Wired State

The Hot Breath of Silicon Valley is Breathing on the Neck of the East Coast Establishment

Remember when everybody said Amazon would fail because it was just too costly to maintain all those servers with all those books advertised for sale and it just couldn't pay for itself?  Remember when it went for years without a profit? (And when people said the entire Internet would fail.) People just wouldn't send payments over the Internet or shop that way, and it will go broke, they said. Then there was the dot.com bubble birst.

Of course, thanks to Amazon (and e-Bay and a few of those other early Internet merchants), we have a normal Internet now instead of a giant collective farm herding us into communes guided by "thought leaders". Good!  To be sure, with each passing year, Amazon seems to be grabbing a bigger and bigger cut in fees from your used book sales...I believe the plan is to make the value of the hard-cover book so low -- lower than paper back -- that it will cost more to ship it by the old USPS than its worth, and people will move to Kindles. Already, you can see many books available for one cent...

Even so, this is not an instant process nor one that can invade every aspect of life.

THE INTERNET IS A BIG TELEPHONE ATTACHED TO A BUNCH OF TRUCKS

While the Internet is properly described as a "series of tubes," I've always thought it was practical to explain that the Internet is really just a big telephone hooked up to a bunch of trucks.

Yes, there are pictures and movies and text on this big telephone, and that makes it "special,"and people will go on living in that "cyberspace" that Evgeny Morozov says doesn't exist, consuming content and chatting  on the Internet that Morozov also says doesn't really exist as a human artifact -- so much so that he is as scared of it as a ghost, and keeps it locked up for a good portion of every day, with the screw driver he could use to open the safe thrown into the safe for good measure...

But when it comes time to explain "what is it that the Internet does," you have to concede that what it does is make it easier for you to browse books (or vacuum cleaners) online on Amazon.com, read some reviews, flip through some of the pages, then order it either new from one of the big box warehouses or from some people in another state who send it to you via the US Post Office.

Either way you slice it, it will come to you via a truck -- trucks move more than 2/3 of America's freight. Without those trucks, the Internet wouldn't mean anything to you. Most people don't get a date or a quick sexual encounter via the Internet, and the movies they watch or the games they play or the chat they have about their cats aren't terribly fulfilling. The Internet delivers when it delivers -- when you get some bargain -- like a peacock purse from Kings Way constantly thrust in your face by Facebook. No. I didn't mean that. Because I would never, ever buy that peacock purse thrust at me by Facebook. However, my daughter did find this cool canvas tote with a drawing of Medusa on it at etsy.com

If you have family members who drive trucks, or who drive around fixing server farms for big news companies, or even just printers of Catholic Church bulletins, you would understand this basic truth about the Internet and about how other things work and why they never seem to "go on" the Internet.

SPECIAL DELIVERY

So when we're told that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for its "delivery system," I might almost believe it, although I have to wonder if the system that involves 11 year old boys throwing the Washington Post on porches in suburbia, which hooks up to stay-at-home moms driving to get bundles of papers, and union trucks delivering those bundles can also handle vacuum-cleaners. Well, maybe books.

I think some church bulletin printers can stay in business because there are still pizza parlours, funeral parlours, lawyers, clothing stores and beauticians who find it profitable to place ads in them. Someone might invent an app to replace the church bulletin, but most people like the process of first getting the folded paper from their fellow parishioner and chatting after the service, then taking it home and affixing it to the refrigerator with a magnet where they might say one of the prayers, remember the holy days, and use the pizza coupon or call the lawyer.Have you ever tried to throw away a church bulletin? Your conscience will twinge, and you will read that homily you skipped and curse yourself for missing the deadline on the sub sandwich offer.

Now, I don't know what they really mean by "distribution" -- Fast Company is among those saying that's what this is about.

But it's about systems for storage and forwarding -- connection.

SERVER FARMS

First, there's former Amazon employee and current Googler Steve Yegge's notion that Bezos has this fabulous far-reaching futurist top-down view of everything that makes him brilliant. (Yes, he was an early investor in Second Life.)

Here's the thing that Yegge says that's important in terms of the Wired State -- servers and data:

You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you?

Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch.

WASHINGTON HOOK-UP

Maybe when you buy the Washington Post you buy the center of all the relational data of lobbying and politics in people's heads who work there... You literally buy the connections to power...

Fast explains then that we're not talking about the newspapers rolled up going on the porch:

When you look at these as capital investments in the context Yegge offers, you can start to think of the newspaper as a computing infrastructure for distributing information. The Washington Post has one of the best APIs of any newspaper; it’s a distribution mechanism for short-form content. (Although reportedly the team that developed the API was not sold to Bezos as part of the deal.) Purpose-built distribution networks for different kinds of content are beginning to solidify into infrastructure, just as e-commerce did 10 years ago. And if we’ve learned anything about Bezos, it’s that he loves to own his own infrastructure and leverage it into new kinds of business we can’t even imagine right now

Well, watch this space.

I personally don't think Citizen Bezos bought this bauble (for one percent of his $25 billion personal net worth) for merely tinkering with "short form" (news apps) or "long form" (books) content and "delivery systems" in the sense Fast is describing it. Come now, there are better APIs in the world than the Washington Post's -- oh, Amazon has them lol.

I think it more about the quest for political power that Silicon Valley has long wanted -- they're not content to just make the gadgets that other people who are in power are using to get and stay in power, they're not content to just connect everybody else, they want to be integrated as part of the process. So it's not just the president's Blackberry (and maybe he, too, converted to a smart-phone by now),  not just the president's dinner with the Valley tycoons, not just the help Obama enlisted from Google, Facebook and other engineers to win the election, but being in the institutions themselves.

THAT OTHER SILICON VALLEY BAUBLE HATES ON BEZOS

The New Republic -- itself an example of Silicon Valley gobbling up a venerable East Coast establishment -- to my enduring sorrow -- is hating on Bezos doing exactly the same thing they did.

Is this the technocommunist fighting the technolibertarian? I think so -- there has always been a struggle for the soul of Silicon Valley between those who want to steal from the middle-class and give to the poor (e-Bay) or make the middle and lower class work for free to provide content and feed a new oligarch class (Facebook and Twitter) and those who sell widgets and make money the old-fashioned way (Apple) and those trying to combine all of these things (Google).

The TNR piece by Mark Tracy on Bezos "murky politics" translates to the technocommunist's aversion for people who don't want excessive taxation of the rich and his lament that Bezos is "no George Soros or Sheldon Adelson". Even so, Tracy thinks that as corporate-oriented as he is, Bezos might take aim at the "conservative" (i.e. not cravenly "progressive") elements of Washpo:

Bezos has also announced there will be no layoffs from the Post’s staff of 2,000. If I were a Post employee who does not believe Bezos when he claims he will not meddle, I would probably be most scared if I were one of the editorial staffers who have fostered a distinctly conservative editorial page whose columnists include Obama administration “critic-in-chief” Charles Krauthammer; Bush administration staffers Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen; false-balance-peddling hawk Fred Hiatt (also the page’s editor); former New Republic editor Charles Lane, who consistently (and I speak only for myself) takes vintage “even the liberal New Republic” contrarianism about three steps too far; racial profiling enthusiasts Richard Cohen and Kathleen Parker; and serial climate-change-denialist George F. Will. Them I imagine Bezos not jibing with.

If Bezos gets rid of these people -- then, see what I mean about how we need a new magazine. Tracy forgot to bas Jennifer Ruben, the in-house neo-con.

Bezos can be expected to hew to the line of the other Silicon Valley "thought influencers" who argue for net neutrality or more visas for engineers or good relations with China, where the manufacturing base of Silicon Valley is located.

But one very important thing that Bezos decided, which puts him in the company of those non-progs that Tracy and other TNR writers so loathe is that he removed WikiLeaks from his servers. Good! That was absolutely the right thing to do. When Sen. Lieberman asked publicly why Amazon was storing the stolen classified cables that Bradley Manning had hacked with Julian Assange's connivance, and invoked Amazon's own terms of service, which prohibit uploading content that is not your own and distributing it, Bezos to his credit instantly got it and blocked Wikileaks from his speedy server services -- a decision he has maintained to this day and which I hope he never goes back on.

Perhaps we might even make a pillar of the community out of one of these Internet moguls yet.

EVIL BOX WAREHOUSES AND BRAND

Alec MacGillis, TNR senior editor, who once tried to spin Obama's socialism away as merely a kind of liberalism, speaks of the "shock and dolor" involved in Bezos' purchase. Oh, there's those evil box warehouses without the AC where ambulances stand by at the door to carry away fainting employees and where robots can't quite do the low-paid jobs yet but might soon. Oh, there's all this evil capitalist stuff.

Chris Hughes, who did the same thing to TNR -- and made himself editor which at least Bezos isn't going to do -- tries to spin this as "buying a brand". Ugh. Can't these people think in terms of anything but brands? There's no more uglier form of capitalism than technocommunism, you know? Because for them, brand is partiynost', party discipline...

The purchase does not include Foreign Policy -- not to be confused with Foreign Affairs -- which is that edgy hipster IR lounge for neo Real Politickers (which I happened to stop reading for 6 weeks and didn't miss it, and even The Cable and Democracy Lab don't hold me as they once did -- we need a new magazine.) Does that mean it is going to die and Blake Hounsell will have to stop tweeting? (Oh, wait, I am SO out of date. Blake is now at Politico, not FP. But...why can't Bezos buy Politico, too?)

OUR VERY INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE

James Fallow  -- whose own magazine somehow got taken over by the Silicon Valley scientism virus even if a tycoon didn't buy it out I don't think is spouting nonsense.

For now I mean only to say: this is a moment that genuinely surprised me. I think I'll remember where I was when I first heard the news -- via Twitter! -- and I am sure it will be one of those episode-that-encapsulates-an-era occurrences. Newsweek's demise, a long time coming, was a minor temblor by comparison; this is a genuine earthquake.

* * *

So let us hope that this is what the sale signifies: the beginning of a phase in which this Gilded Age's major beneficiaries re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence. We hope it marks a beginning, because we know it marks an end.

Yeesh. Yes, the Atlantic is now filled with open source loons like Alex Madrigal, and gaggles of young fangirlz gushing love for every single arrested hacker anarchist, as well as a stable of Realist and even pro-Kremlin authors on the foreign policy left over from FP. 

If a denuded Washington Post now stuffed with "short content' online Amazon style is supposed to be our intellectual infrastructure, make me a new Internet please.

Pretty soon, like Roland LeGrande, my Second Life friend, they will be talking about Journalism-as-a-Service (JaaS, per Jeff Jarvis) just like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

I love this Washington Post article for the title alone -- Who is Jeff Bezos?

I'm glad Bob Woodward spoke up to say it was very sad -- the Post survived Nixon but it was killed by the Internet...

Jim Friedlich summed it up:

A possible downside, Friedlich said, is that “there is unquestionably some element here of a highly successful guy buying a seat at the table. Chris Hughes at The New Republic, John Henry in Boston, Jeff Bezos in Washington. Citizen Kane 2.0.”

And this is what I have been describing as the replay of The Two Cultures with the defeat of the humanities.

WILL THE WASHINGTON POST GET A SECOND LIFE?

Bezos provided a whopping $11 million to start the online virtual world of Second Life, where I still remain active with a small rentals business. I don't know if he saw it, as I do, as a kind of proving group for the whole web 2.0 movement, where many phenomena, good and bad, were tried first in this petri dish before expanding to the larger Internet. People think of Second Life as having failed years ago after its peak in 2007-2008 when a lot of marketing companies invaded it, but in fact it's going strong and I think represents the future of the Internet with payment systems and auction houses and oneline marketplaces for user-generated content in digital creations and services. I think most people have no idea that this world of some one million people with about 70,000 concurrency spread over even a smaller number of server clusters than it used to be (now 26,000 I believe, down from 30,000) actually turns a profit ($75 million a year) not only for its owners, but its users (who trade about $400 million every year).

That's incredible, on an Internet filled with technocommunism and "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." Eventually, we will come out of this era of sterile collectivism, which is why Rod Humble has bought Desura.

Bezos also invested in another start-up of Second Life inventor Philip Rosedale, called Coffee & Power. It was sort of a job-space sharing and errands trading interface that eventually died when it couldn't get past the latte drinkers and coders in San Francisco to people who could really spend money on it -- and it was facing competition from similar jobs and errands boards. Rosedale has now moved on to make a better virtual world with another start-up called Hi Fidelity.

 P.S. See below about how the cool kids are explaining to us that a) Amazon is not in Silicon Valley (snort) and that b) the Iceberg is buying the Titanic, yuck yuck.

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Shorter Googler title: "How We Won the Elections for Obama".

The news of this book is being RUSHED so greatly, for reasons I can't fathom, that Random House doesn't even have the artwork ready -- despite the wonders of our digital age.

New book out by two figures I have often criticized on these pages (here, here, here), Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, and Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas, Google's new think tank.

“The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” begins a new book written by two top Google executives, which aims to explain how this experiment will play out in politics, business and even personal lives.

Alfred A. Knopf publishers, a Random House imprint, said it would publish the book, titled “The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” in April.

But this is what I've tended to write about all this:

Why do I worry about someone who is merely overenthusiastic about cool tools? Because lurking underneath this is not frivolity at the end of the day, but the arrogant undermining of institutions, and of course, the use of the tools to push certain ideologies.

If I hadn't just been staring at pictures of Eric Schmidt partying with the Obama engineers on election night, I might be more hopeful about all this.

You know, at the risk of instigating yet another furious rant from Andrew Feinberg, yes, I did predict this back here.

It really has all been terribly troubling, watching how first Google and Twitter and other big social media platforms sucked up all our data, as they got us to upload other people's content which they sold ads against and waited for lawyers to chase them; then they moved from all that free and open web 2.0 goodness to Big Data, and the closed society that the Obama For America campaign represented, drilling, drilling, drilling for data and Getting Out the Vote.

The Silicon Valley geniuses created the tools, baked their ideologies into them, larded them with features to block, ban and remove dissenters, then drilled the data to GOTV. If other alternatives caught up in the intervening years, it might not be so terrible, but meanwhile, Sergey Brin is calling for a world with no political parties and Harper Reed is here to guide us all in the lovely open source cult of the authoritarian persona.

The Time Machine

I had a chance to read H.G. Well's The Time Machine over the holidays. I read it back in 1974 when I took a "gut" course in science fiction in first year in university. I had forgotten it and then remembered it again by the time I got to the names of the creatures, the Eloi and the Morlocks.

Of course, this brings to mind, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," Jesus' last words as He hung on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  So the "Eloi" were like gods.

The story has been studied and criticized to death, of course, but I wonder if anybody happened to notice that coincidence -- the one version of Jesus' last words which are rather discouraging (and ultimately, not true, as the Son was not forsaken by the Father, according to our faith) -- as contrasted with the more altruistic and upbeat "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do."

Usually this story is thought to be actually about time travel, thinking about the fourth dimension -- time -- and discussing how time travel could actually be effected -- and of course the problems ensuing like atoms occupying the same space from different times when they do collide in time, and possible explosions or disintegrations.

But really, I don't see it so much as being "about" the Time Machine so much as the Time Machine is a vehicle to discuss and play out various theories of humankind and civilization, and ideas for arranging society.

And of course the chief preoccupation here is communism, and the character says it first (the mayor) and then the narrator himself speculates that the futuristic society he sees is perfected communism, then abandons it for another theory where he imagines that there is a kind of "1 percent" and "99 percent or "47 percent and 53 percent", the Morlocks, the workers toiling away underground in the dark, in order to keep the Eloi in happy, playful lives where they just run around all day raising flowers, making flower wreaths, making love, eating delicious fruit, taking swims, and not really caring when some of their number disappear below -- although in a few scenes he describes their fear of the dark.

Then he revises his theory again, and declares that it's really more about the Morlocks, while they must toil in darkness and sweat, being like ranchers, as they pasture the Eloi, then eat them as their meat.

Well, anyone who has seen "real, existing communism" in action would say that this is still communism, as indeed communism tends to destroy people, spirit and body, one way or another.

But the Time Traveller, as the main character is called in this paperback version of the book, seems still to retain admiration for the Morlocks, even though he fears them and flees them and has to wrest his Time Machine back from them - he likes the idea of their toiling, and is contemptuous of that carefree life the Eloi live among their flowers. Over and over, he comments at how child-like and even stupid they have become, how weak and pale and short, as if the good life ennervated them and destroyed them in evolution over the centuries because they didnt have to struggle, they reached the point where they didn't have to work.

Clearly, H.G. Wells -- the Time Traveller is usually taken to be him -- idealizes the labour and like a lot of British intellectuals who fell for socialism thinks there is something transcendental about labour, and even spiritually sanctifying about labour, like Tolstoyans in the Russian woods.

Interestingly, Wells writes a somewhat unflattering remark about the Time Traveller, which I immediately wrote down to save as it summed up for me all those purveyors of utopian ideals like the TED fanatics:

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine.  The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed; you never felt that you saw all round him, you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.

H.G. Wells makes short work of capitalism in one little interchange:

"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and hurry on ahead!"

"To discover a society," said I, "erected on a strictly communistic basis."

Of course, we think of discussions of communism revolving around the Soviet experiment and ensuing Soviet mass murder. And usually some wit tells you that communism was a great and good idea, but just implemented poorly. That is has never been implemented well and always leads to mayhem and mass murder never seems to "stick" as a hard fact.

But H.G. Wells wrote this story in 1895, long before the Bolshevik revolution, but of course, exactly during the period when all kinds of Russian and German socialist theories were fermenting.

Some people admire Wells as some kind of futuristic and visionary thinker or something, but I find him a didactic old bore, as all socialists can be, especially with insufferable Darwinism. Darwinism seems likely true as it goes as a theory of change for organic life, but that doesn't necessarily mean it applies as "science" to other aspects of human life on earth, i.e. to theories of governance or politics or whatever. And yet, so often people apply social Darwinism especially in the world of software and increasingly of any social media platform. "Patch or GTFO" and all that, survivor of the fittest with the most followers...

What's strange about the Darwinism with regard to The Time Machine is that Wells actually posits a negative evolution -- the Eloi who are evolved in the year 800,000 something are in fact weak and dying out and unfit -- they became that way because they removed through intellect all the elements of their existence that would have kept them fit and did for many years -- struggle, want, etc.

Was he unconsciously doubting his own theories or merely playing with them in the narrative? In fact, not only do the Morlocks and Eloi merge to become merely jumping rabbit-like dimwitted people, dial the Machine a few more million years and all that is left is this huge, ugly, encrusted red crab with green slime all over it and creepy eyeballs, coming for him. And yeah, that's a good metaphor for communism!

Wells was a die-hard socialist (Fabian Society, William Morris) and his early experience burned in his loathing of the "1 percent" -- he struggled in school, his parents didn't have money,  the shop they bought when they moved out of the labouring domestic servant class failed as it was in a bad location and had poor goods, and his father had to make tips as a professional cricket player -- until he broke his thigh and then couldn't play anymore. His mother had to return to domestic servitude and was not allowed to bring her family with her to the house she worked. H.G. had numerous fits and starts in schools, pupil-teacher jobs, apprenticeships he hated, etc. which gave him a lifelong hatred of the wealthy and privileged and obsession with the "distribution of wealth". He was an auto-didact; auto-didacts can be the most didactic.  He wrote many books about how to get socialism to work; he wanted to get it to work.

Now, once he gained familiarity with the "real socialism" in the Soviet Union, he may have been a bit critical. But in fact, the Soviets liked him and he was friends with the paramount Bolshevik, Maxim Gorky. He and Gorky wanted to make a kind of "Great Books" collection, a shorter and dumbed-down version of all the worlds' best books in a kind of encyclopedia, which the workers would read in order to become enlightened. In other words, Wikipedia...

This is how Wikipedia describes it, without mentioning Gorky, however:

In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain, including the essay, "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia".

Did you know H.G. Wells was the father of "miniature war-gaming?" And also had a conception of a "world state" (like Gorky and other Old Bolsheviks). Read Wikipedia on all this. Wells admired Stalin, although he thought he was a bit narrow-minded, and would debate socialist reform ideas with him. And not surprisingly -- all of these ideologies go together -- Wells believed in eugenics; he advocated a kind of fascism for the sake of this socialist world state. No accident, comrades! Oh, and he hated the Zionists, too! Really, Wells is a most loathsome character and is an iconic example of all the strains of ideology in England at the time that still manifest today, more than 100 years later.

In short, H.G. Wells is the founder of the ideas of the Wired State; he would fit in perfectly in Silicon Valley with do-gooding reformist-minded software tycoons who want capitalism for themselves and communism for you. Oh, and where does this better-worlding take us, this itch to reform man that always ends up abstracting him away into non-existence? In his last book Mind at the End of its Tether (1945) he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea."  Cheerful stuff!

C.S. Lewis spent a lot of time countering Wells -- Wells disliked Christianity and particularly
Catholicism as well. The character Jules is meant to be Wells, in That Hideous Strength, my favourite book, by C.S. Lewis.

Among the lovers of Wells (his wife was said to sanction him having affairs) wasn't just the feminists and Rebecca West but Moura -- the Russian woman in Berberova's Moura:  The Dangerous Life of Baronness Budberg another one of my favourite books. Wikipedia doesn't mention her, but from Berberova's findings, Wells seems like a cranky old man whom Moura stuck by out of loyalty -- I believe she was with him when he died. I have to get that book again, I had borrowed it to read it and I can't find the passages I need on the search on Amazon.com.

Socialism! Improvement of the race, then leading finally to elimination of the human species all together! And War of the Worlds!