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05/21/2013

My Twit-Fight with Jeffrey Sachs: Who Develops and Where's the Democracy?

I'll put this here, because it can be very hard to access old tweets now -- you can't get them more than a month or so before today's date, and even Topsy may not have everything.

I had been meaning to post this and forget about it and was reminded again by coming across Sachs pontificating on the Millenium Development Goals again. And I was reminded again just how wonderful Armin Rosen's article was, critiquing Sach's idea about African development (see at the very end).

I don't know if this exchange needs much explanation, but just in case: I got into a debate at first with a woman about whether the US and Europe were to blame for Africa's disruption. I think this is myopic and unfair and part of that anti-Western Marxist mentality you see in Western campuses and some African political organizations -- but not all. I think it's more complex than that, and while the scourges of colonialism naturally have to be blamed, and US machinations and oil companies and all the rest, at a certain point, you have to seek personal accountability, and you can't go on forever blaming whitey and the West. That's my conviction. And when I see the kleptocrats and maniacs leading some of these countries, I stand by it. I don't think they can be fixed by adding more mosquito nets.

But regardless of what I think, this story is about how the debate gets framed. Jeffrey Sachs has long been supported intellectually and financially by George Soros. He is typical of the can-do technocratic elite figure that George loves to back as a doer and maker, not in the Silicon Valley way -- George doesn't really seem to have an affinity with Silicon Valley -- but more in the old fashioned way of scientific development approaches -- economic solutions to political problems. There's more than a little third-way social democracy, even socialism in the ideals of this billionaire, and he tends to fund the leftwing and "progressive" organizations that fit these ideals.

Some time ago, he more or less revised -- abandoned? -- his ideas of the "open society" a la Popper, and began to believe that picking the one, true, scientific "progressive" way with rationality and free will was the way to advance society -- and then give the strongest organizations that extra boost, rather than funding pluralism for pluralism's sake.

As Alex Goldfarb, a one-time aide to Soros, once put it: It's the difference between funding the entire class, and hoping that out of that class of mixed abilities will come one or two geniuses, and the rest will have benefited from all being funded or funding those one or two geniuses because they are the strongest and best and you shouldn't waste money on failures or mediocrities. (This is also described as the Athenian versus Spartan form of education). 

I think arguably Soros has moved from the former to the latter belief, especially with his investments in American politics, but at any rate, Jeffrey Sachs is one of his big investments -- and by that I mean not necessarily in some literal dollar amount that Sachs may get today but more about his ideas, and advancing them either personally with Sachs, or many NGOs that will listen to Sachs and at least not criticize him.

There's almost no criticism of Sachs anywhere, and I think this is a function of the fact that there's a kind of taboo on that -- Soros grantees -- and there are a lot of them! -- don't want to fall out of favour. Even those without a direct Soros grant, say, a university, don't want to speak out of tune with the great one. This is incredible pervasive throughout the progresso-sphere -- this Partiinost' or Party discipline, and I really find it repulsive. What this interchange I had with Sachs shows is the enormous lengths he will go to -- narcistically -- to keep the adulation intact.

You would think normally someone of his magnitude wouldn't have time to come and interrupt a Twitter chat between two strangers who happen to use his handle merely to indicate they were discussing his article. But he did. He challenged my claims about the critique of his ideas for Poland and Russia -- which at the time were very controversial and caused a certain amount of dislocation. Maybe they worked better in Poland; Russia was beyond him. He doesn't answer that challenge.

But when I invoke Bill Easterly, a thoughtful writer on the great wrongs of international development, Sachs actually points me to the 22nd minute of a video (!) where on a panel, Easterly is basically forced to retract his past critique of Sachs. I marvelled at this. I couldn't understand it. Easterly had already gotten a reputation to standing up to Sachs, but then he stopped. I surmise he stopped evidently because the flak he was getting not only from Sachs' supporters and the Soros-funded "system" -- and Sachs himself! -- was going to harm his career possibly; he felt that constantly being the negative nabob, the sourpuss as the celebration of Sachs' lovely ideas was just too much hard work. Nobody wants to be negative all the time.

I had to marvel that Sachs would waste time arguing with me, a minor blogger, yet he did because the vanity and the imperative to keep the rep ever bright was so great. In the end, I made the crack that Armin must not get a Soros grant because he was able to eloquently take apart Sachs' ideas -- which truly are missing the vital component of governance and democracy.

I've told these stories many times that sum up the entire fandago that is "development" via international organizations. The first comes from a Russian human rights activist in 1995 at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, where the Soviet Union had already collapsed, but its old pupils were still demanding the erosion of civil and political rights by insisting on the primacy of economic and social rights. Vienna represented a certain truce on these two issues, but not really. One of the compromises the UN had to put up in order to get the acknowledgement of the civil and political rights out of the worst abuses in the world like Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, etc. was to create this "right to development" concept and the whole clumsy (and expensive) infrastructure that still exists today around it. The third-world countries kept yammering about how they had to have the right to development. The Western concept of this is different than the Marxist/Eastern one of course, and in the US, economic rights aren't even recognized. Finally, exasperated at this constant demand for positive rights, coming from a state that was finally at last getting out of the way of the negative rights, this dissident said, "Nu, develop already!"

And to be sure, in a certain sense, that's all you can say to people and countries asking for a big shakedown and a handout. What's stopping you from developing? Stop stealing the foreign aid and use it to help your people. Life is more complicated than that, of course, and I have come to see that in fact the international system and states have to invest in certain areas like health care and education to ensure justice in their societies in tandem with the civil liberties. This idea of balance isn't one libertarians/Randians share but in fact the rights lexicon can help these developing countries, as they are called, wrest commitments out of those autocrats. But there's more.

The other story comes from a time I brought a Tibetan scholar in with our organization to take part in this panel at which a Chinese diplomat was speaking about development. The Chinese official went on and on about how wonderfully everything was going with adding railroads or schools or whatever in places like Tibet. To which the Tibetan could only ask: who develops? Indeed. Who? The Han people deliberately flooded into the region to erode the population of Tibetans, or the Tibetan people?

Re: Benghazi I just wrote about how I thought the development approach to terrorism just wasn't working and was misleading and even dangerous -- but then, on the "democracy" side there are just as many idiocies, such as the fetishization of elections in places like Afghanistan. In any event, here it is, the rare challenge to Jeffrey Sachs, one I don't have the ability, scholarship, or funds to sustain, but one in which I hope others will take up.

  1. .@JeffDSachs: We should really understand how much the U.S. and Europe have destabilized Africa over the last 60 years #ForesightAfrica

  2. @hellenotii @JeffDSachs So murderous regimes like Bashir's in Sudan, civil wars in DRC, these aren't destabilizing?

  3. @catfitz @JeffDSachs of course there are many factors contributing to destabilization - does affirming 1 negate others?

  5. @catfitz history is history not about blame, more looking at the whole picture, this part has been glossed over

  6. @hellenotii I don't buy the narrative on Africa at all. Let's go back to @JeffDSachs damage in Poland, Russia, then take it from there.

@catfitz @hellenotii Poland's success surpassed that of the other countries in the region. Here are some facts. http://jeffsachs.org/2012/03/bolivia-poland/ …

2:59 PM - 10 Jan 13
Image will appear as a link

  1. @JeffDSachs @hellenotii If you could fix the world by freeing prices or supplying mosquito nets, no one would be migrating from those places

  2. View on web
4:39 PM - 10 Jan 13 · Details Flagged (learn more)
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Posted at 01:27 AM in Technology, U.S. Policy | | Comments (1)

03/13/2013

The Interface In Your Face

Kids and Screens
These little boys in the Dunkin's would rather play on the i-pad than have ice cream (I asked them). (C)Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 2012.

I'm confused.I thought the cardinal sin of the Metaverse was to design your web site using frames.

I thought frames were a marker of total dweebhood. That's why I have sites when I've helped other people more clueless than me make websites 15 years ago that are still in frames -- because I'm not a web site designer. That's why, when thinking of a spring trip, I went hunting for this old favourite restaurant in Dundee, New York -- the Dresden Inn -- I was happy to find their web site was still in frames, because the ravioli might be as good as it was 50 years ago (I wonder if they still have the chestnut trees in the front yard).

Frames, we're told by many bossy geeks -- and have been for a decade -- are just all wrong.

And yet, frames are back. Aren't they? They're back even though they aren't called that. They're back -- even though they may be called something else and are more hip and are built on Agile Ruby on Scrum C+ Rails -- or whatever the new thing is called (yeah, I know it's not really called that).

The thing is, somebody got the idea that if you should optimize your site for mobile readers swiping their hands and pushing their fingers on the screen, then the whole site should turn that way even accessed on the web (which I guess nobody uses anymore -- but then, we're told the entire thing is a "social construct" anyway! I guess that's why Twitter goes down a lot! It's just a social construct!)

Actually, the whole world is turning into the mobile view now. Bus shelter ads now shift as if you are finger-swiping them -- giant billboard ads on 42nd Street and Times Square shift and move rapidly as if they are on your cell phone or tablet. I've noticed TV has started putting in cuts and jumps that are designed to make you feel you are on a cell phone. Everything is getting smartphonized. Tabletized. It's creepy. And not always pretty. In fact, annoying.

Scoop.it has just moved my cheese by changing their interface. I complained, and they told me that this is what customers wanted (well, they mean friends of the devs, because no one ever polled or asked the wider customer base to my knowledge). That customers "wanted" to have less clicks, so they didn't mind if the curation and the view functions were combined.

Except now you have to click 100 times more because you are inside a frame. Yes, a frame. With one of those sliders -- right next to the other, outer slider that moves the whole page, so you slip and mix them up, or you can never grab it quite right, or you grab it and release it and it bounces you back to the beginning instead of the place where you just were ("focus" is what they call this in Second Life, and bug reports are often filled with "loss of focus" problems like that). 

It was already hard enough with this Scoop.it system of seeing only so much within the old frame, but it was to the left so that you could operate it easier. Most people read left to right. Now you have to look up into the right corner and struggle with sliders and try to pick and then get rid of the things you didn't pick. It's made something that was mildly enjoyable and easy into such a chore, you just don't want to do it.

I hate reading Mashable now. It's bad enough seeing that guy full face on Twitter just about ever second. Now the site is like his face, too. It's a big white box -- the geeks thing you need a blank white background so you can feel like you're on Google's medicinal white sterile web page. And it has these, well, frames, for lack of a better term. Boxes in which other stuff happens, which is distracting. You read a line, and don't bother. Maybe that's the idea.

This boxation stuff also happened to The New York Republic, where their new Big White Background from their Silicon Valley tycoon  is par for the course, and where the awfulness of the articles now, like from Marxist propagandists they would never have published in the old days, are diminished because you only read a few paragraphs on the big block -- it fits in your phone screen -- before moving on. There's more underneath the box -- but oh, who cares, there's another shiny to click on.

Pandodaily.com has a real big case of this -- they were pioneers in it. There are frames -- er, boxes -- and then a moving ticker of stories across the page. Catch them if you can.

Quartz has the worst case of this. It's so bad that if I ever find myself on a link that goes to Quartz, I back out of there immediately. I just hate it so much. Quartz even reduced their Twitter handle to just @qz recently, because they found that they were losing people's attention span by having it @quartz with too many letters. And that "u" after the "q" and all...

"Quartz is a digitally native news outlet for the new global economy. ... This website uses technologies not supported by this browser."

But I have Firefox. Wouldn't Mitch's thing be the coolest?

But I ask you, those of you who remember the 1990s. Isn't Quartz made in a verboten frames mode? I mean, there's just too many boxes and too many sliders. I hate that big black bar at the top and the way it moves up and down, seeming to slam on you. I just don't want to read something that does that.

Please tell me how Pandodaily, Mashable, and Quartz are now different than The Worst Web Page in the World. Seriously. I'm not getting this.

Another site with a bad case of this is Gawker. Sometimes when I'm there, it feels as if there is no way to move behind the front page stories. You have to grope for the slider.

G+ is such a chore to move. Have you ever noticed that it's the place gifs go to die? But try it on your smart phone. It actually looks *better* than it does on the web. The pictures pop up large at you and slightly settle down after grabbing your attention. They look less goofy in that format as a result, more important, somehow.

Have you noticed that you can make just about any story feel more important if it has a big old picture coming at you first, especially if part of it is a little out of focus?

It was with these issues in mind that I caught site and re-tweeted something from Stowe Boyd, even though Stowe Boyd himself is one of those interface issues all unto himself, if you know what I mean. I remember when Amanda Chapel (Strumpette) used to target him with her parody account that took down all the Silicon Valley egos (it's too bad she's not around any more).

Stowe's website had a summary of the discussion about the "invisible interfaces," and then you could go directly to the original author, Timo Arnall, No to NoUI.

This is something we passed through which v2.0 of Second Life, remember? What a hell.  They were even going to get rid of landmarks as shareable objects and objects you could put into objects and just have them be backspaces. The UI is still recovering from that scrum software nightmare....

Then I realized despite having thoughtlessly retweeted these blogs like an Internet myrmidon that in fact this critique from Arnall was more Luddite than I thought, and in fact then I wouldn't likely endorse it -- because I don't tend to the extreme Luddite position  -- it's pastoral Marxism of the conservative technocommunist bent.

There were calls for making interfaces more rough to let us know the machines were working or that people had to labour to make them -- part of that old socialist fetish with labour as a blue-collar physical worker emblem of the communist movement -- the advance guard of intellectuals preordained to lead these lumpen would often glorify them (even as they would even devise terms like "lumpen proletarian"). It was out of touch with the complexities of life.

Why should we have to have raggedy interfaces just to see the moving flywheels and gearshaft that so satisfy the souls of the technocommunists? I don't mind if you keep them out of sight. After all, I drive a car without knowing the theory of internal combustion or even how to change the oil. The Internet should be more like that. The Internet *is* more like which is why we are having this pastoral backlash. Says Timo, fussily, with hatred for capitalism back behind it all:

We already have plenty of thinking that celebrates the invisibility and seamlessness of technology. We are overloaded with childish mythologies like ‘the cloud’; a soft, fuzzy metaphor for enormous infrastructural projects of undersea cables and power-hungry data farms. This mythology can be harmful and is often just plain wrong. Networks go down, hard disks fail, sensors fail to sense, processors overheat and batteries die.

I agree "the cloud" is a childish mythology that is meant us to overlook the fact that it is just "other people's computers."

Shouldn't he love those big technocommunist infrastructure projects though, which are the digital equivalent of all those huge Soviet dams and irrigation canals that led to things like the Aral Sea drying out? NTR! NTR! (The Russian initials for the words "Scientific Technical Revolution") -- that used to be the rallying cry at the Knowledge Society sessions and any local Party meeting. NTR is what drives Sergey Brin.

I loved this quote though, which I felt would be a good coda to the insanity of Morozov playing academic on Nick Carr's website over his book (sell more books! sell more books!):

Computing systems are suffused through and through with the constraints of their materiality. – Jean-François Blanchette

Yes, they sure are. That's why you have to turn them on and off again all the time to get them to work.

Eric (Spin Martin) asked reasonably the other night on G+ -- why can't we rename all these talking things like Siri with our own names? Like "Jeeves" or whatever. Yes, why not? And configure many other things as well (Scoop.it needs tear-off menus like we finally got put back on the Second Life menu; wouldn't it be great if Microsoft Word also had tear-off menus!)

Related articles
Timo Arnall on invisible design
'Invisible Design' Is A Cognitive Trap
Flat UI Free - PSD&HTML User Interface Kit
A Tale of Two Newspaper Interfaces
Square UI - Awesome Flat User Interface Pack

Posted at 10:19 PM in Technology | | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

02/12/2013

Geeks: Are Their Numbers Stabilizing?

Saurik
Photo by Joe Hall

Forbes has an article about how 7 millions phones have been jailbroken. It's got a video with the typical freaky long-haired geek whose handle is @Saurik explaining how to jailbreak your phone and justifying it by showing all the neat little thingies you can do with it, like jumble your icons.

Seven million. Or maybe it's already 10 million by now! But some people have multiple phones.

Seven million. That's the number of people who signed the Google-orchestrated anti-SOPA petition. But some people used bots and alts and proxies to jack up the signature numbers which Ars Technica would be the last to admit. Sure, beyond Google, there were maybe a half million or something more.

But let's call it seven million for jailbreaks and anti-SOPA today. That's the operative number for the active geek population today in America.

So is this number stabilizing now? Or is this population a growing threat to society and the rule of law with its ethics-free hacking or the justification of same by power users?

Is it, as one man says in the comments, that "we are all" becoming a little bit geeky and more people jailbreak their phones even if not geeks. Or is it really mainly the core of the geek population?

Given the deplorable state of education in this country and the lagging behind of other industrial nations in STEM, I think likely that number is stabilizing, and only increased through immigration, which is indeed a good reason to encourage entrepreneurial visas and the rest in immigration reform.

What effect will this have on the stability of society in general?

In theory, if there was good will and ethics (there aren't), what Tim Berners-Lee prescribes (no angel he) would work to mitigate the Internet of Things:

“The right to have root on your machine is the right to store things which operate on your behalf,” Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at a Linux conference in Australia last month. Without that right, the creator of the world wide web contends, users are subject to agendas they can neither control or, in many cases, even be aware of. He acknowledges the need to devise better security protocols to make sure that users with such access do not inadvertantly instal malicious code, but it is clear that he sees this as a smaller threat than that of the ubiquitous opacity. Linux is the language of Android, so clearly his remarks were addressed to Apple. Why couldn’t root access be an expert setting for iOS? Only the geeks will use it anyway.

In other words, if you, instead of a proprietary company can completely control your gadget, they can't control/watch/modify you etc.

But, even so, it means being under the control of code and coders and their lack of ethics, amply demonstrated everywhere. That is, if to jailbreak your phone you need to go get something like RedSn0w, or then install Cydia aps, or get hooked up to other websites and services you are still in the hands of coders and code-as-law.

Where will it stop?

Oh, as you can see from this screenshot I found on Flickr, what this is all about is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Surprise, surprise! They're happy to stick it to the man and harass Apple by inciting jailbreaking, which people endlessly argue about being legal or illegal.

Cydia was a bit secretive in this interview. Scoble asked three times for a website address. They wouldn't give one. Why? Well, because it doesn't really describe much about jailbreaking or this company, says Saurik. He has just hired a community manager, which makes it sound like a company! But he admits the company really just consists of him and her, and, as he says, a vague network of "other people working on other things".

Why, so secret, Saurik? Both he and his community manager (who stays humbly in the background while Saurik pontificates although Scoble does his damnedest to try to include her as a woman in the conversation) claim that jailbreaking causes no harm and doesn't de-stabilize your phone. Oh, watch out when you upgrade the OS as you could lose all those cool aps.

The website is indeed ultra-spare. I guess what you have to do is hit up Saurik on Twitter, where as an ancient oldbie (like me on @Prokofy lol), he has 330,000 plus followers (I only have like 2000 lol, but then, I don't jailbreak phones or code cool aps!).

Or...maybe not. Saurik says he gets so many replies that he physically can't even scroll through them! Well there's (finally, as he says) his website.

But mainly his work and customer support for his aps has been on Twitter.

So...jailbreaking and the aps you can then add with it is...one of those things where you have to hunt around a little and find a guy who knows a guy or go in the IRC channel or Google around links to you get it eventually.

Would you rather have your phone under control by a company that has customer service, stores with customer service agents in real life, a board of trustees, fiscal responsibility, financial reports, stock, etc. etc. Or would you rather have your phone jailbroken and entrusted to nested variants of various shadowy aps made by people with nicknames that might or might not see your tweet? And do whatever with your information?

That really is the question. The geeks NEVER put it that way. They just assume that *as* geeks, they will jailbreak, control the actions of other geeks through peer-to-peer pressure, and that's it.

But the rest of us who don't want to bother to fish around in roots and whatnot will be at their mercy. And then it really is a question of trusting them or Apple. They don't trust Apple. We do. That's why they have two people in their company, and Apple has thousands.

h/t Robert Scoble who did the interview featured on the Forbes article and whose Facebook feed is where I picked up the Forbes story -- and all of this is actually stuck on something called Newsle which is tracking every article and share...

 

 

Posted at 09:22 AM in Hackers, Influencers, Internet Governance, Internet of Things, Technology | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Why We Should Abhor the Internet of My Things

Babbage Linden

Babbage Linden in Second Life. Photo by Jim Purbrick.

 

It was bad enough when it was "The Internet of Things" -- wiring up things like your home or car to run them via your smartphone on the Internet. I've written about the horrors awaiting underneath the upbeat claims of tekkies of this Brave New World.

But now they are trying to make it even more palatable and saleable by calling it "The Internet of My Things" the way everything collectivized online is called "My" to make the user have the illusion he is in some actually personal private space. So some media that is drilling you and making you sign up for their forced social media scrape merely to share stuff creates things called "My Slate" which aren't really so much "my" anymore -- but theirs. And on some of these services, every time your friends go read an article, they see you "liked it," and they might even wonder why, and you might even wish you could get rid of some of that. In fact some of the services showed you when you merely read an article, and started posting it to all your social media automatically -- people hated this and those services began to die out. They'll be back. The drive to make "what is yours mine" is big.

I saw the Internet of Things prototyped in Second Life about 7-8 years ago by Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick, a very creative fellow who probably doesn't think of himself as an IOT founder). I wrote about it enthusiastically initially as well as did Mark Wallace, thinking only in the context of the community of that little virtual world, not the wider Internet, and focusing more on the rating than the tagging functions. (Purbrick went on to conceive and prototype IOT as helping, for example, people use Second Life as a 3d data base to keep track of their real-life carbon-emitting objects to assess their carbon footprint; today he is doing things like making 3D printing from personal web information.)

But even then I had some misgivings about all this tagging and the inflation of the reputational system instantly welded into it back then, and watched as Grid Shepherd, as the scraper avatar was known, by the development company Electric Sheep, scraped the entire grid and took everyone's objects and put them into search -- and abuse-reported it back in 2007. This scrape including things accidently left for sale, sometimes merely to be moved from one person to another, which then became vulnerable to theft. People did not like having their property advertised in this way -- and it was all devised basically as a prototype of how to make an Internet of Things to increase shopping on the oneline marketplace. I called it "Greed Shepherd's Big Fleece."  The geeks then -- as they always do now -- snarked that people's items were in search "anyway" and were fare game and that the dbase "needed to be populated" to be "useful" and therefore they couldn't have "opt-in" or even "opt-out".

Well, but nobody thought some powerful force, funded by old media (CBS), would come in and scrape all their simulators and put everything they owned into search so, among other things, people could pry into their private lives and ridicule or even blackmail them, i.e. if they were gay online but in real life had not come out of the closet. It was awful.

For a while, there was a program that picked up everything on every sim, threw it into search, and then when you arrived on that sim, you could easily search it again to find the product or item you were searching for. This made scavenger hunts, a popular activity, immediately deprecated, and so people had to devise ways of naming things with fake names or hiding them in other things to play such a game. While it seemed convenient for a store, people hated the erosion of privacy, even in a virtual world where privacy is only a theory, really, easily defeated with cams and chat loggers and such. Eventually, this feature in the browser was removed -- probably it was too big a strain on the data base and servers anyway. It was replaced with a function you could toggle for each item -- to place it in search or not. Merchants defeated this by checking the object to be in search forever by closing the "mod" perms. And so on. Online life is filled with pernicious features with destructive social impacts as we constantly see in the prototype of Web 3.0 (or 3.D as it was known for a time) in Second Life.

Few people of influence take Second Life seriously, and don't realize it is a prototyper, consciously or not. And it doesn't matter, in a way, because real life gadgetry is soon overtaking even the fantastic prototyping functions of Second Life 7 years ago.

John Udell of Wired.com has an article about such wondrous technology being developed now to create the "Internet of My Things".

As usual, the way this technology is sold is not by thinking of its larger implications and negative impacts -- obviously -- but how it might be useful -- and make fortunes for people:

As usual my friend Phil Windley, whose distributed event technology I wrote about in the second installment of this series, isn’t just imagining this future. He’s helping to invent it:

“Kynetx is getting ready to introduce a product called SquareTag. SquareTag is a simple way to use personal clouds to keep track of things you own and imbue them with functionality they might not otherwise have.” – Introducing SquareTag

So far these are mostly just passive tags with QR codes, but the system is technology-agnostic and will happily embrace RFID, NFC, you name it. What matters isn’t the tag, it’s the connection you forge between a tagged item and your personal cloud.

And as useful, it's about how it would be useful to a nerd -- most people don't take their smartphones with them to change a filter and take elaborate notes on its date, make, place of purchase, etc. If they do have their smartphone with them, it's to text their girlfriend or watch "Waking Dead," not write about filter details. But of course, the "Internet of My Things" is rapidly developing and "the Internet of Your Things" is coming out to meet you, with the manufacturers taking the work out of note-taking by putting all this information into *their* tags. And so on.

My daughter recently asked what "the cloud" was. I had gone to TechCrunch two years ago and asked a number of the ardent evangelists for various cloud services to explain their technology to me. I went around and listened to their pitches, read some articles, and concluded:

The cloud is other people's computers, not yours.

In that sense, it is like the MMORPG game developers' fearful mantra about their games:

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

That is, their game has to be viewed through a browser that enables the user to hack them and bother other people. The cloud is merely you taking things you used to keep on your own personal hard drive under at least password protection, and under at least the theoretical obfuscation of being one of a zillion and not searchable unless you turned on filesharing programs -- and then putting them on to other people's computers. Putting them on to other people's computers so that you can "access them anywhere" and protect against data loss if your device is wrecked, but it's still about other people's computers, not yours, and your stuff becoming theirs, not yours. Really, that's all it is!

Hence, my intervention below. And I can't stress enough: it's not about the hypotheticals and edge-cases that your vacuum cleaner in the cloud is going to be hacked and start running on its own and wake you up in the middle of the night or all your doors will lock to keep you out of your own home, although we will see that happen. It's about how property becomes collectivized by coders when it becomes electronic and connected. Its inherency is broken up -- which is of course is that process Comrade Lawrence Lessig zealously began when he began to smash the inherency of copyright of digital art and induce people to "share" without paying the author.

* * *

Each item that you put on the Internet of Things becomes partly not yours -- in fact, at any moment, it could become entirely not yours. Each thing with its unique UUID uploaded and connected to the Internet becomes collectivized by coders and then available to hackers.

What matters isn't the connections *you* forge among your things and the Cloud, which only has the thin membrane of a likely poorly-devised password.

What matters is that each connection strips away the inherency of the property as yours, and makes it at least a little bit -- and then maybe a lot -- someone else's.

If a heating pad or a television or a coffee maker requires a remote control commander or switch to operate, and you automate that via the Internet to make it work, at any moment, whether because "technology just doesn't work sometimes" or because its hacked or because the coders and operators of the Internet -- oh, don't like your blog or your political views -- those items may stop working. When they stop working, they lose their main property -- use to you. Your property with a lot of electronics in it that doesn't work anymore isn't much use now, is it?

Now imagine if it is your pacemaker?

Now, technologists interested in the Bright Future skip over these problems and call them minor or rare or fixable with encryption or whatever. But the problem isn't just the *misuse* of the cloud and your own personal Internet of Things.

The problem comes in your collectivization of your things. As you put it, "I’m not the only one who can use it. I can authorize other parties to use it as well."

That means you've stripped away some of its essence as your property and for the sake of "smartness," collectivized it. You may find this useful now, say, to somebody changing the car in your oil. But surely it's not too hard even for you to imagine when this "smartness" might get "dumb" pretty fast.

You say: "These won’t be “free” services that we get by trading away privacy for convenience. We’ll pay for them. In return they will not only store our data. They’ll also run code."

But everything that is coded and uploaded to the Internet related to me and my personal property is now a coder's and "the Internet's," not mine. Have you ever seen how the thuggish hackers' movement Anonymous operates? Is *that* what you want done with your toaster or your car?

The privacy inherent in disconnected private property is stripped away by the act up uploading and connection through the UUID or RFID, and you can never get it back -- you won't be able to reset an objects unique identifier but will be forced to buy a new one. It isn't just that your collectivized property is vunerable; try to see it. It is collectivized and you are now in a commune. You may never get your private life back again. This is why I call it technocommunism, and I warn about the way in which we will continue to get this awful system online that was discredited on earth: the Internet of Things.

* * *

Go from "Internet of My Things" to "Internet of My Social Relations" to see the further collectivization potential for manipulation.

P.S. I'm trying to find my screenshots from back then of the parcel in the Linden sims around Derwent showing all those flowers and pots and things with taggability and rateability, and then the HUD to use to track them. Anybody else have any?

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Posted at 06:46 AM in Augmented Reality, Internet Governance, Internet of Things, Internet Policy, Technology | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

01/30/2013

Will John Judis or Bobby Jindal Prevail?

A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Remember when I analyzed the socialism in Obama's Inauguration Speech?

Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left  -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.

I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.

That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.

Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."

Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.

In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.

Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.

Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.

But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.

Not much, however. Here's what he says in Foreign Policy in 2009 after Obama's first win, but describing a more bleak time after Reagan's win:

A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."

I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.

Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".

So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?

Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:

Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure “competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our skepticism of central authority.”

He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.

Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.

To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:

This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”   

Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state sovereignty.

This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!

Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.

Says Judis:

Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights interpretation of democracy.

Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."

John Judis has been debated in the conservative blogosphere. But it's symptomatic of the awfulness of the leftward turn at New Republic that he won't get a debate from liberals now at TNR.

The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.

Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.

Bobby Jindal
Governor Bobby Jindal joined members of Louisiana’s seafood industry to discuss the impact of the BP oil spill on the industry at Acme Oyster House in New Orleans. Photo by lagoshep.

Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.

James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.

I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?

Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.

Oh.

I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.

They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve  -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side,  say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".

No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.

In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).

Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:

We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.

We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.

Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.

I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.

It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.

Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:

If any rational human being were to create our government anew, today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government workers.

We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.

The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.

Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.

For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):

Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy, “high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.

Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and  it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.

While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:

Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make “central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security, that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and groups like ACORN.

Armed? Really?!

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Posted at 01:03 AM in Big IT, Corporations, Current Affairs, Technology, U.S. Policy, Venture Capitalists | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

01/11/2013

Foreign Policy's Livefyre Commenting System Sucks -- and Maybe That's on Purpose

FP problem 1

No doubt like other readers of ForeignPolicy.com, I've been frustrated for months with the really crappy comment management system used on the articles, called Livefyre.

Of course, Livefyre sucks wherever you find it because it enables anonymous comments, and that always makes for unaccountable idiocy and nastiness.

The gold standard these days is to have Facebook log-ins for comments, as that forces people to use their real-life identity, and therefore their remarks attach to their online reputation -- and that's a good thing.

I'm all for pseudonymous accounts and their rights, and it's possible to build up a good persistent identity online even with a pseudonym, but the worst thing is to be in a setting where you reveal your identity but the other commenters hide and snipe at you -- such is the atmosphere on many websites and we're all used to it.

Livefyre gets especially frustrating and stupid on ForeignPolicy.com, however, because of the mechanics of how it dysfunctions.

You've probably noticed that when you get a notification that someone has responded to your comment, if you click on the link in your email, it "goes nowhere" -- you get to a page with an error message. Perhaps you conclude that the comment -- which might seem nasty more often than not -- was removed by moderators -- but actually, it isn't most of the time.

FP Problem 2

If you are curious, you might try logging into the site, or noting that you are logged in already and try again -- maybe that's the issue?

But you'll discover that in fact that makes no difference -- you can't reach that story by that link no matter what, even logged in.

So if you are like most people, you give up at this point (or you did even before) because comments under The Cable or Passport or Shadow Government -- where all kinds of trolls hang out and harass those who disagree with them -- aren't worth answering.

So maybe Foreign Policy likes it this way -- by keeping this built-in, engineered dysfunction, they probably cut their comments in half or less. 

Of course, that failure to keep reader stickiness hurts their ad clicks and their overall bottom line, so some grown-up should try to explain to them that they need to swallow their nerdy "progressive" pride and let people talk as much as they want on their comments, given that they're open and not moderated -- or at least, not pre-moderated.

But in order to get at this problem, you'll have to be very persistent -- and penetrate the wall of geek assholery that perpetrated this situation in the first place -- and will make it hard to fix. Namely:

o The geeky editors -- Blake Hounsell and company -- don't care what happens in the comments. They chose a system that they vaguely thought would enable more comments and more free speech -- and maybe they suffered from the usual geeky hatred of Facebook as a "walled garden" -- but in fact they didn't do due diligence to see if it actually works. Why? Well, they don't really want comments. The authors never answer them. They never appear even to have read them. They are for the masses -- especially those "low information voters" so loathed by the Twitterati -- to entertain each other, not for real reader engagement.

o The geeks at Livefyre itself refuse to care about what they view as Foreign Policy's problem. It's not their business to try to make the FP customer's experience better; we're not their customer -- FP is their customer. They view their job as only the narrow patch between their servers and the commenter, and whether that fully integrates smoothly with foreignpolicy.com itself is really not something they can be arsed to worry about. Not my server, not my problem. It's just an API or whatever it is, they handle it, and if half the people are lost using it, too bad. Let FP figure it out.

The combination of the arrogant foreign policy nerds (see their admissions policy if you want to learn how snotty they are) and the arrogant Livefyre nerds means that the readership of Foreign Policy can go fish. That's how they like it. In fact, it ensures that only the most dedicated and determinated (or the most obsessive with the ability to hang out online all day) will go to the trouble to search in the huge cluttery clusterfuck that is the front page and side bars of FP for articles they once commented on and find their comments manually to be able to answer the other fucktards that cranked at them below some hipster's blog post about Syrian rebels or Chuck Hagel.

So hence this correspondence below with Lifefyre. The language, the attitude, the assumptions  will be familiar to those long-suffering denizens of the JIRA or bug-tracker in Second Life, so I include it here for your enlightenment. Maybe -- as I said -- some grown-up at the switchboard over there at FP will wake up and figure out that they need to create dynamically-updating URLs for their articles so that they don't go out of date even within a few hours and prevent commenting and trackbacks from working and therefore cutting out gadzillion return visits to the site and ruining traffic and CPM.

Continue reading "Foreign Policy's Livefyre Commenting System Sucks -- and Maybe That's on Purpose " »

Posted at 10:33 PM in Big IT, Internet Governance, Open Source, Social Media and Social Media Gurus, Technology | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

12/19/2012

Chomskyan Logic and Trying to Explain Human Affairs

One of the things that used to drive me crazy in Linguistics class at the University of Toronto in 1975 was the Chomskyan grammar.

My linguistics professor, a young, dapper Canadian who resembled the singer Robert Palmer and drove a motorcycle, would assure us as we tortured ourselves over Chomsky's grammar methods and rules that however wacky his politics were, his linguistics was sound.

Later, I was to sit in political science lectures where the professors would assure us the opposite: his politics were sound, but his linguistics was wacky. I came to believe both were true.

The linguistics method involved taking the mess of a language, as it was transliterated (imperfectly) to us, and then devise rules for why it did what it did. So you'd get the Xhosa language in Africa with its clicks, or Kyrgyz or Turkmen or some language where the rulers had decided to ration the vowels, and struggle to figure out why it went through this or that morphemic change in its various cases or tenses.

So this involved constructing elaborate schemes for how an "o" became an "a" during certain circumstances  of stress -- like the "o" in "konechno" in Russia becomes an "a" in Moscow and other regions but doesn't in some -- or how the "ch" in "konechno" becomes more of a "sh" in the St. Petersburg region. World-burning stuff. Except -- as our young professor kept telling us -- we were doing this for a greater cause -- we were going to be able to teach machines to read languages -- computers were just getting started and networking of them was soon to come -- and it would all improve our lives.

So...Remember, there was no Internet then, and computers were literally giant things that took up entire rooms and required punch cards to run -- I had seen them myself in summer jobs at Xerox or Citibank where as a temp worker, I had to be the one to bundle the cards and mail them places or sit and tediously fill out their boxes for various chores they were going to do. I'll never forget the portly older gentleman in suspenders and beards, or or the middle-aged men in buzz-cuts, bow-ties and 1950s eyeglasses who raptuously worked on these machines until well in the wee hours of the night --sometimes overnight -- adapting themselves to these machines that were in fact supposed to make us have things easier.

I always found the Chomsky thing fake -- you had to concoct this entire scaffolding to explain why a language did this or that, and it felt as if you were faking things along the way. Our linguistics professor would praise or chide us depending on whether we came up with "elegant' or "messy" solutions -- I remember I got an "elegant" once merely by accident. This would involve whether you had to have many, many steps and complex ideas to get from, say, "o" to "a" in back formation, or whether you could do it more neatly and economically (that would be better for machines, see).

Linguistics 202 was a big disappointment to me -- they had snuck math in without telling me, and I hated math. I had joined Linguistics 101 enthusiastically, with vague ideas of learning lots of languages, or at least rudimentary forms of some of them and a few well, and going around the world and Doing Good, perhaps at the UN or in business or even as a missionary. I was filled with stories of people who, alternately, innoculated little children by learning the language of remote people suspicious of vaccinations and persuading them to take part in health programs  (which they still are deadly suspicious of), or figuring out how to advertise for Coke effectively, or translating the Bible into the language of some indigenous tribe which would then acquire literacy. Those were the narratives of the day imbined from the combination of Life, Atlantic, and the National Geographic which we had in our home. I thought, in other words, that linguistics was about helping humans talk to each other, not helping machines to talk to humans.

As I have mentioned bfore, my father had learned Russian when he was put in immersive language training in the US Army Air Corps and fought in the Korean War, and my mother had been "youth ambassador to Spain" from her city in an international exchange program where she lived with a family for a semester in Zaragoza. Earlier, my grandmother had learned some Greek and Latin by literally sitting and eavesdropping outside the classes of boys, encouraged in this study as girls weren't at the time, and picking up some phrases. Foreign languages were the way in which these people from Irish immigrant families were going to get farther than upstate New York and I am grateful to them for that resolve.

Linguistics 101  at the U of T in those days was taught by an elderly man in a bow-tie and horn-rim glasses who did not spend his days by computers but had spent many years both as a missionary and a scholar. I read Benjamin Whorf at the time and thought linguistics was going to be this lovely literary experience where we would notice how the word "splash" had three consonants and vowel sounds that so perfectly reproduced the sound of water splashing. Our professor explained that there was "descriptive" linguistics and "prescriptive" linguistics. "Descriptive" was the camp he belonged in, and Whorf, and it had to do with learning languages and describing them and leaving it at that. He snarled at those coercive "prescriptives" who were doing damage to the organic mysteries of human language.

But by Linguistics 202 -- to show you how fast events were moving -- the machinists were already prevailing. These two camps warred over who was right, and they warred even over how to describe each other's beliefs, as so happens in ideological wars.  One of the problems in trying to discuss this topic now, as you can see from the Wikipedia entry, is that the referents of these terms have now shifted. Now, "prescriptive linguistics" seems to refer to haughty British linguists who are horrified at Americanisms creeping into the King's English, and "descriptive" seems to mean those that let it all hang out and are willing to put words like "LOL" into dictionaries. I'm sure Peter Ludlow would describe this all differently than I am, with utter exasperation, as a professional linguistics professor -- and Chomskyan.

But I'm framing the rough-and-ready problem here: there are theories of human behaviour that try to seek rules for it, and rules for language, which is the expression of human thought, with the aim of making machines be able to interact with humans, and these theories tend to concoct abstract constructions for explaining the rules that don't always make sense, and then there are those who just describe languages and human behaviour as they are and don't attempt to seek patterns that might not be there or might be inexplicable. But then, there is the moral overlay, as the former become coercive and the latter refuse to concede to moral principles and bless "transgressive" or "emergent" behaviour merely because it exists. "There must be no stigmatism," they intone as they devise this or that social policy based on descriptives; the prescribers then seem to devise ever more complex rules to explain this or that thing away they don't like.

A lot more could be said about this, but let me come to the point. I didn't do well in linguistics 202 as it was taught in those days. For one, I missed some classes in the first semester and fell behind. My grandfather was very ill with cancer and I went home to visit him. He had taken us children for candy every Sunday and bought us Easter chicks, and then taught us how to play chess and deliberately lost so we could feel as if we understood how to win. My grandmother was taking care of him alone. So I felt that it was right to visit him in his last weeks. I then returned home again for his funeral.

My solutions grew less elegant and there was no question I was going to "pull a hook" (get a C or worse) in this course, and drag down my entire grade average which otherwise was on track to get a scholarship, which I needed to stay in university. My father was laid off with thousands of other people at Xerox Corporation -- they needed less of the ceramic engineers who worked with their hands on the carrier beads and more of the computer engineers.

So I then decided to do something that we were always discouraged to do at U of T, which had year-long courses with exams at the end, not semester courses with exams at each semester. I decided to drop out of linguistics half way, and find some half-year course -- very rare -- to sustain my grade average. I found a half-year course just in the works of Turgenev, but it was a third-year level. I cajoled the professor into taking me and struggled terribly with some of the work in the original Russian, but managed to earn at least a B. Linguistics as a meta-science was over for me -- except for another half-year course called "The Morphology of the Russian Folk Tale" which couldn't seem to resist having some Chomsky with the literary insights.

Chomsky has remained for me the epitome of machine thinking, and thinking by contrived rules. Curiously, he has a theory of inherency (from where? God? the evolution gods?) to go with the elaborate devised mechanical rules -- children are born with an innate apparatus that makes them learn language in a certain way, instead of as a learned behaviour.  (I've always wondered about that, given how Russians never learn to pronounce the sound "th" that American children learn and Americans never learn to pronounce the soft "l" that Russian children learn -- everyone has had the shock of awareness that "even little children speak this difficult language" they are trying to learn.)

This is part of the "nature versus nurture" debate, and it's funny that Chomsky, who is a Marxist-Leninist on so many other questions, rejects the evolutionary biologist's aversion to nativism.  But then, Chomsky, as we learn from Wikipedia, hated the Skinner box:

"Skinner's behaviourist idea was strongly attacked by Noam Chomsky in a review article in 1959, calling it "largely mythology" and a "serious delusion".[7] Instead, Chomsky argued for a mathematical approach to language acquisition, based on a study of syntax."

Maybe Skinner was just a bit early with his box -- later, they had the Internet delivered to computer towers to become the Skinner's box.

In any event, this is a longer and more complex discussion than I can do justice to here, but I want to say this:

o There are people who devise rules to explain everything about human nature or human events. Chomsky is one of those for whom every evil in the world traces back to the government of the country he lives in; every evil is a direct result of American imperialism; every evil outside of America refracts from Israel -- and so on. Russia's evil never really enters the equation. China or Iran never enter the equation. America is always the quintessential, innate source of evil from which every other evil emanates. Their rules may be logical; their solutions may even be elegant, but you sense that beyond the contrived construction is an entire world that they just didn't discover or acknowledge, and perhaps a world that couldn't always be expressed in mathematical and mechanical terms.

o There are people who concoct rules to explain mysteries -- conspiracies -- that seem to logically follow from their curious and probing and skeptical thinking and which they construct together, getting farther and farther away from intuition and common sense -- which they began with, questioning the constructions of others.

I remember my one encounter in life with Noam Chomsky. I was invited to speak at a panel at the Socialist Scholar's Conference in the 1980s. My topic was the independent peace and human rights movements of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and how they represented a new kind of social movement for this region and how it was important to be raising human rights and peace issues together. Chomsky was going to talk about what he always talked about, evil American imperialism and its wars. There were two or three other socialists on the panel. I wasn't a socialist, but was accepted as a guest because I came from a liberal human rights organization.

In the audience sat Barack Obama, as was later chronicled, the future two-term first black president of America, but while I remember Cornel West, I don't recall Obama, who wasn't famous then.

I was a little nervous as a young person at the thought that I'd have to debate Chomsky, and face down his anti-Americanism and tacit pro-Sovietism which he usually handled by deflection. So I was surprised to discover, after reading his aggressive articles and books, that he was quiet, withdrawn -- and flat. He didn't make eye contact. He didn't directly engage. In fact, thinking about this now, I wonder if Chomsky wasn't the first famous Asperger's patient, undiagnosed. He had a short haircut and nerd glasses and dressed very "straight" in conservative pants and shirt and sweater, unlike the audience in those days that had a lot of big hair, jeans and long ethnic skirts and batiks.

He didn't debate. He laid out his own theses and simply ignored mine. That was understandable -- I was a nobody by comparison. But given that there was a very big debate then at the time as to whether Western peace movements should take on board the defense of movements like Poland's Solidarity or East European pacifists or Soviet political prisoners like Sakharov (who opposed above-ground nuclear testing, the invasion of Afghanistan, and later opposed "Star Wars"), it was frustrating that he wouldn't lay his cards on the table. Yeah, I get it that he has his own sort of Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union as "state capitalism" and that feels like criticism. But then, it's not a critique of the communist ideology and communist reality as worse than "American imperialism" at the end of the day, is it.

What am I saying with yet another one of my long, rambling posts with memoirs of my youth and insights of old fights of yesteryear? That the reasons for the Newton shooting are complex, but not that complex; that the solutions for the Newton shooting are complex, but not that complex, that some of those trying to explain solutions away are constructing elegant logic about guns or mental illness that may not fit other situations; that human life is complicated.

Even so, there will still be foreigners who ask in bewilderment, why do Americans say "grosheries" instead of "groseries"? And why do Americans love free speech but love guns just as much? Should they control either the one or the other or both and live in peace?

 

 

 

 

 

Posted at 04:19 PM in Current Affairs, Technology | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

07/29/2012

A Creepy Movie About the Future -- the Singularity?

A short futuristic film by Israeli film-makers Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo. This sure is a creepy film about the future -- with virtual worlding and apps embedded into the eyeballs, even beyond Google Glass -- and gamification everywhere. It's like Vernor Vinge's Rainbow, where there were "wearables" -- but not these implantations. Would people accept implantations like this? Well, people already accept laser surgery to improve sight or do without glasses, maybe they would. And that Wingman! It's funny that the girl didn't keep walking...

Posted at 05:04 PM in Augmented Reality, Technology, Virtual Worlds | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

07/18/2012

Why Doesn't the USB Fit in the Slot?

Shouldn't all keyboard USBs be standard to fit in the towers of any computers?

So what's up here with this e-machines keyboard not being able to fit into this Dell 1100?

There's only one slot that a purple USB prong from the keyboard could go into -- this hole that is also helpfully coloured purple here on the back of the tower:

 

USB slot

Yet it won't fit.

USB pring

Now, why won't it fit?

If you look closely -- and it may not be visible in this camera photo -- the USB prong has a not only tines like a fork, but a kind of wedge that has to fit into a slot, inside.

And that doesn't match, as there is no slot inside the purple USB hole on the tower.

Hmmm. So I could cast around and see if I can find a used keyboard that goes with this Dell 1100 (used). Or get a wireless keyboard? I have a feeling those will break down a lot.

 

 

Posted at 05:39 PM in Technology | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

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