Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Apple Doing a Lot Better than Expectations

John Gruber:

Daring Fireball: I just went through Apple’s iPhone availability checker for all 50 states in the U.S.: one store in Hawaii has one model (8 GB), one store in California (out of 38 in the state) has one model (16 GB black), and the Fifth Avenue flagship store in New York has one model (16 GB white). That’s it.

So much for my “just wait a week and then cruise in and pick one up in five minutes” plan.

This doesn't appear to be an "underproduce to make sure you keep the buzz" stockout. This appears to be a genuine surprise stockout...

The Transparent Society...

Distributed global surveillance:

Yes, Google News Comments Works...

Now I have another time sink: obsessively googling myself on Google News...

I need staff. I need staff badly...

Distributed Co-Creation

From Blaise Zerega:

What Hath Open Source Wrought?: Five years ago this month, economist Brad DeLong asked a question central to the value of information technology. If the industrial age yielded the assembly line, what, he pondered, will the information age yield? "From a historical perspective," wrote DeLong in a Wired magazine column, "it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively." By tools, he was referring to computers, software, and of course, the web. The answer, he hinted, was to be found in open source software.

Fast forward to the present. It's obvious to anyone who has paid attention not just to advances like open source software, but to crowd-sourcing and to the importance of user-generated-mass-production. While we still have some thrashing about to do, it's going to be a glorious thrashing about. And you know a development is real when McKinsey gets involved. In June, the firm published The Next Step In Open Innovation (free registration required). The authors cite such examples as LEGO, the LAMP stack, and the design of the ATLAS particle detector. It's definitely worth a read this holiday weekend.

Oh, and the report offers up an answer to DeLong's thorny question: the authors dub the phenomenon he described as distributed co-creation. Gotta love it.

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From Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson:

next step in open innovation: For most companies, innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps. Over the last decade, however, a few consumer product, fashion, and technology businesses have been opening up the product-development process to new ideas hatched outside their walls....

Suppose that a wireless carrier, say, were to orchestrate the design of a new generation of mobile devices through an open network of interested customers, software engineers, and component suppliers, all working interactively with one another... open-source platforms developed through distributed cocreation, such as the “LAMP” stack (for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python), have become standard components of the IT infrastructure at many corporations. What facilitates this new approach to innovation is the rise of the Web as a participatory platform....

Distributed cocreation is too new for us to draw definitive conclusions about whether and how companies should implement it. But our research into these online communities and our work with a number of open-innovation pioneers show that it isn’t too soon for senior executives to start seriously examining the possibilities....

In nearly every sector, many of the ideas and technologies that generate products emerge from a number of participants in the value chain... suppliers understand the technology and manufacturability of their pieces of the end product better than the OEMs do.... The benefits of specialization and collaboration seem obvious today.... The example of Wikipedia suggests that companies can take even greater advantage of specialization by ceding more control over decisions about the content of products to networks of participants (suppliers, customers, or both) who interact with one another. Does this seem far-fetched? IBM apparently doesn’t think so: it has adopted the open operating system Linux for some of its computer products and systems, drawing on a core code base that is continually improved and enhanced by a massive global community of software developers, only a small fraction of whom work for IBM....

While distributed cocreation does seem promising, it isn’t entirely clear what capabilities companies will need (or how they will organize those capabilities) to make the most of it....

Many cocreating online communities assume that “crowds”5know more than individuals do and can therefore create better products; as the open-source-software expert Eric S. Raymond has said, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” It is far too early to know with certainty if this idea holds true across all kinds of products, but a growing consensus maintains that in software development, at least, distributed cocreation is a ticket to quality.... Apache runs more than half of all Web sites and that eight of the ten most reliable Internet hosting companies run Linux....

Research that we and others have conducted on consumers participating in online communities demonstrates that most cocreators recognize that the brand—not they—will own the resulting intellectual property. Why then do they get involved? Rewards and fame were certainly motivators, but participants are largely interested in making a contribution and seeing it become a reality.... In choosing between competing ones, brand affinity is the most important factor for users willing to cocreate, and 40 percent of would-be cocreators will refuse to cocreate with companies they don’t like or trust...

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Brad DeLong:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view.html?pg=5: In the spring of 1994, I wiped the game Civilization off my office computer. I wiped it off my home PC. I wiped it off my laptop. I threw away the original disks on which it had come. It was clear to me that I had a choice: I could either have Civilization on my computers, or I could be a deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury. I could not do both. It wasn't that my boss ordered me to - she herself played a mean game of computer solitaire. In this, I was the boss, and I had decided that with Civilization on DeLong's hard disk, DeLong's productivity would be unacceptably low.

Computers are tremendous labor-saving devices. They give us power to accomplish extraordinary amounts of work in extraordinarily short intervals of time: financial analysis, data mining, design automation. But they also give us the capability to do things like play solitaire. Or send instant messages. Fiddle with fonts. Futz with PowerPoint. Twiddle with images. Reconfigure link rollovers. At the organizational level, however, the uses of high tech that might be valuable for an individual can be pointless or counterproductive. Consider a meeting to decide between two courses of action. Often, the same decision would be made whether weeks were spent preparing overheads or no overheads were prepared at all. It's easy to see that, from the company's point of view, all the hours spent on PowerPoint slides are dissipated waste.

Now, I don't want to say that computers and communications haven't increased productivity. They have. They've tripled the underlying rate of productivity growth since the bad old days of the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. economies. Large investments in computers and communications seem necessary for rapid, industry-level productivity growth. Still, there is a strong sense that computers are less of an asset to the economy than they might be if we truly knew what they were good for and how to use them.

McKinsey and its brethren tell horror stories of companies investing heavily in computers that were of no more use than doorstops: Kmart applied computers everywhere except in preparing to handle fluctuating sales volumes; automated check-imaging systems wound up saving banks neither time nor money. (McKinsey will also tell you that the best way to avoid such organizational dysfunction is - surprise! - to hire McKinsey.)

Meanwhile, we are a long way from the old-fashioned version of white-collar control, where you sat at your desk and either stared into space or did your work. Most often you stared, until you got so bored that your work seemed interesting. Today, white-collar workers want to use their machines to be more productive and impress their bosses, but also to do things like shop and read blogs, which make their lives happier and their workdays more interesting.

From a historical perspective, it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively. As Stanford's Paul David was the first to point out, much the same thing happened a century ago when the electric motor came to American manufacturing. New general-purpose technologies work well only if they are the base of a system, or form a cluster of reinforcing and self-sustaining changes in the way work is organized. With electric motors, the important gains arrived only when engineers used them to reorganize factory layouts to improve workflow, giving birth to mass production.

We do not yet know what will be to the information age as mass production was to the electricity age. Detailed monitoring of every keystroke, every word entered, every image viewed? A more relaxed workplace that accepts the mix of activities that fill our lives? Successful automation that makes jobs more interesting by off-loading the boring tasks onto microprocessors in a more thorough and comprehensive way?

Those who work for large organizations will likely face a future of increasing surveillance - in which managers know hour-by-hour how many items have been scanned through the register, how many keystrokes have been made in writing a legal brief, how many directory assistance calls have been answered, and in which modern technologies distinguish those who just look busy from those who are busy. If this happens, bosses can step up the pace and reduce the on-the-job leisure that we all enjoy.

The underlying ideology of the large company - that your time is its time - will, for a while, make the idea of using surveillance technologies irresistible to high-level managers. I hope this proves inefficient and counterproductive, that after a decade or a generation, such bosses will realize detailed, hour-by-hour surveillance simply doesn't boost output...

Bill Gates Reviews Windows...

This is the good version of Windows--XP, I think:

Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant:

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn't in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system ... and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn't Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn't use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like "Open" or "Save". No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don't you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

Firefox 3 Now Controls Scott Eric Kauffman

Who writes:

Acephalous:: If you're the kind of person who likes to open 423 articles in JSTOR so as to bring the CPU of his relatively new computer to its knees, you should download Firefox 3. Right now, I have 78 tabs open.  More than half of them are JSTOR articles—for those without access, that means gigantic memory-hogging images—and Firefox is currently occupying 298,732 K of memory.  Yesterday, it would've easily engorged 1,400,000 K and had my CPU in tears. 

Short of extreme protestation, I'm not sure how to make this endorsement sound earnest at this point. But it is.

Ask the Mineshaft

Three questions:

1. How do I get my few old Amazon digital downloads onto my brand-new Amazon Kindle? I mean, an ebook should be an ebook should be an ebook, shouldn't it?
2. How do I get my Google Books books onto my brand-new Amazon Kindle?
3. Why does http://unfogged.com call its advice sections "Ask the Mineshaft" anyway?

She "Lost" Her Phone, Ha-Ha!

Megan McArdle says that she has to buy a new-model iPhone today because she "lost" her cell phone:

Megan McArdle: What do you do with your old iPhone?: Well, today's the day that Jobs is supposed to unleash his new creation on the world--and not a moment too soon, as I seem to have lost my old cell phone...

I would snark without mercy, except that I really did lose my cell phone last week. Honest. Swear. I can provide affidavits...

For those who have not lost their iPhones, she has advice:

For those who are still in full possession, however, this presents a problem, at least if they are iPhone owners. The new phone will have better data speeds, probably better call quality, and several new features like GPS. This suddenly renders the price of their old phones--well, probably you can still trade it in that currency composed entirely of gigantic stones. The word on the street from my shadowy hipster associates is that the thing to do is jailbreak the phone and then ebay it internationally to some country where the iPhone is not yet sold through a carrier. In those fabled lands, a jailbroken iPhone 1.0 is probably worth almost as much as you paid for it.

Sound

Derek Powazek writes:

The Quest for Perfect iPhone Earbuds: V-Moda Vibe Duo. PRICE: $101. PROS: Best sound of all: big bass, clear highs, love it. I like the style of it, especially the feel of the cords. And they’re way comfy in the ear. CONS: The sharp metal bits can scratch the iPhone if you put it all in the same pocket. The clicker button can be difficult to find without looking. By far worst reliability of any headphones I’ve tried. I’ve gone through four pairs now. Each time, one of the earbuds stops working after a few months. Returning them for replacement is easy enough, but still a hassle. VERDICT: My favorite earbuds of the bunch. They must be - I’m on my fifth pair. (Aside to V-Moda: You must know about the failure rate by now. Fix the damn things.)

The Worm Ouroboros...

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors:

Feminist Law Professors: Why I Love Being A Law Prof, Blogging Edition: I’m listening to Jack Balkin (of Balkinization) give a talk, whilst sitting next to one of my very favorite law prof bloggers, Michael Froomkin (of Discourse.net), and next to him is Brad DeLong (of Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong). Nearby is James Grimmelmann (of The Laboratorium). Yesterday I was on a panel that also included Bill McGeveran (of Info/Law) and Frank Pasquale (of Madisonian.net and Concurring Opinions). I’ve heard presentations by very smart people like Wendy Seltzer (of Legal Tags), and Andrea Matwyshyn (Jurisdynamics Idol) and gotten to catch up a little with the wonderful Susan Crawford (of Susan Crawford blog) and Chris Hoofnagle (of Chris Hoofnagle.com).

There are lots of great non-bloggers too! The weather here stinks but the pizza is great. As some of you may have already guessed, I’m in New Haven. Next week I’ll get to hang out in Montreal with Bridget Crawford (of this blog of course!), Sudha Setty (of The Title IX Blog) and Christine Hurt (of The Conglomerate) at the LSA Annual Meeting, because we are all on a panel about Blogging As Feminist Legal Method, along with Alison Stein, author of the very cool article discussed here. Life is good, especially during the summer conference season!

Shades of David Lodge's Small World...

Bloomberg San Francisco Bureau at Pier 3

Do we have wifi? Yes! We have wifi! Does it connect to the net? Yes!!

I am stunned and awed by the Bloomberg San Francisco bureau--they have been in it since February. It is amazing what you can do with an old cargo terminal/wearhouse built out over San Francisco Bay... with a few coats of paint... and some hardwood flooring... and more miles of gigabit ethernet cabling than I have ever seen in my life... and teh scuba divers to lay the foundations for the elevators...

Wow! I suppose that two-thirds of the time it must be either dark or foggy, but the remaining third it is absolutely glorious!

Here to do Tom Keene's show: http://www.bloomberg.com/tvradio/podcast/ontheeconomy.html

And to do a panel on exchange rates:

FX panel discussion on 5/20: "Dollar Weakness and Financial Crisis: A Bloomberg Panel": 4PM, Bloomberg San Francisco Bureau (Pier 3, SF, 94111): In this historic year, Bloomberg L.P. brings together two top, but different minds to discuss the interdependencies of the economy, credit and foreign exchange markets. Particular focus will be made on the imbalance of Pacific Rim and European capital flows. Moderated by Thomas Keene, host of Bloomberg on the Economy, the seminar will address recent dollar strength as LIBOR spreads...attempt to narrow.

Panelists: J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley; Robert Sinche, Head of Strategy: Global Rates, FX & Commodities, Bank of America

Little Brothers: Panel on David Brin's "The Transparent Society": Thursday May 22 Omni New Haven 3-5 PM George A&B

Thursday afternoon in New Haven, CT, I am on a panel to talk about David Brin's decade-old book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? at the 2008 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference: http://www.cfp2008.org/wiki/index.php/%22The_Transparent_Society:%22_Ten_Years_Later.

Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale
155 Temple Street
New Haven, Connecticut 06510
Phone: (203) 772-6664 or (800) 843-6664.
Fax: (203) 974-6777
Web site: http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/NewHavenYale/MeetingFacilities/CFP2008ComputersFreedomandPrivacyConference5.aspx

David Brin, Alan Davidson, J. Bradford DeLong, A. Michael Froomkin, Stephanie Perrin, Zephyr Teachout

Here are posts from the past, hoisted from the archives:

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Lots of Little Brothers:

Not Just Big Brother, But Lots of Little Brothers Too...: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: My father is jolted by his new issue of Reason:

The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: "James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!"

But then he calms down:

The accompanying story has a rather different spin, though. Written by Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for News.com and keeper of the well-known politech email list, it is entitled "Database Nation: The upside of 'zero privacy.'" The theme is that the increasing availability of data is excellent news for all of us in many ways, primarily because of the increases in efficiency and choice in the provision of goods and services that are enabled by information.

After all, if you think that a counterparty's possessing too much information about you is not to your benefit, you can always hide your identity in some way--undertake a transaction through intermediaries, establish cover identities via forgery and using them to set up PayPal accounts and anonymized email addresses, make sure to only use public-access computers out of the range of spycams, et cetera.

And he concludes:

As for the jolt of surprise -- my address has been in the telephone book forever, so anyone with a map and a crayon could always do what Reason did. My feeling of a loss of privacy is actually rather illusory.

I don't have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon--at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that's six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments--future Stasis--will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. One reason Ann Marie and I never let the kids watch Saturday morning cartoons was that we didn't want to be eroded by advertising-induced waves of pressure for X or Y. We hang up on all telephone solicitations immediately because we know our vulnerability to persuasion too well. And once enough people out there have figured out who we are, our internet wire transmits information both ways.

The way Larry Summers put it was that he wants everybody in the world to know that trying to sell him golf stuff is a waste of time, but that he might well bite if offered tennis stuff. But at the same time he's profoundly uneasy about negotiating with or interacting with somebody who knows and has had plenty of time to think about every detail about all of his purchases for the past twenty years.

Sometimes what look like quantitative changes--the falling cost of information processing--make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.

Useful Comments:

Isn't the kind of privacy we're concerned about losing here a very modern development? I spent a couple of years living in a village in a developing country, and everyone knew everything about everyone else. The universe of people local enough to be interesting was small enough that any tidbit of information: an unusual purchase, a change in routine... anything, was synthesized quickly into a coherent narrative that got passed around to everyone in the village. If you wanted to do something privately, you had to literally keep it a secret -- do it behind closed doors without in any way signalling publically that there was anything untoward going on. This certainly sounds annoying from a modern American point of view, but it really wasn't all that unlivable once you got used to it, and it's how people have lived since the dawn of history. The anonymity we're used to, being able to do things publically that we would prefer our acquaintances to remain unaware of by relying on the difficulty of compiling the huge amount of public information out there, is very new, probably post-WW II for most Americans. What are the ill effects we expect from losing it? Posted by: LizardBreath on May 16, 2004 08:23 AM

For those who missed it, medical privacy in the US is apparently at an end (see http://www.medicalprivacycoalition.org/). I have no idea whether the situation is similar here in Canada, though I should. "The Justice Department now states that patients "no longer possess a reasonable expectation that their histories will remain completely confidential," adding that federal law "does not recognize a physician-patient privilege."" Posted by: Tom Slee on May 16, 2004 08:24 AM

Suddenly, monitoring and information processing is cheap, and so, potentially, control is cheap. The "ethics" of a society/polity in which monitoring/information processing was expensive no longer apply. Listing your phone number in a phone directory no longer has the same implications. The penalty for, say, speeding on the freeway, which is appropriate, when the police can only observe and cite, say, one in 4,000 speeders, is not going to be appropriate when the police can cite one in 50, or one in 5. The ACLU approach, which is a reactionary attempt to prevent use of cheaper monitoring to do what corporations and governments will do, is hopeless and misguided. Misguided because it stands in the way of desirable increases in technical efficiency and productivity; hopeless because you cannot stop a force of nature. I suspect the solution is the "empowerment" of the individual by the same technology. Concealment of a kind is made cheaper by the same technology, which makes monitoring cheaper. by: Brian Wilder on May 16, 2004 09:43 AM

"In the greatest surveillance effort ever established, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. ECHELON is controlled by the NSA and is operated in conjunction with the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) of England, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of Canada, the Australian Defense Security Directorate (DSD), and the General Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain under wraps even today." http://fly.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html "An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens. The House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens." http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/05/cyber/articles/27network.html Connect the dots: ECHELON --->BUSH --->ENEMY COMBATANT. We've got nothing to worry about though. Right? Right??? Posted by: Dubblblind on May 16, 2004 10:51 AM

"The biggest threat to our society, he warns, is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people not by too many." Brin does not strike me as someone who has a realistic view of human psychology. His claim is basically that with good enough surveillance tech, everyone has the potential to survey and monitor everyone else so might as well dump privacy to practically eliminate crime, government oppression, etc. As far as I can see this is quite a silly view. We will combine the worst aspects of small villages with the worst aspects of big societies. In a small village everyone knows what everyone else is doing. This produces community but also an often rather straitjacketed conformity. In a big city you lose some of that community but you can also more easily escape the busybodies who try to enforce conformity. In an urban surveillance society, on the other hand, you start to get some nasty social dynamics. Because while it may be easy to COLLECT certain forms of information, it is not so easy to ANALYZE and USE the masses of data that result. In interpersonal affairs this would be a victory for moralists and busybodies. There will be enough of them to immediately tie any "deviant" behavior to an individual and make it public. But the elimination of privacy would not magically bring tolerance for the nonconformists. You will get a "small town" conformity effect enforced not by community rumor but by a small minority of people driven by enough moralistic outrage to spend lots of their time observing others. This observation will be directed disproportionately at deviants. Unlike a real small town where people know about everyone, there will be relatively few people interested in processing the information about your typical average, boring person and then disseminating it where it can do the most damage. A similar thing applies to the government, but with a difference in technological expertise and capabilities. Frankly the internet and advancing personal surveillance tech do not and will not give citizens some magical capability to observe the government. You won't even be able to use your mini-cameras to catch cops beating people in jail if they use the simple expedient of removing such devices from suspects. It's not like you're going to be able to set up webcams in NSA headquarters either. I certainly don't see how it would do anything about the potential for intelligence abuses - collecting information on dissidents and threatening to use that against them. Indeed, they can sit back and relax while that information is collected for them and the public demands that something be done about the undesirables. We're a society that doesn't watch CSPAN or support real investigative reporting. How the heck would there be enough people to do the difficult and mostly-boring job of collecting lots of amateur intelligence about their own government? Hell no, we're far more interested in gossip about each other and in enforcing conformity, that's where virtually all of the energy will go. Posted by: Ian Montgomerie on May 16, 2004 12:16 PM

DeLong's aware of Brin's ideas on this subject. He reviewed Brin's "The Transparent Society" soon after its publication: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Transparent.html I'm moderately ashamed to say that I haven't read Transparent Society, despite having read most of Brin's fiction, and having been exposed to his basic thoughts on privacy and transparency in lite form there. Posted by: RT on May 16, 2004 02:30 PM

I had a recent experience that relates to the issue of privacy, albeit peripherally. Bear with me and go easy on the flames if you feel that this is irrelevant: "I got a call from someone at the Ford Motor Company Credit department concerning someone whose name I did not recognize. I assumed that this person (let's call him Joe Blow, although I forgot his real name) had listed me or someone whose name was similar to mine as a credit reference and FMC was calling to check up on him. I didn't want to screw the guy's chances of getting credit because a mistake was made, so I called FMC (during my workday, because the time difference necessitated it). It turns out this was not a credit check gone wrong, but instead Mr. Blow was my upstairs neighbor at the apartment complex I lived in, and the FMC representative started to ask me a number of questions about him. No, I had never met him. No, I had never seen a black Mustang in the garage where I park. And no, there is no way that I would relay a message to him. Actually, I regret saying no to that last one. I should have said yes, then asked how much I would be paid to work as a paid agent of the Ford Motor Company Credit Division, and whether they would insure me if Joe Blow took umbrage at the messenger of bad news and beat the shit out of me." I guess all this is to say that I think that private corporations will be as blithely unconcerned as the government about the privacy (and safety) of others, and will eagerly enlist unrelated parties to do their dirty work. Yes, what the government can do to you is generally worse than what corporations can do to you (at least here in the U.S.), but the experience was far creepier than any I have had with any governmental agent. Posted by: no name on May 16, 2004 03:21 PM

I spent Saturday afternoon with my eight year old son on a tour or Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena. I have a friend who works there (Cal (BS) '82 MIT (PhD) '85); it was the annual open house to the public and science exhibitions for children. He showed my son and his daughters around. The highlights were the kids lying down and having a six-wheeled robot truck drive over them; and, looking as the 42" flat panel screen hanging on the wall outside my friend's office and moving a mouse to zoom in on an image of the Western United States, then California, then Southern California, then Los Angeles County, then Jet Propulsion Labs, then over to my neighborhood, then to my street. I'm told they can get a lot closer with a lot better resolution. My friend is now mapping the rain forests to track deforestation using radar technology to make maps and pictures. Posted by: Cal on May 16, 2004 10:13 PM

---

Book Review:

David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society, (New York: Addison-Wesley: 020132802X): For perhaps two centuries people living in today's advanced industrial societies have had a modicum of privacy. Before two centuries ago, privacy was nearly unheard-of: you lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else's business. Between two centuries ago and the present, people moved out of the village and out to a--relatively isolated--farm, or into a city where the sheer number of people made relative anonymity--and thus privacy--possible. But, at least according to David Brin, the future will be different. In the future privacy as we know it today will be nearly impossible to attain.

In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.

Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.

I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.

If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.Book Review:

David Brin (1998), The Transparent Society, (New York: Addison-Wesley: 020132802X): For perhaps two centuries people living in today's advanced industrial societies have had a modicum of privacy. Before two centuries ago, privacy was nearly unheard-of: you lived in a village where everyone knew everyone else and everyone else's business. Between two centuries ago and the present, people moved out of the village and out to a--relatively isolated--farm, or into a city where the sheer number of people made relative anonymity--and thus privacy--possible. But, at least according to David Brin, the future will be different. In the future privacy as we know it today will be nearly impossible to attain.

In the future privacy will be next to nonexistent because of the explosion of audiovisual, communications, and computer technologies. Cheap hard disks will allow people to collect massive information about transactions: who did what. Cheap cameras will allow people to collect massive amounts of information about locations: who was where. Cheap computer power will allow the sorting and searching of massive amounts of information in search of those nuggets of data relevant to any one particular person. And cheap computers will allow anyone--or anyone with access codes--to access what will essentially become the stored life history of anyone. From David Brin's perspective, this change is coming. The only question is who will have access to the information that will be contained in the great surveillance databases. Will the information be "secret" and "private"--in which case only governments which may turn thuggish will have access? Or will the information be "open" and "public"--in which case we will once again be back in the village, where nearly everything is done in public and everybody knows everybody else's business: truly a global village.

Brin makes a good case that the technology will bring us to one of these two outcomes. And he argues that the first outcome--in which we try to preserve our "privacy" by restricting access to the great surveillance databases--is a very dangerous outcome. It is a dangerous outcome because secret knowledge is power, and if the twentieth century has proven anything it is that governments cannot be trusted with secret knowledge. The great tyrannies of the twentieth century flourished because their surveillance gave them control and their secrecy kept enough citizens from realizing what they were up to fast enough. The advent of modern audiovisual, communications, and computing technologies greatly amplifies the power of surveillance, and greatly multiplies the danger if it is not countered by a greatly amplified power of the people to survey the government. And popular surveillance over the government carries as a side effect a potential loss of privacy. Anything that restricts popular access to information about other citizens restricts popular access to information about the government as well.

I believe that Brin's book is not necessarily an accurate forecast. The futures that he envisions will probably never come to pass. And the choice that he foresees may well never be posed in the stark form in which he poses it. Yet the book is useful: the future Brin envisions is clearly one of the possible futures that might come to pass, and the consequences of what he sees as the wrong choice in that possible future could turn the twenty-first century into an abattoir that would make the twentieth century look like a Sunday picnic.

If enough people read Brin's book, or are brushed by the currents of thought in represents, then it may turn into a self-negating prophecy: a warning of dystopia that by virtue of the horror it paints helps avoid that horror. That was the function of George Orwell's 1984. That is an honorable role for anyone's book.

Manna From Heaven for the iPhone!

Hosanna:

Ecamm Network: PhoneView FAQ - Disk mode for the Apple iPhone: Q: What kinds of files can be converted into Notes? A: You can convert text files, rich text files, PDF files, Word files, and HTML files into notes on your iPhone by dragging them into the notes list. See the instructions for details...

James Fallows vs. Vista

James Fallows continues his war against bad hardware and software:

My three computers (MacBook Air saga, cont..):

1. The sublime elegance of VMWare Fusion... once it was installed, it let me run PC programs and Mac programs side by side, in normal screen windows from which you can cut and paste text back and forth. My cherished PC program Zoot is there in a window right alongside the Mac's Scrivener or DevonThink Pro. And so are Microsoft Outlook and Word 2007. I have learned to be skeptical of the assurance that something "just works." But for me, over three months, Fusion has just worked.... Of course... under Fusion they are actually running on Windows XP, not Vista as on this ThinkPad.... This leads us to the second point for the day:

2. The bottomless villainy of Vista. I am sure I would not be in the middle of switching platforms now if I hadn't bought a Vista-equipped laptop 15 months ago.... [N]early a year and a half after it went on the market, Vista is still an unbelievable dog (as many senior Microsoft officials knew before it was released.)... 99% of the problem turns on slowness... slow to start up, slow to shut down, slow to detect and connect to wireless networks, slow to get programs like Outlook up and running.... It has taken my Vista/ThinkPad at least eight minutes to come fully to life, to recognize the local wifi network, to become responsive with Outlook, to stop its disk churning.... The MBAair was ready to go in well under one minute....

3. The willful inelegance of the Mac keyboard.... Whether or not the Mac layout is objectively better or worse than the PC's, it's different, which requires countless small adjustments....

Sooner or later, three more points (including about MBA's battery, operating temperature, and so on)...

James Poulos on the Invisible College

A good college--visible or invisible--is composed of people who (a) know stuff, and (b) think well. The best colleges are made up of people who know different stuff, who think well in different ways, and who--most important--understand that when they listen to people who know different stuff than they do and who think well in different ways than they do, they learn.

James Poulos:

James Poulos » In Defense of Blogger Collegiality: [W]hat has drawn this motley crew of bloggers together in such a way? Surely not a freakish felicity with constitutional law, or even a common writing style. In fact, all of the bloggers mentioned in this post share what I at least think are fairly wild mutual divergences in style and tone, as well as in content and slant. If anything, there’s a vague libertarian consensus among those identified on the right. But Ramesh is a different kind of conservative than Ross, I am a different kind of conservative than both of them, and Reihan has just identified himself succinctly as a

Rawlsekian neoconservative singulitarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberalincrementalist.

Add other blog greats with whom many of us are familiar, like Andrew and Daniel, and the valences of intellectual diversity are only intensified. The main common attribute, it seems to me, is idiosyncrasy, which isn’t necessarily correlated with collegiality in any way. What looks like a nonthreatening difference of opinion to one idiosyncratic blogger might strike another as a dangerously or dumbly uncategorizable source of opposition.

No, the big conspiracy here I think is one among people who like a good conversation, and have discovered a consistent set of conversation partners whose content and style best compare and contrast with their own. Professional bloggers are paid conversationalists — or should be, at least. And the good social art of collegiality well understood is an essential part of good conversation — especially good public conversation. People sometimes fear that the blogosphere will close itself off to new talent, but, based on the dynamic I’ve just outlined, that strikes me as impossible. The ‘gold rush’ is probably over, but blogging will probably take on the generational tempo of the music world, with big acts retiring for a while to pursue real lives and then making comeback tours after a suitable hiatus — and with lots and lots of new acts competing for attention. Sometimes attention is won by mere novelty, but more often it’s won by talent. That may be somewhat boring when the talent involved is taking ‘Baba O’Reily’ and turning it into a Nickelback-style gruntfest, but may be less so when the talent involves daily attention to political, economic and cultural life.

Charlie Stross Takes His Sense of Indignation for Its Sunday Walk

The large bandwidth downside of advertiser-supported media:

Charlie's Diary: Why your internet experience is slow: Here is a random-ish URL from Salon.com, a not too unusual online magazine: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2008/05/09/askthepilot276/. This HTML page contains the first chunk of a piece of journalism by Patrick Smith... 950 words of text... 6.5Kb.... (Patrick, if you're reading this, I am not picking on you; I just decided to do some digging when I got annoyed by how long my browser was taking to load your words.)

In actual fact, the web page my browser was downloading turned out to be 68.4Kb in size. The bulk of the extra content consists of HTML tags and links.... But that's just the text, and as we all know, no web page is complete without an animated GIF image. So how big is this article, really?... I switched off my browser anti-advertising plugins (AbBlock and NoScript), hit "reload", and then saved the web page. Inline in the page are: 4 JPEG images, 4 Shockwave FLASH animations, 4 PNG images, 8 GIF images (of which no less than five are single-pixel web bugs), 4 HTML sub-documents, 6 CSS (style sheet) files, 22 separate Javascript files... in order to read 950 words by Patrick Smith my cable modem had to pull in 948Kb, of which 942Kb was in no way related to the stuff I wanted to actually read....

This is a novel in HTML.... "Accelerando" runs to 145,000 words; it fits in about 400 pages.... It is 949Kb in size, or about 10Kb larger than a Salon.com feature containing 950-odd words....

If content is king, why is there so little of it on the web? And why are content providers like Salon always whining about their huge bandwidth costs, given that 99% of what they ship — and that is an exact measurement, not hyperbole — is spam?

(Note: these are rhetorical questions. Despite the burning certainty that someone on the internet is wrong, you don't need to try and explain how the advertising industry works to me. Really and truly. I'm just taking my sense of indignation for a Sunday walk.)

Fake Steve Jobs on the Red Queens' Race that Is a Competitive, Contestable Market--and Why Dell Will Not Bounce Back

You know, I have forgotten whom Fake Steve Jobs really is:

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Why Dell will not bounce back: love Charles Cooper of CNET... but I have to take issue with his latest effort (see here) where he tries to argue that while Dell looks like crap today, in fact Dell could bounce back just the way Apple did....

What people overlook is that the advantages that allowed Dell to prosper for about a decade were all fleeting advantages. Dell was for a while an innovative company, but its innovations did not involve product design. They involved manufacturing and distribution efficiencies. On the distribution side, Dell sidestepped the cumbersome... distribution model... wholesalers like Ingram Micro and Tech Data who in turn sold to retailers who in turn sold to end customers -- Michael Dell early on recognized that this was stupid and simply decided not to play ball.... The other PC makers knew they were caught in an abusive relationship with their channel but it took them a decade or so to unwind the old relationships and sell direct.... Game-changer here was the Internet which made it easy for anyone to set up their own Web store and build direct relationships with customers. Dell's advantage got erased.

On the manufacturing side, Dell figured out faster than the others in its space how to squeeze component suppliers... brought in loads of former Wal-Mart people... you, Mr. Parts Supplier, end up paying rent to Dell for the privilege of carrying its inventory on your books. Nice, right? Trouble with this "innovation" is that the advantages it creates are fleeting. What wiped this one out was a little place called China.... The rise of China means everyone can make PCs pretty much as cheaply as Dell does. And it's not just cheap manufacturing anymore. The real genius and power of China lies in its armies of low-cost and brilliant engineers. Seen a Lenovo box lately? Heck of a lot nicer than anything Dell is pooping out from its factory in Round Rock.

Bottom line is this: the only innovations worth making are the ones involving product ideas and product design.... To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.

The other reason Dell won't rebound is that the company is yoked to Microsoft. Vista has hurt them tremendously. Don't doubt it. All of the PC makers know this and they are furious about it. But what can they do? They put their future in the hands of the Beastmaster. They figured they could deal with the Borg's evil nature; they didn't anticipate having to deal with the Borg's incompetence.... [I]nstead of putting our future in the hands of the MicroTards we undertook the massive effort of creating a next-generation operating system of our own. A lot of people, including some very smart ones, said this was crazy. Especially for a company with 2% market share. They said we were suicidal, ridiculous, old-fashioned, hubristic, doomed. The effort cost us huge amounts of time and money and was far from a sure bet. But my feeling is if you don't dare bet on yourself and your own people, you shouldn't be in business. So we made the bet. And now it is paying off in spades -- on Macs and iPhones and other devices which we have not yet announced but will restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives, trust me....

Now as for Dell, well, you know what their big problem is? Dell doesn't have me. Or anyone like me. Mostly because, let's face it, there isn't anyone else like me. I'm one of a kind. Sui generis, as the French say. What Dell has is Michael Dell. Don't get me wrong. He's a nice guy. And a smart guy. But he's not a visionary. He's not an artist. The stuff he's good at -- squeezing suppliers, screwing distributors -- was very cool ten or fifteen years ago. Today? No big deal.... The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.

Linux: The Revenge of Ronald Coase

Tom Slee writes:

Whimsley: Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job: One of the highlights: "over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work". 14% is contributed by developers who are known to be unpaid and independent, and 13% by people who may or may not be paid (unknown), so the amount done by paid workers may be as high as 85%. The Linux kernel, then, is largely the product of professionals, not volunteers.

So Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies... participating for a diverse set of commercial reasons. Some want to make sure that Linux runs on their hardware. Others want to make sure that the basis of their distribution business is solid. And so on, and none of these companies could achieve their goals independently....

This does not mean that Linux was always a commercial venture, or that all open source projects are commercial ventures.... Open source started off as a small-scale set of projects done mainly by volunteers. As the scale and scope of open source projects an increasing number have provided their contributors with some money (augmented perhaps by a waitressing job). Now a few of the most successful have hit the big time and become full-scale economically important commercial enterprises.

Things change. As open source software has matured and expanded it has become both more unlike the rest of the world and more like it. It will be fascinating to see what comes next, but the Linux Foundation report has made clear that open source has crossed its commercial Rubicon, and there is probably no going back.

I Really Do Not Need to See This...

This is evil. Thoroughly evil.

I have no idea which Google tool is doing this, so they are all going into the trash right now:

403 Forbidden: Google: Error: We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you're continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser's online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

On David Brin's "The Transparent Society"

Michael Froomkin writes:

Discourse.net: CFP '08 Accepts Our Panel on 'The Transparent Society': I’m delighted to report that my proposal for a panel on “‘The Transparent Society’ — Ten Years Later” has been accepted for CFP’08, thanks no doubt to the sterling panelists I was able to assemble. Our panel is now scheduled to take place on Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 3:30-5:00(PM) in the George room at the Omni Hotel in New Haven.

Computers, Freedom and Privacy is the most fun conference I go to; the program can be variable, I admit, but the hallway conversations are always fantastic. Come - it’s fun.

Here’s the panel description:

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of David Brin’s controversial book, “The Transparent Society”. The book argues that in the face of the explosion of sensors, cheap storage, and cheap data processing we should adopt strategies of vision over concealment. A world in which not just transactional information, but essentially all information about us will be collected, stored, and sorted is, Brin says, inevitable. The only issue left to be decided is who will have access to this information; he argues that freedom, and even some privacy, are more likely to flourish if everybody - not just elites - has access to this flood of data.

Brin proposes a stark choice: either the information will be “secret” and “private”—in which case only governments, always potentially repressive, will have access. Or, the information will be “open” and “public” and we will all be transparent to each other. Given this choice, Brin argues, better to be naked to each other than to empower a few with unique access to information about the many. The attempt to protect privacy as we know it carries too great a risk, as it leads if not inevitably than at least all too easily to a world of enormous information-driven tyranny in which the powers — primarily governments — with access to our ‘private’ information will abuse it. In contrast, a high-transparency world with very little privacy is one in which citizens have tools that allow them to monitor their governments.

Brin proposed a paradox which infuriated a good segment of the privacy community. It is normally an article of faith for privacy advocates that privacy empowers, and the removal of privacy is at least disempowering and at worst oppressive. Brin counters that privacy advocates have it exactly backwards: trying to maintain traditional ideas of information privacy in the face of technological changes he sees as (now) inevitable is what will disempower and perhaps oppress; only a program of radical information openness, nakedness even, stands a chance of leveling a playing field on which information is truly power.

The reception of “The Transparent Society” reflected the audacity of its claims. Some dismissed it; some attacked it; a few embraced it. What is striking, however, is that the ideas have had staying power: the book remains in print, it is regularly footnoted, and it comes up in discussion. Right or wrong, “The Transparent Society” has become more than a polar case trotted out as a good or bad example, but an as-yet unproved but also un-falsified challenge to how we think about privacy — one that demands continuing reflection (or, some would say, refutation).

The tenth anniversary of publication is an appropriate time to do that reflection at CFP.

About the presenters:

David Brin (remote participation): David Brin is the author of “The Transparent Society,” the inspiration for this panel. He is a noted futurist and science fiction writer.

Alan Davidson: Alan is the head of Google’s Washington, DC, government affairs office. Previously he was Associate Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Alan is a frequent speaker and presence in national privacy debates, and a frequent CFP participant.

J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley: In addition to his work as a macro and economic historian, Brad has written extensively about the economics of information and the Internet. He runs a very popular economics and culture blog, “Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong’s Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal” at http://delong.typepad.com/. Brad served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy in the Clinton administration, 1993-95. He is also a founder-member of the Ancient, Hermetic, and Occult Order of the Shrill.

A. Michael Froomkin (Moderator): Professor of Law, University of Miami: Michael has been writing about privacy, encryption, and anonymity for almost fifteen years. His writings include “The Death of Privacy?” 2 Stan L. Rev. 1461 (2000). He is a founder-editor of ICANNWatch, and serves on the Editorial Board of Information, Communication & Society and of I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. He is on the Advisory Boards of several organizations including the Electronic Freedom Foundation and BNA Electronic Information Policy & Law Report. He is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. He is also active in several technology related projects in the greater Miami area.

Stephanie Perrin: Stephanie is the Acting Director General of Risk Management, Integrity Branch, Service Canada. She is the former Director of Research and Policy at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and was prior to this a consultant in privacy and information policy issues, president of her own company Digital Discretion Inc., and a Senior Fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington. She is the former Chief Privacy Officer of Zero-Knowledge, and has been active in a number of CPO associations, working with those responsible for implementing privacy in their organizations. Formerly the Director of Privacy Policy for Industry Canada’s Electronic Commerce Task Force, she led the legislative initiative at Industry Canada that resulted in the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, privacy legislation that came into force in 2001 and has set the standard for private sector compliance. She is the principal author of a text on the Act, published by Irwin Law.

Zephyr Teachout: Visiting Asst. Prof. of Law, Duke University: Zephyr is one of the leading practitioners and theoreticians of online political organizing. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Zephyr is noted for advocating the Internet as a tool for creating local offline groups. publications include “Mousepads, Shoeleather and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics”(Editor) (forthcoming August 2007, Paradigm Publishers); “How Politicians can use Distributive Networks” (New Assignment, November 2006); “Youtube? It’s so Yesterday,” (with Tim Wu) (Washington Post, November 2006), and “Powering Up Internet Campaigns,” book chapter in Lets Get This Party Started (Rowan and Littlefield, 2005.) She is currently writing about the meaning of corruption in the American constitutional tradition.

The Computer Revolution Continues...

Take value added by manufacturing industry in 2000, project it forward using the BEA's chain-type indices for real value added by industry, and here is what you get:

Peak-to-peak, the Bush business cycle of the 2000s looks to have been the first business cycle in America in which real manufacturing output was essentially flat since... well, ever. But real computer production still managed to double.

Bad Machine! Down!! Bad MACHINE!!!!

Google Mail has decided that ALL of the comments on my weblog are spam. Excuse me while I go train it...

Information-Wrangling Tools

I am supposed to be smart. I should be able to find a way to use all of these in a way that is truly useful:

• Tumblr
• Evernote
• Jott
• Sandy
• del.icio.us
• Skitch

I Find Myself Unable to Disagree...

How could anyone possibly disagree with this, from Paul Graham?

How to Disagree: The web is turning writing into a conversation.... Many who respond to something disagree with it.... Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say.... The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word....

If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well... here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

DH0. Name-calling.... DH1. Ad Hominem.... DH2. Responding to Tone.... DH3. Contradiction.... DH4. Counterargument.... DH5. Refutation.... DH6. Refuting the Central Point....

Truly refuting something requires one to refute its central point, or at least one of them. And that means one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is. So a truly effective refutation would look like:

The author's main point seems to be x. As he says:

quotation

But this is wrong for the following reasons...

The quotation you point out as mistaken need not be the actual statement of the author's main point. It's enough to refute something it depends upon.

What It Means

Now we have a way of classifying forms of disagreement... while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.

The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments.... By giving names to the different forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional....

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it.

Comment Moderation Strategies

Barry Ritholtz points us to the owl-like Teresa Nielsen Hayden::

The Big Picture: My own policies are clearly stated here, but I like the description of how to get your comments banned over at boingboing:

Q. What's likely to land me in your bad graces? A. Since you've asked, here's a nowhere-near-exhaustive list... http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/27/boing-boings-moderat.html

Tor Books Enters the 21st Century: Step I

This threatens to be, in the words of Jo "Authoress of the Damnedest Versions of Both the Tale of Sir Lancelot and Jane Austen (Actually Anthony Trollope) I Have Ever Read" Walton:

more fun than a barrel of Arcturan spider-puppies!

From Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Making Light: Phase one: collect underpants: Yes, we're building a new web site, separate from our perfectly good corporate site.... [A]s I told at least one web reporter, if we knew exactly how it's going to work, we'd be done. We don't, entirely, so we're not, entirely.

But we know several things. We know that the site will use a blog-like architecture to present an ongoing stream of news, opinion, and observation from various Tor people, myself included, about the SF and fantasy events of the day--and about perhaps less-current things that are nonetheless of interest to SF and fantasy readers, such as medieval siege engines, the Van Allen Belt, hoisin sauce, XKCD, and the novels of Georgette Heyer. We know that there will be non-Tor bloggers.... We know that the site will also feature new original fiction... free of DRM... lightweight "social networking."... Most of all, we know that the real point of the exercise isn't to create yet another blog, but rather, a place and a context for the lively, ongoing, wide-ranging, and profoundly self-organizing discussions that have characterized the science fiction subculture since its earliest days. In other words, it'll be a lot like Making Light, except with original fiction and art, more front-page bloggers, a more direct connection to SF and fantasy, and run out of the middle of Tor Books.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So this is, like, a big Tor promotional exercise, right?

PNH: Only in the sense that Tor is a pretty good brand to put on something associated with science fiction....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So what about the free e-books?

PNH: I'm glad I made you up so that you could ask that question! As you know, Bob... we are, For A Limited Time, sending... links through which they can download free, un-DRMed digital editions of various recent Tor books in a variety of formats.... However, the munificence of this offer (Slashdotted twice on its first weekend), combined with our vagueness in describing the actual site for which the offer is merely a build-up, has caused a lot of people to jump to the conclusion that the new site will be all about selling and/or giving away digital books. This isn't the case....

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: Is to be a Focal Point Fanzine, meyer.

PNH: So very busted.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: We thought so. We recognized the signs. The sensitive fannish faces. The faint but unmistakable aroma of mimeo ink. Exactly whose idea was this?

PNH: Well, er, Fritz Foy, former Holtzbrinck CTO and incorrigible ubergeek... and the aforementioned Irene Gallo...and, er, well yes, both Nielsen Haydens. Not long after the project's initial phase, Teresa was promoted to the Vingean Beyond, from whence she sends occasional messages of encouragement to those of us back in the Slow Zone where FTL and true AI are impossible.... And of course we'd be nowhere without the energy, enthusiasm, focus, and endless Outlook-calendar meeting notices of professional Web producer Larry Hewitt, hired by our corporate management to turn our gauzy ideas into a properly flowcharted plan. (Look! He has a plan! We must eat his brain!) We cope.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF FANDOM: So when do you launch? Do you have a beta phase? Are you looking for early volunteers?

PNH: Again you anticipate me with the slan-like acuteness of your fine minds!... Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION. Anyway, that's our plan.

Reading Books Online

Adam Engst writes:

an Open Letter to Steve Jobs: In Support of an iPod reader: Reading habits have undoubtedly changed, since we have more entertainment and research options available to us than ever before... the prime mover... is that Americans are now spending 32.7 hours per week online, almost twice as much as they spend watching TV (16.4 hours per week) and more than eight times as much as they spend reading newspapers and magazines (3.9 hours). If you want to point to an industry in trouble, look no further than newspapers, where circulation is in a steep decline.

The key point is that time spent online is largely time spent reading (and writing), whether email (57 billion messages sent in 2007 by IDC's estimate), blogs (over 70 million, with 1.5 million posts per day, according to Technorati), or more traditional online news and entertainment sources. People read more than they ever have, thanks to the Internet, and new forms of reading are appearing all the time. Witness the Japanese "cell phone novel," meant to be read in serialized form on the ubiquitous mobile phone. The Economist reports that since appearing in 2001, the genre has grown to become an $82 million business in 2006, with some ebooks receiving over a hundred thousand downloads per day.

I've called out all these numbers in order to encourage Apple to acknowledge that people read vast quantities of text and to focus hardware and software design efforts on making it easier to read on the iPod, iPhone, and future devices. The iPod and iPhone can be used to read some online content now, along with small bits of text synced from a Mac, but the experience could be significantly improved with native support for PDF, better user interface support for stored text documents, and more.

But I, speaking as a reader and a publisher, would really like to see Apple create a larger version of the iPod touch optimized not just for a better video experience, but also for a best-of-breed reading experience. Apple has the hardware design and user interface chops that Amazon lacked when creating the Kindle.... Equally important is the iTunes Store....

Such a device would make good business sense for Apple too....

John Markoff has speculated that your dismissal of American reading habits is actually a calculated setting of the stage for just such a device. You didn't have kind words for cell phones or the MP3 players that predated the iPod, with justification - they were (and for the most part remain) utterly awful. So Steve, here's hoping that an upcoming special event will feature an iPod reader, designed to do all the great things we've become accustomed to from an iPod, but with the addition of native support for downloading, managing, and displaying textual documents of all sorts....

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let's add to that The Hobbit and Harry Potter, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work...

Tom Slee Tells Us to Read Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch"

Tom writes:

Whimsley: The Big Switch: The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr, is published by W.W.Norton, January 2008.... Unlike most technology commentators Nicholas Carr knows that if you want to predict what's happening next, you've got to follow the money. And he does so very well, which makes this book (and his weblog) recommended reading for anyone interested in where  technology is taking us.

Google is everywhere in The Big Switch and the reason is simple: cost.

No corporate computing system, not even the ones operated by very large businesses, can match the efficiency, speed and flexibility of Google's system. One analyst [Martin Reynolds of the Gartner Group: see here ] estimates that Google can carry out a computing task for one tenth of what it would cost a typical company.

That means, if you are a company and you have a computing task to be done that Google already does, you can save a bunch of money and you can now start outsource your CPU cycles just as you previously outsourced other tasks. And that means that the computing lands