Source

Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1996/more.notes.and.recommend.html

Content

This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.

more notes and recommendations

``` More notes.

RRE is in a slump right now. Partly it's August -- vacation time. Partly I've been in a crummy mood as I've labored to finish my book. The "final" post-copyediting manuscript has gone to the production editor. The title is "Computation and Human Experience"; I expect it'll be out in the spring. I'll send an announcement when it does.

I'll be in Prague on September 12th-13th, Vienna on September 14th, and Ottawa on September 16th-18th. Let me know if anything cool is happening at those coordinates.

Recommended reading. Read Brian Arthur's article on increasing returns in the July/August 1996 issue of Harvard Business Review. You've probably heard by now that high technology works on different economic principles than traditional production industries. Arthur's article spells out the strategic consequences of this fact, and in so doing explains much that is bizarre about the computer industry.

Also, Barry Wellman's work on social networks. You'll need access to a university library, but it's worth the trip. His article "The community question re-evaluated", in Michael P. Smith, ed, "Power, Community, and the City" (Comparative Urban Research, Volume 1, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988) destroys a particularly annoying cybermyth: the nostalgic idea that "communities" have fallen from a past state of grace in which they were tight-knit, self-contained units. It's not so. Geographic communities have always loosely intersected large numbers of far-flung social networks. (To understand this in a concrete way, Wellman and I both recommend that you check out Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's book "Montaillou", which reconstructs the whole life of a medieval French village from records of very detailed research that the Catholic Church performed there in the course of putting down an outbreak of heresy. It doesn't really work methodologically, but it makes fascinating reading anyway.) Not only that, but Wellman and several colleagues have a survey article on computer networks as social networks coming out in the 1996 volume of the Annual Review of Sociology, which should be showing up soon in the reference department of a university library near you. Many more myths go up in smoke in this article; check it out.

When the final list of Important Films is assembled in the hereafter, Julian Schnabel's movie "Basquiat", about the late Haitian-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, will probably not be on it. Nonetheless, it's a great social document about the 1980s' New York art scene. I personally think that Basquiat was an important painter, but he was eaten alive before the case could be comprehensively proven. A huge cast of characters gives marvelous performances, starting with David Bowie as Andy Warhol. Dennis Hopper and Parker Posey are terrific as well. The movie is full of fine details. Watch for the scene fairly early in the movie where Basquiat is working as an electrician's helper in Mary Boone's gallery. It goes by quickly: JMB introduces himself to Boone and an unnamed customer; that customer is, for me, the absolutely definitive 1980s' type. I mean, I know this guy -- his Beemer is parked at an angle across two parking spaces outside.

An article about a project to reconstruct the famous British WWII code-breaking machines -- before the technicians die -- is at http://go2.guardian.co.uk/computing/960822coonBombesaway.html

"The Book of Visions" is an eccentric catalog of "social inventions". It's at http://newciv.org/GIB/BOV/BOVTOP.HTML

The weirdest: A couple of wacked-out guys broke into an abandoned Titan missile silo, took pictures, got arrested, probably got thirteen different kinds of cancer, and then published the pictures on the Web. Absolument nutsville. http://www.xvt.com/users/kevink/silo/silo.html

Fair warning. The rest of this message reflects the aforementioned crummy mood. Things really are going to start looking up next month.

A few people complained about my practice of responding to spam by sending a megabyte of copies of the spam back to its sender. One argument is that it if someone sends me mail I don't want, the only civilized thing to do is just to delete it. But that's like saying if someone dumps trash on my front lawn then the only civilized thing to do is just to clean it up. If we had laws against junk e-mail, like the American law against junk faxes, then I would have some formal recourse. But I don't, so I respond in a measured way -- it's 1 megabyte, not 100, and five or six messages, not hundreds of them -- just enough to halfways ensure that the spammer's costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, I would argue that it is (very mildly) wrong not to respond to unwanted e-mail. If everyone responded -- not necessarily a megabyte's worth, but a form letter anyway -- then the word would get out that spam does not pay. Another argument is that huge amounts of mail hurt the other customers of the offender's ISP. But it seems to me that an ISP that provides the tools for grossly antisocial behavior is already placing its customers at risk. In the normal course of things, ISP's should be competing on reliability of service, and this includes ensuring that customers are not harmed by the antisocial behavior of other customers. One way they can do this is by responding substantively to complaints about spam that are sent to their "postmaster" alias. Few ISP's, in my experience, ever respond to such messages. Netcom does, though, and I'll usually send a note to postmaster@netcom.com instead of retaliating against a Netcom-based spammer. The online services usually reply to such complaints with an unconvincing form letter, though my memory isn't clear about the details of who does what. Now, I think I would be wrong if I took actions that, by themselves, would risk shutting down an ISP. I'm only talking about actions whose effect will only be felt if large numbers of other people take them. This is hardly a perfect situation, but the situation will be even less stable if spammers find that they can profit from their wrongdoing. Right now, my sense is that most spam comes from naive companies that have fallen for sales pitches by firms that gather online mailing lists. I've heard several tales of spammers, having been misled by assurances to the contrary, being genuinely taken aback at the news that such behavior is widely considered antisocial. It would be great if some reporter felt like tracking these people down and making their stories widely known.

Now for this month's puzzler. Do you remember my long article about baiting in the November 1995 TNO? The number of baiting messages I receive dropped way off after that article -- some people may have recognized themselves. Recently, though, I got what has to be the all-time greatest. It makes me giggle just to think about it. I didn't have the presence of mind, of course, to save it and see if I could send it to the whole list. But the outlines are easy to explain. Here's the deal: the racism, elitism, and Luddism of this mailing list are lamented in tones of great and weary indignation. Why? Answers below.

Some of my good friends on RRE complained about the Web index of online hate groups whose announcement I posted to this list; they considered it biased on the grounds that it contained a preponderance of right-wing groups. Nobody has told me which left-wing hate groups it left out, but if everyone sends me their nominations, I'll gather up the responses and send them to the list. The only ground rules: explain your reasoning, provide a URL, and don't say anything that will get me sued. I've been trying to figure this one out myself. There's the Spartacist Youth League, a Trotskyite splinter that seems to exist for no other reason than to provoke pointless confrontations. They've surely got a problem, but I'm not sure that "hate" quite expresses it. I can't find them on the net in any case. But hey, I'm not a walking phone directory of the left. Straighten me out.

Okay, why am I a racist, elitist, and Luddite? I am a racist for sending the Atlanta 911 transcript to this mailing list. Get it? My motive, you see, was not to watch the computer break but to make fun of the dispatchers' dialect. This was transparently obvious. I am an elitist because I suggested that the Internet could be used to build bridges between intellectuals and activists. What I guess I meant by this was that everyone should bow down in the hopes that intellectuals will come along and tell them what to think. This one was considered particularly outrageous and worthy of an essay to an important global mailing list. I have to admit that I was unclear about the evidence for my Luddism. Apparently this list is rife with it.

This sort of emotional noise is the price of running a mailing list. Fortunately, 99.7% of RRE's readers are outstanding human beings, and I love them all dearly.

FWIW.

Phil ```

This web service brought to you by Somewhere.Com, LLC.