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``` Some mostly short notes about conservatism, the Microsoft trial, Web standards, digital convergence, public relations, online newspapers, the academic job market, and online civil society. And some URL's. Thanks as always to the people who send them to me.
You might have noticed that I've stopped naming the people who send me stuff. I've been finding, in some cases the hard way, that most people don't want to be named. And running the list as a volunteer, I usually can't make time to inquire. But I do appreciate everyone's contributions, and you should continue to regard these messages as a collective effort.
As a periodic reminder, you can end your subscription by sending a message that looks like this:
To: requests@lists.gseis.ucla.edu Subject: unsubscribe rre
We've had an amazing turnover in the last month, something like ten people coming and going every day. I must be doing something right.
By popular demand, I've simplified the -=-=-=-= banner that goes at the top of most RRE messages. You won't have to scroll down quite as far to get the content.
I've received a bunch of comments about the version of "Networking on the Network" that you were kind enough to publicize. So I've made some changes, for example cutting back on American idioms like "out of left field". Now I'd like to ask you again to really stretch and come up with more ways to get "Networking on the Network" into the hands of every PhD student in the world. Create a hyperlink to it from your department's web site. Recommend it to every PhD student you know, and every professor. If you're a graduate student, send it to your local Graduate Student Association. Write a blurb about it for your professional society's publication. Get it out there so people can benefit from it. Its URL, once again is:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html
You'd be welcome to rework the announcement for NotN that I sent to the list a couple weeks ago. Here is a URL for it:
http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Networking.on.the.Ne.html
I've put such effort into NotN because networking skills make such a difference to students' careers and because they usually go untaught. My goal is not to teach students how to suck up to the powerful -- that is the most destructive of the stereotypes about networking. Quite the contrary, I want to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to succeed on the merits of their work.
A request to RRE readers in Britain. Has anyone published yet an intellectual history of the rise of Blairism? Your prime minister is not just a politician, it seems to me, but the leader of a shadow government of quasi-intellectuals. I've heard about the Demos think tank and I've read Tony Giddens' "Third Way" book, but I've never seen the whole story. The newspapers focus on the easy-to-tell story of "old" versus "new" within the Labour Party, but that's just the surface of something much deeper. I ask partly because of the failed analogies to the American context: the Clinton administration could have become as dominant as New Labour if Bill Clinton had been, well, Tony Blair. The big picture, it seems to me, is that electorates worldwide see the inevitability of aligning themselves with the demands of globalization, but they want the job done without too much gratuitous brutality. Thus the worldwide plague of right-wing-center- left governments that Clinton and Blair vaguely lead. I'm interested particularly in the role of the Internet in the Blairite worldview, whose radicalism, I think, is completely unknown outside the UK.
Are there any high-quality newsletters that I should be publicizing on this list? I don't mind publicizing newsletters that cost money if they're worthwhile on other grounds. I just need a sample copy that I can distribute. Wait for a particularly good issue.
The IEEE statement on UCITA that I circulated (by permission) turned out to be an unfinished draft that had been released by mistake. They've asked me to direct your attention to the final version, whose treatment of intellectual property issues (they tell me) is more precise: .
How much time has humanity spent thus far waiting for domain name servers? It should be possible to calculate at least roughly.
In reading the responses to my recent notes on political subjects, it has finally dawned on me that many people who regard themselves as conservatives don't know what conservativism is. Conservatives believe in objective truth, and there is an objective truth about what conservativism is. Ever since conservatism was given its definitive articulation by Edmund Burke, conservatives have worked to build a society of orders and classes, governed by a hereditary aristocracy, in which tradition and prejudice are good things and equality and innovation are bad things, in which the lower orders unquestioningly regard the judgements of authority and institutions as the absolute truth, and in which everyone presupposes that all oppression is the fault of the oppressed. That's what conservatism is, and what it has always been.
None of this has ever been secret. You can read it in Burke, who was writing in reaction to the French revolution. If Burke's sentences are too long then you can read about him in Russell Kirk, who was one of the founders of modern conservatism in the United States. (See, for example, his exposition of Burke in chapter 2 of "The Conservative Mind".) The problem for the punditry, of course, is that Americans tend to be revolted when conservatism is defined in plain language. It sounds like the opposite of what the country stands for, as indeed it is. That's why it tends to be framed within the strong emotions and primitive thought-patterns of the pundits and their jargon.
One more reason for confusion is that conservatism is often usually compounded with a completely different doctrine, one that used to be called liberalism. Whereas conservatism is a normative picture of the workings of society very broadly, liberalism is a normative picture specifically about government. It is usually summarized in terms of the rule of law, that is, the norm that government should secure liberty and that the law should be applied the same to everyone. The idea, originally, was that conservatism consisted of the arbitrary rule of the aristocracy, and the rule of law was supposed to restrain their arbitrariness of the aristocrats without actually deposing them. Burke could fuse these two pictures because, living in the late 18th century, he had little experience of the thoroughgoing conflict between a market economy and a traditional social order. He was a transitional figure who tried to hold onto a romanticized medieval view of the world while also embracing the dynamism of the capitalist world that was taking form around him.
Many of Burke's contemporaries were clear about the conflict between conservatism and liberalism, and Tom Paine defined the popular politics of the American revolution savaged conservatism as a thing of the oppressive past. Modern-day conservative commentators tend to emphasize themes of liberty in their public representations, leaving the medieval themes in soft-focus and promoting them by indirection. In the conservatives' esoteric writings, however, the medieval themes come out much more clearly. See, for example, Russell Kirk, whose archaic views remain a secret because people on the left would rather die than read them. The conflicts between conservatism and liberalism also come out clearly in the esoteric literature. See, for example, mid-20th-century liberal theorist Friedrich Hayek's "Why I Am Not a Conservative", which was published as an appendix to "The Constitution of Society". (For an interesting critical comparison between Hayek and Burke by a conservative scholar that downplays the tension, see .)
The relationship between conservatism and liberalism has been confused throughout American history. Burke had embraced the conservatives' rule of arbitrary prejudice in most areas of society, insisting only that the government conform to the rule of law. This compromise being unsuited to American culture, liberals in this country have gone off in two directions. One group, now known as libertarians, gave up the fight against conservatism and allied themselves with the would-be aristocrats of industry during the fight against communism. For them, the rule of law has become an end in itself, indeed the sole end of politics. The other group, still known as liberals, still want to end the domination of people's minds by the aristocracy and its pundits, and to this end they have engaged in a vast and partially successful "long march through the institutions". Libertarians define liberty solely in relation to the government, and liberals define liberty in relation to society as a whole: liberty for them is liberation from of the medieval society of orders and classes that conservatives seek to restore. Whereas libertarians believe that coercion is only practiced by governments, liberals believe that coercion happens in many ways, and that it starts with the mental chains of ideology, the wounds of private brutality, and the isolation of an atomized society.
We can sneer at liberals precisely because we have forgotten how stultifying the world was when the conservatives ran it. So now the medieval world of conservatism is coming back, and people can once again entertain the paternalistic fantasy that everything will be alright if we just elect a President who comes from the right kind of family, someone who is wise and just purely by heredity, and who will take care of us if we just stop thinking. It doesn't work like that, of course, and discovering a workable alternative to that kind of society is the whole reason why our country exists.
The Microsoft trial has probably already achieved its most important outcome: Judge Jackson's detailed (if not comprehensive) analysis of Microsoft's wrongdoing will provide a huge body of precedents that will establish some decent rules of competition in high-technology industries. I don't mean "precedents" in the official legal sense, of course; those won't be available until the appeals go through. But meanwhile, any time that a company engages in conduct analogous to that of Microsoft, someone will be able to cite chapter and verse of Judge Jackson's findings of fact to sketch the outlines of a viable lawsuit. We will never know how many abusive practices -- and how many high-tech market failures -- have been avoided in this manner.
As attention turns to remedies, however, the good that Judge Jackson has already done is likely to be obscured by the frantic foggery of the beast. Much of the fog can be comprehended as follows. If the First Law of Cartoon Physics is that nobody falls until they realize that nothing is holding them up, the First Law of Cyberspace Physics is that when something new comes along, everything old disappears. This Law makes it too easy to announce the kind of world-historical discontinuity that should have gone out of fashion with the Khmer Rouge. The increased economic importance of information technology can be inflated into the New Economy, the increased importance of industrial networks can be inflated into a claim that hierarchies are disappearing, the increased importance of "bits" can be inflated into a repeal of everything we ever knew about "atoms", and so on. In the case of Microsoft, the op-ed punditry inflates the hypothetical emergence of new high-tech markets into the dubious claim that poor old Microsoft, having been left in the dust by the dynamism of the market, is no longer a threat to society.
This is, first of all, a logical fallacy: monopolistic behavior in one market is no less illegal when attention is shifted to different markets. Personal computers are unlikely to go away, and indeed the central point of Jackson's analysis is the variety of underhanded tactics by which Microsoft has worked to prevent the technology from evolving in directions that it cannot control. The claim that Microsoft is obsolescent is, moreover, simply false, as everybody in Silicon Valley perfectly well knows. The supposedly courageous people at Apple or Intel aren't going to make strong public statements about the need to punish Microsoft for its crimes against them until such time as the government has weathered Microsoft's zillion-dollar political blitz and definitively extracted its fangs.
That said, it is certainly possible for the government and the Judge to mess up the remedy phase. I do not think it would be useful to break Microsoft up. Breaking up Microsoft entails an architectural judgement, inasmuch as it requires the court to find the correct dividing line between the operating system and the applications, and then it requires the court to have an ongoing role in enforcing that dividing line, inasmuch as the Windows that is marketed by a separate operating systems company can perfectly well acquire new features that formerly would have been regarded as applications. The broken-up companies, furthermore, would be so deeply bonded to one another by culture and social networks that the division between them may have no practical reality.
The correct remedies, therefore, are ones that define administrable rules of engagement for the whole high tech industry. The nature of these rules can be understood in precisely the way I described at the outset: by reading the findings of fact and saying, simply, you can't do that. How one writes these findings into actual rules is, of course, a complicated matter. Some good suggestions have been made, however, none of which is sufficient but which taken together would make the effort of hauling this incredibly obnoxious company into court almost worthwhile.
Once upon a time, maybe five years ago, the officially right way to write a URL looked something like this:
Nowadays one is more likely to see something like this:
thothflex.com/snort/
One element after another has dropped away, and the reason why is most instructive. Let us consider the elements one at a time...
The idea of the notation is that we were supposed to have several ways of specifying the locations of Web pages. Everybody knew that URL's were a crock, for example because they go bad when a page is moved somewhere else, and so everybody assumed that we would get a system of URN's -- uniform resource names -- that were location- independent; see . But the problem of actually supporting such names proved harder than anybody had thought, so we're stuck with URL's.
Next consider the http: protocol. There's nothing dramatically wrong with HTTP, but it's very basic, and everybody assumed that a variety of other protocols would arise to compete with it and even replace it. Other protocols do in fact exist, but they are mostly older protocols -- news: and ftp: -- not newer ones. So we're stuck with HTTP, and we have a hard time even moving to new versions of that.
Then the www. part of the domain name. In the early days, everybody assumed that you wanted to put your Web server on a separate machine from the main machine where you did important things like e-mail and file service. So the convention arose of calling that machine "www". Many people have grown up believing that a URL must necessarily begin with "www.", and several times I've had to persuade fact-checkers for magazines that my own www-less URL's, first at UCSD and then at UCLA, were not errors. Lately, however, advertisers and others have begun to drop the "www." because it's redundant. If you say "thothflex.com" then everybody will know to add a "www." to the front of it, and even if they don't it's an easy matter to make the www-less version of the URL redirect to the right place. What's more, some organizations have dropped the whole idea of a separate Web server, inasmuch as the Web is central to their Internet identity. By now, for example, a majority of Internet users think of e-mail as something you do on the Web.
Now the .html part. HTML is a truly primitive language, and it was not even something that ordinary users were ever supposed to know about, much less mark up pages with. Everybody assumed that HTML would be surpassed by fancier languages with all sorts of dynamic features. Well, that never happened. The little bits of dynamism that could be added with Javascript embedded in the HTML code turned out to be adequate for most purposes, and the effort of standardizing a whole new language never quite came together. Now, many years later, we can begin to glimpse the XML era, but XML will be mostly for industrial applications for a little while. We're still pretty much stuck with HTML, so much so that it's redundant to put ".html" at the end of a URL, especially in a commercial context where it matters whether people remember the URL, or whether they have to copy it down from a print advertisement. So the copy-writers have come up with the trick of calling their page "snort/index.html", not "snort.html". That way they can write ".../snort/" and leave out the redundant file extension. Of course, users surfing the Web do come across .pdf files, and .gif, and so on. But home pages -- the URL's that people have to pay attention to -- are almost all marked up in HTML.
Finally, ".com". Way back when, everybody assumed that the Internet would acquire a batch of top-level domains as ".com" started to get full. Some of us can even remember the blood that was spilled over gTLD's. Remember the gTLD-MOU? At the time it seemed like the Internet's equivalent of the Treaty of Westphalia. It defined top level domains like ".biz" and ".firm". Or maybe it was ".art" and ".porn" -- I can't recall. (It's still out there: .) You know what happened: ".com" became hyped as a veritable trademark of Internet commerce. Nobody wants to be ".biz" any more, if they ever did. So ".com", like "URL:", "http:", "www.", and ".html", is itself redundant. We keep it only to signify that the stuff around it is a URL.
You can see the pattern: technical people take for granted a world of boundless diversity, but then institutional dynamics drive us to a world of homogeneity. And not just any homogeneity, but an iron-clad path-dependent conservatism whereby the technical people's provisional guesses become nearly irreversible. The more successful the Internet becomes, it seems, the harder it is to fix. Processors get faster, storage gets denser, pipes get fatter, but the standards that people encounter on their desktops stay much the same. We're still running 1960s-era operating systems on our personal computers, to take another example, though we might finally shift to 1970s-era operating systems this year.
This can't last. Something has to give. Gigahertz processors will be common a year from now, and ten gigahertz processors will be common by 2003. But at the current rate, the services that this fast hardware supports will be pretty much the same as they are now. At best we'll have new functionality layered on top of the old stuff, much the way that bureaucracies can start new departments but can't get rid of the old ones. But another option is available: entirely new platforms upon which we can build afresh. The Internet people are certain that those entirely new platforms will be built on top of IP -- that is, in fact, the whole point of IP. But it's not just about the technology. It's also about the world in which all of the technology is embedded. Those path-dependent Web standards aren't going away because they are wedged tightly into a set of social conventions. They are the objects of commitments and investments; they are the basis of compatibility for whole industries; they are propped up by the vast installed base of services that use them, and they are propagated by the need for new services to be compatible with the old ones. By the time the hundred- gigahertz processors roll around, we may find ourselves wedged into a small box, unable to make full use of them.
I recently had the misfortune of buying a new cell phone. This time around I got a Sprint PCS phone because they have a real national network. It's cheaper for traveling, and long distance is included. Buying it, however, was a real hassle. Some of the Sprint PCS models, such as the admirably cheap Qualcomm 1960, have a real data port -- it uses the same connector as the power adapter. I had visions of plugging this data port into my Powerbook and reading my e-mail on the beach. So I called up Sprint and asked a simple question: will the data port work with my Macintosh? Uh oh. Nobody could give me a straight answer. I spoke with perhaps a dozen Sprint people and several more at retailers, and answers ranged all the way from "yes" to "no". The "yes" answers were more numerous but less persuasive.
Sprint has, shall we say, a training issue here: its people are given to saying "yes" in a tone of voice that says "I don't know". The best was a Sprint employee who said "it works with all PCs" in a tone of voice that said both "yes, of course" and "what's wrong with you?". Stunned, I cautiously replied, "your answer is perfectly ambiguous; if 'all PCs' means 'all personal computers' then it's 'yes', but if 'all PCs' means 'all and only IBM-PC compatible computers' then it's 'no'". She said "oh", and then she said "oh" again, as the enormity of her cluelessness began to dawn on her. At long last, having been forwarded from one number to another through the bowels of Sprint, I finally spoke to a gentleman of an obviously technical persuasion who delivered a convincing "no".
Along the way, I decided to amuse myself by asking the same question at a Macintosh authorized service center. The gruff proprietor said "yes, of course" in a tone of voice that said, well, "what's wrong with you?". His line of reasoning was that the issue was purely one of hardware; once one obtained a cable that had the right connectors at each end, surely the appropriate Mac software would appear for free on the Internet somewhere. This made sense when he said it, but the technical guy at Sprint assured me that it was not true. I never did understand why.
In talking to all these people, I was endlessly struck by the chasm between the telephone world and the computer world. Everyone in the telephone world had superficial training and good manners; everyone in the computer world had deep training and a bracing arrogance. And with the sole exception of the one technical guy in the bowels of Sprint, neither side exhibited the slightest comprehension of its connection to the other. Hey, everyone: the telephone world and the computer world are merging! This merger, it would seem, is not just a technical matter.
I have been collecting more examples of the characteristic rhetorical techniques of public relations. Consider the following quote:
Defense lawyers "sometimes holler 'DNA' as if it undoes every conviction, when DNA tests in many or most cases would not make a difference", said Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Asplen, staff director for the [US National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence] and a former Pennsylvania prosecutor. (USA Today, 9/27/99)
An awful lot is going on in this 22-word quote. Notice, first of all, the exaggerated dichotomy between one extreme -- DNA "undoes every conviction" -- and another -- "in many or most cases would not make a difference". Notice the strong emotion: "holler". And then notice something sophisticated: even though Mr. Asplen is irresponsibly arguing in terms of exaggerated dichotomies and strong emotions, he is projecting responsibility for the dichotomies and emotions onto defense lawyers. It is they who "holler", they who exaggerate. The issue having been framed in such terms, Mr. Asplen then goes ahead and takes up the opposite extreme: "DNA tests in many or most cases would not make a difference".
Now, one could determine empirically whether defense lawyers actually speak in such exaggerated terms, although the "as if" suggests that Mr. Asplen's interpretation of their meaning is pretty subjective. We could also inquire whether "DNA tests in many or most cases would not make a difference" simply means that most cases, statistically speaking, do not involve any evidence to which DNA tests could be applied, so that his position is trivially correct. Whatever the case, what Mr. Asplen is clearly doing is breaking an association. This is a very common pattern: he invokes language of strong emotion, thus framing the issue irrationally while projecting responsibility for that irrationality into his opponent; he portrays his opponent as forming an association between DNA tests and overturned convictions; he inserts a crowbar of vague argument between the two elements; and he pulls on it, hoping that the audience will then no longer associate them. His argument offends against all norms of reason, and it works (if it works) by shutting down the faculties of reason and replacing them with more primitive patterns of thought. Of course, he is probably not aware that he is doing this; he is most likely copying rhetorical patterns that he has seen in a thousand places. But that doesn't change the fact that he is contributing to a systematic assault on the rational mind.
I wish the New York Times web site would get its act together. They have chronic problems with moving from one day's stories to the next. Pages are often missing. The date often changes before or after the articles do. Most annoyingly of all, they don't put the stories up until anywhere from fifteen to forty minutes after midnight eastern time. The Washington Post is usually ready well before midnight, though they've been having problems since they switched to their new, more cumbersome format. Salon is also inconsistent about what time they get the new day's stories online.
This complaint is partly a joke, of course. In the old days we had the concept of "the morning papers", which I would read over coffee on my way home from the gym. Nowadays I find it's common to see a late- breaking AP story on the New York Times site on a Monday evening, and then to see the same story on the front page of a print newspaper on a newsstand on Wednesday afternoon. It's an odd time-warp sensation, disorienting, like I've lost track of what day of the week it is.
While I'm at it, the web sites of the British papers really need work. The New York Times writes little summaries of each article and the Washington Post automatically quotes the first paragraph, so that you know what you're getting if you click. But the Guardian, for example, just provides a spare list of titles, which is not enough information to persuade me to click on a transatlantic hyperlink.
When I circulated my how-to of "Advice for Undergraduates Considering Graduate School", the #1 response came from people who insist that prospective graduate students be informed of the poor job market for people with new PhD's. The idea that graduate school is a ticket to the breadline has soaked into the culture, and I can only imagine the harm that it is causing to the research on which progress depends. The truth, as usual, is more complicated. The academic job market was indeed poor during the Bush depression, not least because of some destructive policies on the part of the NSF. But it is recovering, and those who enter graduate school now can expect a strong market by the time they graduate. As evidence for this view, I enclose a few paragraphs from a letter dated 1/14/00 to University of California faculty by the chair of the UC Academic Council, Lawrence B. Coleman of UC Davis:
"California's Department of Finance has projected an increase of 60,000 undergraduate and graduate students at UC between now and the year 2010-11. Such a jump would equal UC's enrollment growth over the last 30 years and would result in a student body of about 210,000 students by 2010-11, as opposed to the 152,000 students we have now. The University has, of course, been planning on growth for some time, but California's recent economic boom has brought not only more migration to the state than was expected, but also higher levels of enrollment in the state's colleges and universities. The 60,000-student increase is some 24,000 students more than UC's campuses have been anticipating in their long-range development plans. Thus the problem: How is UC going to deal with all these additional students? The fledgling UC Merced will provide only limited help, as it is expected to enroll no more than 5,000 students by 2010.
"Some of the problems stemming from this enrollment boom will be dealt with primarily by UC administrators and state political leaders. Among these is the question of funding, and then building, enough classrooms and labs and residence halls to accommodate not only additional students, but the additional faculty that will come with them. There is another challenge, however, that will have to be taken on primarily by the UC faculty: that of hiring a huge number of faculty colleagues over the next 12 years. A kind of pincers movement is exacerbating this issue. On the one hand there is the growth I have spoken of; on the other, there is the large number of faculty retirements that will take place in the next decade. Setting UC San Francisco aside, to simply accommodate enrollment growth, UC would have to increase its faculty numbers by 40 percent between now and 2010-11. When retirements and other 'separations' are factored in, the upshot is that the University will have to hire more than 7,500 faculty in the next 12 years. This is more than the 6,400 faculty the University currently employs. Recruiting at this level will mean hiring an average of 628 faculty each year through 2010-11; by contrast, over the past three years we have hired about 324 faculty per year.
"Lots of issues will accompany the faculty-hiring problem. One that I have been contemplating is how the University will find the money to fund start-up costs for new-hires. Relying on a professorial favorite -- the back-of-the-envelope calculation -- I estimated that UC will conservatively need $50 million per year in start-up money alone over the next 12 years. This does not include the cost of building labs, offices, studios, and other research space.
"Despite such dilemmas, UC's coming enrollment surge provides a case-in-point for the assertion that problems are first-cousins to opportunities. With the faculty hiring that will take place, an enormous opportunity has been presented to the UC faculty. Because of the length of faculty service, our decisions in selecting colleagues will shape the University for decades to come. This means, of course, that we have the opportunity to shape the University for good or ill, but I am confident that we can rise to the challenge. Our tasks include remaining highly selective in the face of pressing demand; making progress in hiring more women and minority faculty; choosing wisely in hiring across existing disciplines; and moving wisely into new disciplinary areas."
I am aware that structural changes in non-research universities have depressed the proportion of full-time faculty positions. My point is that the picture overall is far from bleak, and that undergraduates who care about ideas should be encouraged to explore graduate school.
I received a message from Ecuador the other day that illustrated the gap between promise and reality on the Internet. You will recall that the Ecuadorian government announced a plan to tie its currency to the US dollar, and that this set off massive demonstrations that resulted in the president being thrown out in favor of the vice president. At least that's the story you read in the paper. I first heard about the demonstrations over the Internet, when an RRE subscriber who first joined the list after my WTO comments passed me a message from someone in Ecuador who was broadcasting a global alert on the situation. The message seemed important to me; to my knowledge, it represented the first time in 500 years of nonstop oppression that the indigenous people of any Latin American country had organized such a successful rebellion against a national government. And if the message was to be believed, it was basically a nonviolent rebellion.
But that was just the problem: whether the message was to be believed. I had no doubt that something was happening; nobody would make such a thing up from scratch. But was it an exaggeration? One problem was that it was written in the kind of left-wing jargon that in the United States is a sure sign that the writer has no organized constituency, but that is essentially the norm among Latin American intellectuals. Which set of expectations should I go with? I was stuck. If the news was real then I wanted to illustrate the power of the technology by passing the message along to my mailing list. To hear about the events online first would be great, and I had little confidence that the American media would report them fairly. But I didn't want to send out something that would prove to be spurious. Nor do I have a lot of time to research the credibility of the items people send me. If I'm not comfortable with them, I usually just delete them. But I figured this one was worth a slight effort, and so I asked the person who had sent me the message to follow up with whatever authenticating materials he could find. He sent some more stuff the next day, but I still couldn't get comfortable. A couple of days passed, the American government applied its pressure, the rebellion dissolved, and a new guy was put in place to implement the same policies of sucking the blood of the poor to pay off loans that had mostly benefitted the rich.
What was missing, clearly, was an intermediary. I can only maintain my own personal ties to a small number of people and issues, and if I want to play intermediary on other issues then I need some other intermediary that I can trust. I can subscribe to alternative news services, but they are in the business of processing information and writing their own copy, not passing along messages from real people. Activist organizations, for their part, can work most effectively by aiming their products at the mainstream media, so authenticating messages by real people isn't not worth their effort either. This, then, is the gap between promise and reality. The promise is that of unmediated interaction with anyone in the world. The reality is that intermediaries serve real functions, and yet intermediaries do not automatically spring into existence when they are needed. So what do we do? We can invent new models of business, NGO work, and individual activism. We can also take a long-term view, building the kinds of "weak ties" in online correspondence that can provide a basis for trust when it's needed. And we can build and articulate an ethic of service that helps people imagine ways of being useful to the world through their online activities.
I didn't provide enough directions to Mark Schone's really funny "This American Life" segment about "Southern accents". Aim your web browser's RealPlayer plugin at and go to the halfway point, 30 minutes into it.
Some URL's.
The Internet Protocol http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/chapter/ch02.html
What Does Your Phone Number Spell? http://www.phonespell.org/
Has the "New Economy" Rendered the Productivity Slowdown Obsolete? http://faculty-web.at.nwu.edu/economics/gordon/researchhome.html
NECI Scientific Literature Digital Library http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/
Peter Menzel's photograph of me, Burlingame CA, March 1995 http://www.unesco.org/courier/1998_09/photoshr/44.htm
proposed FTC rules on financial privacy http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2000/02/glbact.htm
screen snapshots of the Eazel interface for Linux http://www.ionet.net/~hestgray/nautilus/
Human Rights Watch report on Colombian government ties to paramilitaries http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/col0223.htm
Are Corporate Bodies Really Alive? (online conference) http://www.nancho.net/bigmed2000/bbonline.html
"the weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk" http://www.ntk.net/
Wireless Application Protocol http://www.wapforum.com/
Bluetooth http://www.bluetooth.com/
Ubiquity magazine http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/
The Daily Howler http://www.dailyhowler.com/
Nondisclosure and UCITA http://www.badsoftware.com/nondisc.htm
The Many Silver Linings of the Y2K Challenges http://policyworks.gov/intergov
Organizers' Collaborative http://www.organizenow.net/
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