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TNO 2(1).
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 JANUARY 1995
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This month: Conservative infrastructure Libraries and information activism Information technology and the workplace Mailer errors from hell A batch of useful net resources
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Welcome to TNO 2(1).
This month's issue includes four brief articles by the editor, plus the usual departments. The first article offers some thoughts on the incoming Republican majority in the US Congress and the shifting political structure that it reflects. I want to assemble some materials toward a more sophisticated understanding of the roles of technology in political life. More on this topic in later issues.
The next two articles are transcripts of contributions to panel discussions on the subjects of "the potential dark side of the NII for the workplace" and "the NII and the Constitution". Each begins with lengthy demurrals about the assigned topics, followed by more positive analysis. As usual, I suggest that neither technology nor law make any real difference in the world unless people get together to actively make and use them rather than passively predicting their "effects".
Finally, I offer my top-ten list of the most annoying phenomena I encounter as the maintainer of a large mailing list. The error messages produced by Internet mailers are probably the single worst bit of user-interface design that the average network user encounters, and many of them really are beyond belief. I was once among the people who assert that the Internet brings true freedom of the press, given the old saying that "freedom of the press is enjoyed by whoever owns one". But I've realized that this isn't really true -- the tools do not exist for any but the most fortunate and sophisticated few percent of Internet users to maintain their own large mailing lists. The net will not live up to a fraction of its potential until this can change.
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The conservative revolution.
My liberal friends are virtually all in denial. They change the channel when Rush Limbaugh comes on, they cite low voter turnout figures as evidence against the electoral legitimacy of the new Republican Congress, they assert as obvious that Republicans and Democrats are the same by now anyway, they dismiss Newt Gingrich and the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal as nut-cases, they speculate that the 1980's provide grounds for predicting that the new conservative movement will self-destruct and fade, and they act as though they could rebut every last conservative argument before breakfast with one hand tied behind their backs.
Dream on, my friends, because you are in serious trouble. Little analysis of the detailed electoral numbers is required to figure out that we're looking at the largest and deepest shift in US political institutions since the New Deal. But the strongest evidence goes beyond the numbers. The conservative movement has built an impressive array of institutions, a system of parallel structures with serious funding and a genuine mass base. This includes parallel media institutions (the Washington Times, talk radio and National Empowerment Television, all of them by-passing the mainstream news), parallel public interest organizations (the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) competing head-to-head with the ACLU, as well as a batch of other conservative legal institutes employing the ACLU model but pressing property rights and anti-affirmative action agendas), parallel intellectual networks (based for the most part in privately funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, but also in law schools and economics departments), and much else. One reason why liberals can maintain their denial is that they have chosen, by and large, to remain uninformed about these alternative institutions. Their world has remained stable for so long that they are unable to conceive that changing political conditions could simply throw a switch, channeling cultural and financial resources to the new institutions and leaving the old ones to wither and die.
Money helps build such institutions, of course, but it's not just money. The last decade has seen the rise of an extremely well-organized network of activists who are much more thoroughly studied in conservative ideology than the Reaganites of ten and fifteen years ago. They support and recruit young Republican activists on college campuses, they get vast amounts of ideology distributed to people who can use it, and they sell large numbers of books by Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and a world of other conservative theorists to people who really do read and understand them. In particular, they have sophisticated ideas about the structure of the liberal coalition and its weaknesses, and they are exhibiting extraordinary precision and thoroughness in applying pressure along the fracture lines.
One sign of the ongoing decimation of the liberal coalition is its nearly complete lack of rhetorical traction in rebutting conservative arguments. We can see this, for example, in the impunity with which conservative rhetors have appropriated words like "elites" (a term which no longer includes bankers but does include journalists), "bigotry" and "hate" (now used to signify opposition to the political program of religious conservatives), and "political correctness" (a term which formerly was rarely used in seriousness by anyone but sectarian Leninists but which now routinely conflates social dissent and political repression). We can also see it in the impunity with which these same rhetors employ extreme vocabulary in their anti-liberal polemics -- read any of P. J. O'Rourke's "enemies lists" in the American Spectator for the prototype, but the phenomenon is pervasive. Much will happen in the next couple of years. The Democratic Party will disintegrate. The corporate funding on which it came increasingly to rely as it alienated its mass base by increments since the late 1970's has now shifted radically toward the Republicans. (Most of the figures you'll see won't seem to prove this, since the radical shift only began toward the end of the 1994 campaign.) Corporate money only went to the Democrats in the first place because money buys access and the Democrats were the majority party. Now that that's no longer true, this money will seek its natural home and the inherent bias toward incumbents in the money-intensive political process will lock in with extra strength. Enough things are genuinely messed up in Washington that the new Republican majority can be heroes simply by cleaning up the worst of them, starting with Congressional rules. It'll take incredible discipline to institute term limits and pass a balanced budget amendment, but they'll do it. Once they start actually balancing the budget, though, they'll need to considerably deepen the revolution. If they're smart, which they are, then they'll take Bill Kristol's suggestion and hold "show trials" of failed government programs, presumably starting with the Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development. Eventually they'll empty out the Department of Education, since it's a creature of the Democrats' most central constituency, the National Education Association, but they don't need to do that immediately. What the liberal pollsters don't understand is that the conservative ideological network can back up Republican legislative initiatives with tremendous grassroots firepower through talk radio and other media -- the crime bill and failed attempts at lobbying reform in the previous Congress provide good examples. What seems politically impossible today won't seem so impossible once this machinery gets back in gear in a few months. This effect will be awesome in the 1996 election cycle, and Bill Clinton is more likely to be assassinated than he is to be reelected.
The biggest question is whether the new conservative majority has enough discipline to prevent a return to the social conditions of the 1880's, when a laissez-faire legislative majority and legal system permitted the profound social chaos inherent in an unregulated market economy to express itself. Large business coalitions are already forming to eviscerate the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulate perhaps the two most morally hazardous industries. Increasingly frequent proposals to means-test Social Security benefits will turn Social Security into a form of welfare and thus great increase its political vulnerability. Once people like Richard Posner and Richard Epstein are appointed to the Supreme Court, if not before, look for New Zealand-style changes in labor law and the end of affirmative action. It's a leftist's dream, in an unfortunate and twisted way, but it will take place against the background of a thoroughgoing conservative hegemony that will make leftist arguments nearly unintelligible.
What does this have to do with networks? All along, I've pointed at something important -- the infrastructure of the conservative political movement. This includes technical infrastructure -- radio, Newt Gingrich's videos and conference calls, direct mail and the databases that back it up, and so forth. It includes institutional infrastructure -- activist training by groups like Gopac, networking groups like the Council for National Policy, the Free Press, and the whole world of institutions based in conservative evangelical churches. It also includes what we might call rhetorical infrastructure -- the discursive forms of public relations that provide standard frames and logics for the ceaseless circulation and reassembly of bits of fact and argument and narrative by conservative pundits and activists. And it includes what we might call ideological infrastructure -- the basic framework of abstract ideas that get filled in with this rhetorical material in particular settings.
No one or two of these basic types of infastructure suffices to characterize or explain the material workings of the conservative movement. In particular, technology is an indissociable part of the whole picture, but it is just one part. In another TNO article I want to sketch a framework for thinking about the communicative metabolism of social movements in general, but for the moment I simply want to remark on the specific uses being made of communication technology by this one particular movement. As I keep saying, the technologies do not in themselves determine how they will be used, but their specific workings do matter for the workings of the larger social machinery -- the institutional, rhetorical, and ideological machinery with which it articulates in daily practice.
Will the conservative movement change its character as (or, I suppose we should say, if) access to computer networking becomes more widespread? We cannot be certain. We can be certain, though, that computer networks will not themselves change any existing movements or create any new ones. Rather than wait for that to happen, let us become aware of the specific ways in which different kinds of social movements take hold of particular technologes, and let us keep on imagining the other ways in which the technologies might be used.
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The NII and workplaces.
[This is an edited transcript of my contribution to a panel on "The Potential Dark Side of the NII", organized by Stephen Bates at the Annenberg Washington Program.]
My assigned topic here is "The Potential Dark Side of the NII in the Workplace", and I want to start out by clearing the ground with a series of hedges and qualifications organized around that phrase. There are six of them.
First of all, the phrase "the NII" tends to presuppose that the NII is a unitary system. This may actually happen if a generic bit-transport protocol like Asynchronous Transfer Mode emerges the most efficient way to ship all types of content for all purposes. But an equally likely outcome is a great diversity of information infrastructures tailored to different purposes.
Second, to speak of "the Dark Side of the NII" suggest that the infrastructure itself produces good or bad social consequences, and this is surely far too simple. The NII is not monolithic or inevitable; rather, it will coevolve with a complex and varied range of institutions and applications, and it is these things that can be spoken of has having light or dark sides. I also want to make sure we don't fall into single-factor explanations; as the NII evolves, ten other important trends will be evolving as well.
Third, in focusing on dark sides I'm wary of being typecast as a technophobe. As I hope will become clear, my stance is more complex and ambivalent than that, and I am quite enthusiastic about the light sides that I do see.
Fourth, very little is known with any certainty about these matters. The reality is evolving daily, and empirical research is having a hard time keeping up. The argument I'll make here rests on an extensive patchwork of different kinds of evidence, but it is surely an oversimplification in many ways.
Fifth, from the point of view of analyzing workplaces, what's crucial is not the NII, or National Information Infrastructure, but the GII, or Global Information Infrastructure.
And sixth and finally, it is not at all easy to define what we mean by a workplace. We want to be sure to include places like kitchens that have often been neglected for their historical associations with women's work, as well as places like commercial trucks, airline seats, and hotel rooms that are increasingly connected back to a mobile worker's home organization through wireless and other forms of modern communications.
These points having been made, we're in a position to put the emerging workplace in some kind of larger context. I want to approach the topic of workplaces stealthily, starting with a general consideration of the place of computer networks in the global economy.
What do computer networks do? Or, more precisely, what do computer networks allow people to do? For one thing, computer networks contribute to a generalized decrease in transaction costs. This effect is uneven, of course, being most intense in finance and only starting to emerge in areas like legal services. At the same time, computer networks also contribute to a generalized decrease in coordination costs. As a result, we can expect to observe a very complex pattern of structural changes in virtually every industry. Generalizations about these thigns are bound to be flawed, particularly given our current state of knowledge, but some broad themes are starting to become clear. As experience grows with large-scale technologies of coordination, power shifts increasingly to globally coordinated firms that have the capacity to orchestrate sharp global competition among their suppliers. These firms have a strong incentive to outsource everything except their knowledge-intensive core competencies and to rationalize and standardize their activities to obtain the maximum advantage from their global scope. Production processes, including formerly concentrated activities such as design, are broken down into smaller units, which are then distributed globally wherever they can find the optimal combinations of infrastructure, wages, skills, and political conditions.
Within organizations, as a general matter, networking facilitates two simultaneous trends that in the older regime of Fordist assembly-line production would have seemed contradictory, namely a decentralization of operational decision-making and a centralization of organizational control.
How does computer networking facilitate these things? That's the question that will let us get the new workplace in focus. In particular, it's the question that will let us get the potential "dark side" of this new workplace in focus. In recent times concerns in this area have been articulated in terms of "workplace privacy", and the metaphors for thinking about these concerns have been derived from historical experiences of the secret police: the Big Brother boss is watching you, for example by reading your e-mail, or listening to you, for example by tapping in on the conversations of telemarketing workers and phone operators.
These phenomena are real enough, although their extent and significance has been debated. Yet the underlying metaphors, while useful enough up to a point, nonetheless really do not allow us to grasp the shifting reality of the workplace in the globally coordinated economy.
Instead, I think, we have to back up to the deep logic of computer system design as it is currently taught and practiced. This logic seems simple and compelling. In order to support an activity, a computer has to represent it. And in order to represent an activity, a computer has to, as the computer people say, "capture" it. And in order for this to happen, the activity must be reorganized in a way that permits it to be captured by a computer. A great diversity of technologies is rapidly arising to support this process, based on accounting software, bar codes, smart cards, radio-frequency tracking devices, and much else. Whereas formerly system design meant something closer to one-user-one-machine, now it means the overlapping of globally coordinated human activity systems with globally distributed computational processes.
It's not very useful to think of these schemes in Orwellian terms, as oppressively detailed surveillance installed for the simple purpose of oppression. Rather it's the playing-out of a technical logic within an evolving market structure.
We can make this concrete in the context of Total Quality Management and related schemes, which employ to one degree or another what I regard as the two crucial elements of the new workplace, namely empowerment and measurement. Work activities can be measured to the extent that they are captured, thus ensuring centralized control, and competition with other suppliers removes some of the need for old-fashioned direct discipline, thus making room for local operational decision-making authority and creating pressure for continuous local innovation.
This situation, obviously, is not all bad. The reduction of direct discipline and the creation of space for local initiative are raising skill levels and sometimes genuinely improving working conditions. At the same time, the thoroughgoing tracking of work activities and the ceaseless competitive pressures organized by global coordination can, in very short order, introduce severe new pressures and a great deal of additional insecurity and instability. This sort of thing cannot be good for anyone's health, much less their family life.
This, it seems to me, is where we discover the "Dark Side of the NII in the Workplace". What can be done? To the extent that computer system design imposes detailed tracking on human activities out of simple habit, just because that's how the design methods work, standardization of different design methods, for example based on cryptographically enforced anonymity, might help. Yet while these methods may actually take hold in some consumer and commerce contexts, employers have little incentive to employ them in workplaces, not least given the enormous inertia imposed by the existing dominant standards.
The real solutions will be found, I think, precisely in what I think of as the "light side" of the NII, namely its use by ordinary people and nonprofit organizations as part of the current flowering of global civil society and the rediscovery of democracy. By this I mean democracy in the broadest sense, of people coming together to take some control over their own lives. Along with the growth of globally coordinated industry, we're also witnessing the rise of global coordination among the people who work in industry. As economic growth brings pressures for political freedom in countries like China, much of this newly released democratic energy will be channeled precisely into the use of new-generation communication technologies for global solidarity work in the union movement. All of those people doing high-value work for low pay will want the high standard of living that we've historically enjoyed in the United States, and they are going to figure out how we got it -- through education and union organizing. And over the Internet I bet they'll teach us a lot about how to get it back.
A short reading list:
Philip E. Agre, Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy, The Information Society 10(2), 1994, 101-127. (See TNO 1(7).)
Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan, eds, Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993.
Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean: The Changing Landscape of Corporate Power in the Age of Flexibility, New York: Basic Books, 1994. (See TNO 1(12).)
Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL, Boston: South End Press, 1985. (See TNO 1(6).)
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The Internet meets the Constitution.
[This is an edited transcript of some remarks I contributed to a discussion organized by the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the California Library Association at the CLA's recent conference.]
The topic we've been assigned today is "The Internet Meets the Constitution". As computer networks become a more important part of the larger process of getting information to people, a wide variety of social choices will be made about the nature of that machinery and how the machinery functions as part of society. The Internet is an important test case for this process because it is simultaneously one of the technical wonders of the world and one of the world's greatest spontaneous experiments in democracy. I will explain why I believe it is crucial for librarians to take a leadership role in guiding the future development of the Internet and information infrastructure generally, but first I want to focus for a moment on the more specific advertised topic of the Internet and the Constitution. I want to make clear that I am not an attorney and that I cannot quote chapter and verse of the law in this area. That's not such a great handicap at the moment, though, since there simply is very little settled law in this area at all. This is assuredly going to change as more social life starts happening on the net and more of the conflicts of that life move into the courts. Nonetheless, it is my personal belief that librarians can expect very little from new Constitutional law for the issues that most concern them in the world of computer networks.
Partly this is due to the growing conservatism of the Supreme Court, a trend that will probably continue, steadily if not rapidly, for the rest of this decade. But it is also due to the nature of the issues that are arising. Let me illustrate this with a quick tour of five issues that concern librarians, most of which arose in the discussions leading to this panel.
First, equal access to information for everyone. We're all agreed that this is a good thing. But as information increasingly becomes a commodity, equal access to information becomes an entitlement. While a certain amount of due process and equal protection might be found here, the courts are unlikely to expand any kind of entitlement except through their review, interpretation, and enforcement of particular legislation.
Second, ownership of information. This is a rapidly evolving area, with a great deal of policy action going on in the Clinton Administration right now which I urge you to learn more about. The resulting proposals may include a variety of affirmative requirements for organizations such as libraries to protect the information property of others. The Republican Congress is likely to support or even strengthen these proposals, and the courts are unlikely to interfere to any significant degree on First Amendment grounds or otherwise.
Third, privacy of communication. Much of the protection we currently enjoy in this area derives from the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It has been a long time since the Supreme Court has expanded its Constitutional privacy jurisprudence, and some of the key precedents in this area are built on complex interpolations of the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments that are highly vulnerable to limitation in cases over the next few years. Privacy torts are in even worse condition, and the courts do not seem to be accepting academic arguments for an expanded tort law of informational privacy, though some test cases may come up concerning secondary uses of credit information and the like. Workplace communication is receiving very little protection, not least because the management owns the machinery. Most of the Internet is in fact private property, and this fact bodes ill for broad Constitutional protection for communication privacy, particularly in workplace settings. Much remains to be seen, though.
Fourth, access to new technologies. It is widely held that access to new-generation networking technologies is a social justice issue. Historically this interest has been addressed not through Constitutional law but through the universal service provisions of the 1934 Communications Act. Attempts to update that act failed in the last Congress, largely due to incoming Majority Leader Bob Dole's opposition to updated universal service and public access set-aside provisions. It is unlikely that such provisions will even get out of committee in the next Congress, and just as unlikely that the Supreme Court will override the will of the legislature in this area.
Fifth, freedom of speech, press, and assembly on the net. Some useful academic theory is being developed in this area, and a number of cases have already been decided in the courts. The outlook here is fairly good, but two crucial issues have not been subjected to serious Constitutional test, namely the scope of who counts as the press in cyberspace and the capacity (or indeed, perhaps, the responsibility) of network owners and service providers to restrict speech, press, and assembly within their own domains.
The foregoing outline of Constitutional issues has been rapid and oversimplified, and once again I do not want to present myself as a final authority here. No doubt the situation is a little more complex than I have made out. Nonetheless I hope you'll at least consider the possibility that the future of information access in a networked world is going to unfold not through Constitutional guarantees but through organizing, action, and education in other areas.
The main "other area" I want to consider here is what I call the "architecture of information access". This is not just the architecture of information machinery, though it certainly includes that. And it is not just the architecture of information itself, for example in cataloguing and interfaces, though it crucially includes that as well. Much more generally, the architecture of information access includes the whole network of social relationships that surrounds and organizes the social process of getting and using information. This includes schools, bookstores, war stories told by coworkers, rumors on the street, traditions passed from old to young, the press and specialized commercial information delivery firms, and much else. From a social justice standpoint, though, perhaps the crucial link in the chain is the professional who knows about both people and information, and about the hundreds of practical circumstances that either connect people to information or else fail to connect them.
The rise of information technologies is bringing us many new efficiencies and opportunities, but it only makes more complex and more crucial the architecture of information access. Now in addition to all of the above we have computer user groups, school classes and after-school computer clubs, local computer gurus, the whole on-line community, friends and coworkers helping one another to get computer-based work done, system and interface designers, and much else. What is the role of information professionals in this whole network? It is a crucial role, obviously, because all of the new complexity of information access makes it even less inevitable that people will get connected to the information they need. The amount of knowledge needed to connect people to information in the new world is staggering, and that knowledge only grows through the experience of actually doing it and reporting back to the profession on what is happening.
Many technical people are wholly unaware of this phenomenon. They are designing the net with little awareness of the complex social architecture of information access. As library automation specialist Karen Coyle points out, the Internet as it stands is an amateur job. There's plenty of information, but it's largely disorganized, with only the most haphazard provision for professional help in connecting people to information. This has to change, and it has to change soon before anti-social technical standards become entrenched through widespread use and commercialization.
What can librarians do about this? Plenty. Two things need to happen hand-in-hand: experimentation and publicity. My colleague, infrastructure policy expert Francois Bar, emphasizes the crucial role of end-user experimentation in defining the network architecture of the future. These experiments can have a huge impact on the world through publicity. This means giving presentations and demos to community groups, holding events and sending out press releases, and making code and documentation available on the net.
But above all it means organizing: going out in the community and building an active constituency for information access and intellectual freedom. Organizing is the only way anything has ever changed in the world, and it's the only way we're going to ensure that the democratic potentials of new information technologies become real in our community and our nation the day after tomorrow.
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Bouncemail top ten.
In running a large mailing list for the past year or so, I have become acquainted with a depressing variety of dysfunctional mail handling software. I've gathered here my top ten least favorite phenomena in hopes that a Universal Union of Large List Maintainers might spring up to force them to get fixed:
10. Mailers that give intermittent "user unknown" messages for users who perfectly well exist, perhaps because they cannot detect transient local network problems well enough to postpone delivering mail.
9. The confusion over the Errors-To: field, which sure seems like a good idea to me but which apparently is not part of the standard. It is supported by most but not all mailers. If it didn't exist then I'd have to run my mailing list from a separate account.
8. Mailers that generate messages lacking well-formed headers, most commonly addresses like "someone@local" without proper domain information.
7. Mailers that tell me "Press F1 for help with VNM error codes" even though my function keys are unlikely to be programmed the same way as they are for users at the site that generates the bouncemail message. In general, mailers designed on the assumption that all senders and recipients of messages would use that same mailer -- particularly when the mailer in question does not think in terms of standard IP domain formats.
6. Mailers that complain that a certain message could not be delivered but do not specify who in particular the message could not be delivered to. Also, mailers that complain that a forwarded message could not be delivered without providing any indication of what address(es) the message was forwarded from.
5. Vacation programs that respond to bulk or mailing-list mail or that do not keep track of who they've replied to, with the result that I get batches of spurious vacation messages (sometimes in German) as each holiday approaches.
4. Mailers that generate mail that cannot be replied to. Sometimes a message says "From: Fred_Q_Smith@foobar.com", even though the user's account is actually called "fqs". Sometimes I have no idea why I cannot reply to a message, and the mailer offers me no help in figuring it out. This is particularly annoying when the sender in question starts sending further messages to the effect of, "you should reply to my messages, you rude person!" It is even more annoying when the machine that generated the bogus message does not have a "postmaster" alias defined.
3. Mailers that take a month before giving up on the delivery of messages to a missing user, whereupon they initiate a monthlong stream of error messages, individually, for every one of the messages I've sent in the last month.
2. Mail-reading programs that automatically generate a little message to the effect of "so-and-so read your message about "routine administrative notes" on December 3rd at 08:41" -- even when the message was sent to a mailing list and not directly to the person reading it. The people whose mail readers generate these messages are usually not aware of them, and their site maintainers usually do not know how to shut them off. 1. The astoundingly baroque and uninformative error messages that I have gotten from the Novell mailer.
Of course errors happen. The basic point here is that the error messages are so incomprehensible, so incomplete, so inconsistent, and so difficult to adjust or control. The right way to do this, in my view, would be for mailers to be talking to one another and maintaining updated status tables for the process of delivering (or not delivering) each message. A reasonable amount of useful information could travel over these lines of communication, and my mailer could consequently provide me with some significantly more useful functionalities. Imagine a GUI interface with a window showing the messages that got bounced, deferred, and so forth. And imagine that I could just click on each one to say, in one nice clean operation, "okay, let's just take this person off the mailing list, send them a nice explanatory note in case they're magically back on-line, and expunge from the system all remaining traces of existing messages from me to them or error messages from these mailers about them".
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This month's recommendations.
Jeff Buckley, Grace (Columbia). An inspired reinvention of rock and roll, Zeppelinesque chiaroscuro somehow transposed into the wholly different key, as nearly as I can describe it, of medieval Christian church music. One brilliant segue toward the end, for example, moves from the ethereality of Benjamin Britten's "Corpus Christi Carol" through ominous electric guitar riffs into a modern-day fire-and-brimstone remonstration called "Eternal Life". When critics carry on about this record they invariably call it "emotional", but the right word is "passionate" -- in an old sense nearly lost in the present day.
Campaigns and Elections. You must go read the December/January 1995 issue of the US magazine "Campaigns and Elections" ("The Magazine for Political Professionals"). It's a special issue on "grassroots lobbying", the practice of mobilizing and organizing constituencies of "ordinary people" to pressure legislators on specific issues, or issues affecting specific interest groups. Of course, people have mobilized and organized themselves and one another since the Stone Age. What's different now is the rise of professionalized commercial firms that go out and create grassroots movements for paying customers. Numerous such firms have advertisements in this issue of C&E, and the issue would be worth the $4.50 cover price for the ads alone. The issue even includes a four-page "Grassroots Lobbying Buyer's Guide" listing well over a hundred companies. In short, C&E is the cheapest and easiest window onto the extraordinary distortion of democracy in modern times, so check it out. (Ten issues a year, $29.95, 1511 K Street NW #1020, Washington DC 20077-1720.)
Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath, New York: Random House, 1990. My car apparently having blown a gasket in its exhaust manifold on Christmas, I spent Boxing Day at home reading Kevin Phillips and Friedrich von Hayek in alternating chapters with Rush Limbaugh's "The Way Things Ought to Be", seeking some clue as to the nature of the vacuum currently being filled in American political culture by the sophistry, mendacity, and cruelty of the latter's muddled declamations. More about Hayek another time, but I must say that the experience expanded my already awestruck respect for Phillips, who is the foremost student of American electoral politics. (Everyone who reads Campaigns and Elections reads Phillips as well.) Despite his being a Republican, he is merciless in his dissection of the unfortunate structural changes in American society during the 1980's, and acute in his historical comparisons to the 1880's and 1920's, among other relevant decades -- and not just in generalities, but region by region and sector by sector. So now I guess I'll have to get his new book, whose title is "Arrogant Capital" -- the word "capital", I gather, referring to economic and political elites equally.
Bob Scher, The Fear of Cooking, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Not a cookbook but a book about how to cook. This is the book that got me past following recipes to being awake and aware in the kitchen, able to cook without a recipe and able to diverge confidently from recipes when the situation demands. Its motto is "it's right in front of you". Charmingly eccentric and well observed, its lessons about tastes, smells, rules, messes, fears, failures, and learning are all written from the standpoint of experience -- a mortal person getting along in a real kitchen. This book has gone out of press for some weird reason, but if you pester the publisher and talk to the best used book store in town, you might be able to track one down.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
Equifax 1600 Peachtree Street NW Atlanta, Georgia 30309
phone: (404) 885-8231
You've probably heard of Equifax -- they're one of the largest companies collecting and distributing credit information on consumers. They are also the most sophisticated among such companies in terms of their public relations. They invest real money in activities like publishing annual surveys of public opinion about privacy issues. You might have seen, for example, a recent Equifax press release revealing that a majority of the American public would be willing to create a database of residents for purposes of regulating illegal immigration. This is no doubt accurate, at least assuming that the public is not yet fully informed about the downside of such a proposal, but the fact that they selected this number as the lead on their press release provides some idea of the subtle game they play.
I recommend that everyone learn about the rhetoric and methods of public relations around privacy issues, and an easy way to get started is by obtaining and carefully studying Equifax's materials on the subject. You'll find, of course, that they do in fact have some valid arguments and that they do engage in some responsible practices. The subtle thing is how privacy issues are framed in the first place, and this is a matter best studied through careful, repeated readings of the text, without having to determine right away whether the facts and arguments being offered are correct.
Try to defamiliarize the text in as many ways as you can. Ask, how do the facts and arguments work? What is it like to read them? With Buddha-like detachment, take note when you find yourself adopting their questions as your own or thinking "gee, I never thought of it that way". Read the text out loud to some writers and artists and solicit their instant reactions. Look up the etymologies of the words in a dictionary. Notice the metaphors (fluids, conduits, forces, measurement, vision, etc) and extrapolate them. How else might they have written it? What implicit ideas do they have about ordinary people and their beliefs and concerns about privacy? What implicit ideas do they convey about the nature and structure of the personal information industry? Gather a batch of reactions to the text based on such questions -- it helps a lot to write them down as you go along. Then sleep on it and send some relevant Internet discussion group a message reporting what you've discovered.
(Of course, you can do all of these things with my own writing as well, or the writing of anyone else expressing concerns about privacy issues. It's just that theirs is much more interesting.) Do not, however, harass the people at Equifax -- only request their position statements on privacy issues if you genuinely wish to read them. Thanks very much.
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Follow-up.
A couple of people from the Washington public interest community responded to my discussion of Issue Dynamics Inc in TNO 1(12). They pointed out that the founder of IDI, Sam Simon, far from being a corporate PR person, is a long-time associate of Ralph Nader, and they were particularly pained by my having mentioned IDI in the same breath as Newt Gingrich. I didn't mean to equate the two. The fact is, though, that IDI talks and acts like a fairly sophisticated public relations firm operating on the Internet, and my main goal was to educate net people on the nature of PR work so that they can make their own fully informed judgements about it. These folks point out that IDI has associated itself with a number of good causes (for example the Brock Meeks defense fund, for which -- don't get me wrong -- IDI did real work). Is this from conviction or is it a means of positioning the firm as good guys with the net community, thus building credibility to be cashed in later on behalf of the regional telephone companies and the firm's other clients? It's precisely the art of an organization like IDI to maintain a perfect ambiguity between these two interpretations.
As a footnote, one of my correspondents suggested that IDI's site is called idi.net because IDI considers itself an Internet access provider, and many access providers use the .net. I must admit I had not thought of that. At the same time, it doesn't explain wireless.policy.net.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is now on the Internet at gopher://chronicle.merit.edu:70/1/
The first bona fide web artwork that I've seen and liked is "Life With Father" by Joseph Squier. Its URL (which I've broken over two lines because it's long) is: http://gertrude.art.uiuc.edu/ludgate/the/place/stories/ life_with_father/Life_With_Father.html It'll work better if you have a Macintosh with a large screen and a fair amount of memory.
The EFF archive includes a nice concise how-to on lobbying. Look in this directory, which has some other useful stuff too: http://www.eff.org/pub/EFF/Frontier_Files/EFF_Files/Activism/ The lobbying file is called lobby_techniques.faq
The folks at LLNL have an extensive set of telecom net resources indexed at http://www-atp.llnl.gov/atp/telecom.html Plus more random stuff at http://www-atp.llnl.gov/atp/link.html
David Chaum's Scientific American article on digital cash is available at http://digicash.support.nl/publish/sciam.html
Al Whaley
The Supercomputing '95 conference is going to be in San Diego in December, chaired by Sid Karin of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. They want to have a thoroughly wired conference, which should be interesting. Check out their web pages at this URL: http://sc95.sdsc.edu/SC95
In case anyone is interested, I've made web pages out of my thirty-odd contributions to Risks this year. The URL is:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/risks-94.html
Or you can get the whole set in one file by sending a message that looks like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send risks-94 It's about 100Kbytes.
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
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The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater News Service. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE server, rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu, whose subject line reads "subscribe firstname lastname", for example "Subject: subscribe Jane Doe". For more information about the Red Rock Eater, send a message to that same address with a subject line of "help". For back issues etc, use a subject line of "archive send index". TNO is also on WWW at http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/tno.html
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Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
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