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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 9 SEPTEMBER 1994
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This month: The epidemiology of Unix Imagining the future of labor markets The infrastructure of public relations Books about writing E-mail addresses for gay activists
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Welcome to TNO 1(9).
This month's issue includes a couple of articles by the editor. First is a commentary upon a savagely humorous new book based on the UNIX-HATERS mailing list, leading to a discussion of how unfortunate technical standards can become entrenched. Unix is merely a nuisance mess, but many other standards are downright dangerous, and an understanding of the social dynamics of standards might avoid further dangers in the future.
Then comes a deliberately frightening scenario about the future of information-intensive labor markets. As computers decrease the transaction costs associated with hiring, and as networks increase the geographic scope over which firms can hunt for people to do specific units of work, human labor may become radically commodified through standardization. What's your cheerfulness rating? The point of this exercise is not concrete prognostication, but rather restretching our imaginations. Big Brother provides one dystopian vision of institutional abuses of computing, but many other scenarios are possible.
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The epidemiology of Unix.
According to The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (a funny but serious new book from IDG Books in San Mateo, California, edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassman):
Unix is a computer virus with a user interface.
Maybe you have to be a computer person to get the humor in this, but I personally find it all too funny. UNIX-HATERS is a mailing list begun in 1987 by an MIT Media Lab graduate student named Mike Travers, so that people worldwide who spend far too much time struggling with the Unix operating system could compare notes and engage in rude, exasperated flaming. Over time the UNIX-HATERS list distributed a remarkably large number of very nasty, very well-informed messages, which three members of the list have now included in a book. Although they are listed as editors, in fact they wrote a great deal of additional text, within which the UNIX-HATERS messages are for the most part simply illustrations. (They even included one small message of mine, about one version of the Unix "rm" command.)
Unix is not literally a computer virus, of course, but the analogy is striking. Unix was written by a couple of guys who needed a simple operating system to enable them to do something else. From there it grew and spread exponentially, gathering a bewildering variety of additional hacks and variant versions which have successfully resisted numerous attempts to impose order and standards upon them. Why? One reason is that anyone could get it basically for free -- including its source code. But the more fundamental reason is that Unix filled a niche -- lacking a standard operating system for "workstation" computers, everyone found it easier to incrementally adapt Unix to their purposes than to buy something else or write it from scratch. The history of Unix, then, is not a matter of conscious design and planning but of ceaseless mutation and multiplication. This is the sense in which Unix is like a virus.
I was utterly absorbed the UNIX-HATERS book. When one of the editors, Simson Garfinkel, sent me a draft, I sat right down and read it pretty much straight through, marking typos and accumulating a batch of written comments. I had better things to be doing, to be honest, but there was something compelling about the ceaseless barrage, page after page, of outrageous stories about Unix functionality, including dozens of instances of bad design that had bitten me over the years. The book is written in an exaggeratedly nasty style which actually somehow works, perhaps because the undead Unix is the product of no single villain.
The scope of The UNIX-HATERS Handbook is almost exclusively technical. These are computer people whose sense of good design has been offended, and they are exacting revenge in the name of much better operating systems that have been relegated to the software museum by the haphazard spread of viral standards. And indeed, for sheer harmless moral outrage, the book is hard to beat.
My own questions about Unix, though, are more institutional. If Unix is a virus, surely we need an epidemiology. Just as the spread of human viruses is abetted through the mechanics of air ducts, the civil engineering of sanitation, the culture of sexuality, and the economics of pharmaceuticals, likewise the spread of technical standards is influenced by a variety of non-technical factors relating to the technology's place in the larger world. Why did Unix spread? One important reason, at least in the early days, was the many separate choices of individual programmers who just needed to get individual systems running -- Unix was quick and easy if you knew how everything worked and just needed to make forward progress.
In the long run, though, a more important factor was the decision of companies like Sun Microsystems to aggressively promote Unix as a standard. When a new market niche opens, like the emerging niche for workstation computers that Sun nearly dominated for a long time, quality doesn't matter nearly as much as speed -- how fast you can get products to market. Sun could take Unix off the shelf, promote it as a standard, cut prices like mad, and promise to fix the problems later. In economic terms this was an entirely rational decision. Part of the reason for this, though, was that very many of the people who bought Suns were not aware of the high costs of Unix system maintenance which ate up much of the savings on the hardware. This includes the hidden costs of the legions of frustrated system users and programmers trying to overcome the numerous manifestations of Unix's bad design -- or more precisely, its lack of design. Many of these hidden costs are hidden because their victims simply weren't aware that the world could be organized in any other way.
Unix, of course, is simply an extreme example of something that happens a lot with technical standards. Take the familiar QWERTY keyboard, which is well known to be ergonomically inferior to other designs but which persists because it's next to impossible to get millions of people sufficiently coordinated to make the shift. Given that the world is full of QWERTY keyboards, someone deciding to learn to type is best-advised to learn QWERTY typing. Once they've learned QWERTY typing, it's hard to convince anyone that it's worth learning Dvorak typing, or any other optimized typing scheme. Keyboard manufacturers, for their parts, are facing a world in which most typists know the QWERTY system and not any other. Thus the QWERTY standard remains entrenched just because it got established and keeps reproducing itself. With Unix, of course, the situation is much worse because of the ceaseless mutations it undergoes. But the principle is similar.
So who do we arrest for causing the Unix epidemic? How about the executives at Sun and other similar companies? Did they have reasonable alternatives? Probably not. The lesson, I think, is to be extremely aware of the rise of new standards. If we want things done right, we need to make noise quickly, at the beginning of the cycle, before something random becomes entrenched. The consequences can be severe. With Unix it's just a matter of cost and inconvenience. But with other types of systems it's also a matter of civil liberties. Consider the vast number of systems that collect personal information indexed by a personal identifier such as a Social Security Number. Did those systems really have to work that way? Could they have used cryptography to protect individuals from abuse of their information, and to give individuals more control over the ways in which their information was used? Yes, most likely they could. So why didn't they? One answer is profit, since secondary uses of personal information so often bring in good money.
But another answer is that the systems were designed that way by default -- since that kind of plain, explicit representation is what programmers are taught in school. We'll probably always need legislation to make sure that information is not abused. But perhaps a better, longer-term answer is to change education in computer science so that privacy-protection methods such as cryptography are taught in the earliest classes and integrated into the design methodologies of systems analysis -- rather than being stuck on in non-standard ways afterward.
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Science fiction and social choice.
Today our society must make, very rapidly, a large number of difficult choices about technology. Distributed computing technology is changing with particular speed right now, and the consequences of its diverse uses are finally starting to be felt on a large scale. Technical standards and market structures are nearly impossible to roll back once they become entrenched, so it is important to try to imagine ahead of time what the future will bring. This is not just -- or even mostly -- a technical matter. It is more a matter of social imagination: what kinds of social and institutional dynamics will emerging technologies enter into?
Many technical people of my acquaintance rebut this question with the lame answer that such things are impossible to anticipate, so why try? One "why" is that it matters, and another is that, colorful counterexamples notwithstanding, we actually can anticipate a great many things reliably enough to make important choices now. This is the zone where science fiction intersects with sociology. (Why does "science fiction" connote stories set in the future or an irretrievable past, whereas "sociological fiction" connotes either nothing at all or stories set in the present day?) Let us call it the "technosocial imagination" and think hard about it, because we're going to need it.
The technosocial imagination, like all kinds of imagination, is profoundly influenced by the past. In particular, it is deeply influenced by precedents and by metaphors. It is a notorious fact that ideas about the future, when investigated in retrospect, invariably turn out to have been ways of working through situations in the present. This isn't so bad, but it's unfortunate when it distorts choices about technology that really do matter for something. We can defend ourselves against this effect, at least to some degree, by using the tools of critical analysis to make explicit the structure of our ideas about these things, thereby making possible the conscious investigation of alternatives.
When it comes to distributed computer technology, perhaps the single most important precedent and metaphor conditioning our technosocial imagination is "Big Brother" -- George Orwell's fictional abstraction of the totalitarian societies of the mid twentieth century, drawing on historical experiences of the secret police going back a long ways. The idea of computers maintaining extensive databases about your purchases and finances, your work activities, and your personal life certainly sounds, on first blush, like Big Brother at work.
But Big Brother has his limitations as a structuring metaphor for the technosocial imagination. In TNO 1(7) I explained one reason why this is so, namely that computers don't work by looking at things. They work by languages, and applied computing isn't just a matter of watching you but of restructuring your activities (either obviously or subtly over time) so that they afford "parsing" in terms that given computer systems can represent to themselves. Another problem with Big Brother is that it is a metaphor of state action and thus has limited applicability to analyses of the market. The secret police really does exist and I wouldn't want to minimize it. But it's not what's driving the social structuring of distributed computer technology right now.
Here I would like to start developing some alternative forms of technosocial imagination to encourage reasoning about distributed computer technology. To speak of "forms of imagination" rather than "theories" is to announce a cultural intervention rather than an academic exercise, though these two activities clearly overlap. More concretely, to speak of "forms of imagination" is to beg forgiveness for extrapolation, exaggeration, abstraction, and simplification. Metaphors are blunt instruments: they order some elements of reality in simple and compelling ways while pushing all the other elements to the margins. Thoughtful people apply them with care, heuristically, as a stimulus to critical reflection and a generator of hypotheses and questions that might be addressed to material reality, both through formal experiment and through the lived experiences of the people to whom the stuff is happening.
That said, I want to extrapolate some things that are going on in the labor market right now. It's clear that a great deal is going on in labor markets, but people disagree about what is going on. Temporary work is found in areas where it formerly was not. New kinds of piecework are called "consulting". Contract manufacturing has become more prominent in the global division of labor as low-skill (and, increasingly, high-skill) manufacturing has drifted from formerly industrial countries to formerly nonindustrial ones. It is not an extreme exaggeration to say, as did the cover story of a recent issue of Fortune (9/19/94), that we're looking at the "end of the job". What I think is safe to say is that we're looking at an increasing heterogeneity of contractual relationships in the workplace, both in the relationships between organizations (e.g., partnerships) and between organizations and individuals.
Computer networks alone did not cause these developments, and it is hard to determine precisely what contribution they have made. But in some sectors, as TNO 1(8) pointed out, "human resources" has encountered informational economies of scale that have made it possible for companies like McDonald's to contract much of their labor needs (finding, hiring, paying, and firing employees) to outside firms. These firms employ extensive testing and try to "match" people to jobs in a rationalized way on a large scale.
Where could this go? Business management literature in the last decade has placed increasing emphasis on the role of ideological control in workplaces. The idea is that, in order to "empower" people to make decisions based on local knowledge, it is necessary to indoctrinate them (they often use these words, ideological and indoctrinate) with the company's "philosophy" and "values" and "culture". Many managers now say things like "we hire people who share our values" -- that means that they employ some kind of personality testing (either through formal tests or more informal kinds of screening) to hire people who fit a certain personality profile, for example "cheerful", "work ethic", "team player", and so forth.
Imagine a system in which such tests become standardized on a large scale. If you want a job anywhere in the bottom four fifths of the economy (or, in a different way, in the top three percent) then you'll regularly take a batch of personality tests and your scores will be stored in databases. Employers, using statistical evidence gathered through pervasive work monitoring to correlate personality factors to job performance, contract for labor using this database. When this system becomes large enough it will move beyond the simple idea of a "match" between the job and the person. Instead, different personality traits will have market values. In such a world, one might reasonably expect, a high "cheerfulness" rating will be a fairly valuable commodity that will fetch a premium on the market, with a high score for "sullen efficiency" trading at a modest discount.
A functioning market in human personality traits will go a long way to maximizing the efficiency of a wide variety of industries -- and not just service work. The people who design jobs and the machines that hire people to fill them will be able to make economic calculations: one kind of restaurant, for example, might require its employees to be rapid learners and good at managing conflict, where another might require them to be docile and susceptible to being pressured, and the relative labor costs associated with these attributes might be factored into choices about what kind of restaurant to open where.
In such a world, a temporary agency will operate very much like a commodity market like the ones that sell pork bellies in Chicago. No doubt it will become possible to trade futures in human labor, for example futures in solemnity or aggression whose values might be affected by the introduction of new psychopharmaceuticals. Large companies will be able to purchase long-term contracts to lock in their labor prices, but a spot market will remain for those purchasers whose sustained needs are uncertain.
In such a market, people will be able to make better economic decisions about altering their personalities. Investments in psychotherapy will be much better quantified, and "retreats" and "workshops" that promise "transformational" changes in one's basic philosophy and values, already a substantial industry, will begin to advertise much more openly and lose much of their (often well deserved) reputations as cults. It'll be like test cramming courses only much more so: "my cheerfulness on the RDPM scale is now in the 98th percentile, and I owe it all to Lifespring!".
The precise structure of the new rationalized labor market will be affected by many things -- or, I should say more precisely, it will interact with many other factors. Among these is the extent to which jobs -- actually, the newly fashionable phrase is "work that needs to be done" -- can be broken down into easily learned units that might be assigned to what we now call "temporary" workers. In past times, and indeed for the most part in the present day, this end has been achieved principally through the fragmentation of jobs into time-and-motion-measured units. But it can be achieved through a combination of many other factors of well: increasing standardization of the skills, standardization of the ideologies of work (this effect was formerly achieved by professions, but professions used to have a certain amount of autonomy and solidarity that they are rapidly losing), increases in the potential hiring pool for each job by permitting work to be done remotely via computer networks and the like, and work monitoring through computers and otherwise.
What will it be like to live in such a world? It is hard to say for certain. It depends in large part on whether, and in what ways, and to what depths, people actually believe in the particular ideologies that are in demand in the market. If they really do believe these things then they will be happy until they are driven into the ground by the stresses of overwork and continual changes of jobs. I expect, though, that most people will be in a middle ground, neither believing the stuff nor not believing it, but rather driven by the market to learn to animate its outer forms without having much time to critically examine any of it.
This would all be sad. Will it happen? I can point at quite a few signs and rumors that it's on its way, but I really don't know. The point of the exercise is not to make a prediction that can be scored correct or incorrect someday, but rather to shake up our technosocial imaginations. This unhappy scenario is far from Big Brother but just as unpleasant. If it doesn't have quite the same bite, that's because quite a few people have full-time jobs justifying such things by arguing against abundant evidence that the unfettered market necessarily provides the best of all possible worlds. The motto of this newsletter is that the market is like the police: of course you need it, but if it becomes the central organizing principle of your culture then you're in deep trouble. And that's my conclusion here: computers are cultural artifacts as much as they are technical ones, and they lend themselves to cultural engineering just as much as they do to technical engineering. That's not a necessary connection, since computers can probably be used in different ways in different worlds, but it's a wholly plausible connection in the world that is emerging before our eyes today.
Is it what we want? We still have time to decide.
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This month's recommendations.
Andrew L. Friedman, Computer Systems Development: History, Organization and Implementation, Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1989. This is a detailed, utterly astute history of computer systems development, based on a sequence of three stages: building programs that satisfy specs, developing specs that correspond to structures of work, and designing user interfaces that people can use. He predicts the emergence of a fourth stage: concern with interactions between structures of computing and structures of organizations.
William Strunk Jr and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, third edition, New York: Macmillan 1979. I've read a lot of books about how to write, but this is the book I keep coming back to. It contains a simple, clear ideology of language based on the slogan "omit needless words". Just reading it won't make you a great writer. But reading it at bedtime on writing days can work wonders -- once you set to writing again the next day, you'll start to notice the truth of its simple rules, whereupon you can look for your own personal way to apply the spirit of those rules. Far from constraining your writing to artificial norms, you'll probably find that this process helps you bring out your own voice. Even better, try picking just one of the rules (for example, its injunction to use active verbs) and go through every sentence of your current draft. If you're like me (and many of my students), you'll be amazed at the radical changes that this simple procedure can bring to your prose.
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Boston: Shambhala, 1986. Another manual for writers, as different from Strunk and White as it could possibly be, but just as useful. Goldberg is a Buddhist writing instructor in New Mexico whose speciality is a very personal kind of fiction writing, but whose methods can be extended to all other kinds of writing as well. She suggests stirring up your writerly self by engaging in a kind of automatic writing that circumvents your efforts to make your writing "good", fashionable, according to the rules, and so forth. She also offers plenty of useful general-purpose advice about writing that should make valuable bedtime reading for anyone who is, say, stuck on a dissertation.
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Company of the month.
This month's company is:
PR Newswire 1515 Broadway, 32nd Floor New York, New York 10036
+1 (212) 832-9400, fax (800) 793-9313
Producing a newspaper or news program costs money. One way to save money is to use predigested news "stories" from PR agencies. Oscar Gandy calls this an "information subsidy". This practice, while commonplace since early in this century, has grown ever more pervasive, to the degree that a whole elaborate infrastructure has grown up to implement it. Perhaps the single most important element in that infrastructure is PR Newswire, which allows organizations engaged in public relations to have their materials delivered to news organizations worldwide. A customer can choose from a variety of "newslines", corresponding to a given geographic region, industry, ethnic group, or whatever, including both mainstream newspapers and more specialized publications. Their coverage is truly amazing. For example, you can get your 300-word press release to the national news agency and all major media in Bangladesh for US$265. They'll send photos, and they'll store your own letterhead in their computer for repeated notices.
The fact is that news organizations use these materials. Now, nobody can complain when the materials in question are simple matters of fact. The problem starts when the news organizations do not -- whether to save money or to avoid offending potential sponsors or because they simply don't care -- dig beneath the "spin" on the stories they get from the PR Newswire to see what other framings of the story might better inform the public.
So you might want to learn more about PR Newswire by getting their literature. But don't harass them. Only get it if you really want to read it. Thanks a lot.
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Follow-up.
Mike Sunderland
Al Gore's National Performance Review now has some web pages. Have a look at http://www.npr.gov/ and ignore the huge bit maps.
The Office of the (US) Secretary of Defense now has a web page as well. Much fun. Aim your WWW client at http://www.osd.mil/
In a neat bit of symmetry, the Survival Research Laboratories (which stages allegorical demonstrations of mechanized warfare on city streets) is on the net now as well. The URL is http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~paulos/SRL/
The August 8th issue of the direct marketing industry journal "DM News" reports that "Affinity Marketing Group is offering the 29,888-name Hillary Haters list", which consists of individuals who "despise anything and everything to do" with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Affinity says that these folks are "proven supporters of patriotic and ultra-right wing causes, campaigns and committees and ... are pro-military, anti-gay, pro-gun, anti-welfare, pro-American and anti-foreigner". You can reach Affinity at PO Box 2409, Fairfax VA 22031, phone (703) 978-4927, fax (703) 978-7832.
The Institute for the Study of Civic Values' gopher contains many things relevant to community networking and community development. Aim your gopher at gopher.civic.net port 2400 From a unix prompt: gopher gopher.civic.net 2400 URL://gopher.civic.net:2400
Here, courtesy of dbatterson@aol.com via a very useful on-line
newsletter on e-mail an government published by Jim Warren
* Oregon's No on 13 Campaign (formerly Save Our Communities PAC) is at: socpac@aol.com .
* Idaho's No on 1 Coalition is at: NoProp1ID@aol.com .
* The Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund is at: victoryf@aol.com .
* Digital Queers is at: kwickre@aol.com .
* National Gay & Lesbian Task Force is at: ngltf@aol.com .
* Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is at: glaadsfba@aol.com .
* International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission is at: iglhrc@agc.apc.org .
I wandered through the local VA hospital the other day and happened upon an issue of "Atomic Veterans Newsletter" for veterans who got sick from being exposed to US nuclear weapons tests. It's fascinating. The address is NAAV, PO Box 4424, Salem MA 01970-6424. Membership (including a subscription to the magazine) is $15 a year, but it sounds like they might only accept memberships from people who were actually exposed to radiation. You might want to check it out anyway.
My favorite palindrome is: Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu Department of Information Studies University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154 Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460 USA -------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1994 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- ```