Information Technology

I got an iPad for X-Mas so – finally! – I can get in on this e-book thing. I bought Quiggin’s Zombie Economics. Also, Mieville’s Kraken. Now I’m thinking about writing: Krakenomics: How Really Big Things Can Drag Down You, And Everyone You Love, To The Very Bottom, And There’s Nothing You Can Do About It, Probably. “Chapter 1: Shit Creek and the Paddle – Learning To Love Learned Helplessness”. Or something like that. But I’m too lazy to write it, so you write it. Also, I haven’t even read the Mieville yet, so what do I know?

But I’m thinking about quoting our John in something I’m writing (yes, on Zizek). But I can’t footnote a Kindle edition. No pages. What will the world come to? Bibliography has gotten a bit old and odd in the head in the age of the internet, but the existence of pages themselves is kind of a watershed. On the one hand, there’s really no reason why a text that can be poured into a virtual vessel as easily as it can be inspirited into the corpse of a tree should have to have ‘pages’. Still, it’s traditional. Harumph. I suppose I’m going to have to use Amazon’s ‘search inside’ or Google Books and pretend I read the paper version, as a proper scholar would. Or just email John Q. and ask.

If you aren’t reading “Glenn Greenwald”:http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html on this, you should be. The latest turn of the screw is that “Visa have said”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11938320 they are suspending payments. The good news is that, at least for Europe, this will take time to implement. The Wikileaks donations page is currently “here”:http://213.251.145.96/support.html

According to this Nielsen study, American teens between 13-17 years old are sending or receiving, on average, 3,339 texts per month, and teen girls send or receive 4,050 per month. (Obviously, this is among teens with cell phones.) It’s hard to believe that the average is distorted by a minority of massive users – that’s already a text every 7 to 9 minutes across the whole waking day. Of course, I could be wrong about how much they sleep. On the other hand, the study was conducted between April and June, 2010, so at least some of them were presumably in school – not that this necessarily eliminates all opportunities to text, I know, but it must cut down on them somewhat, right? I mean, we’re talking about high school, not college, here.

The exciting Berkman Center (where I spent the 2008/09 academic year as a Fellow) is accepting applications for both its Academic Fellowship program for an early/mid-career academic as well as its open Fellowship program. It is a fantastic place to spend some time so I highly encourage people with interests in Internet and society types of topics – very broadly defined – to look into these opportunities. Please spread the word! Berkman is genuinely interested in having a diverse set of voices and perspectives represented among its fellows. To achieve that, it is important that this call is circulated widely.

I have an interview over at The Setup, for those of you who are interested in cursor-gazing.

“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/facebook-and-freedom/ describes this “Malcolm Gladwell piece”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/facebook-and-freedom/ as a ‘smart’ take on ‘how the kind of “weak ties” promoted by online social media can’t do the kind of work of the kind of “hard ties” that the leaders of the civil rights movement used to knock down an authoritarian system.’ I did a “bloggingheads with Julian Sanchez”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/31257?in=52:12&out=60:32 yesterday where we discussed this piece – and, to put it mildly, we didn’t find it smart (Julian describes it as his ‘most recent excretion’). Not because it was necessarily _wrong,_ but because it did the usual Gladwell trick of taking a vaguely counter-conventional-wisdom argument (in this case, a rehashing of what Yevgeny Morozov has been saying for the last couple of years), adding some quasi-digested social science and a couple of illustrative anecdotes, and then spinning out a _New Yorker_ article. He’s a good writer (for pre-masticated values of ‘good writing’) but a quite mediocre thinker.

I’ll confess to being _particularly annoyed_ by the Gladwell piece because it seems like the purest possible distillation of the intellectual-debate-through-duelling-anecdotes that has plagued discussion over the Internet and authoritarian regimes over the last few years. As this “new report”:http://www.usip.org/files/resources/pw65.pdf (PDF) for the US Institute of Peace (co-authored by Sean Aday, me, Marc Lynch, John Sides, John Kelly and Ethan Zuckerman) discusses at some length, we more or less have _no idea_ of whether Internet based media hurt authoritarianism, lead to group polarization or anything else.

bq. The sobering answer is that, fundamentally, no one knows. To this point, little research has sought to estimate the causal effects of new media in a methodologically rigorous fashion, or to gather the rich data needed to establish causal influence. Without rigorous research designs or rich data, partisans of all viewpoints turn to anecdotal evidence and intuition.

The report provides a kind of toy investigation of the Iran protests using network analysis and basic data on informational diffusion to discipline the anecdotes, but is primarily focused on pushing for _actual research_ (which would take substantial investments in developing tools and gathering data) that might try to answer the relevant questions. Without such research, we’ll be left relying on Malcolm Gladwell articles to guide our thinking. And that is not a particularly good place to be.

So my university just got me a replacement Dell printer for my office desktop, which is a Mac. When I went to Dell’s site to download it, I found that they have the necessary .dmg files readily available – compressed as an .exe file. Looks as though this has been an issue for “quite a while.”:http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/peripherals/f/3528/t/19297965.aspx You might think that someone at Dell would know that Macs can’t read .exe files. You might think it. Still, this doesn’t match my personal-nominee-for-worst-software-design-decision-of-all-time – the wonderful Windows XP tool you had to use to log laptops onto ‘secure’ wireless networks. This asked you to enter in the secure key in a masked text box, so you couldn’t see what you were typing – which is annoying, but in principle justifiable for security reasons. Then, it asked you to enter it in _again_, as far as I can make out, for no logical reason whatsoever that I could make out, and booted you back to the beginning of the process if the two passwords didn’t match. When you have long randomly generated passwords (as you should), there is a not insignificant chance that you are going to type it in incorrectly. Being forced to type it in twice doubles this chance for no apparent gain.

While I’m on a roll, I’m also peeved at Google’s recent decision to randomly challenge you to enter in your password again every couple of days, even if you are already logged in – since I use a long randomly generated password that is impossible to memorize, this usually involves a couple of minutes of searching for the password while swearing profusely. So that’s my life at the moment – how’s yours?

About eight weeks ago I left my MacBook on the DC Metro. Not a wonderful experience, as you can imagine – especially as repeated calls to the Metro’s Lost & Found, advertisements on Craigslist with reward promised and other such measures failed to produce any results. But then, last week, I got a call from Ross Sirbaugh at “Computer Warehouse”:http://www.compwarehouse.webs.com/ in Falls Church. Someone had brought in the computer and asked them to reinstall the operating system. Ross smelled a rat, took a look at the machine, figured out my name and other details, then tracked me down and called me. And then, to put the icing on the cake, refused to accept any reward whatsoever for his pretty considerable efforts. So I figure the least I can do is to give a WWW shout-out to Ross and his colleagues at Computer Warehouse, for their willingness to go that extra mile and then a couple of miles again (please – don’t anyone tell the “Heritage Foundation”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/heritage-foundation-breaks-major-abuse-of-power-story.php though). I think it is a pretty safe surmise that if this is the level of due diligence that they exercise when they don’t have _any economic incentive whatsoever_ to do it, the level that they’ll exercise when they do have such incentive (because you’re paying ’em for something) must be super-duper awesome. So, go to Computer Warehouse for all your needs (it looked like they had some pretty good value in laptops – and clearly, their tech people are strongly recommended). Did I mention their name? “Computer Warehouse”:http://www.compwarehouse.webs.com/ – right on Leesburg Pike.

Also – in the spirit of locking the barn door after the horse has gone but to your very great surprise been returned later through the benevolence of strangers – recommendations for minimizing the pain of stolen machines.

(1) _Back Up Everything Important_ somewhere external. This is the one measure I did take – and the pain would have been far, _far_ greater had I lost my work along with the machine. I use “Sugarsync”:https://www.sugarsync.com/referral?rf=dvbii96jagjv0 which keeps the work documents on my various machines in sync with each other as well as giving me an online back up – others swear by DropBox, SpiderOak and other services.

(2) Make sure that your account is password protected. I didn’t do this – remarkably stupidly – but appear to have gotten away without loss of personal information. You shouldn’t take this risk. I won’t again.

(3) Set up a “firmware password”:http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1352 if you have a recently made Mac. Makes it much harder to wipe the OS.

(4) Consider buying anti-theftware like “Undercover”:http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/. Depending on your tolerance for risk, this may be too expensive for the benefits provided (me: my risk tolerance has decreased substantially since this happened to me).

Other suggestions or recommendations welcome in comments.

Every six months or so I pose an amateur copyright puzzle, so here goes. Is there settled law, or substantial precedent, for dealing with the fact that copyright terms differ in different jurisdictions, as a result of which many works are in copyright in the US but public domain elsewhere, and vice versa? Project Gutenberg, for example, passes the legal burden onto its users. Many of its offerings bear notices to the effect: “Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook.” I take it this works, otherwise they would have been sued into the ground. But what if you want to publish a new paper edition of – oh, say, Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. It’s in the public domain in the US, so if you are a US publisher, go to. But Russell was a tough old bird and only passed on in 1970, so it will be decades before it’s in the clear in the UK – or Singapore (which has UK-style copyright). But if you sell your book on Amazon, someone might order it from the UK, or Singapore. And even if you only sell your book in the US – hell, it might be printed in Singapore. What about selling ebooks, as opposed to giving them away, Gutenberg-style? Is there any case of a non-US rights holder bringing successful suit against a US publisher for overstepping the geographical bounds of the US public domain (or, vice versa, for a US rights holder)? It seems as though, in this webbed-together world, there would have to be a settled way of dealing with such cases. But maybe there isn’t.

Long ago, before there was the internet, I was so much more persistently and baldly ignorant about various and sundry things that interested me. Example: I just got a guitar – well, in October – and resolved that I would finally learn to play after all these years. Needless to say, I can find lots of videos and online resources. It’s highly satisfactory. When I tried to learn guitar in college, only to give up quickly, I had none of that. (I had a teacher but, looking back, he was a bad teacher. Probably it was my fault, too.) I’m a lefty, which means I now occasionally Google up things to to with left-handed guitar. Which means that I randomly found a video of former Cars guitarist Elliot Easton musing about growing up a left-handed guitarist. Not a thrilling interview, but he remarks, off-handedly, that he had been playing left-handed for some time before learning that left-handed guitars – not just restrung righties – actually existed. And then he muses generally about how little information you had. You were just staring at a few LP covers, wondering what the hell was going on. You were pretty sure to suffer some or other stupidly and persistently huge hole in your knowledge-base, due to the accident of not happening to know someone who told you the thing any fool would Google up in a minute today. I think about the things that interested me, growing up – like science fiction novels, for example. And comics. And I realize that almost everything I knew about these things that mattered a great deal to me (did you notice?) I learned by talking to about six people, four of whom were kids like me, and going to four different stores in my hometown. (And sex. Did I mention that, as a young teen, I was quite intrigued by the topic of sex, but – sadly – lacked reliable sources of information and reportage on the subject.) I suspect you could provide your own examples, if you grew up pre-internet. And I feel it’s pretty important, somehow, that those of you who grew up post-internet probably can’t provide your own examples. Or rather fewer.

Of course, this is a flagrantly obvious thought: the internet = important! I don’t really know what to say about how it has made a difference, specifically, that things like serious young left-handed guitarists who don’t even know there are such things as left-handed guitars are now more infrequent occurrences. These sorts of minor epistemic follies tended to elude systematic documentation. Information now gets spread more easily and therefore efficiently. That’s for sure! But I feel there’s more to be said about the ways in which the shape of an individual’s whole view of the world used to be a lot less …(what’s the word?) … internetish? Maybe I should Google up something about Marx + “the idiocy of rural life”. I know that’s Marx’s phrase but I’ve never read what he had to say on the subject. (Well there you go!) Possibly there is some analogy to be drawn.

Matthew Yglesias says the necessary to talk people down from the ledge.

(Me? Last week I taught my students everything’s made of monads; mere universal holograms seem fairly ho-hum.)

But there is one point that should be made in these connections that almost never is: deception is a very different concept than error. Deception is a game for two: one to fool, one to be fooled. Whereas you can be wrong all by yourself. You can smudge the distinction with favorite epistemologist phrases like ‘if it turns out I am massively deceived about the way the world is …’ But if you dramatize the possibility of systematic/fundamental error by imagining deceiving demons, Evil Gods, Agent Smith, mad scientists with brain vats, caves equipped with the latest in projection technology, or giant holograms, you confuse people’s intuitions. Specifically, you confuse them into thinking that error is more conceivable (or differently conceivable) than it may really be. Telling people the universe is a hologram makes it sound as though the universe actually intends to pull the wool over their eyes. Reality itself is the ultimate Long Con! But if you just tell them matter is made of atoms, or water is really H20, that doesn’t make it sound as though the micro entities think all the macro-types with minds are marks and suckers. [click to continue…]

My colleague Axel Gelfert just launched a bold book review-type literary thing, The Berlin Review of Books. And he kindly invited me to review a big fat book, Jan Tschichold: Master Typographer: His Life, Work and Legacy [amazon], for his grand opening. So here is my review. It’s a long one. My main pivot is around one quote from the master, from 1959:

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable … Good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the result of intelligent planning … The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Janson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible. In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel’s infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

[click to continue…]

One of the longest-running of culture wars, that of Mac vs PC (or rather, Mac OS vs MS-DOS and then Windows) can finally be declared at an end. After this piece by Charlie Brooker, nothing more need ever be written on the subject (hat tip, Nancy Wallace).

So we were down for a few hours this afternoon thanks to a massive flood of comment spam. Tyler Cowen had a “post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/09/not-bad-for-a-spam-comment.html a few weeks ago on the cognitive benefits of spam, which made me realize that much of my knowledge of the society I live in comes from trawling this spam and deleting it. At least 80% of the (presumed) female celebrities whose nude pictures are yours if only you click on this dodgy-sounding address are known to me from spam and spam alone (Jessica Simpson???). I would have no idea that “Ugg boots” (whatever they are) existed, let alone that anyone cared about them, were it not that a particularly persistent Chinese spammer tries to tell the users of my “academic blog wiki”:http://www.academicblogs.org about them at every possible opportunity. Sadly, given the existence of “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, I can’t just ban page changes using the term in question.

There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in _and no more_ can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.¹ Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me _some_ benefit.

¹ Not that I am above these things at all; just that I don’t usually have the time, energy and attention to dig it out. It has to be a Jon Stewart-worthy scandal, preferably involving Republican senators, highly specialized providers of intimate services, and greased porcupines or the like, to make it through my filters.