Some notes on software patents, the culture of deference, and the growing irrationality of American politics, several follow-ups on past topics, and a most excellent batch of URL's. Thanks to everyone who contributed. May you have a thousand children. Chad Jones is our mailing list guru, and he does a lot of invisible work to keep RRE running. You can thank him for his kindly help by sponsoring him in the 2000 AIDS Marathon to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles. Details at http://www.runchadrun.com/ Have you installed a firewall on your home computer and discovered amazing things? I have a reporter who wants to talk to you. (I know him. He's a good guy.) Send me a note and I'll pass it along. Now that the government has proposed breaking Microsoft into two companies, one for operating systems and another for applications, the op-ed party line is that the proposed punishment is only tangentially related to the evidence of the case. I'm not enthusiastic about the breakup idea myself, but consider what this argument presupposes. The browser wars are over, and no remedy could reverse Microsoft's victory. The demand that the remedy stick close to the particulars of the case leaves the court with few options that would have any real consequences. Monetary damages? A nice thought, but this is the government suing Microsoft, not Netscape. The facts and logic of the case strongly suggest a pattern, and I hope that the government follows up with suits in other areas, followed by criminal indictments for perjury and racketeering. In the meantime, this case needs to establish a clear understanding of what constitutes fair dealing in an industry where economies of scale and network effects are overwhelming, and in which monopolies can be leveraged from one market to another. That's the big picture, not the fate of these awful people. The controversy over Amazon.com's "one-click" patent is a portent of things to come. A zillion such patents are in the pipeline, and nobody will know what's in most of them until they are issued. At that point, if history is any guide, the players who own the most valuable patents will form a patent pool and the whole industry will consolidate into an oligopoly because nobody outside the pool will be able to play. Most people sense that something is wrong with these patents, but the law isn't helping them to explain what it is. One approach is to claim that they are obvious, but I gather (not being a lawyer) that the traditional tests for obviousness may not apply. Another approach is to claim that the inventions aren't new because they simply translate an existing technique into a new medium; on that approach, however, one must still explain why that's not an invention. I'll leave that to the lawyers as well. Perhaps it would help if we understood where the problem is coming from. Despite their revolutionary reputation, computers are mostly a conservative technology. The way that you make a computer is to start with some language and then inscribe that language into the workings of the hardware and software. Computer "inventions" usually take the form of long-familiar language being inscribed into this new medium. Of course, one can inscribe fancy new language into the medium, but then the resulting system probably won't fit very well into the world around it. Computer technology is conservative because it provides a vehicle for existing ways of understanding the world to be reified and made rigid and concrete in the workings of machinery. Computer technology is also conservative in the historical dynamics of its development. New computer inventions typically do not replace the old ones; instead, they are built on top of them. Of course, particular platforms can displace the old ones under very particular circumstances, but the working principles of those platforms are much the same. Computer systems are built in layers, and new technologies tend to be layered on top of the old ones. Partly this is because the old ones are simply the best known answer to a thoroughly studied question, and partly it is because the new stuff has to coexist with legacy systems that are too deeply intertwined with everything else to get rid of. For this reason, computer architecture in the real world -- as opposed to the idealized models of some textbooks -- more resemble geologic strata than the rational devisings of a modern-day designer. When progress occurs, it often takes the form of new stuff being built on new platforms, until the underlying platforms atrophy. Thus information services are moving wholesale onto the Web. The Web, of course, runs on top of personal computers and other archaic stuff. But once everything useful is running on the Web, we can hope that the underlying archaic stuff can slowly go away. The problem with Amazon.com's patent has to do with the dynamics of a new platform -- in this case the Web. (I am using the word platform in a broad sense to include network service layers and other things, not just hardware platforms such as the IBM PC and the Palm Pilot.) The whole point of a platform is that it enables designers to build a great diversity of new stuff on top of it. Most of that new stuff will be translated from existing concepts in other domains. And so once a new platform becomes established, a kind of Oklahoma Land Rush commences. Everyone who has a clue lines up at the starting gates, and they all race forward to plant their stakes in the ground. The winner is not the smart or the brave, but simply the fast, which means in practice the well-connected individual who comprehends the critical mass of developers that the new platform will be able to attract. (A current example would be WAP. Over the horizon there's W-CDMA.) This sort of thing is "innovation" in a certain narrow sense, but it scarcely matches the story we normally tell about the reason for patents. Part of the problem, of course, is that the story we normally tell about patents is wrong. Many inventions, technological or otherwise, really are the result of a well-networked individual noticing which way the wind is blowing. Jeff Bezos saw the wind blowing in a certain direction, and he rushed to get there first. That's productive work too, isn't it?, and it should presumably be rewarded somehow. But anyone who moved into that territory first would have come up with a no-brainer like "one-click shopping". And so precisely because the economic justification for intellectual property law is to create the incentives for innovation, we need to understand just how many incentives are really required. When you have an industry like high technology -- and everything that can be done with high technology -- where network effects and economies of scale tend to produce monopolies, competition will reward those who are good at a particularly fast and violent form of land-grabbing in the early stages, long before most anyone is aware that the market even exists. The very dynamics of high-technology markets guarantee that those people will be thoroughly incented, and it is hard to imagine that amplifying those already unreasonably high rewards will materially improve the social benefit of the technologies and business models that result. Have you noticed that the media are increasingly using the words "Internet" and "Web" interchangeably? See, for example, a headline in the 4/10/00 Wall Street Journal: "AT&T Hopes to Save 'Billions' by Routing Calls Over the Web". This confusion of layers is not an accident or a glitch introduced by the compositor who writes the headlines: the body of the article says, "Still, AT&T is a few years away from deploying Web-based phone service, known as voice-over-IP, on the public Internet". Yet it also refers to "Net2Phone Inc.'s Internet-based phone technology" and "Internet phone service". Let's consider some theories of this phenomenon. A wide range of Internet applications are moving onto the Web, including ones that suffer from the rather narrow range of interfaces that can currently be built there, and so perhaps the difference between "Internet" and "Web" is becoming an esoteric, internal matter, sufficiently distant from the experience of normal people that publications for normal people need not mention it. It wouldn't be an implausible theory in another context, but the readers of the Wall Street Journal will surely have enough inside understanding to appreciate how senseless it is to speak of phone calls being routed over the Web. Here's my theory. In spoken English, we use the word "net" as an abbreviation for "Internet", especially in contexts where we are talking about something in the real world and the Internet is in the background. But in written English, we don't say "net". Why? Partly because it looks odd: "net" isn't recognizably connected to "Internet", "Net" looks like a proper name all on its own, and "'Net", beloved of copyeditors, is just weird. But "World Wide Web" has a diminutive form, "Web", and so when we need a short way of saying "Internet", we can use that instead. That's my theory. People keep calling me "Dr. Agre" and "Professor". Ugh. Some people are so intimidated by the concept of a college professor that, having been asked to call me Phil, they call me "Professor Phil". I can't stop this, but I don't like it. Like most normal Americans, I am an egalitarian. Contrary to centuries of artistocratic propaganda, egalitarianism does not mean that we take rich people's stuff away so that everyone ends up with a precisely equal share of the loot. I don't have any real problem with taking rich people's stuff away in moderate quantities if it's done consistent with rational social policy and the rule of law, but that's not because I'm egalitarian. Egalitarianism is a cultural thing. An egalitarian society is one that is not organized into a hierarchy of orders and classes in which the lower orders regard themselves as intrinsically, immutably inferior to their betters. That kind of conservative hierarchy is coming back now in the slightly hidden form of arbitary, selective judgements that the lower orders are engaged in "victimhood" and "whining" and "lack of personal responsibility" when they try to keep their betters from stomping on them. Conservatism in that sense is fundamentally a set of mental chains, and the mental chains of conservatism become manifest in a culture of deference, for example the idea -- taken seriously on the radio -- that we should bow down before Bill Gates. The practice of addressing professors by their titles is a remnant of this dreadful culture, what bothers me about being called "Professor" is exactly this sense that someone is bowing before me, treating me as their social better. I don't want that. Professors get their intimidating reputation in various ways. Some of them are smarter than the rest of us. Most of them know more than the rest of us. Many of them are accomplished in ways that should genuinely occasion respect. But ritual deference is something else, deeper, less rational than the respect that grown-ups can accord one another when it's deserved. Of course, conservatives aren't promoting deference to professors these days. That's simply because their grip on the universities was loosened by the shift toward meritocratic admissions policies in the elite private schools. (George W. Bush was just about the last person who was accepted to Yale under the old system of aristocratic preference, and he still burns with envy toward the students who were admitted on merit. He makes no secret of it. Conservatives' hatred for this impertinent generation is frightening to behold, and their vengeance against it will be terrible.) As soon as they retake the institution, the culture of deference will return. In the meantime, however, the strange and archaic custom of addressing people by title can remind us just how stifling, deadening, demeaning, irrational, and boring life in a conservative world used to be, and how dreadful it will become once again if people are somehow fooled into clamping the mental chains of conservativism back on. The word "entitlement", in fact, originally referred to the attitude problems of people who inherited aristocratic titles, and it has been refreshing to see the word correctly applied once or twice to George W. Bush, who is related to several kings and expects to be elected president even though he has never had a real job in his life. It is a central principle of conservative discourse to systematically accuse others of what they have been doing themselves (see, for example, the letter to the editor in the 4/6/00 Wall Street Journal asserting that, of course, "[b]laming the media is Bill Clinton's trick"), and if our rational minds were still fully engaged then we would be laughing ourselves silly at the aristrocats' suggestion that it is actually the common people -- people on welfare, no less -- who exhibit an attitude of entitlement. The intellectual poison of conservatism corrupts us all in these dark times, and only in the long term can we hope to better ourselves enough to be rid of it. A particularly alarming instance of the haughty disdain in which the conservative elites hold their putative inferiors (yes, that's what the conservatives accuse liberals of, but that accusation is part of the larger pattern) can be found on the "leisure and arts" page of the 1/31/00 Wall Street Journal, in a commentary by the reliably bewildering Dorothy Rabinowitz. Reporting on a C-SPAN political call-in show, she spoke of: the remarkable number of people phoning in with bitter accusations, dark secrets they had unearthed about one political figure or another. Not to mention conspiracies in which C-SPAN itself is, they know, directly involved ... So far her accusations sound even-handed, and one tends to assume that callers to the Democrats line must have been just as guilty as those to the Republicans line. She then spoke particularly of a "singularly impassioned" caller: She herself was a supporter of George W. Bush, the caller said between breaths, but she wanted to know just how these two women could sit there and defend Bill Clinton. That they did so told her, moreover, that "your morals are just like his". What this enraged caller had heard, and what the guests had said, bore no discernable relation to one another -- a common distortion growing more common every day. Reading this, I was alarmed. Here is a very conservative journalist, writing for a very conservative arts page, lamenting the delusional ravings of conservatives. (She will later refer to them as "psychic disorders".) And lamenting them in not especially comprehensible terms: what exactly is the "distortion" that is "growing more common every day"? She doesn't describe any particular distortion, just a complete disconnection from reality. What's going on? Perhaps, but in their small way, calls of this kind and related accusations serve as reminders of a larger matter -- namely, the extent to which paranoia has now settled itself into the culture. For this we can thank, mainly, the cult of victimology, whose habits of mind and way of viewing the world have now spread far beyond all offically designated afflicted groups to the general population. Wow. It's like a magic trick. She has somehow blamed conservative paranoia on the "officially designated afflicted groups" who founded the "cult of victimology". The strategic vagueness of conservative discourse provides her with considerable deniability as to her targets here, but we all know that she's talking about feminists, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and all of the many other social movements that represent anybody except conservatives. It's not even limousine liberals who are to blame, but those whom the liberals have chosen to designate as afflicted. The daring of this passage can hardly be overstated. Its logic, of course, is preposterous. Conservative paranoia has a long history indeed, and robustly predates the cult of victimology that we hear so much about. The specific contents of conservative conspiracy theories often derive word-for-word from Dorothy Rabinowitz' fellow editorialists at the Wall Street Journal. And you'd think that someone who mocks victims would be reticent to blame conservative psychosis on liberals. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? But this author is not blaming her own disorders on someone else. It is someone else's disorders that she is explaining away. She wants to exonerate conservatives, but she does not want to identify herself with crazy people who call in to call-in shows. She is above that, superior to the rank-and-file conservatives whose mental disorders are a mark of their inferiority. Once the rank-and-file conservatives learn their place and deliver the institutions of American society into the hands of their betters, they'll learn to apply the language of victimology to themselves. And the Dark Ages will resume. In response to the materials from my nouveau "systems analysis and design" course, a couple of people asked me why I did not mention issues of values and responsibility. People designing in the new medium surely need a moral compass to (for example) prevent them from enclosing the people who use their devices in an iron cage of privacy invasion. Several answers: (1) it's hard to do everything, (2) we're making huge moral progress just by blowing up the bad old methods of systems analysis and design with their command-and-control assumptions, (3) we're also making huge moral progress by including deep observation of the real-world uses of information as a major component of the class, and (4) sometimes you can accomplish a lot more by keeping the overt moral language out of it; conservatives, after all, hate it when you talk about morality and responsibility and right and wrong, and we have to be tolerant of their lifestyle. I'm making a point, of course, with the last of those cracks about conservatives. It is a measure of the fury of the conservatives' ideological assault that they've captured the idea of "conscience" from the left and persuaded many normal Americans that conscience is something that dissenters from conservativism have always opposed. This is a tremendous feat of historical forgetting, given that the left has emphasized the necessity of conscience in nearly everything it has done for decades, from the civil rights movement to dozens of reform movements within the various professions. Conservatives have appropriated the idea of conscience through the simple device of stereotyping -- stereotyping amplified and endlessly repeated, of course, but nothing especially complicated. It's easy. Start by saying something like "some people say that conscience has gone the way of the dinosaurs" or "we disagree with some people who say that conscience is not important", and then juxtapose that blurry "some people" with equally blurry characterizations of various disfavored social groups, over and over, until the lizard brain can no longer associate the concept of conscience with the people who spent so many decades promoting it. Bit by bit, our rational minds are being blurred away as the primitive logic of the lizard brain reasserts itself on every media wavelength. Let's consider the logic of the lizard brain in action. Consider the following quote from the indispensable Senator Bob Smith (R-NH): There was no hesitation on the part of this administration to sacrifice innocent lives to achieve their own agenda, and the agenda this time was diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro, so Elian was expendable (AP 4/23/00). The rational mind, if suitably caffeinated, can comprehend this as an accusation as to the administration's motives in rescuing a Cuban boy who was being held by conservatives in Miami. Accusations as to motive are nothing new in the present climate, and the rational mind is sufficiently numbed by now that it has forgotten how much evidence civilized people used to require before they issued such accusations. But the rational mind will find it hard going to punch through the strangely exaggerated language. That's because this particular quote is much better suited for the lizard brain, which is operating on a different logic. To the lizard brain, the key words are "sacrifice innocent lives" and "expendable". The rational mind had to struggle past these words, which first seem to suggest that the administration had killed somebody -- multiple people, in fact. But the lizard brain operates not on reason, much less reality, but on strong emotions and associations. And here the emotions -- multiple murders! -- could not be stronger. This is a very common pattern in conservative rhetoric: amping the emotional force of an accusation by stretching a phrase in a way that cannot be rationally refuted. It's a metaphor, after all. Here is another example, an "aside" from the endlessly instructive Wall Street Journal editorial page (4/28/00), which because of its short length (147 words) I will quote in full: A US Appeals Court ruled this week that the ACLU is right that Ohio's motto, "With God all things are possible", is unconstitutional. Now it may go after Arizona's motto, "God Enriches". We also read in yesterday's Journal that China's Communist government is cracking down on Falun Dafa, Christians, Buddhists and Muslims. Maybe they should consult with the ACLU. And maybe America's believers should consult with the former Soviet dissidents who communicated surreptitiously in samizdat. Ohio's motto could be, "With Smokey the Bear all things are possible". The US could change the words on the new Sacajawea dollar to, "In Ms. or Mr. X We Trust". All of America's believers could declare themselves members of an underground religion, like Falun Dafa. This isn't what the Founders intended, but with so few prominent voices raised against the ACLU, it looks like this is what we're going to get. It helps to know a little about the previous day's article that the editors were referring to. This article described in graphic detail the torture and murder by Chinese authorities of an ordinary woman who would not renounce her belief in Falun Dafa. Now this editorial draws an extended analogy between these hideous event and the Appeals Court's ruling. You can see the fallacy as well as I can: a failure to distinguish between government imposing a religion on the people (which the Journal supports and the ACLU opposes) and the government imposing a lack of religion on the people (which is what happens in China). This is an elementary point, and it would get in the way of any remotely rational method of discussing the matter. Fortunately for the Journal editors, however, the English language provides endless resources for promoting strong emotions and vague associations. Consider the simple phrase "go after", which normally implies physical violence: one "goes after" someone to beat them up. The rational mind considers and rejects the violent interpretation, but the lizard brain notices the analogy between this suggestion of violence and the very real and gruesome violence, still fresh in mind, to which the editors allude in their next sentence. In their trademarked tone of snide exaggeration, the editors then present a series of suggestions, each of which builds an assocation between the ACLU and the Chinese Communist Party, and between the US Appeals Court and the Chinese government, without quite asserting that the two sides are rationally equivalent. Rather than say "they're just the same as", the Journal editors say "maybe they should consult with". The ideal reader will start to enter a trance at this point, so that the odd reference to Smokey the Bear in close juxtaposition to the mention of samizdat literature will deniably call up images of burning books. The editors oppose "the ACLU" to "America's believers", as if no American believers support the ACLU, and they throw in a gratuitous suggestion (deniable in rational debate but perfectly clear to the lizard brain) that feminism is an anti-religion that leaves a blank where God belongs and raises the status of women above that of men. The final sentence is a masterpiece. Let us consider it slowly: This isn't what the Founders intended, The first word, "this", could refer to several things. It could refer to the imputed assault on phrases such as "In God We Trust", which the Deists who founded the country embraced at a time when it had different implications than it does now when Deism no longer exists. Or it could refer to the business about America's believers declaring themselves an underground religion -- the idea of an underground religion is logically unrelated to anything that the ACLU has said or done, but the lizard brain does not know anything about logic. Or it could refer to the whole system of associations that the editorial has constructed, violence and everything. but with so few prominent voices raised against the ACLU, The rational mind, if it is still conscious at this point, can see the falsehood of the notion -- presupposed rather than asserted -- of "few prominent voices raised against the ACLU", given that so many prominent conservatives rail against the ACLU whenever they want. For the lizard brain, those conservative political commentators do not exist as objects of rational discourse; they simply stimulate strong emotions in the primitive mental space in which individual human beings are not yet clearly distinguished from one another. The conservatives and non-conservatives occupy wholly different realities, so that the overwhelming glut of conservative political commentators in the media can easily be reconciled with the idea that the media are dominated by liberals. it looks like this is what we're going to get. Finally, having created its chain of strong emotions and vague associations, the editorial brings its reader out of the trance by asserting at last that the ACLU really will bring about the repression, torture, and murder of America's religious believers. That's what it says, right there on the page, but by now the chain of associations is long enough that the great majority of rational minds have given up trying to follow them. Another rhetorical atrocity slips past the collective narcosis of American political culture. Or so they hope. In my comment on the census flap, I said the following: The US Census Bureau claims to be surprised at the degree of privacy concern that has arisen lately over its "long form". All I can say is that the Census Bureau is run by idiots. I felt bad about the "idiots" part. I even felt somewhat bad about making details of the meeting public. I was genuinely mad because the census, which I regard as an important and good thing if done correctly, is being threatened in part because the Census Bureau people didn't listen to me when I lectured them on the dangers. I'm still mad. I rechecked the rapporteur's summary of that meeting and was thoroughly reminded what it was about that meeting that had gotten me into lecturing mode. They had plenty of time and plenty of warning. But still I don't want to personalize it, given the double bind Congress has put them in. In response to my request for Grateful Dead tapes, RRE subscribers came through. I got a whole file box of them that one long-time good person had in his garage, and a few others made copies of their best shows for me. One of them even connected me to a guy in Chicago who has promised to make me a copy of my all-time favorite show, 11/5/79 in Philadelphia, particularly the second set, which I probably spent whole weeks of my life listening to before my first copy got stolen. Seven years ago this would have been a heartwarming Internet story worthy of the newspapers. Today we take it for granted. One of the downsides of circulating my "Advice for Undergraduates Considering Graduate School" is that I periodically get messages from places like Pakistan asking me whether the University of Pennsylvania's electrical engineering program requires calculus as a prerequisite. I find myself being remarkably tolerant of these messages. You and I know that the answers to such questions vary with the institution and are best answered by looking at the institution's Web site. But if you're a kid who stays up late doing math problems as your most promising ticket out of Karachi, the whole problem is that you're too far out of the loop to know such things. I think about this a lot. Once you've been inserted into the workings of an institution, be it the university or the stock market, you instantly forget how clueless you had been beforehand. And so you have no way of empathizing with all of the normal people who stand outside the institution's doors, unclear on what takes to get in or how to behave once they're there. This is what's so obnoxious about Foucault's theory of the subject. Foucault, simplistic inverter of received wisdom that he often was, regards our locations within institutions -- as professor, medical patient, wage-earner, stamp collector, television viewer, or what-have-you -- as oppressive, not so much because someone is assaulting us from the outside, as because we have internalized a whole framework of symbols and practices that define our actions and our consciousness alike. Yeah, okay, that's true to a degree. But try telling it to the engineering students in Karachi -- or to children of Los Angeles' janitors who have been raising heck to get themselves admitted to the institutions of this country. In response to my message about SEC surveillance of online stock discussions, one person with an enviably varied career history wrote to tell of his days running a very low-circulation newsletter for investors. He said that the SEC was definitely interested in his work, and that it claimed dominion over pretty much the widest range of things that you could imagine calling "newsletters". I don't doubt that, and didn't mean to inquire about what the securities laws say or pass judgements about what they ought to say. My point was a bit larger. The great flexibility of digital media thoroughly blurs the distinctions among existing media and genres, so that the line between (the digital versions of) a "newsletter" and a conference call among personal friends is no longer as easy to find as it was. Best theory of the month: the stock market tanked temporarily on April 14th not because of the inflation numbers but because hordes of amateur investors, many of them operating on margin, realized at the last moment that they had to unwind their positions to pay their capital gains taxes. RRE readers wrote to scorn Wired News and its false assertion that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. These readers were especially scornful of the article's petty conclusion: High-visibility events can be prone to embarrassing slip-ups. At one recent White House event, Gore introduced Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, who he had met with privately earlier that day. Gore told the audience how much he valued Chambers and one of the products Cisco produced. But he mispronounced "routers" as root-ers. Paul Hoffman of the Internet Mail Consortium, for example, wrote from the IETF meeting in Australia to say that: I believe that at least 10% of the people in the IETF pronounce it as rooter. That percentage goes up when you talk to people who actually develop routing protocols. This is certainly my experience, and others said much the same. Besides, it can't be easy to say "rowter" with a Tennessee accent. Give the man a break, or at least know what you're talking about. There's also this passage: Gore has taken credit for popularizing the term "information superhighway" and around 1991 penned related articles for publications such as Byte magazine. But the term "data highway" has been used as far back as 1975, before Gore entered Congress. Notice the sleight of hand. I'm not sure how one could have been alive in 1994 and deny that Gore popularized the term "information superhighway". But Wired News doesn't actually deny Gore's claim. Yes, similar phrases were "used" earlier, but by no stretch had those phrases been popularized. Here we see a relatively new pattern: scoffing at a statement that is true, giving the impression that it is false without actually denying it. This business about Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet would be trivial, comparable to the question of whether Dan Quayle really misspelled the word "potato", if it were not part of such a pattern. The media by now has gone through numerous episodes of echo-chamber hysteria, accusing time Gore of lying, exaggerating, shading the truth, and even being mentally ill, based on stories that were simply false. And not just arguably false or somewhat false, but just plain factually-not-true false. You've heard them: Al Gore falsely claimed to have inspired the novel "Love Story", the author vehemently denied that what Gore said was true, and Gore admitted that he had been making it up. Gore falsely claimed to have worked on a farm as a child. Gore claimed to have discovered Love Canal. And Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. These stories are by far the most common examples adduced in support of the idea that Gore exaggerates, and they are all false. Every last one of them. Completely wrong. Yet the pattern goes on and on and on without anybody but a few nuts on the Internet pointing it out. And unlike the 1990s fabrications about Bill Clinton that made a roundabout journey from right-wing chat rooms to the Daily Telegraph to conservative op-ed columns to Congressional inquiries to the front pages of serious newspapers, most of these fabrications have originated with political reporters from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other serious publications. (In this sense, the Wired News case is an exception -- a throwback to the old model of scandalizing bottom-feeders.) Few of these howling falsehoods has ever been retracted in any serious way -- in contrast, say, to the time that the New York Times retracted a perfectly true story about the anti-Semitic sources of Pat Robertson's writing. And many of them continue to be repeated with impunity long after they have been exposed. Isn't anybody else alarmed at this pattern? What is perhaps most disturbed about it is its lizard-brain logic: the media stars who exaggerate and lie by falsely accusing Al Gore of exaggerating and lying are not just hypocrites; they are very compactly projecting their own wrongdoing into the object of their abuse. This kind of projection is the most primitive and the most dangerous of lizard- brain thought processes. If you stand back and look at it logically -- something that the strong emotions and cognitive fragmentation of the lizard brain conspire to make difficult -- then you see something scary. The people who issue whole reams of false and exaggerated accusations against various supposed enemies of society are in fact everything that they claim the objects of their abuse to be. It's not just that they are making a horrible caricature of their enemies; they are, right before our eyes and yet somehow almost invisibly, making themselves into something just exactly that horrible. In their minds they are confronting the devil, but in their hearts they are becoming him. I therefore found it particularly distressing when a small number of actual readers of this mailing list wrote to explain that, really, Al Gore did claim to have invented the Internet. In each case their reasoning proceeded by taking Gore's words out of context and saying something like, "'creating' does sort of mean 'inventing', doesn't it?". What's distressing is the unhappy sense that I am not talking to a human being. Anybody could look at Gore's words and see perfectly well what they meant. Their most straightforward interpretation was not modest, to be sure, but it was entirely true. The Internet pioneers who spoken on the matter haven't bothered to play word games about it, but their statements provide considerably more support for Gore's claim than anything the solitaire-playing governor of Texas has provided for any of his claimed "reform" accomplishments. Yet these people, having persuaded themselves that Al Gore is an exaggerator, claim to be able to discern extra meanings hidden in his words. They twist them and bend them and place interpretations on them that are completely arbitrary, and yet in their minds it is not they who are twisting language. Rather, it was Gore who twisted the language, and they are untwisting it. This is more projection. In working themselves around to this position, they have checked themselves out of the community of normal speakers of English -- the one whose members, regardless of their politics, can listen to a phrase of the shared language and take for granted a grown-up agreement on what elements of meaning it does and does not contain. Their thought processes are out of control: whatever constraint an ordinary person might feel from the demands of logic or meaning, these people have liberated themselves from. Their enemies are totally evil, they've decided, and capable of anything, and so their reasoning about those enemies does not require any rational constraint or scruple either. But this is not a matter of individual psychopathology. I don't know whether these people are clinically disturbed or not. But I do know that they are cultivating a dangerous set of thought-patterns whose origins lie in the black arts of public relations. Here is the basic formula, which is repeated innumerable times every day: (1) Start with a "message", call it M. (Political people such as Newt Gingrich use the term "strategy".) The message has to be vague enough that small handfuls of facts cannot refute it but forceful enough that people who don't like it will feel obliged to refute it. Messages typically take the form of primitive associations, such as an association between "Gore" and "exaggeration". It should ideally be epitomized in a simple adjective-noun phrase such as "tenured radicals", "environmental wackos", "liberal media", or "Al Gore's preposterous claims". (2) Research a set of "facts" that, taken in whatever context you choose to present them, seem to provide support for M. "Facts" is the PR term of art, as in "liberals ignore facts!". These "facts" might be examples -- the outrageous left-wing college professor of the week, the latest wacky proposal from environmentalists, the latest fragment of news reporting that does not hew closely to the conservative party line, Gore's latest outrageous story. It doesn't matter whether these "facts" are true, or how trivial they might be, or how representative, or whether any numbers they contain are based on any rational methodology. Just have a lot of them. (3) Start feeding the message through various media outlets. Talk radio hosts are always starving for material. Syndicated columnists often get their research predigested from interest groups that they support. Members of Congress can gain politically by getting out in front of new issues that are likely to have organized campaigns behind them. In each case, the finished product will consist of a batch of invective that hypergeneralizes from a few facts to support the chosen message. (4) Keep it up. Repetition counts. You haven't succeeded until you get the media echo-chamber effect going, and that requires your message to be ingrained in the media discourse. So produce more facts in the same series. Get them out there. Because about now, a few questioning voices, having conducted research of their own, will start pointing out that your "facts" are either misleading or false. The correct answer is, "that doesn't matter -- what matters is M" or "the reason that people find that claim so plausible is M" or "there's something wrong with you for defending those lowlifes -- given the overwhelming evidence for M, nobody could sanely disagree with it". Once you get to this point, you've won. (5) Start weaving messages together. Your goal is to ingrain your message, M, into the mental equipment of everyone in the society, or at least everyone in your electoral coalition. You want them to start seeing the world that way, to notice supporting evidence for your message (and not to notice contrary evidence), to get snide or outraged or whatever in each case, and to mock and browbeat your enemies. Once your enemies have internalized this abuse, they will respond with helplessness and despair. With time, you will be able to say things that are just completely false, and nobody of any significance will challenge you. This strategy obviously requires massive access to the media. It does not require that one literally control the media. But it does require a professional understanding of the dynamics of the media, which is why so many former reporters have gone to work -- at higher salaries -- in the public relations business. You might think that it requires that one's opponents not have massive access to the media, inasmuch as a sufficiently mobilized opponent will be able to call you on your distortions in real time. But in recent years we have seen this whole strategy executed at its pathological worst to tear down a sitting President, and now a sitting Vice President and leading presidential candidate. When the media said something bad about Newt Gingrich -- instigated in many cases, no doubt about it, by liberals using these same methods -- Gingrich could count on massive air cover from the conservative media. Clinton and Gore do have a few defenders in the media, but the sheer amount of slime they have confronted, and the sheer amount of complicity in the slime that the New York Times especially has displayed, has routinely overwhelmed the vast media-control resources of the White House. If the White House doesn't have a dozen supportive op-ed columnists shooting down every incoming round, then White House officials have to do the shooting themselves, and this doesn't work nearly as well. At the end of the day, the major victims of these sorts of campaigns are not the people they denounce. Yes, a lot of people working for the Clintons have had their reputations and bank accounts ruined by reckless accusations, abusive investigations, talk-radio slander, and all of the rest. But those people know that they are ultimately in the right, and they will retain their sanity and get over it. The real victims are the rank-and-file of the screamers, the people who go around snidely thanking Al Gore for his fine inventions and sarcastically chortling, "I guess I'm not being politically correct here, haw haw haw". That's right, those people are the real victims. In the course of abusing others, they cultivate and internalize a disturbed set of thought-patterns that may or may not be clinical, but that will certainly condemn them to great oppression one day. These are the mental chains of conservatism. These chains are not pretty things. They are made of rage and dissociation, projection and irrationality. Their ultimate object of abuse is not Al Gore, or liberals, but rather the healthy and sane parts of the abuser's own mind, which unless rescued will sink into corruption and terror so profound that only God can really understand it. I committed a major faux pas by using the phrases "open source" and "copyleft" in the same phrase. You may have heard of the, um, slight tension between the "open source" and "free software" people. It's one of those factional disputes that's like the distance between the sun and Alpha Centauri: when you're orbiting around one or the other they seem impossibly far away, but if you live your life in another galaxy they are indistinguishable. (Lots of things are like this.) I don't want to risk trying to characterize the difference between open source and free software in precise terms, but the following intuitive explanation may be useful. Any scheme for the cooperative production of software must answer two questions: what will motivate people to contribute their work for free, and what can prevent a Microsoft from converting an open de facto standard into a proprietary standard by tactics such as "embrace and extend". For free software, the answers are human nature and law, respectively; for open source they're self-interest and economics. Free software comes with a license that makes it illegal to embrace and extend; open source may nor may not have such a license, but it relies more heavily on the intrinsic advantages of open development, such as its capacity for rapid bug fixes. I also confused some people with my use of the word "distributed". I'll plead guilty and then defend myself anyway. Here's the point. The Web is a distributed application in a narrow sense, but it still revolves around centralized servers. We need to get away from that system for several reasons: it's not democratic, it produces network traffic jams, it creates the potential for single points of failure, and it invites censorship. Thus many people foresee a shift in Internet applications architecture toward a more symmetric relationship among users. It's still hard for most normal people to run a server because they use dialup connections that have dynamic IP addresses and aren't, as they say, "always-on". Normal people also don't have the software or technical sophistication to run such a site securely. But Napster provides a hint as to what a distributed application -- in this more rhetorical or political sense -- might be like. Napster is quite a mess in practice (most of the servers are down, download times can be upwards of an hour for normal people with dial-ins, a large proportion of downloads fail, a large proportion of the audio files are defective in some way, labeling is primitive and inconsistent -- why doesn't anyone report on this?), but like most things on the Internet we like it because we simply assume that the problems are temporary glitches. Of course, Napster may be out of business next month, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. But other models are available, for example Quake, and we can expect others. The distinction between "client" and "server" is very 1990s, and we will surely graduate to a more diverse and interesting set of distinctions real soon now. A libertarian screamer wrote with several objections to the message that contained Lauren Weinstein's report on the privacy invasion plans of Predictive Networks, which wants to collaborate with ISP's to capture the finest details of their customers' Internet use. It would seem that I had successfully baited him with my trawl of a reference to "libertarian elites who think they know what's best for the rest of us" -- the conservatives endlessly turn around phrases that are applied to them, and so I want them to feel for themselves how obnoxious this practice is. This guy's message was striking, first of all, in its tendency to see calls for regulation whether they existed or not. He took Lauren to be calling for regulation, for example, even though he was not. And he claimed to be unsurprised to see the New York Times calling for regulation. This latter notion is striking on several counts. First, the bit that I paraphrased from the New York Times did not call for regulation; it only reported a poll reporting that online Americans are calling for regulation. Second, it really would be surprising if the New York Times had been calling for regulation, given that mainstream reporters are well to the right of the average citizen on economic issues. (It's only on cultural issues that they are somewhat to the left.) Third, and most striking of all, is the pattern of dissociating inconvenient facts by blaming the media for reporting them. This sort of thing can only go so far before the rational mind begins to succumb. Yet there was more. He then proceeded to label liberals as an elite who were trying to impose their wills on everyone else, even though the polls clearly show that it's the libertarians who are a very small, if heavily resourced and highly vocal, minority on this issue. It can be hard to keep track of this stuff sometimes. And he even argued that the most experienced Web users, who happen to be the most opposed to regulation, are the best-suited to make the decision. I figured I could rest my case right there, but then I decided I should at least explain what's wrong with the suggestion that these most-experienced individuals are the best able to evaluate proposals for regulation. First, those individuals are likely to be more educated and technically sophisticated than the average person, and thus more capable of fend for themselves under the law of the jungle that they endorse. Second, those individuals are more likely to be members of the industry that privacy regulations would regulate, and thus hardly impartial in their judgements. Third, experts forget what it's like to be beginners, and are thus not necessarily capable of judging the situation that non-experts face when they try to navigate the privacy minefield of the net. Fourth, the Europeans live under these laws, and they're doing just fine. Their Internet penetration doesn't match ours, though it's coming along, but that's largely because cell phones match their way of life much better. His other objections were more rational, if not any more defensible. He dragged out the capture theory, which simplistically contends that regulatory agencies are inevitably taken over by the industries they regulate. Why this is an argument for giving in to those industries' demands has always been unclear to me. If the people decide to protect themselves against the information traffickers then of course the traffickers will try to subvert the democratic process. When the Washington state legislature recently introduced a modest privacy bill, for example, the traffickers fielded no fewer than 118 lobbyists against it (Wall Street Journal 4/21/00). That just means that we need more democracy, not less. He next argued that regulation would help larger firms at the expense of smaller ones. But this is a non sequitur. If it's wrong then it's wrong for everyone, big or small. Laws against theft punish the little guy too. It's true that compliance with government regulations often involves economies of scale, which tend to bring concentrated industry structures. But the economies of scale in information-based businesses are already so great that it's hard to tell whether privacy regulation materially adds to them, and regulatory economies of scale can often be mitigated through outsourcing. Finally, he argued that the market would resolve any privacy threat from Predictive Networks and its plans. Those who don't want their privacy taken away, for example, will move to another ISP. This kind of objection presupposes a false model of privacy regulation, whose main point is to cause this sort of market solution to work correctly, for example by requiring clear notification of what information will be collected and what will be done with it, and not to replace it. The real question is whether privacy regulation is enough to make the market solution work. So long as the ISP market is competitive, hope remains. The degree of competition in the ISP market is often overestimated by the blurring of the different services that ISP's provide to different market segments. But even if we ignore that factor, the natural economies of scale in Internet service, and the increasing network effects in enhanced Internet services, may well be driving the ISP business toward the same kind of extreme concentration that characterizes most of the other segments of high tech industry. And once service providers acquire significant market power, the free market argument no longer applies, and the democratic process becomes a perfectly reasonable way for people to defend their interests. Some URL's. MI5 Builds New Centre to Read E-Mails on the Net http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/04/30/stinwenws01034.html W-CDMA http://www.nttdocomo.com/index3.htm http://www1a.mesh.ne.jp/smap/w-cdma/ What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis http://www.tnr.com/041700/stiglitz041700.html NATO targeting decisions in Yugoslavia http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2000/mj00/mj00arkin.html a relatively skeptical article on Echelon http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2000/ma00/ma00richelson.html Independent WAP/WML FAQ http://wap.colorline.no/wap-faq/ Growing the Wired World http://www.iftf.org/html/iftflibrary/technology/wiredworld.pdf Automakers, Parts Suppliers Spar over Net Marketplaces http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1008-200-1777336.html government's proposed remedy in the Microsoft case http://news.cnet.com/News/Pages/Special/Microsoft/remedy_proposal.html academics' statements supporting the government's proposed remedy http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/biztech/articles/29soft-shapiro.html http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/biztech/articles/29soft-romer.html http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/04/biztech/articles/29soft-henderson.htm l economists' amicus brief arguing for Microsoft penalties http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Final%20microsoft%20brief.pdf petition to stop AOL-Time Warner merger and require open access http://www.mediaaccess.org/filings/ptndeny.PDF San Diego State's Senate Creates a Detailed Policy for Distance Courses http://chronicle.com/free/2000/04/2000042601u.htm "Relationship Software" May Be Key to Colleges' Success http://chronicle.com/free/2000/04/2000042601t.htm Internet Political Economy Forum http://www.cis.washington.edu/ipef/ The Effects of Electronic Commerce on the Structure of Intermediation http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol5/issue3/schmitz.html archived video of Doug Englebart's seminar at Stanford http://www.bootstrap.org/ article on IDEO http://www.businessweek.com/reprints/00-10/b3671021.htm Hardware Is an Outdated Idea http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=38d833160 Library of Congress educational site http://www.americaslibrary.gov/ Museum Computer Network http://www.mcn.edu/ Ars Electronica http://www.aec.at/ Museums and the Web http://www.archimuse.com/conferences/mw.html CORE Industrial Design Network http://www.core77.com/ Developing a Product http://www.uiah.fi/projects/metodi/130.htm Designing a More Usable World http://trace.wisc.edu/world/ Industrial Designers Society of America http://www.idsa.org/ Design Management Journal http://www.designmgt.org/publications/journal/index.shtml art, design, architecture and media information gateway http://adam.ac.uk/ The End of the End-to-End Argument? http://www.reed.com/Papers/endofendtoend.html end