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Jaron Lanier on the Semi-Closed Internet
Will Wilkinson writes "Jaron Lanier's recent essay, The Gory Antigora: Illusions of Capitalism and Computers, kicks off a discussion of 'Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead?' at the Cato Institute's new blogazine, Cato Unbound. In Lanier's essay today, find out how the 'brittleness' of software has kept the Internet from realizing its potential as 'a cross between Adam Smith and Albert Einstein; the Invisible Hand accelerating toward the speed of light.' Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'"
That peer is the very sentance you are writing, correct?
This entire essay is bunk; every paragraph the author brings up a point that can quickly be refuted. He overgeneralizes issues and adds a big dollup of emotional appeal to make his points. And frankly, his points are just misguided, if not straight out wrong.
There isn't much in TFA except a nice point about how we should be able to "browse" video games in the way we browse through books or newspapers. Which does, in fact, make me wonder why stores don't allow you to rent a copy of a game, bring it back and decide whether or not to buy it. I've been doing that for years, but never with one store.
Not much new here, especially if you look at this from a history of technology perspective. The same comments about "lock in" (a.k.a., capitalism is evil) apply to telephones, electricity, and the water wheel. Bottom line: Humans continue to get stuff done whether there is "lock in" or not.
How to Download YouTube Videos
Here, I'll translate it for you:
Yo, buss dis. My man Will be up and writin 'bout JL's recent papah, "Da Gory Antigora: Trippin 'Bout Computers and Bling", be kickin off, rappin 'bout 'Intanet Liberation: Dead Or Alive!' at da Cato Institute's new blogazine, Cato Unbound, aiii? JL be writing today 'bout how da softwares dat run yo Intanet can get a cap bust up in they a--, an' don't do all 'dey can to mix the ideas of th' devil and Albert E; dat is, dey don't have some invisible hand puttin the smack down at th' speed of light.' You can also read yourself 'bout how when JL met my man RMS, JL done say: 'An open version of UNIX! Nigga, please!'"
Peace.
The *special* hell.
I'm confused.
Dumbasses didn't put clicky links on their image. Why not? So that you can dig, dig, dig and find the long winded articles?
Maybe they haven't figured out the internet as well as they think. Blogs with 5000 word essays tend to be a pain in my ass. I'm barely literate. How much do they expect slitscan to read?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Jaron Lanier... Cato Institute... 'blogazine'... Richard Stallman
After that summary, I can't decide whether I need to take an aspirin or a shower first.
From the summary:
at the Cato Institute's new blogazine
Alarm bells are ringing, Willie:
Fluff topic? Check.
A grandiosely named organization? Check
A newly-coined, silly, and far-too-hip word modeled after another newly-coined, silly, and far-too-hip word? Check.
Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'
This part is probably true, although without the 'An open version of UNIX!' part.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
But I just got a prescription for "blogazine", a topical ointment which alleviates muscle pain.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I remember Jaron Lanier from the 1990s when he gained some fame from his pronouncements about virtual reality. Perhaps I'm ignorant of his real accomplishments, but Lanier, like Paris Hilton, seems to be famous as a result of self promotion, rather than anything he has achieved. In the world of pundits it appears that it is quite possible to create yourself from thin air (or perhaps hot air). Unless I'm simply ignorant of Lanier's accomplishments, why should we listen to anything he has to say?
"Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'" Richard Stallman has spent decades creating software used by millions of people. Jaron Lanier has created ummm...what again?
The unfortunate Internet has only one peer when it comes to obfuscation due to an inundation of excessive punditry, and that peer is religion.
Translation - I've got nothing very interesting to say, but just look at the words I'm saying it with!!! Ain't I hip?
I'd be more scathing if it weren't for a nagging suspicion that the author is just taking the piss.
The Gory Antigora
For those who don't know, this is what is known as a Chiasmus. That is, a sound pattern of ABBA. Other famous examples include, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" and "Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you."
The reason I point this out is that of all the literary devices, the Chiasmus is probably both the coolest and also the most difficult to come up with. So props to Jaron for this one.
H-Dog, is that you? ;)
o rnfeld/
http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/view/k
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Oh good god, they've managed to find a word even more annoying than blogosphere: blogozine :/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We aren't to the point of virtual citizenship, but we may be in the middle of a trend toward borderless loyalty. People are becoming less loyal to the nation-state and more loyal to ideas and movements (religions, software models, companies, professions). I hope that the trend doesn't result in a single world government before the individual borderless movements get powerful enough to keep one in check.
Untraceable electronic currency doesn't have any chance: the people issuing the currency want to know where it is. It's enough that numbers are inherently abstract, though. It will always be necessary to launder your funds if you want their movement kept discrete.
As far as the conciousness expansion of free information goes, that too is the wrong question. (Some) people will always choose to be blissfully ignorant about (some) things, and you can't force them to learn. The network makes it easy to find information, but it's always going to be more like fishing than a floodlight. People have to want the information you have.
In general, it's too soon for Utopia but the world is getting newer all the time.
sigs, as if you care.
He has a terminal case of verbal diarrhea!
Copyright law prohibits the rental of software, generally speaking, unless the software is specifically for video game machines (i.e. not for a general-purpose computer) or cannot be odinarily copied (e.g. a hardwarre game cartridge). See 17 USC 109(b). (This section was originally written to stop "record rental", but was later expanded to software.)
Nonprofit lending by libraries, however, is exempted from this prohibition.
Cato is infamous for questionable research that politicians have used to support some ridiculous claims. Nothing different from them here.
Yes, the article is full of bunk in every paragraph and then somewhere in it he claims some of it anyway is a farce. If you refer to his bio, there's a clue in there.
"Phenotropics," concerns rejecting traditional protocol-based approaches in favor of statistical and pattern-recognition techniques to bind software components together in order to improve large scale reliability.
The whole "software is brittle" agenda is cleary his own.
SLIGHTLY OT
I was watching a remake of "the music man" with my daughter yesterday and his whole "software is brittle" agenda reminds me of how the main character runs around the small town talking very nonsensically about how the new billiards hall is going to corrupt the citizens. Of course the citizens love controversy, so it becomes a "social problem." The main character has the solution, buy musical equipment from him. Now, if only Jaron would sing he can remake the Music Man... Again!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Lanier's claim to fame is that he "invented" virtual reality. or something like that. His real fame comes from being a huge fat guy with white boy dreads who has an unfounded reputation for being a "luminary". He cons people into paying him to write articles, speak, "conceptualize", and keeps the repuation going for more cons.
:)
I worked alongside him at Time Inc. New Media, back in the Pathfnder days. He kept on proposing one project after another that simply couldn't be done - the technology didn't exist. I called them "Flying Car Projects" - sounds good, but creating a Flying Car is tough once you start dealing with logistics of fueling, licensing, training, etc. etc.
His biggest "idea" was called GigaJam, where we'd have millions of surfers hit virtual keys, somehow turning that into music, and streaming it back to them. In realtime. That'd be difficult to do today, but totally impossible back in 1996. Moreover, I'm not sure that there would have been much of a point to devote resources to something like that. To a user, that would have been fun for about 2 minutes.
Rumor was that he was boinking one of the head honchos at TINM, which is likely how he got the job. He was likely getting paid an assload of money to do nothing but bother people with his silly notions. After a year, he had contributed NOTHING. Not one of his projects was ever adopted in any fashion. And I heard that he had difficulty using a Macintosh to do things like, say, copy files.
So here's a guy that has fed (and rather overfed) himself on being a technology pundit, who doesn't understand the first thing about technology. Plus he's fat and smelly. So take his opinions with a huge chunk of salt.
All the above opinion, rumor, innuendo
This is the same loose affiliation that will scream about "liberal media" until their noise drowns out any other signal. And the Cato Institute is the "section" that sets up the "information" that is going to be sited.
My big concern here is that this is the beginning of the hard core lock down of the internet. Their typical tactic is to chip away until nothing is left. Think imperialist presidency, with their "Us" in control. It almost sounds like fascism, remember, Hitler was elected too.
Go ahead, mark this as a troll, but the Libertarians should be just as scared as the Liberals.
Oh, but you know the rest.
And Stallman is an insufferable, pretentious, genius. No wonder they can't get along.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Why is a right-wing propaganda machine like the Cato Institute being given a forum here? At least be honest and put it in the politics forum.
Every computer user spends astonishingly huge and increasing amounts of time updating software patches, visiting help desks, and performing other frustratingly tedious, ubiquitous tasks
Define huge. Hundreds of hours? Double-digit percentage of all time spent using the computer? He doesn't say, and I doubt it's close to either metric for all but the most inept of users. For the average person *any* amount of time spent doing *any* one of these tasks is, in their opinion, too much. Time spent doing basic maintenance is one of the most overstated stats thrown around.
The biggest point he comes close to touching but then completely misses is with the language analogy. The informational content of language is almost entirely context sensative. For example, I can make the statement "I'm blue", and without context, you don't know if I'm refering to the color of the clothes I'm wearing, my emotional disposition, me political affiliation, if I'm pretending to be a cartoon dog while playing with my kids, or any other reference for which the word "blue" might apply.
Langauge has the the immediate context of the conversation in which it is occuring, and the ultimate context of the physical world. What he misses is that not only does computer software have to be precise, it has to supply it's own virtual context; i.e. your web browser exists in the virtual context of the network, which connects it to an application which exists in a vitual context of a combination of, for example, a java environment on top of a database on top of an operating system. All the underlying layers provide a context for the next layer above in which to exist and interact. And we had to create every single layer from scratch!
Lanier then makes the usual eglatarian conceit with the statement "Only culture is rich enough to fund the Antigora." The Internet is its own culture, which both incorportates and yet transends mutiple, different national, tribal, and social cultures. Lanier and all the other Internet pundits need to recognize that, get the hell over it, and move on.
I'd dare say as soon as they created a browser that could render HTML and graphics we had all these things.
No, I can tell you exactly when the problems began, and that was with the BLINK tag.
Everything before that was pretty tame -- it's when things started to move that it got really obnoxious. From blinking crap it was pretty much a straight downward progression to animated GIF crap, and then to Flash crap.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you needed a "text file" in the Tandem world, it was treated as a big object (a BLOB) in the database, and handled as a unit. THis seems wierd, but it allowed program development on Tandem machines. Storing a file was, of course, an atomic operation; you never had a truncated file.
Apple's "resource fork" was a step in the right direction, but the implementation of updates in the classic MacOS was so unreliable that it was hopeless as a data-storage mechanism. Apple backed off from the resource fork when they went to a UNIX-type file system after the NeXT acquisition. Now it's making a comeback in a minor way.
Early visions of Microsoft's Longhorn seemed to be moving in that direction, but Microsoft couldn't bring it off.
UNIX/Linux has terrible file reliability semantics. Locking is an afterthought. File transactions aren't atomic. (Even lock file creation isn't atomic if the the file system is on NFS.) Nobody understands two-phase commit, the technique that keeps your bank account from being debited twice if the ATM loses power during a transaction. There have been attempts to fix these problems (see UCLA Locus), but they never caught on.
The most likely company to fix this problem is Google. Google's own machines are full of databases of text, not "files". In a sense, we're all using a system that's not file-based - we just don't see it.
And as for a Luddite revolution:
So robots build vast volumes of cheap goods and thus the value of a dollar relative to the cost of goods declines to the point where even the poor can afford automated health care. Or new computers, or HDTVs, and other technology. Except it ignores the stagnant and high cost of necessary goods: energy, food and shelter being the most obvious examples. Even assuming automated food production - robots ploughing the fields - there is only so much land. Maybe building housing will be cheap with robots, but we'll still need to heat or cool it depending on the climate. Providing these basic necessities cannot be automated away because they rely on fixed and limited resources. The best we can do increase the efficiency of utilization, or find a radical and unknown new method for creation.
But - unlike slashdot conventional wisdom in this forum - I thought the essay was well written and highly contemplative. A good read. Thanks Jaron!
...just a few days ago. I remember the promise of the virtual world back in the late 80s and early 90s. Whatever happened to the neo-hippy, VR enhanced, smart drug world that I was promised almost 20 years ago???
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The problem is that databases and other non-file data stores are more brittle than files. The more complexity there is in the metadata, the easier it is to lose information, and the more you're locked in to one specific form of metadata.
And databases came first. back in the 60s and even well into the 70s, a "file" was seen as a column in a table, or a table, in a database. As databases became more powerful, data stores tried to follow... you had RMS on DEC operating systems, "typed" data sets and files, systems like Pick, Apple's "resource forks", and Be's BeFS. No matter how the data's stored, eventually anything more than a shopping list (oh, yes, there are very complex shopping lists: address books, customer databases, and lots and lots of indexes into collections of flat files like Harvest and Spotlight and Google) becomes a flat block of text with embedded links to other blocks of text.
Whether those links are "see chapter 10" or "#include stdio.h" or "import io"... those links are not links to databases, they're links to files.
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The idea that an unstructured block of data was the default was a breakthrough. The idea that a command line interface could be relatively terse and simple so that mere humans could learn to use it, that was a breakthrough too. UNIX cut through an enormous amount of user interface trash and laid bare what was, for the end of the '60s, at least as dramatic an improvement in UI design as GUIs were for the '70s. It's a linguistic interface, not a gestural one, but the first linguistic interface that provided concurrency (through the & background scheme, then through shell layers and job control) and the complete OPPOSITE of the normal "user submits a command, user waits for a response" that every other system in the world used.
I implemented a UNIX shell with explicit backgrounding on RSX-11 and showed it to my boss, and he was astonished. Even though RSX has an ability to hit return and get a new prompt at any time, so you already have the ability to "interrupt" a program and do something else, he'd never used that other than to treat that MCR prompt as an "I'm still busy" message. But being able to take something that was going to take a long time and throw it off into the background under his control was great.
Given the hardware limitations of the time, I submit that the UNIX shell and the UNIX plain-text-file pipes-and-filters job-control environment is close to the very best user interface that could be developed. It's the "tabbed browser" of the command line world. Alas, X-Windows came along and people stopped really using and understanding the shell, and X11's high-latency message based interface became the standard for the UNIX world.
It's really X11, a non-UNIX-like window system developed for UNIX and VMS at MIT in the '80s, that Lanier should be complaining about. Because UNIX itself doesn't suffer from the flaws that he's attributing to it. UNIX is small, tight, fast, responsive, and concurrent, a UNIX shell is a team of willing slaves that does WHAT you want WHEN you want it, and you NEVER have to wait for them unless you choose to.
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File systems with UNIX semantics, by the way, work well. That's the problem with NFS. NFS is *not* a UNIX file system, and its semantics make it a huge nightmare for applications developed on REAL UNIX file systems. It was a hack-job designed to make it possible to implement a reasonably fast and efficient file system in the kernel on a 68000-based Sun workstation in the '80s. It should have been turfed long since and again IT'S NOT UNIX, IT'S NOT UNIX FAULT.
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For structured data, databases are great. Using a file system for database operations was a result of UNIX coming from an era before there was a really common way to talk about relational operations linguistically. Bad as SQL is, at least it gives us a framework to deal with the problem. But for hierarchical randomly interrelated data the filesystem model works well.
Google is an index, it's not the data itself. The data that gives google its value is in a file system.
He seems to be extending the command line concept to GUI and hypertext interfaces, which is fine for me, but I dont see him raising any genuinely new UI concepts apart from touching on Virtual Reality.
I wish he would, because we do need new ideas. Basically he seems to be saying that everything is a dialog at the moment (commands and responses). Well OK but anything we develop is going to go that way in any event.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Seriously. Someone needs to buy that author a copy of The Elements of Style. Lanier couldn't write a clear sentence if his life depended on it.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
When the salesman on TV tells you that it's a once in a life time
oppportunity to buy his slightly used automobile, do you rush
down to his auto lot to check it out ?
The act of talking about issue A and not issue B can be deliberate.
Some people want to talk about bringing democracy to the people,
but don't want to talk about the cost (# of people killed in the process).
It's simple common sense to take into account the speaker's
views and motivations in order to understand what IS said and
what ISN'T being said.
Jaron vision is about as stale as civil war cookies left in a damp basement: the computer science community has been abuzz for several years now with notions of "organic computing" and "autonomic computing", and even those are fads that reflect an obsession with biologically inspired computer science that goes back half a century.
Of course, little has come of it so far: as it turns out, merely applying ideas of biology to computer science does not lead to robust systems. And non-biologists tend to overestimate how good biology actually is--biological systems have high failure rates and lots of trouble spots.
What I can't figure out is whether people like Jaron are simply deluding themselves into thinking that they have come up with a novel vision, or whether they actively scour the world for on-going trends and deliberately plan a strategy to make it appears that it is "their" vision.
Most of the time, I can read most of the comments on this site and forget that I'm surrounded by a bunch of whiteboys. Then, there are the times that the sad truth comes bubbling furiously to the surface.
(Score:5, Funny)
That's just...sad. That being said, I'm certain that I will now be modded down into oblivion. Goodbye cruel world. I hardly knew ye.
I seriously have no clue what you just wrote, or how it is even remotely related to my post. Would you like a copy of The Elements of Style as well?
The Rise and Fall of Online Community