Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
Because people will either:
1) Copy the video game at home and return it saying they don't want it, thus having the game without paying for it.
2) Play the game, beat it, return it, having "used" all the content without paying for it.
For the most part, I understand #1 is the main reason stores no longer allow returning opened games. As for trying out the games, isn't that what playable Demos are for? Such as the Unreal Tournament 2K4 demo?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
"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.
H-Dog, is that you? ;)
o rnfeld/
http://www.theonion.com/content/columnists/view/k
Loading...
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.
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
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
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 think the biggest issue I take with Lanier's Luddite Revolution is that it doesn't consider human nature. Even if the proletriat's cost of living retreated more quickly than their income, so that their standard of living went up, it still would have a destabilizing effect on society if there is no clear path up the societal ladder.
American society is maintained, in part anyway, because there is a widespread perception that it is possible for a person to be a 'self-made man.' That is, no matter how poor or unskilled or stupid or whatever you are, it is possible -- however unlikely -- for you to own a 3-bedroom house and drive a Ford and have a wife and kids. And although we are becoming more cynical by the day and many of us would say that we don't believe in the 'american dream nonsense,' people act as though they are attempting to realize that dream all the time.
Also, there is a self-fulling prophecy at work here. When someone does manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fullfill the self-made-person fantasy, they normally receive a certain amount of notoriety for it (at least in extreme cases). This publicity helps to reinforce the idea that such a climb up the social ladder is possible, and keeps people at the bottom at work every day.
If you were -- perhaps through germline genetic engineering or biological/technological fusion -- to create an unbridgeable chasm between the 'haves' and 'have nots,' so that it was no longer possible for a low-class person to even imagine that they might one day be able to join the ranks of the well-to-do, you would remove a lot of of the reason why people at the bottom of society go to work every morning. It would destabilize society, and could easily result either in a revolution, or in the upper-class being required to use force in order to constantly suppress the threat of one.
The fact that they can buy a refrigerator or a big-screen TV isn't going to keep people from strapping blocks of C4 and nails to their chests, when they know that there are people in society that have riches -- vastly prolonged lives, for instance -- that they can barely dream about and will never have. There is a strong human tendency to despise anyone who has something that you cannot get, and which we keep in check only by collectively believing in the notion that anyone can achieve anything if they really try. If we made that notion -- fallacious as it may be -- completely implausible, we'd really be in trouble.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
---
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.
---
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.
---
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.
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
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.