Don't take anything for granted
Leon Fleisher has a CD out called Two Hands. For a long time he could only play with his left hand. Now he has both again. I love listening to this recording. You can hear his joy at being able to use his right hand.
And he says being without that hand made him think differently about music.
I’ve had to think about music in a much more detailed manner than I ever had before so that I could really describe what I’m doing…I think I became a far better musician; I became a far better teacher.
So: don't take your hands for granted.
Brief SOP report
Peter Ludlow was the key speaker tonight. He said [very roughly paraphrasing]: “Why do we need virtual worlds with Draconian terms of service allowing the world to destroy your creation and/or kick you off for any reason (”or no reason”)? Why not just go off and build your own thing with your friends in an open source environment? Try Croquet. Try Muppets. Go ahead and learn to script. It's really easy.” Ludlow was refreshing and straightforward.
Beth Noveck's conference is off to a good start. It was entertaining to hear about A Tale In The Desert again. It didn't sound fun last year and it still doesn't sound fun. But it's good to think about governance. If only we could make it fun.
Second Life has a great PR campaign: raise money, announce it the day of the conference, and have your journalist be the lead-off speaker. Good work, guys.
State of Play begins tonight
I hear that SecondLife has just raised eight million dollars from Pierre Omidyar's group and others. Dinner tonight is on them! [not really]
I'm very much looking forward to this weekend's conference, which I predict will be engaging, funny, and totally exhausting. I'll blog, and so will many other people.
Big win for competition
Huge victory in the Lexmark v. Static Control [pdf] case today. Lexmark can't use the DMCA to keep its competitors from marketing cartridges that work with Lexmark's printers.
With luck, this opinion will become the Hush-A-Phone decision of our time. “Of course,” we'll say. “It's unthinkable that someone could use the DMCA to stop competition.”
It was not always so.
Webnote
Danah and Mary wrote about this a while ago, so this is old news, but Webnote is pretty neat. As Mary says, it's like Third Voice. But it's better at visually organizing notes on a screen. And maybe it won't try to build a business model based on advertising — that's what did Third Voice in.
Net Ecology Day
I'm proposing a Net Ecology Day. And it has to be visual, so that people understand the differences between hierarchies and networks and get the chance to care collectively about the health of this network of networks.
It's my belief that the ecology of the net is deeply threatened. It's not just the attacks on P2P networks or government thoughts about requiring authentication as a condition of online life — although these developments and others give rise to concern — it's about what seems to be a general sense that the net is a dark and dangerous place. A seedy place. A place that needs to be constrained.
This overall reaction to the net provides breathing room for all kinds of initiatives, ranging from the FCC's broadcast flag rule to ISP gags required by national police. But very few people are paying attention to the overal ecology of the net.
Earth Day came into being because Sen. Gaylord Nelson became concerned in the 60s that no one was paying attention to the environment. He wanted to “shake up the political establishment and force [the] issue onto the national agenda.” He wanted “to show the political leadership of the Nation that there was broad and deep support for the environmental movement.” He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans took to the streets to demonstrate for a healthy environment. Since then, Earth Day has become a global phenomenon, mobilizing hundreds of million of people in support of environmental issues. Not all these people would support everyone else's issues, but once they had Earth Day they could support the collective activity of worrying about the environment. As Sen. Nelson puts it:
Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.
Now we have a new environment — the internet — that is under attack. Not everyone will support everyone else's issues. But we need to draw attention to the threat in some shared, ritualistic, visual way that will cause a shift in perception. We need an Earth Day for the internet. And we're in luck: the internet is particularly good at organizing itself.
Here's the suggestion for how this could work: The central problem that we need to solve, the central complacency we need to overcome, is the general feeling that someone is (or should be) in charge of the internet. We need to show the difference between networks and hierarchies.
What if, on one day a year, we globally built a picture of links together? Each person could put a dot on the global page, identify it, and then draw a line to something online that they care about. I bet the result would be a very interesting and dynamic network diagram that we could animate. You'd see the thing pulse and change, as some links became thicker through popularity and clusters connected all at once. Then, for one day, people could post this living, animated network diagram on their page or blog. Very zippy. We could make it possible for people to show “their” part of the network — what they had decided was important. (There are, to be sure, a few hurdles to overcome, but don't bother me with your petty technical difficulties (PTD)).
Then, by contrast, we could provide a “movie” of an animated hierarchy plodding along. Blump, blump, blump. Frozen and boring.
With these two pictures, one of them built in real time, collectively, by people around the world, we could see the difference between a network and a hierarchy. We wouldn't need permission to do this. We'd just need a good symbol and a good PR campaign. Just one day a year. In the fall.
If anyone is worried about the ecology of the internet, we need to reach the world to explain why we're worried. It's not enough to reach a few classrooms. We need a dynamic picture that, like early religious icons, can transmit ritualistically the meaning of the internet to a network-illiterate world. Religions figured this out long ago. Truth is transmitted to our successors through ritual and music and pictures, not just the written word.
Of course, this idea of net ecology is not a religion, it's a science. Or is it?
Tech politics
The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) published today a short set of Bush and Kerry answers [pdf] to questions about technology policy. For my money, the most interesting pair of statements came in response to the following question: “What is the appropriate role for the federal government in addressing concerns about content over the Internet?”
President Bush immediately jumps to children, and gives a weirdly focused answer. Let's take it apart.
We must give our Nation's children every opportunity to grow in knowledge while protecting them.
Does this mean that the chief responsibility of the federal government when it comes to online content is to act as a terrified parent? Is the internet assumed to be a dangerous, threatening, dark and seedy place?
Parents have the first responsibility for protecting children online, by paying attention to their children when they are on the Internet, and by preventing children from giving out personal information online.
Okay, apparently the Administration is not alone in being a parent. Parents can also be parents. But we're really focused on those threatened kids. Is the internet just a place for scaring children?
My Administration is standing with parents by waging a nationwide effort to prevent the use of the Internet to sexually exploit and endanger children.
Yes, apparently the internet is mostly for the exploitation and endangerment of children. Which happens in chat rooms and by way of P2P services of various kinds. We must get rid of this P2P idea.
My FY 2005 Budget would double funding for Justice Department programs that investigate and prosecute child exploitation and obscenity over the FY 2001 level. My Administration has successfully defended the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires schools and libraries to filter content that is harmful to minors if they are to receive Federal money for Internet access.
So the main role of the federal government when it comes to the internet, which is a dangerous, dark, and oppressive place, is to prosecute. And to insist on filtering. Rather than encouraging the development of tools that facilitate user control of their experiences (both in terms of filtering and making useful connections), the government is going to protect us on its own.
I signed into law the Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act to create a new child-friendly domain on the Internet, which functions much like the children's section of the library, where parents can feel comfortable allowing their children to browse.
How many active, non-defensive registrations have there been in .kids.us? According to Michael Gallagher's (NTIA official; rumored to be the next FCC Chairman if Bush wins) testimony in May 2004, “Currently, kids.us is home to thirteen active websites.”
That's right. There are 13 great places for kids to go online in kids.us.
And that's it — that's the end of the President's statement. Granted, he was operating under strict word limits. But still, it's worth wondering what's going on here. Between protecting children (after all, even the oldest among us are God's children, right?) and assuaging security concerns, the Administration we've got is going to be very forceful about constraining this awful, grimy, set of “internets” — it'll take money, it'll take prosecutors, it'll take reams of international agreements, but someday we'll rein it in.
Sen. Kerry was able to talk about issues other than child safety in his response. Here's his answer in full:
Concerns about content over the Internet range from parents worried about the proliferation of pornography to musicians worried about their works being stolen on peer-to-peer networks.
I am a big believer in technology and science. I strongly support attacking bad behavior — putting child pornographers behind bars and prosecuting individuals engaged in mass piracy. But, regulating technology should be a last resort to solving any content problem.
I believe that technology will solve most content concerns. Software available to parents to filter out pornography is helping parents protect kids. Legal music and movie services are on the rise, with services like iTunes and iPods revolutionizing the marketplace. The role of the federal government is to remain vigilant in the protection of our children and in standing up for the protection of intellectual property. And, it is the role of the federal government to ensure that law and regulation encourage the development and deployment of new technologies.
He's worried about children and he's worried about IP, but Sen. Kerry seems to sense that technology is not all bad.
Either way, whoever is elected, we may need an Earth Day for the internet.
The Note and TheRegular
It's hard to choose between The Note and TheRegular. The Note has the political junkie voice of Mark Halperin, lionized in this week's New Yorker. TheRegular has a slashdot approach to political news — and although it's just starting, it's going to be great. The Note is (in a sense) a slashdot affair as well, but the collaborative filtering is done by Halperin and his team. TheRegular has all of us (as soon as we start participating) helping out.
We're still at a primitive state when it comes to online blog-like news. Why can't we see issues coming towards us, in a radar-screen-like way? Why are we so tied to text and comments — things that disappear “below the fold” if we're not watching every minute of the day? Why don't we have structures for our obsessions that allow us to wield large amounts of data visually and gracefully? When will our screens become pliable and musical?
On the other hand, the nation is TheTired of electioneering. Maybe it's just as well that TheRegular and The Note are just sending us text and friendly static colors. Maybe more multimedia approaches to deliberation are overwhelming. Let's get this election over with and then move on to changing our relationship to the screen.
The Future of Physics
Dennis Overbye of the Times had a beautiful article today about Dr. David Gross posing 25 questions about the future of physics. Gross, a recent Nobel Prize winner, talks heroically about the intertwined disciplines in which physicists are interested. He's talking to his “dream conference” of physicists, and he says the conference could have lasted a week — because they only took two and a half days, everyone had to talk very quickly, and there was no time for questions. He has a picture of a curve to describe the quality of talks: “If you have no time to talk at all, the quality is zero; if you talk for a month, the quality is pretty small…length of time for the highest quality talk is between 10 and 30 minutes — no more. … After five minutes, you either understand everything and don't want to hear any more, or you understand nothing and don't want to hear any more.”
He stresses that the most important product of knowledge is ignorance. Science is shaped by ignorance. So what questions do we still have to answer that are driving the field of physics? Gross got a lot of help from his fellow physicists in creating this list.
The first four questions:
1. How did the universe begin? how far back can we probe? can string theory determine what happened at the point at which the universe was created? was there a time before the big bang? is time itself an emergent concept — so that we're formulating the question incorrectly?
2. Dark matter — 25% of the universe is dark, and we don't know what it is. What is the nature of dark matter? how does dark matter interact with ordinary matter? is it wimpy (this must be a physicist term of art)? can we detect it in the laboratory? what's its distribution in the universe? what does this tell us about structure formation?
3. Dark energy — which is 70% of the universe — what is the nature of the dark energy? Is it just a cosmological constant?
4. Astrophysics. How do stars form? How do planets form? (this is the growth area in astrophysics, based on average age of the attendees) What is the frequency of planets that can support life?
Gross really seems to be having fun giving this talk.
So: for the cyberlaw/IP world, what 25 questions would we ask?
HBO and coyright law
HBO is saying that fair use applies only to broadcast, not to cable:
Q: “Has the law changed? Please help me understand what is (and is not) legal for me to do with HBO programming. I have grown accustomed to making and often sharing copies of programs with friends and family.
The laws on copying distinguish between broadcast and non-broadcast programming. Broadcasters are required to permit consumers to make a single copy of broadcast programming for time shifting purposes. However, the law allows non-broadcast programming networks to decide what copying privileges they wish to extend to consumers.”
HBO's position has support in Section. 1201(k)(2) of the DMCA, which says that pay-per-view/subscription television can take advantage of copy control technology required to be part of VCRs.
The interesting question is how subscribers to HBO will feel about this. Are they so used to making copies that they'll leave HBO in droves? Will they generally abandon cable for online sources of content? Probably not.
More from HBO's FAQ:
“Q: Is only HBO doing this, and why?
HBO has decided to begin implementing copyright protection technologies now with the increasing proliferation of digital consumer electronic equipment. As television transitions from analog to digital technology, it will become important for distributors of high value programming to take similar steps.”
Hang on to your old open devices. And don't look to cable and satellite providers to provide you with lots of choices. Bit by bit, the analog hole is going to close.