Archive for December, 2004

Let's say you're dividing your time between weeks in the jungle exploring Mayan ruins and addictively surfing the net from your Manhattan apartment — but what you'd really like to be doing is writing the Great American Novel. Or let's say you're interested in becoming a well-read person while trying to turn out newpaper columns and commuting and keeping up with your family (and addictively responding to email from your office).  Or maybe you just want to get some long law review article written that will change the world, but you keep wondering whether someone has been trying to get in touch with you online.

Maybe even now you're waiting for peace and focus to descend on you, and you're wishing that you had a long plane flight ahead – anything, anything at all to keep you from being distracted.

It's clear that speakers can't take the attention of their audiences for granted.  But it's also apparent that knowledge-workers (or whoever it is that might be reading these words right now) can't take their own attention for granted.  This focus can be split in a hundred pieces across a dozen tasks every day.  We can be deeply embedded in a hundred different online communities.  That's all fine. 

But what's happening to our ability to do longterm work?  Do we now have to go to greater lengths than earlier generations did to get anything done?  Is there a cost to this fractured attention, or are we just getting better at processing information — so that we really can listen to a podcast, write an email, open a chat session, and write the Great American Novel all at once?

Gotta go.  Someone's IMing me.

In their November 2004 comments [warning -- enormous pdf] in the CALEA proceeding now pending before the FCC, law enforcement has made clear that they want everyone to ask permission before launching. 

This is a big deal.

All IP-enabled services that might be covered by CALEA and that don't want to go through some post-launch “deficiency” proceeding with the FBI (ark! our service has been enjoined!) will go through pre-deployment review for “compliance” with unstated requirements. 

That's right — the DOJ doesn't know exactly what information it will require, or what form it will need to be in, or who should do what to get it.  All of that will be worked out behind closed doors, with people who are anxious to launch.

That means prior approval of internet services by DOJ.  If you don't go through such a process, DOJ will penalize you. In DOJ's view, any service provider must submit their proposed new application to FCC and FBI review “well before deployment of the service in question”; and “DOJ would certainly consider a service provider's failure to request such guidance in any enforcement action.” (all of this is on p.38 of the huge pdf).

Now, everyone is already required to help law enforcement execute wiretap requests.  That's built into the federal criminal code.  And there is no evidence that DOJ is having trouble getting these requests carried out.  Zip.  This is a back-door design mandate — negotiated design mandate — that DOJ could never get through Congress.  (I hope.)

This is like the “interim process” set up by the FCC in the flag context.  There, as here, FCC set a broad framework, saying it wanted to protect DTV.  (Here, FCC will say it wants to protect us against terrorists.  Piracy/terrorism — one big group of Bad Guys.)  There, as likely will happen here, FCC threw up its hands when confronted with the hard details — what exactly do you want us to do? — and gave over control to another actor.

In the flag world, that other actor was and is the MPAA, which persuaded several content protection technology developers to give up on allowing content to traverse the public internet — even though the line maintained by the MPAA was very different than the standard set by the FCC (which talked about indiscriminate online distribution). 

All of this dampening effect on innovation is incremental.  So our machines are a little broken. So our online services have been designed with law enforcement in mind.  All of this happens in a negotiated, soft way, with no real public scrutiny.  Why should we care?

We should care because both of these steps, now being echoed around the world, will have (if successful) deep effects on the openness of online life.  Both of these are initial, baby steps that may lead to much more serious incursions. 

AP reports no confusion.  Bravo to Judge Brinkema, who gave us the Loudon County filtering decision as well.

Back in 1984, John W. Patterson contributed an essay called “Thermodynamics and Evolution” to a volume of scientific responses to creationism. 

Creationists have claimed that the second law of thermodynamics (“The Entropy Inventory of the World Tends to a Maximum”) conflicts with evolution.  How could evolution to higher, more ordered, forms of life be possible when the universe tends towards disorder?  The answer is an elegant one: 

1.  Yes, there are many spontaneous “downhill” (towards disorder) processes going on all the time in the universe.  The universe, as a whole, is a closed system to which the second law applies.

2.  These downhill processes provide the energy fluxes/differences that prompt uphill (towards order) developments.

3.  As long as the downhill flows exceed — overall — the constructive processes of evolution, the second law is not violated.  Entropy increases, on the whole.

4.   But inside open systems like the earth's biosphere (or an ideally end-to-end internet), order is increasing.

5.  It turns out that energy and entropy are subject to being transferred from place to place in the universe.  Remember, although the universe as a whole is an isolated system, many things inside it are not.  No organism is an isolated system. 

6.  Patterson uses a metaphorical walled-off courtyard to represent the universe.  It is open to the sky, and snow is falling.  The snowfall represents the entropy inventory.  Within the courtyard, however, wind can create deep local furrows — these are examples of increasing order in open systems.  That entropy decrease can occur as long as it is coupled with compensating (or overcompensating) entropy increases nearby.

7.  Localized entropy reduction is very common.  We get “order for free” all the time, as long as the system in question is open to outside energy and is at a critical state (what Prigogine calls a “dissipative” system).  These dissipative systems have had heat or other forms of energy applied to them, have become unstable, and have therefore undergone a phase change into highly ordered configurations. 

8.  All of these dissipative systems have to do something with their excess entropy.  A dishwasher puts out heat; so does a laptop.  Inside, order reigns — as long as more entropy is expelled than is ingested. 

9.  This local order emerges BECAUSE the outside area is becoming increasingly disorganized.  The vast majority of mutations are discarded or disappear.  Meanwhile, the energy requirements of living systems are derived from all of these things flowing “downhill” — towards disorder.  As long as the dominant tendency is downhill, creating tensions and differences that provide energy, small uphill steps are made possible by the feedback loops in dissipative systems. 

10.  Patterson notes that “entropy” has been a useful term for creationists to use (evolution violates the rules of entropy!) because no one understands what it means.  Indeed, Claude Shannon was advised by Jon Von Neumann to call his “uncertainty function” by the name “entropy.”  Von Neumann said, “No one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

Here is Patterson's conclusion:

“In reality, … the 'uphill' processes associated with life not only are compatible with entropy and the second law, but actually depend on them for the energy fluxes off of which they feed.  Numerous other kinds of backward processes in simpler, nonliving systems also proceed in this way, and do so in complete accord with the second law.”

This all ties to internet governance.  A sufficiently open net will tend towards order, not chaos — and will do so on its own, with no external pilot.

(Thanks to Seth Schoen for the pointer.)

The Geico case against Google is in open court in the Eastern District of Virginia beginning today.

I don't get it.  Say a drug store is selling, oh, Old Spice.  If the drug store allowed someone to stand near the counter with a sign saying “Low-Price Colognes For Sale Here,” with a map to locations where you could find the other resources, would that be trademark infringement?  What's the consumer confusion?  Consumers know that Old Spice is different from competing colognes (or whatever Old Spice is categorized as these days).  If they're searching for Old Spice, they'll buy that.  Seeing another advertisement won't dissuade them.

Google's service is no different, in my view.  You don't “own” a string of letters the way you own a house.  You can't just stop other people from using those letters or even making money off of them.  All you can do with a string of letters is prevent passing off or other forms of unfair confusion.  If a keyword search term is triggering competing ads, that's not confusing.  That's competition.

Geico can go ahead and buy “geico” as a search term if it wants to.  Strangling the Google marketplace by requiring Google to pre-clear any sold search term (who owns “ford”?) isn't useful for society.

Peaceful picture below (non-ICANN, non-internet governance, non-FCC, non-democracy moment) from Byron Henderson, who makes his home in a beautiful spot — Sooke, British Columbia.

This third day of the Berkman conference is dedicated to four tracks of group discussions about this and that.  This is clearly a better format than the panels and speakers we had yesterday. (See Jeff Jarvis on the same point.)  As one particularly articulate guy said this morning, “Our panelists suck!”  No matter how smart they are, most have failed to adequately prepare.  It's hard to speak off the cuff and well.  And the presentations haven't been mapped to one another — there's X, and then Y, and then an off-topic Z.

It may be, however, that this crowd is impatient with anyone talking at the front of the room. We're willing to listen for, oh, maybe 10 minutes — at the most. But after that we want to hear from other people in the room. We're enjoying the IRC back-channel, we're reading email — we're all over the place.

Maybe some of this is just “conference ADD” — another catchy phrase.  We're able to scan text so quickly now, reading a zillion blog feeds, deleting email at a glance, that a voice is just too slow and mono.

Theater in the round — that's what we're willing to engage in, as long as part of the theater is Us.  This has deep implications for classroom learning.  Focusing by doing, by creating and editing, may be a more powerful way of learning than listening to the front of the room.  Is this too individual-centric?  Perhaps.

Attention is more expensive than it used to be.

The mainstream media did a horrible job reporting on the campaign, Dan says.  But there were some good things going on around the edges.  Journalism was evolving into a conversation — and that means governments have to move much more towards listening and talking.

And journalists were being watched by the web — witness Dan Rather.  Nevertheless, mainstream media still called bloggers those people in pajamas. 

But bloggers/citizen media having a big effect, and will continue to.  Let's use wikis to watch candidate statements.  Let's watch governments more closely.  Let's shadow them.

Great job by Dan, who has announced that he is leaving the San Jose Mercury News to have his own citizen journalism effort.

Question:  has Meetup solved the problem?

Nope.  Putnam says we don't need to go to concerts thanks to CDs.  A great loss.  We do it all alone.  How can the internet be used to build “real” face to face ties to other people?  These other communities are fictional, because they're virtual.

And then the IRC channel learned that the SCT had taken cert. in Grokster, and we lost focus.

I'm at the Berman Center's Internet & Society 2004 conference, Votes, Bits & Bytes.  The first morning session was a little slow, but things sped up with Tod Cohen's business panel (particularly with the very human Craig Newmark).

Now Scott Heiferman of meetup.com is up, talking about meetup issues.  Robert Putnam, who wrote “Bowling Alone,” will respond to his remarks. I have a feeling that Putnam will say meetup is no substitute for full human contact.

But the IRC channel that Joi Ito set up is buzzing along.  I'm asking what happens to meetup 10 years from now, and someone mentions upcoming.org as a place to look.  I guess the idea is that calendaring functions will integrate meetup kinds of events — it'll be built into the infrastructure.  Hmm.  I'd rather have lots of wildly non-infrastructure meetings going on. With pugs and ukelele guys.

As part of World Day (formerly known as Net Day, although gyrations are occurring about the name), Greg Elin had the bright idea that we should offer an Email Amnesty Day.

Here's the idea:  On one day a year, you are permitted (indeed, expected) to delete all the unanswered mail in your inbox.  Just wipe it out.  Start fresh. And everyone will understand.

No more shame or grief associated with email — just for that one day.