Everyone in the UK pays a license fee for their television which means that we can have a high-quality public-sector television broadcaster: the BBC. The BBC also has the most-popular site in Europe. And yet while I’m delighted that it’s there, and don’t begrudge paying the organisation, there have only really been two things that I use them for – BBC News (TV & web) and Fame Academy. Well now there’s a third reason to pay the license fee: BBC Kitten Cam. Tiny kittens, real-time, 24 hours a day (although at night it tends to be completely dark)…
From Richard Stallman’s (creator of the free software movement and the man behind GNU which is itself at least partially behind Linux) website:
I’m a single atheist white man, 49, reputedly intelligent, with unusual interests in politics, science, music and dance. I’d like to meet a woman with varied interests, curious about the world, comfortable expressing her likes and dislikes (I hate struggling to guess), delighting in her ability to fascinate a man and in being loved tenderly, who values joy, truth, beauty and justice more than “success”–so we can share bouts of intense, passionately kind awareness of each other, alternating with tolerant warmth while we’re absorbed in other aspects of life. My 19-year-old child, the Free Software Movement, occupies most of my life, leaving no room for more children, but I still have room to love a sweetheart. I spend a lot of my time traveling to give speeches, often to Europe, Asia and Latin America; it would be nice if you were free to travel with me some of the time.
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Yet again manufacturing scarcity…
In the interests of fair exposure, I’m going to link back to Scott’s response to my response to his comments on my thoughts about manufactured scarcity, although I’m going to have to leave a more thorough response for another day as I have much to digest and process on other issues today. In the meantime, I’m just going to make two small points. When he says:
People in modern China (or even in a future America where the government has been granted broad control of its citizens) may have a valid desire to maintain anonymity online that is clearly more important than my annoyance with spam. (Capital letters my own)
This was in fact my initial point – that one can’t strip anonymity from the net without destroying much of its power for the disenfranchised. Hence when we’re assembling our micro-community structures online, we work to build a way of interacting that celebrates as much of the power of the web while simultaneously working to stop some uses of that power that could cause that community to collapse in upon itself completely. The nature of the web, web programmers and free software / open source projects (and indeed the market itself) means that there will probably not soon be a monopoly on community technology that stops people simply choosing another form of software to declare their home if the one they are in fails to meet their needs. That is probably the best place to resolve this debate – in net citizens’ interactions with, choices between (and accomplishments enabled by) various types of community software.
I don’t see how Tom’s example system could prevent a user from sitting at a single computer all day creating identities and then passing those identities around to other computers — assuming it can even prevent a computer from doing the same.
Again – it wouldn’t at all. But in my initial rough gestural example, the logging-in process would be time-consuming – which would mean that very specific speed bumps would be placed between new identity creation and new identity posting. This could radically slow down the amount of new users that someone could effectively maintain per computer. It’s a question again of difficulty – you do not have to make something impossible in order to stop it happening – you simply have to make something not worth the energy, time or money that you’d have to invest. That’s how public key cryptography works – not by making it impossible to break the code, but by making it take impossibly large amounts of time…
I’m a master of the pre-packaged culinary treat. You get it in a packet. You put the packet in the oven. You take the packet out of the oven. You have lovely food. It’s that simple! So as I’m sure you can imagine I was horrified to discover that the Lemon Chicken I purchased from Sainsbury’s required a baking sheet. You have to remove the chicken from the packaging, place it on a baking sheet and then add the sauce shortly afterwards. But if there’s a baking sheet, then it counts as cooking. And if it’s cooking food rather than magic oven food – where’s the pleasure?! It’s an invasion. I feel violated. I’m exhausted.
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On my failings as a geek…
If I was a better geek, this article on XFML at diveintomark.org would be fascinating, illuminating and revelatory. Instead I stare at it in desperation, terror and confusion as the words change and resolve themselves in front of me to read, “Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb”. This is not the kind of thing I’m supposed to admit in public.
Ok. I can just about buy the idea that you can use soundwaves to cool things down, and that you might be able to assemble a fridge that operated by those principles. I can almost buy the idea that two researchers are using “enormously loud sounds to keep their chiller cabinet cool”. And I’m grudgingly prepared to accept that one might be able to convince people that, “the sounds pumped through the Penn State fridge reach 173 dB, tens of thousands of times more intense than any rock concert”. But you have to start laughing when you read that a fully functioning acoustic fridge has been launched into space. And you’re going to look stunned and giggly when you’re told that “sounds of 165 dB would cause a person’s hair to catch fire from the frictional heating caused by air undergoing such intense compression and expansion”! [BBC News | Thermoacoustic Research at Penn State University]
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New stuff on the right-hand menu…
I’ve added a couple of nice little things to the right-hand menu of the site today. You can now talk to people who live near me and work near me via UpMyStreet Conversations. The site’s progressing quite well – there are more conversations every day and new uses for the software keep emerging. Some people are just asking about areas they are moving to, debating London’s new congestion charges or complaining (at length) about layabout teenagers – but others are using it to answer very specific questions or even just to meet new people. I’d love it if UK webloggers decided to put a link to their local areas on their weblogs – I think that could really make it a useful and interesting place to relate to your local geography… But I guess I’ll just have to wait and see if that takes off…
New today – there’s a huge slab-like rambling tome of an interview with Grant Morrison over at my other major ongoing project (barbelith.com). Here’s a sexy quotable:
“The space in The Invisibles, the idea of reclaiming space is based on Situationist ideas – I’m interested in the idea of re-empowering the imaginative city and making detournements through the architectural spaces; that was a thing my friends and I used to do a lot. And cameras; because obviously they’re the real colonisers of space just now, social space, they’re keeping the homeless out of the multiplex shopping centres, they prevent ‘bad things’ from happening to it, there are more and more of them all the time.”
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A brief gripe about Technorati.com…
I know it’s not finished yet and everything, but Technorati still hasn’t figured out that plasticbag.org is a weblog or that plasticbag.org, www.plasticbag.org and plasticbag.org/index.shml are the same page. I just want to have my own little ‘Cosmos’. It doesn’t seem too much to ask..
I really want to write a proper response to this piece on randomchaos.com which discusses the ethics of ‘manufacturing scarcity’. But I’ve been meaning to write something thorough and intellectually satisfying for days, and nothing’s coming. So I’m just going to concentrate on a couple of key points…
Scott says: “Difficulty should never be created. All work should increase ease (in a general sense, work should be self-destructive). I say this because this is the only path toward what seems to me to be an obvious ideal of work being optional.” I think I’d have trouble arguing with the sentiment – but there are problems with relating it directly to these circumstances. Take the use of the word ‘difficulty’ – if making one thing harder really does make many hundreds of thousands of other things easier (in the case of e-mail for example), then collectively the weight of ‘difficulty’ on the community is lowered. We make it hard for people to burn down their houses by fitting smoke alarms and using flame-retardant foam in furniture. This makes it easier for people to live without burning their houses down. We make it hard for people to have their debit/credit card PINs stolen, by making a decision not to print them on each and every connected piece of paper connected with banking. All around us are products and services dripping with usability decisions based around making certain uses easy by making others harder…
Scott also says: When Tom says the lack of scarcity of avatars is a consistent problem for community spaces, he is wrong. The inability to associate avatars with real people is the problem, and Tom is wrongly assuming that scarcity is the only way to create this association. Actually that’s also a profoundly interesting question. One of the things that the internet was particularly celebrated for when it first went mainstream was this ability to shed your identity – to be more anonymous. By forcing people to directly associate identity with avatar, then privacy becomes a huge issue and people find themselves unable to talk freely or honestly. I believe the function of the online community-builder is to locate the particular and unique benefits of online communication and celebrate them – while at the same time not assuming that every aspect of online communication is of benefit. When I talk of scarcity, I’m actually talking about the labour of maintaining them – an identity should be an effort to use. That effort should be negligible for the maintenance of one identity, but substantial for the maintenance of more than one.
Example time… Take for example the simple interaction of logging-in and logging-out of a site. Let’s assume that a computer will have only one browser on it and that only one user can be logged into the site from that computer at any one time. Imagine a circumstance where the process of logging-in is extremely time-consuming, but the user that is logged on will remain logged on indefinitely afterwards. The cost of maintenance here is a one of transaction of ‘logging-in’. But if that user is trying to maintain two identities, that ‘effort’ increases dramatically. Each time he or she wishes to switch identities they have to go through the whole logging-in process. If the process took an hour then a user with one account will spend one hour logging in. Ever. A user with two will spend one initial hour logging in and then an additional hour each time they wanted to change identity. Make it so that you have to post once a week or your account expires, and you add one hour of work each and every week for each account that a user has. Immediately, it’s just much easier to maintain one…