Topic 33 of 40: Cyberdawg (jonl) Barking
Wed, Nov 25, 1998 (08:22) |
Paul Terry Walhus (terry)
Cyberdawg Barking is the creation of Jon Lebkowsky, a very talented local
writer and Whole Foods Internet maven. He's bright, acerbic at times, and
committed to seeing communities prosper. And a strong advocate of our
right to freedom and privacy in cyberspace.
3 responses total.
Topic 33 of 40 [internet]: Cyberdawg (jonl) Barking
Response 1 of 3: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Nov 25, 1998 (08:22) * 36 lines
CYBERDAWG BARKING // 11/26/98 // fry them turkeys!
a bucket of loose thoughts:
Lessee, now that this AOL/Netscape merger can dominate front pages and
involve, not millions, but BILLIONS of dollars, I guess that we can
resolve that the Internet is truly ubiquitous. Not only that, but we can
relax and accept that Bill's world is also Steve's (at a party Steve Case
once told a friend of mine that he sees the Internet as a seed community
for AOL.)
For those who perceive web-based commerce as a true killer app, this is a
logical step forward toward second-nature status for the Internet as an
integral part of daily life, like the telephone. Cultivation of ubiquity,
seen through various niche filters as supportive of fringe culture,
teilhardian spiritual evolution, sophisticated memetic envirnonments,
community networks, etc., appears to be a Good Thing for many reasons,
but ultimately it works because it feeds consumers to the engines of
commerce. And though it's often vogue to assume the worst about
commercialization vis a vis exploitation, those of us who're building and
operating those engines can mitigate the more extreme effects of
unbridled capitalism by integrating online markets with community, like
the street markets around which human communities have always grown and
flourished. We can build online communities and support community
networking. These are not the same: online communities are contexts for
social gathering and affinity building, and community networks are
technological infrastructures for ensuring the broader distribution of
Internet access, as well as social infrastructures to provide training
and guidance for those who fall under labels like 'traditionally
underserved.'
I have a whole other danger/opportunity rant knocking around in my head,
but no time this morning to flesh it out...more soon.
cyberdawg
Topic 33 of 40 [internet]: Cyberdawg (jonl) Barking
Response 2 of 3: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Wed, Dec 2, 1998 (07:48) * 66 lines
Cyberdawg: The Y2K Scam
I've had enough. A few days ago Jerry Falwell characterized the "Y2K bug"
as something like a message from God that we're screwing up, and at that
point I'd had enough. Well, okay, if God thinks we're screwing up, she's
right, but when were we ever NOT screwing up? And it's true that the Y2K
problem results from an inherently human lack of foresight.
But the real human failing here is the propensity for kooks and
charlatans to construct doomsday scenarios around a manageable technical
problem. Even programmers and analysts, who should know better, are
overstating the problem, possibly to drum up consulting business and
possibly because, even for reasonably intelligent folks, belief is just
a swallow away.
There are a couple of Y2K myths I'd invite you to consider. Because I
don't write code and don't work with systems that are sensitive to
century, I won't pretend to speak with complete authority...but I do have
some Y2K background, and this is my somewhat informed thinking.
First, what is this problem? For the sake of efficiency, programmers of
many systems adopted a century-insensitive format for storing dates, like
MMDDYY, where YY is the year stored as two digits, 1998 stored as 98.
Hindsight tells us that this was a mistake, but nobody seemed to realize
how long that code would stay around.
Myth #1: We didn't realize we had a problem until it was too late.
I was on a state agency's Y2K project team something like 4-5 years ago,
and I hear that they're wrapping up the project right now. It is
possible that they missed something, but given the time and thought
accorded the problem, I figure anything they missed will be relatively
minor.
My agency wasn't exceptional...many agencies, banks, insurance companies,
and corporations with large legacy systems using century-insensitive
formats have also been working for several years to analyze for exposure
(the hard part) and make fixes where required. The SEC requires public
companies to file a Y2K status report. It's simply not true that no
one's been dealing with the problem.
Myth #2: Because computers and microprocessors are ubiquitous, our
systems will crash around us on Jan 1, 2000.
I see this one everywhere: "Do you realize how many microprocessors you
depend on for your day to day existence? They're in your car, your
television set, your coffeemaker, etc." The implication is that,
wherever there's a digital system, you have exposure. This is muddy
thinking, though, because most systems don't "care" what year it is.
Your coffeemaker is not going to be confused when the date rolls over
from 99 to 00, even if it's not "Y2K compliant."
Where you might have a worry is with something like a credit card which
shows an expiration date of 01/00 or later. But as many of you know,
those cards were already issued, and some did have problems. Where
problems occurred, they were fixed fairly quickly. No Big Deal.
I welcome refutation, but disasterwise, I'm a lot more worried about
random meteor strikes than about Y2K. If Jerry Falwell wants to save the
human race, give him a space ship and a huge net.
cy ber dawg
Topic 33 of 40 [internet]: Cyberdawg (jonl) Barking
Response 3 of 3: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Fri, Jan 15, 1999 (09:45) * 136 lines
Cyberdawg's 1998 Top Ten List!
Absent-minded as I've become, any ten things about 1998 that I can
actually remember deserve to be on a list somewhere, so here 'tis, in no
particular order...
1) Bill Clinton was busted for bad sex and political hell broke loose in
DC, and the party-line divisions within the U.S. generated gaping
crevices, sort of like in those earthquake movies, fragmenting the hell
out of leadership and punditry. However the economy kept breathing and
and ordinary citizens were remarkably consistent in their support for a
president whose moral confusion didn't seem to affect his ability to hold
the meetings and make the speeches that keep the ship afloat.
2) People in general seemed remarkably complacent about chaotic, often
catastrophic weather conditions. As one hurricane followed another, we
wondered whether global warming might be more than a nifty subject for an
illustrated Scientific American article. Bruce Sterling, ever attentive
to heavy weather, started an email list around his Viridian design
concepts, building psychic infrastructure for a greening of the elite.
3) The Federal government asked the musical question, is Microsoft a
monopoly? And if so, should we Do Something About It? The answers are
probably yes and yes, in that order, but the quandary is what to do about
it, what remedies the court will suggest. Meanwhile a cocky but elegant
operating system called Linux finds increasing market share and
mindshare, not because anyone is spending millions on marketing, but
because it WORKS. (see #10 below)
4) I'm not sure that it's news anymore when we bomb the living fuck out
of Iraq. Maybe they're really building bombs over there, and growing
mutant viruses for germ warfare, making mustard gas derivatives, etc.
Maybe they're evil, maybe they're scared. Maybe we think we're dead if we
don't have a war going on somewhere. I just wish I could have more trust,
but I guess I've seen too much.
5) The Internet is an industry. Corporations are spending millions of
dollars on web sites and Internet marketing. Investors are pumping
kazillions into Internet stocks of unproven value. We suspect that
someone has sprinkled pixie dust over Wall Street. It's called "the long
boom," and it's as real as immor(t)ality.
6) Then again, the Internet really might work as a channel for retail
distribution, in which case some of those investments might just make
sense. Retail to consumers over the Internet feels like a killer app;
ecommerce projects were coming on strong by the end of '98. Delivery's a
big deal here, so UPS, Fedex, USPS, Airborne, and possibly new carriers
will benefit from an explosion of net-based commerce (and their
infrastructures will be challenged, as well).
7) I always figured that the universe was only expanding until it was
ready to contract, i.e. a grand-scale pulsating universe, but I don't
know anything about physics or astronomy. It just seemed to make sense.
In 1998, space-time theorists gathered paradigm-shattering data using new
tools, such as the Hubble space telescope and way powerful new computing
systems. I'm not an astronomer and don't have a clue how to interpret the
data, but I keep faith in a vision of the universe-as-heartbeat. But who
knows? Maybe the Firesign Theatre had it right: everything we know is
wrong.
8) This one's personal: I completed a book, _Virtual Bonfire_, in 1998,
but it was never published. Though it was probably the wrong book for me
to write, I learned a lot while writing it, so the considerable costs of
a four month sabbatical, barely impacted by the small advance, were a
form of tuition. The concept was to write something like Alinsky's 'Rules
for Radicals' specifically for online activists, but I drifted into the
metaphysical, trying to make sense of democracy and political process.
Like I said, "the wrong book." Alinsky was more practical than
philosophical. Jon L. was trying to be both. The best (i.e. most
practical) part of the book, a guide for creating online activist groups,
didn't say enough about how to be effective once you've put the group
together. Fact is, online activist groups haven't been terribly
effective. Those who were most effective in getting the word out managed
to orchestrate call-ins, fax-ins, and email petitions, but these had
little weight compared to fleshmeets and money. We were unable to
prevent passage of the Communications Decency Act despite solid
opposition within the online community, and the CDA's content regulations
would be law today if not for the ACLU's work on the court case, which
took money and time and was quite grounded in the physical. The
effectiveness of corporation donations to CDA opposition far outweighed
the impact of the substantial efforts to organize the denizens of
cyberspace. Jerry Berman of the Center for Democracy and Technology once
told EFF-Austin that we should charter a bus and take our members to
Washington, DC to visit our legislators where the action is, and let them
see that we were real people with real concerns. We're associated now
with folks (like Gene Crick of Texas' Telecommunications Research Center)
who are visiting DC on a regular basis and working far more effectively
than online activists. The book I should've written would have been less
philosophical, less a consideration of "nodal politics" (as I called it),
and more about practical political realities and solutions.
I've moved on, though, and I'll probably never write that book. I wasn't
a true activist, just a whacky guy who felt passionate enough about
freedom and technology to commit a few years trying to put it all
together. Now I'm back where I was in 1992, blending community and
technology in a commercial context, and coming more from a context of
social aesthetics and networking than from some political/philosophical
realm. Real politics is more about taking than sustaining, but our
activism was more about holding our own than taking somebody else's, so I
like to think our intentions were pure if ineffective.
9) After studying the Amish in 1998, Howard Rheingold came away with a
question of deep signficance: "If we decided that community came first,
how would we use our tools differently?" (See Howard's article in Wired
7.01, January 1999, "Look Who's Talking")
10) There's a whole other 'digital top ten' prepared for the Austin
Chronicle (forthcoming), and one of those has really stood out in my
thinking since I completed that list. 1998 saw critical mass forming
behind the Linux operating system and the Open Source movement. Linux is
a computer operating system that runs on PCs, and is based on Unix. It's
powerful and relatively bug-free, and it's been gaining users among
system-administrator types and other users to appreciate its power and
reliability. Linux is a success, not because anyone's aggressively
marketing it, but because it works so well. A user-friendly graphical
interface called GNOME (g'nome) is in development for Linux, and once
it's completed, Linux will appeal to a broader user base. Linux is part
of the Free Software/Open Source movement, in which source code for
computer software is freely available for any programmers to enhance and
improve. Open Source proponents believe that cooperative work among
programmers will result in better software, sort of like peer review
works in an academic context. This isn't new thinking, but in '98 it
became more prevalent as, for instance, Netscape released source code for
its Communicator product (the cooperative improvement of which is
coordinated through the Mozilla project at www.mozilla.org). Open Source
and Linux are looking more and more like real competition for Microsoft
and Windows. Though this probably doesn't mean that Microsoft will
collapse and die, it does mean that the company will have an effective
challenger, and will have to compete, hopefully producing better
software. And desktop users who adopt Linux will have an opportunity to
learn what it's like to use reliable, effective software.
This is cool.
//jonl
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