From Daily Dot.

The Internet is an “essential” utility, like heat or electricity, according to a German court.

A federal judge in the southwest state of Karlsruhe ruled Thursday in favor of a man who couldn’t use his DSL connection for two months in late 2008 and early 2009. He’d already been compensated for a disruption to his cell phone service.

Under German law, companies must provide compensation for failing to provide customers with “essential material items,” according to Reuters.

Just re-stating the obvious, really. But it’s strange to reflect on how perceptions of the Net made the transition from something weird and exotic (in the 1980s) to a public utility like running water and mains electricity (now). The downside is that we take it for granted and are therefore incurious about what’s special about it — which in turn might allow vested interests (governments and corporations) to capture it. That’s one of the thoughts that led me to write From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.

I’ve been reading Stephan Collini’s absorbing review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926–1927 in the London Review of Books. A good deal of the review is taken up with discussion of the role that the Criterion, the serious highbrow literary quarterly of which Eliot had become the editor in 1922, played in the poet’s life. The magazine had at its core a small clique of literary intellectuals who met regularly for dinner. The thing about them that stood out for me is the fact that, with one exception (Bonamy Dobrée), none was an academic. F.S. Flint, for example, worked in the civil service. Howard Reed was a curator at the V&A. Alec Randall was a diplomat. And Orlo Williams was clerk to the House of Commons. (And of course for quite a few years Eliot himself had worked in a bank by day and functioned as a poet and literary intellectual only the evenings and at weekends.)

Noticing this led to one obvious thought about our own time. How many literary intellectuals – or even public intellectuals generally – nowadays have non–academic jobs? (Excluding journalism.) At the moment, I can only think of two: Matt Ridley, who I think is a banker of sorts (at least he was Chairman of one of the banks — Northern Rock — that spectacularly failed during the banking catastrophe); and Howard Davies. There must be others, but at the moment they are the only two that come to mind.

En passant, it’s worth remembering that the fact that the role of public intellectual has become the almost-exclusive preserve of tenured academics in the US is Richard Posner’s main explanation for the decline of the public intellectual in that country.

A friend of mine sent me a draft of a lecture she will be giving soon. It contained a reference to a book that she thought interesting and important. It was The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt. Since I take my friend seriously, I followed the link and bought the Kindle edition. And now I can’t get any work done: it’s one of those books that takes you by the throat and just won’t let go until it reaches the end. It’s a beautifully-written account of the rediscovery, in 1417, of On The Nature of Things, a poem by Lucretius, and of the impact that rediscovery had in shaping the modern world. The book won a Pulitzer prize, and now I understand why.

I’ve just been reading “Why I write”, a thoughtful post by Dave Winer about why he blogs and what’s happened to him as a result.  As a long-time reader of Scripting News, I’ve often been struck by the anger, abuse and hostility he attracts, for reasons that have always baffled me.  Dave is opinionated and quirky, sure, but he’s also rational, thoughtful, decent and humane.  In fact I’ve often seen parallels between his blogging and that of the late Aaron Swartz — the same lack of pretentiousness, for example, and the same willingness to admit to ignorance, difficulty or failure. 

In his post, Dave writes about the abuse he has attracted and how he has had to learn to live with it.

So when someone gets on a soapbox and starts trying to rev up a crowd to hate me, and when they lie to do it, I have to learn not to give that any weight. What I do now is ask a friend to have a look and tell me what they see. Since the ranting isn’t about them, they won’t take it personally. If they say it’s something I should pay attention to, I would — but they never do. The most recent time it happened, a friend came back and said the person is a sadist. But my mind still circles around the abuse. I have a hard time not thinking about it. So what do I do? Write about it, of course. Now it’s on the web, and hopefully out of my way.

One more thing. I remember being at a conference, chatting with someone and I saw at the other end of the room someone who had been a friend but had started trashing me on the Internet. I excused myself and walked over to the guy and sat down next to him, and asked why he was doing it. He started repeating the nonsense he was saying online. But I didn’t think he really believed it, so I pressed him and asked why he wasreally doing it. He said he had cancer, and was in chemo, and was in a lot of pain. I felt sick myself in that moment. I said you know that’s terrible, but it’s no reason to do and say things that hurt me, and make me feel bad. We all have our struggles. Me too. He agreed, and we’re friends again, but now when I see him online, I can’t forget how used I was, and why, and the pain comes back, his pain and mine. This really sucks.

It does. But it’s very common online.  Just look at the comments under most prominent publications, or at any of those that allow anonymous commenting.  And it makes me want to ask: why do people behave like this? Is it really the case that the world is full of angry, bitter, envious, bigoted people? And is the Net somehow responsible for the tsunami of bile? Does cyberspace have a fatal attraction for people of a particular disposition or mentality? Or is it just that humans have always been like that, but until recently lacked the technology — or, more accurately — the medium that would enable them to broadcast their vituperative anger to a wider audience than just their immediate social circle?

My hunch is that it’s the latter — in other words that we’re up against a harsh truth about human nature. At any rate, that’s the argument I’ve generally used against technophobes who blame the Net for the supposed pandemic of pornography that they claim is engulfing us. (Because I write about the Net, and once wrote a history of the network, people seem to hold me personally responsible for what they see as its deficiencies!) My case is that if there is a lot of porn on the Net then doesn’t that say more about humans than about technology? For if people weren’t obsessed with sex then surely the ‘demand’ for porn would decline, and with it the supposedly abundant online supply? On this logic, blaming the Net for pornography is the equivalent of shooting the messenger who brings bad news about human nature. And doesn’t the same apply to the phenomenon of online bile?

I suppose a philosopher would say that the abusiveness of much online commenting is really a symptom of the fact that most people don’t know much about logic and even less about how to construct an argument.  This view ignores the difficulty that conflicting value systems are what Thomas Kuhn called “incommensurable”: that is to say, there exists no independent logical framework that would enable us rationally to assess the relative merits of different values.  There’s no way of convincing someone that Keats is a greater poet than Dylan, say; or that Bach is greater than Beethoven or Mozart. But even when online disagreements are about factual issues, the inability — or unwillingness? — to engage in rational argument is deeply frustrating.

It also makes one wonder about a bigger, but related, issue — whether or not the Net is enlarging what Jurgen Habermas called the “public sphere”.  I used to think that it would inevitably have this effect.  Now I’m not so sure.  And I have a hunch that Dave Winer isn’t sure about it either.

Wonderful reflective post by Dave Winer. Sample:

Computers are amazing things, they really are, in ways most non-technical people aren’t even aware of. For example, when I learned about the process of bootstrapping compilers I was blown away. Still am actually. I tried explaining it to everyone I knew who wasn’t a programmer. The only person who got it, sort of, was my uncle, a mechanical engineer. He could see using a hammer to make a hammer, so what’s the big deal. How about using a specific hammer to make itself? How about that! His eyes glazed over. Yours probably are too. But ask someone who has made a real life compiler and see how mystical they get.

So we programmers in a sense are a secret society. Until you learn the handshake you aren’t one of us. And we can be pretty arrogant about it. Until the computer kicks our ass. Or the market. Or users. Then we learn really quickly that what we learned in school was just the beginning. That when we thought we understood everything that was just the arrogance of youth. It’s functional. Because how else could you take on the world if you understood how huge and complex and fucked up the world actually is! :-)

This is when depression sets in. All of a sudden you see that you are not all-powerful, you can’t handle everything the world throws at you. But then what do you do if you’ve told everyone you can deal with it, that you’ll come out on top? When I got to that point, which I remember very clearly, I felt I couldn’t possibly face failure. I was locking up the office of Living Videotext one night, knowing the next day I would be firing half the company, and having no idea how we were going to bail it out. Yes, you can get lower than that. But between the two paths, one up and the other down, there wasn’t much margin for error.

He’s such a wise old bird. Which of course is why I read him.

Tim Berners-Lee’s post about Aaron Swartz’s death. (Click on image to read.)

Aaron Swartz, one of the most gifted and interesting lads I’ve ever encountered, has committed suicide at the age of 26. At the moment, nobody knows why, but the obvious suspicion is that it might have had something to do with the fact that he was being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts for “wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer, in relation to downloading roughly 4 million academic journal articles from JSTOR”. If convicted, he would have faced a potential prison term of up to 35 years and a fine of up to $1 million. His motive for doing this was his belief — shared by many of us — that scholarly publications should be in the public domain.

All suicides are complicated and it’s possible that Aaron’s reasons may have been unconnected with the prosecution. But whatever the explanation, the fact is that the world — and the Internet — has lost one of its best and brightest stars. If you’ve never heard of him and wonder what the fuss is all about, then I suggest that this post from his blog will give you some idea of why we mourn his loss.

May he rest in peace.

LATER: Lovely obit by his friend Cory on BoingBoing.

Wonderful letter from Philip Greenspun to two college-age children of a friend.

Your dad says that you’re applying to college. Remember that nearly all careers in the U.S. now require a graduate degree. Nobody will ever ask where you went for undergrad. It is not especially helpful to go to a prestige university undergrad because the professors won’t know who you are and won’t be persuasive about getting you into grad school. Economists found that people admitted to Ivy League schools who chose to attend state schools instead ended up with the same income. Being smart enough to get accepted to a top school has some value but actually attending the top school doesn’t have any value compared to U. Mass. And the most prestigious schools are research universities (e.g., MIT, Stanford, Princeton, etc.). It isn’t really even part of a professor’s job to teach undergrads and, in fact, they do very poorly at teaching. Check my analysis of a lecture by one of Yale’s top professors within

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

You need a bachelor’s degree, of course, but don’t succumb to the undergraduate admissions industry’s efforts to convince you that your whole life depends on what happens in the next few months. I was an undergrad at George Washington University and MIT. My fellow students at MIT were smarter/more interesting. My professors at GWU were much more interested and engaged with me. I wouldn’t say that MIT was vastly better than GWU or vice versa.

I’m always amazed by how American families subscribe to the myth that just because an institution is a great research university then the tuition is, by definition, better. One of things that really marks out Oxbridge (and some of the other leading UK universities) is that they remain committed to providing good undergraduate teaching as well as to doing frontline research.