We expect too much of geeks

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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.

So tablets are just the latest version of the PC?

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Interesting chart from Business Insider. Their commentary reads:

In November 2010, Facebook held an event at its headquarters to talk about new mobile products.
After the presentation, a reporter asked Mark Zuckerberg why there was no talk of a Facebook iPad app. At that point, the iPad was only a few months old, but it was already a phenomenon. Facebook hadn’t yet rolled out an app.

“iPad’s not mobile, next question,” said Zuckerberg to laughs from the audience. He followed up saying, “It’s not mobile, it’s a computer, it’s a different thing.”

Apple had successfully marketed the lightweight, portable iPad as a mobile device. So the reporters in the room were incredulous that Zuckerberg didn’t call the iPad a mobile gadget.

Two years later, it’s clear that Zuckerberg was right. The iPad isn’t any more of a mobile gadget than a MacBook Air. The iPad is just a PC.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

HMV and the perils of shipping atoms to ship bits

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Long ago in his book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte drew attention of the absurdity of “shipping atoms to ship bits” – for example using plastic discs as the medium for conveying bitstreams from recording studios to consumers’ audio systems. Now I know that hindsight is the only exact science, but given that music went digital with the advent of the Compact Disc in 1982, and the Internet (which in this context is essentially a global machine for getting bitstreams inexpensively from one place to another) was switched on in January 1983, from that moment onwards businesses that were based on shipping those atoms were destined for a rocky future.

That future took some time to materialise, of course. The Net wasn’t an immediate threat in 1983 because in the 1980s the only people who had access to the network were researchers in pretty exotic labs. But even there one could see harbingers of things to come; for example, in the 1980s some of those researchers were digitising music and sharing it across the network, just as they shared other types of file. But then the pace quickened: the advent of the Web in 1991 — and particularly of the first graphical browser in 1993 — began to turn the Internet into a mainstream phenomenon; MP3 compression technology crunched music files to a tenth of their original size, thereby making them much easier to transfer; Shawn Fanning wrote software (Napster) that made it easy for ordinary folks to share music files and — Bingo! — the die was cast. (For a fuller version of the story see From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg.)

So today’s news that the High Street music store HMV is going into Administration has been a long time coming, but really it’s been on the cards for a long time. There are reports that the music/movie industry will try to rescue it. If true, then that merely confirms how poorly managed those industries are.

Aaron Swartz’s Politics

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There’s been a lot already written about Aaron Swartz (much of it helpfully curated by Seb Schmoller), but this long post by Matt Stoller is simply wonderful at explaining how a clever, curious and agile outsider went about trying to understand the dysfunctional politics of the US. (Aaron worked with Matt as an intern in a Congressional office in 2009.)

Read it and despair.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That’s too easy, because that implies it’s one bad apple. We know that’s not true. What killed him was corruption. Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There’s a reason whistleblowers get fired. There’s a reason Bradley Manning is in jail. There’s a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for torture is the person – John Kiriako – who told the world it was going on. There’s a reason those who destroyed the financial system “dine at the White House”, as Lawrence Lessig put it. There’s a reason former Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There’s a reason DOJ officials do not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as partners in white collar criminal defense. There’s a reason no one has been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. Corrupt self-interest, when it goes systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy, and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice.

More prosaically, the person who warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop, or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues. I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have done good, and among students who challenge power as their colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street. And now we’ve seen these same forces kill our friend.

Well worth reading in full. Thanks to Seb for pointing me to it.

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? The real scandal of the Aaron Swartz case

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When Aaron Swartz was arrested in 2011, the first thought that came to mind was Alexander Pope’s famous question.

As usual, my friend Larry Lessig nails it:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April.

Yep, especially the observation about the architects of the banking catastrophe dining with the Obamaa and the Camerons of this world.

LATER: Seb Schmoller has had the good idea of putting links to the best tributes in one place.

The baroque Net

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Dumb network, smart applications” was the mantra that they [the designers of the Internet] used to express the philosophy that all of the ingenuity should be left to those people developing applications at the edges of the network.

These turned out to be very good ideas. They enabled the “organic” growth of the network to happen. And they triggered an explosion of creativity as smart people thought up clever applications that the network could be used for. Some of these applications (for example the web) were beneficial; some (viruses, worms, and malware generally) were destructive. And many (file-sharing) were somewhere in between. The consequence was that, over time, a network that was originally seamless and uncluttered came to be overlaid with a grotesque accumulation of add-ons and patches, to the point where it begins to resemble a baroque excrescence rather than a classical design.

This is beginning to concern some people whose job it is to worry about these things…

Why I (often) shoot in black and white

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Recently one of my techie friends borrowed one of my cameras and noticed that it was set to shoot in black and white. He was puzzled by this and asked why I did it? It seemed irrational to him that I should voluntarily throw away information. After all, if I wanted a B&W image I could always get it by de-saturating the image in post-processing. And if I were really finicky I could use something like SilverEfex not just to desaturated but even to replicate the grain structure of iconic B&W films like Tri-X.

And of course at one level he’s right. But what he’s ignoring is that when you’re shooting in B&W your photography changes in subtle ways because you are forced to see things differently. Some scenes may not work in colour because it may overwhelm or swamp what’s important in the scene. Or it may reduce the intrinsic drama of a situation.

Since we see in colour, B&W is, by definition, an abstraction. As someone put it in a blog comment, “Black and white is a fantasy. When someone sees a B&W photo, they know they’ve been transported into another place and time”. Once B&W was an unavoidable necessity — the only way we could record images on silver halide. And for a time after colour film appeared shooting in B&W was a pragmatic choice, based on economics: monochrome was cheaper. But with the advent of digital sensors, that logic evaporated: there was no longer an economic reason for eschewing colour. It became an aesthetic decision. Which is a long-winded way of explaining why I shoot in black and white.

We won’t be beaten on price, just on Amazon

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This photograph of the Cambridge branch of Jessops on its last trading day is rather melancholy, given that this particular high street chain was synonymous with photography for millions of Britons for so many years. Two things did for it — the switch from film to digital; and the rise of online retailing and especially Amazon. In the end, Jessops shops were reduced to serving essentially as places where consumers could see and handle cameras which they would then go out and buy from Amazon. With hindsight, perhaps the chain could have turned this from a problem into an opportunity — in the way, for example, that the John Lewis chain has. But for that to have happened, the management would have had to appreciate the importance of making the switch “from place to space” in the late 1990s. Like many bricks-n-mortar retailers, they didn’t. Pity.

LATER: Good post “The High Street is Dying. Did the Internet Kill It? No, it took its own life”. HT to Magnus Ramage for the link.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

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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.