Orlowski is trolling again. His latest incoherent rant ends with a declaration that meeting people at a conference is virtual, but watching a movie is 'Real Life'.
Is he a secret mole of the bloggers' conspiracy, sent to discredit journalists by association?
Wednesday, 23 April 2003
Blogging gets sturdier
Moveable Type just announced funding, by Joi Ito's neoteny.
They've used the money to set up a blogger-like hosting service called TypePad
They've used the money to set up a blogger-like hosting service called TypePad
Missing the point completely
Glenn Fleishman says:
Right now, there's a lot of finger pointing when you buy and try to configure a Wi-Fi adapter. Most of the time, it works. When it doesn't, who do you complain to or even get tech support from? When Linksys and Orinoco cards I purchased didn't work in a Sony laptop, I sent email to five different companies and received 15 to 20 suggestions. Fortunately, the last of these, which trickled in, had the solution (Wireless Zero Configuration was turned off).
This does beg the question 'which part of Zero Configuration didn't they understand?'
If it can be turned off, it's not Zero configuration, is it.
Right now, there's a lot of finger pointing when you buy and try to configure a Wi-Fi adapter. Most of the time, it works. When it doesn't, who do you complain to or even get tech support from? When Linksys and Orinoco cards I purchased didn't work in a Sony laptop, I sent email to five different companies and received 15 to 20 suggestions. Fortunately, the last of these, which trickled in, had the solution (Wireless Zero Configuration was turned off).
This does beg the question 'which part of Zero Configuration didn't they understand?'
If it can be turned off, it's not Zero configuration, is it.
Sapir, Whorf, Pinker, Wonderchicken and Thrash
A while back I mentioned Pinker's 'Blank Slate' in response to one of Chris Locke's missives, and Stavros offered to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He did so today, in great detail, along with fascinating commentary on Korean grammar and society, and how different forms of words are used depending on who one is talking to. I still think Sapir-Whorf is a load of tosh, but this seems to be a consensus now (unless Simon, Dorothea and Akma want to wade in).
I would agree is that previously heard or read language shapes subsequent utterances. Philip Hensher talks of the long linguistic shadow cast by the King James Bible.
Coincidentally, today I was called upon to interpret a conversation between 'John' and 'Thrash', a member of the popular beat combo 'The Orb' for the benefit of the Pho list:
John:
hear me now.
wot is yous banging on about?
Excuse me old chap, I don't quite follow your drift.
judge me wiv me bits not me mula.
Consider what I have to say, not my worldly goods.
got speed garage in da house. it's the most bestest, innit?
I am listening to an uptempo musical style that was popular 5 years
ago, and enjoying it.
i fink i will be going westside to go to me julie.
so gimme a shout next time yous is going down to the boozer.
I may be visiting the expensive part of London, so let me know if you
fancy a potation.
Thrash responds
Big it up!
I say!
Ease in the manor respec
Look mate check it I is fer real bwoyyy
Quieten down - I speak sooth.
Ali g is a pussy bwoy
Alistair is fey and effete.
And if the staines massive come darn tooting boy
Dey get dare nose bus up
If his chums visit my demesnes they'll get a jolly good hiding.
Believe boy I invented the bowl
When I was about 15 man
Yeah right I used to drive 80 mph the wrong way up charring cross road
Old bill giving it large behind
We just didn?t give a monkeys flying whatever you know
The constabulary never apprehended me for my carefree youthful
indiscretions.
Speed garage ?? that for ninny boyz
Arvo parte much better innit
My musical compositions have more subtlety than up-tempo industrial.
It was behind these bins that me first bang me julie
Ahem sorry
It does not do to bandy about a ladies name.
As fer wot I is banging about
You better read it again innit
The subtler shades of meaning in my prose may require further perusal
for enlightenment to dawn.
I would agree is that previously heard or read language shapes subsequent utterances. Philip Hensher talks of the long linguistic shadow cast by the King James Bible.
Coincidentally, today I was called upon to interpret a conversation between 'John' and 'Thrash', a member of the popular beat combo 'The Orb' for the benefit of the Pho list:
John:
hear me now.
wot is yous banging on about?
Excuse me old chap, I don't quite follow your drift.
judge me wiv me bits not me mula.
Consider what I have to say, not my worldly goods.
got speed garage in da house. it's the most bestest, innit?
I am listening to an uptempo musical style that was popular 5 years
ago, and enjoying it.
i fink i will be going westside to go to me julie.
so gimme a shout next time yous is going down to the boozer.
I may be visiting the expensive part of London, so let me know if you
fancy a potation.
Thrash responds
Big it up!
I say!
Ease in the manor respec
Look mate check it I is fer real bwoyyy
Quieten down - I speak sooth.
Ali g is a pussy bwoy
Alistair is fey and effete.
And if the staines massive come darn tooting boy
Dey get dare nose bus up
If his chums visit my demesnes they'll get a jolly good hiding.
Believe boy I invented the bowl
When I was about 15 man
Yeah right I used to drive 80 mph the wrong way up charring cross road
Old bill giving it large behind
We just didn?t give a monkeys flying whatever you know
The constabulary never apprehended me for my carefree youthful
indiscretions.
Speed garage ?? that for ninny boyz
Arvo parte much better innit
My musical compositions have more subtlety than up-tempo industrial.
It was behind these bins that me first bang me julie
Ahem sorry
It does not do to bandy about a ladies name.
As fer wot I is banging about
You better read it again innit
The subtler shades of meaning in my prose may require further perusal
for enlightenment to dawn.
Emerging Bloggers
I got to ETCon too late tonight to catch more than the end of the emerging democracy session, but I gatecrashed a bloggers dinner with Greg Elin, Ross Mayfield, Robert Scoble, Glenn Fleishman, Howard Rheingold, Jon Lebkowsky, Peter Kaminsky, David Isenberg,Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and his son Allen, and some others whose names I have forgotten.
Allen & I had a good long chat about epistemology, Physics and Wolfram's ideas.
Steve and I spoke about the difference between wikis and blogs. I think the main difference is one of voice. A blog has one person's voice, but a wiki is written by committee, and ends up striving for a consensual tone.
Doc, Steve & I talked about how Rendezvous and RSS need to get together for presence-based blogging.
Allen & I had a good long chat about epistemology, Physics and Wolfram's ideas.
Steve and I spoke about the difference between wikis and blogs. I think the main difference is one of voice. A blog has one person's voice, but a wiki is written by committee, and ends up striving for a consensual tone.
Doc, Steve & I talked about how Rendezvous and RSS need to get together for presence-based blogging.
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Alienaid - sweets and snacks - London, UK to San Francisco CA, USA
Matt observes his small cognitive disconnects visiting SF:
Realising that all the tiny things about America that I've seen in films, comic strips and so on aren't enormous cultural symbols or meaningful things at all. People skateboarding down the street, wearing baggy trousers, Twinkies et al: they're normal, like Hula Hoops (the crisps).
Sweets and snack foods are very local, and obviously emotionally important in a Proust's madeleines kind of way.
There are several shops in the Bay Area that make a tidy living by importing English/Australian etc packaged junk food and selling it to ex-pats at a huge mark-up. Similarly, there are specialists selling Indian condensed-milk sweets and nibbles (though these are genreally made fresh) and lots of Chinese/Japanese supermarkets full of endless variations on pot noodles.
I remember Dan pining for Oreos in London too...
Realising that all the tiny things about America that I've seen in films, comic strips and so on aren't enormous cultural symbols or meaningful things at all. People skateboarding down the street, wearing baggy trousers, Twinkies et al: they're normal, like Hula Hoops (the crisps).
Sweets and snack foods are very local, and obviously emotionally important in a Proust's madeleines kind of way.
There are several shops in the Bay Area that make a tidy living by importing English/Australian etc packaged junk food and selling it to ex-pats at a huge mark-up. Similarly, there are specialists selling Indian condensed-milk sweets and nibbles (though these are genreally made fresh) and lots of Chinese/Japanese supermarkets full of endless variations on pot noodles.
I remember Dan pining for Oreos in London too...
Wednesday, 16 April 2003
Toothpaste Tube
If you grew up in London, like me, this map will strongly readjust your mental model of the city.
Tuesday, 15 April 2003
Opposites react
Dorothea continues documenting her ambivalent relationship with academia by pointing to an essay on academic alienation by a marxist ex-academic, who urges the abandonment of ambivalence for commitment.
I can see that may sound less than enticing, but it may help explain a widely noted phenomenon:
[...] this is not another story about how Berkeley is better than Knoxville.� Most of the ways it is (and of course it is) are obvious, and the last thing the� people reading this essay need is the sense of this superiority reinforced, as though the very real struggles of the UT students who I fell in love with year after year are somehow less significant because Knoxville has fewer cultural and political resources than Berkeley.� Rather, this is the story of the forms of disengagement that structure academic departments in general.� Certainly at the top of the profession, in places like Berkeley, scholars are far more likely than at UT to be engaged in national conversations. Yet at every level of the academic institution, a variety of individuals find that the best or easiest way to keep themselves going is by staying out of the way of department life.� At prestigious schools, where people actually have the money to do so, this results in the incessant flying around the world making connections, and the consequent political overvaluation of the so-called global over working in local institutions.� This itself is a form of disengagement.� At the University of Tennessee -- which is nowhere near the "bottom" as these things are assessed -- most faculty members are involved in neither national or local conversations, and as a result become altogether disengaged.
[...] I went from being a participant in specific, local, political movements to being� "global," or at least travelling all the time.� Because there weren't enough people in Knoxville who shared my interests.� [...]� Some academics build genuinely useful networks; others simply avoid responsibility for what needs to be done where they are.
I can see that may sound less than enticing, but it may help explain a widely noted phenomenon:
[...] this is not another story about how Berkeley is better than Knoxville.� Most of the ways it is (and of course it is) are obvious, and the last thing the� people reading this essay need is the sense of this superiority reinforced, as though the very real struggles of the UT students who I fell in love with year after year are somehow less significant because Knoxville has fewer cultural and political resources than Berkeley.� Rather, this is the story of the forms of disengagement that structure academic departments in general.� Certainly at the top of the profession, in places like Berkeley, scholars are far more likely than at UT to be engaged in national conversations. Yet at every level of the academic institution, a variety of individuals find that the best or easiest way to keep themselves going is by staying out of the way of department life.� At prestigious schools, where people actually have the money to do so, this results in the incessant flying around the world making connections, and the consequent political overvaluation of the so-called global over working in local institutions.� This itself is a form of disengagement.� At the University of Tennessee -- which is nowhere near the "bottom" as these things are assessed -- most faculty members are involved in neither national or local conversations, and as a result become altogether disengaged.
[...] I went from being a participant in specific, local, political movements to being� "global," or at least travelling all the time.� Because there weren't enough people in Knoxville who shared my interests.� [...]� Some academics build genuinely useful networks; others simply avoid responsibility for what needs to be done where they are.
Wolfram speaks
Stephen Wolfram, Author of Mathematica and 'A New Kind of Science' was invited to speak by my employer today. Here are my running notes of his talk:
How do structures form?
1st assumption - easy to do; didn't work.
Approach fundamentally wrong - mathematical analysis worked for simpler phenomena, what can you do differently?
Previously based on existing mathematics; wanted a more general construct, which led him to programs.
Consider space of all possible programs, and consider what kinds of programs are found in nature. Mathematica is a new tool like telescope or microscope - reveals the computational world.
256 1-d Cellular Automata is a simple program space to explore. (If you're running OS X, try my program that draws them)
Patterns in nature look more complex than man-made things. The simple rules can give rise to natural complexity - mollusc shells have very similar patterns.
Without computational tools it is hard to see these patterns; people looked for regularity not irregularities.
Principle of Computational Equivalence - complex systems are of equivalent computation. Not linear - phase transitions between kinds of sophistication.
Computational limit is achieved often.
Is rule 30 computationally universal? No, but 110 is. You can make a Turing machine from rule 100 - it is computationally universal.
If the observer is computationally more complex than the system, they can see the patterns; in practice the observer is equivalent in complexity, so systems can look complex.
For a system that is linear or repetitive, you can find out an arbitrary future state; for a computationally complex system you can't. Simulation is necessary, not just convenient.
Mathematics has chosen a subset of possible systems that are tractable, rather than complete.
Simple underlying equations of physics - a 14 bn year program. CA's not appropriate. Do not distinguish matter and space, just define space. Think of space as like water - looks continuous, but is made of interacting particles. Underlying space is a network of nodes with connections between them. Look at dimensionality d dimension r^d nodes.
Are space and time different or not? He thinks yes. Global sync like a CA? Not needed. Consider a single active cell that moves change around. Can only follow the causal network, so you only know others have changed when you get updated too.
Can derive special relativity from the low level network model, and move on to General Relativity.
Not yet derived Quantum Mechanics, but can model particle interactions.
Ongoing reduction of 'specialness' - every time we get less special, science gets more general. Simple abstract systems are as computationally complex as we are.
Process of paradigm shifts - see notes in back of book.
Mathematica - algorithm resource base. Mathematica notebooks as publication model. Symbolic language under Mathematica - symbolic structures.
Schr�dinger's equation relating to these systems - do they apply to PDE's? Yes - start with a Gaussian distribution, get the same kinds of complexity. Can one make PDE's from discrete systems? Yes can do it with fluid mechanics.
Can't derive Schr�dinger's equation at the moment. Rigid body mechanics is harder than fluid mechanics.
Bells inequality - atoms can be joined through the 'space' network - only approximately 3-dimensional.
PCE vs awareness & consciousness? Hierarchy - life, intelligence, consciousness.
Life definition gets harder as we get machines and programs. Life as we know it has a common ancestor, so there is a historical definition. PCE says there is not a general notion of intelligence or consciousness - they are connected through our 'computational history' through pre-existing evolution. Self-awareness 'Real-time philosophy is hard'. Neural net approach to brain modelling is static - machinery is continuum dynamics.
Penrose's discrete and continuous equations - discrete space 'spin networks' fit with the network model of Wolfram. Penrose thinks computers are different from humans. Penrose's view of computing is that brains are different - he considers computers do predicate logic, and is wrong. Continuum vs discrete mathematics - had thought that continuum could transcend Turing, but can't prove, but can't find examples.
I asked him about the connection between his categories and the applicability of the Central Limit Theorem, and he pointed out that while it would break down for his complex systems, it will also break down for long-tailed distributions too.
How do structures form?
1st assumption - easy to do; didn't work.
Approach fundamentally wrong - mathematical analysis worked for simpler phenomena, what can you do differently?
Previously based on existing mathematics; wanted a more general construct, which led him to programs.
Consider space of all possible programs, and consider what kinds of programs are found in nature. Mathematica is a new tool like telescope or microscope - reveals the computational world.
256 1-d Cellular Automata is a simple program space to explore. (If you're running OS X, try my program that draws them)
Patterns in nature look more complex than man-made things. The simple rules can give rise to natural complexity - mollusc shells have very similar patterns.
Without computational tools it is hard to see these patterns; people looked for regularity not irregularities.
Principle of Computational Equivalence - complex systems are of equivalent computation. Not linear - phase transitions between kinds of sophistication.
Computational limit is achieved often.
Is rule 30 computationally universal? No, but 110 is. You can make a Turing machine from rule 100 - it is computationally universal.
If the observer is computationally more complex than the system, they can see the patterns; in practice the observer is equivalent in complexity, so systems can look complex.
For a system that is linear or repetitive, you can find out an arbitrary future state; for a computationally complex system you can't. Simulation is necessary, not just convenient.
Mathematics has chosen a subset of possible systems that are tractable, rather than complete.
Simple underlying equations of physics - a 14 bn year program. CA's not appropriate. Do not distinguish matter and space, just define space. Think of space as like water - looks continuous, but is made of interacting particles. Underlying space is a network of nodes with connections between them. Look at dimensionality d dimension r^d nodes.
Are space and time different or not? He thinks yes. Global sync like a CA? Not needed. Consider a single active cell that moves change around. Can only follow the causal network, so you only know others have changed when you get updated too.
Can derive special relativity from the low level network model, and move on to General Relativity.
Not yet derived Quantum Mechanics, but can model particle interactions.
Ongoing reduction of 'specialness' - every time we get less special, science gets more general. Simple abstract systems are as computationally complex as we are.
Process of paradigm shifts - see notes in back of book.
Mathematica - algorithm resource base. Mathematica notebooks as publication model. Symbolic language under Mathematica - symbolic structures.
Schr�dinger's equation relating to these systems - do they apply to PDE's? Yes - start with a Gaussian distribution, get the same kinds of complexity. Can one make PDE's from discrete systems? Yes can do it with fluid mechanics.
Can't derive Schr�dinger's equation at the moment. Rigid body mechanics is harder than fluid mechanics.
Bells inequality - atoms can be joined through the 'space' network - only approximately 3-dimensional.
PCE vs awareness & consciousness? Hierarchy - life, intelligence, consciousness.
Life definition gets harder as we get machines and programs. Life as we know it has a common ancestor, so there is a historical definition. PCE says there is not a general notion of intelligence or consciousness - they are connected through our 'computational history' through pre-existing evolution. Self-awareness 'Real-time philosophy is hard'. Neural net approach to brain modelling is static - machinery is continuum dynamics.
Penrose's discrete and continuous equations - discrete space 'spin networks' fit with the network model of Wolfram. Penrose thinks computers are different from humans. Penrose's view of computing is that brains are different - he considers computers do predicate logic, and is wrong. Continuum vs discrete mathematics - had thought that continuum could transcend Turing, but can't prove, but can't find examples.
I asked him about the connection between his categories and the applicability of the Central Limit Theorem, and he pointed out that while it would break down for his complex systems, it will also break down for long-tailed distributions too.
Saturday, 5 April 2003
Blogs as Kritarchy
I've been reading a long paper about Kritarchy - governance by justice, and have realised that it describes weblogs rather well. A quote:
it is no more than a historical accident that the word �law� came to be used as the translation of �lex�. It was also and more properly used to translate the Latin �ius�, which has nothing to do with the exercise of political authority. �Ius� denotes a bond or obligation arising out of a personal commitment made in solemn speech (�iurare�, to swear) and in a more general sense the order of human affairs that arises out of such mutual commitments. In other words, �ius� presupposes a condition in which people meet as free and equal persons and arrange their affairs by mutual agreements, contracts or covenants. This is in clear contrast to �lex�, which presupposes that one man can unilaterally oblige another.
The notion is of people interacting through mutual consent, conforming to natural law - justice is determined from the Golden rule and its philosophical ramifications.
In the physical world, contention over scarce resources undermines this; in the virtual world we can all be judges of each other's thoughts and writings, as there is no coercion for others to read them.
it is no more than a historical accident that the word �law� came to be used as the translation of �lex�. It was also and more properly used to translate the Latin �ius�, which has nothing to do with the exercise of political authority. �Ius� denotes a bond or obligation arising out of a personal commitment made in solemn speech (�iurare�, to swear) and in a more general sense the order of human affairs that arises out of such mutual commitments. In other words, �ius� presupposes a condition in which people meet as free and equal persons and arrange their affairs by mutual agreements, contracts or covenants. This is in clear contrast to �lex�, which presupposes that one man can unilaterally oblige another.
The notion is of people interacting through mutual consent, conforming to natural law - justice is determined from the Golden rule and its philosophical ramifications.
In the physical world, contention over scarce resources undermines this; in the virtual world we can all be judges of each other's thoughts and writings, as there is no coercion for others to read them.
Keep the spectrum, keep it open
Mike Godwin has a suggestion to avoid the Digital TV impasse. Allow each TV station to decide whether to keep the digital spectrum and return the analog, or vice versa, and require them to make their programs available for internet download,
Personally, I don't understand why no-one has pointed out the missing principle in this debate. If TV stations are to be given local monopoly rights over big chunks of public spectrum, they should be required to not encumber their transmissions with encryption or access control, so the public can freely receive their shows.
Personally, I don't understand why no-one has pointed out the missing principle in this debate. If TV stations are to be given local monopoly rights over big chunks of public spectrum, they should be required to not encumber their transmissions with encryption or access control, so the public can freely receive their shows.
shooting people to create a demand for hospitals
A wonderful anti-DRM analogy from 'Sanity' on Slashdot:
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:
"stop shooting people!"
"what, you don't like hospitals?"
Capitalism is a means to manage scarcity, and it is very good at it, but artifically creating scarcity just so that capitalism may be applied is like shooting people to create a demand for hospitals:
"stop shooting people!"
"what, you don't like hospitals?"
Friday, 4 April 2003
Simultaneous editing
Hydra is a very nice implementation of this idea - you share your document to the net and people can edit it at the same time as you (you get to choose who). It uses Rendezvous and Addressbook, so you get user icons like iChat.
Jem wrote something very similar nearly 10 years ago before we dragged him into Newton development. His ran over LocalTalk, but it did allow two people to modify the same file at once.
NB Hydra is OS X only.
Jem wrote something very similar nearly 10 years ago before we dragged him into Newton development. His ran over LocalTalk, but it did allow two people to modify the same file at once.
NB Hydra is OS X only.
Thursday, 3 April 2003
Googlewash? Hogwash.
Andrew Orlowski has written a rant about bloggers 'googlewashing' the phrase 'second superpower'.
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protesters, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his thesis that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to. (Update: today the NYT removed its archives from the web, so any links to the original article would now be dead).
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google rankings by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for many years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
Coda:
I like to link to Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay at least once a year, if only to remind myself to re-read it. Mr Orlowski could profit from reviewing it too. His neologism 'googlewash' falls down on Orwell's criterion of creating a meaningful metaphor. Orlowski derives it from 'greenwash' which evidently derives from 'whitewash' - to paint over flaws to give a gleaming exterior. Yet 'googlewash' does not follow here - the complaint is not that the new google-friendly definition is hiding the flaws of the old, is it?
As Orwell puts it:
The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protesters, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.
In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his thesis that it's all about the street, man).
As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to. (Update: today the NYT removed its archives from the web, so any links to the original article would now be dead).
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"
Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.
It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.
But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.
Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.
The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.
Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google rankings by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for many years.
Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.
Coda:
I like to link to Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay at least once a year, if only to remind myself to re-read it. Mr Orlowski could profit from reviewing it too. His neologism 'googlewash' falls down on Orwell's criterion of creating a meaningful metaphor. Orlowski derives it from 'greenwash' which evidently derives from 'whitewash' - to paint over flaws to give a gleaming exterior. Yet 'googlewash' does not follow here - the complaint is not that the new google-friendly definition is hiding the flaws of the old, is it?
As Orwell puts it:
The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
Wednesday, 2 April 2003
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