AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Typeface Pointer

At the risk of involving myself publicly in yet another set of discourses, I mention that I scour the ’Net eagerly for new freeware typefaces. Since these aren’t regularly mentioned anywhere that I usually viist, I thought I’d mention that Nick Curtis just added two faces to his generous collection of designs—and, for the time being, I’ll try to remember to cite other typefaces I uncover that warrant publicity.

AKMA the Grey

Rex Masterson (whom you may know as Alex Golub) brings the epic cycle of danger, heroism, space, anthropology, unspeakable horror, hermeneutics, halakhah, emacs vs. vi, and dishwashing to its completion in Episode V of My Weekend with Leuschke (if you missed the preceding episodes—one can scarcely suppose you did—you may refresh your acquaintance with them at Episode I, IIa, (intermission), IIb, III, and IV).

At a moment such as this, one naturally begins thinking about the movie deal to follow. Rex, of course, gets one of the big-name stars such as Ben Affleck. For the role of AKMA, one would need a middle-aged, mid-level actor who’s not reluctant to leave top billing to the money players. Michael Caine and Sean Connery are rather older than I; Gabriel Byrne has done the ponderous theological roles to death; Viggo Mortensen would command too much money and attention these days (plus, he’s way better-looking than I). I wonder if Kevin Spacey is available?

Analyze This

Last night, I dreamt that I had been invited to give a talk to a continuing-education seminar of church leaders. That’s not so strange in itself, but the topic of the seminar was Church Growth (which makes it a little stranger, since that’s a topic about which I typically keep chary). But what made it really strange was that the headline speaker was Chris Locke. Yes, I just typed “Chris Locke.”

And since it was a dream that I’d only started having a few seconds before, I was totally unprepared. I figured, “Hey, Chris’ll set the tone, it’ll be highly improvisational, provocative, irreverent, and I can come in after and clean up some of the loose ends.” But it became clear as I started claiming the space for my presentation that Chris had been prepared to the teeth—this was not “faster horses.” I don’t have a chance to talk with Chris, but from a distance he looks entirely composed, engaged, pleased with how the morning session went. From what I can tell, Chris had these church leaders role-playing a trial from 18th-century France. And there are courtroom sketches, there’s newsprint all over the place, no one seems to have wigged out from profanity or incoherence—and I’m up next.

What makes it even tougher is that I know some of the people in my follow-up session. One is my old grad-school friend Greg Jones, now the Dean of Duke Divinity School (who looks skeptical about my being there: “I didn’t expect to see you giving a talk on this topic,” he says, and he has good reason since I’m not a church-growth-movement kinda guy). I see some other faces, and I begin the cold panic that accompanies pre-conference unprepared presentations. “Let’s see; Chris couldn’t have used the ‘faster horses’ routine; maybe it’ll work for me. . . .” I began to cobble together what seemed like a plausible outline for my hour of exposition, and as I stepped up to the front of the room with all the confidence I could muster—I woke up.

DigID, Commodities, Ascription, and Identity

I had a great idea earlier today, one that connected an earlier conversation about commodification with the ongoing conversation (or, thanks to Mitch now, converzisation) about digital identity and reputation, and the relation of the two. I doubt I remember the good parts, but hear’s what I do remember.

The key reason to resist commodification in general is that the market tends to define everything it encounters in its own terms. In the end, everything reduces to some kind of exchangeable good. People who describe the market—we can dignify them with the title “economists”—likewise define the ways that people behave as “market forces.”

But I’m not accurately defined as the sum of a variety of market behaviors and forces. There’s more to being A K M Adam than buying Apple computers, choosing second-hand suits, flying on United Airlines, avoiding purchases of leather when practicable, buying Shell gasoline at the station on Chicago Ave, haunting used book stores, and so on. Indeed, though these are all things the market wants to know about me (Andre’s T3 identity, if I understand the article correctly), but they miss a great deal of what I would say is important.

Now Andre talks about T1 identity and T2 identity also. He uses T1 identity to indicate the aspects of identity that we own, that are ours through and through, and T2 to indicate ascribed prerogatives. (Mitch thinks that we should own T2 identity also, but I lose the train of his thought at this point.) Andre points to credit cards (ascribed creditworthiness), job perqs (ascribed authority), server software (ascribing the bounds of permissible participation in the server’s network), and so on as examples of this mediated identity. I follow up to point out that this also captures very little of what it means to be A K M Adam. If Andre is right, and the T3 and T2 strata of identity information “constitute the bulk of today's identity marketplace,” then very little about my identity is actually in play at this point.

(To get back to Mitch for a second, I admire what he’s saying about building chaordic institutions, and about laying claim to our authority over what institutions say about us. At the same time, those institutions need, in order to function, to be able to ascribe categories and prerogatives to me that I do not myself dictate. I have an ascribed credit limit; I suppose I could go in and argue about it, but I don't want to spend that much money anyway. I f have certain limited prerogatives as a professor; I try arguing for more, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Even my prerogatives as a priest, deriving from the Ultimate authorization, aren’t mine to own. I can perhaps go with Mitch as far as extending the bounds of what we think of as “personal” information, but we can’t take ascription out of other people’s; hands.)

Now, I’ve just proposed that T2 and T3 information doesn’t; get at my identity; persumably, that’s all T1 identity information. But here again, (a) my identity isn’t subject to reduction to information (contra the exciting and popular visions of Dr. Kurzweil (love the keyboards, hate the theory) ), and (b) much of that “missing” material isn’t mine to own, either (Who loves him? Whom does he love?), and (c) none of the important stuff has any interest in immediate bearing on market behavior. But the commodification of identity tends first to treat my truest identity as bounded by those dimensions that are in fact of interest ot market agents; second, to define those characteristics in ways amenable to market assimilation (I’m defined quantitatively, or aggregated to a category of people who are just like me); third, the market impinges on me to try to make me behave as though my market-ascribed characteristics were my most important features; fourth, all of these operate imperiously, without my having an open place in which to say, “I’m a homely, deliberate, trusting, tries-to-be-generous kinda guy. I love reading (not just “buying books”) and writing (not just for pay). I put all my resources at the service of my family, my church, and the seminary at which I work.” That stuff is noise; the market is looking for the signal onto which it can latch, to determine my credit limit, my brand allegiances, my spending patterns, and the market segment that predicts, in the aggregate, how I will behave.

I’m running low on battery power again. My main concern here is that when so powerful a public arena as the market has the capacity to identify me in ways alien to my self-knowledge, and only partially mediated by characteristics ascribed to me by those who know me well, then we perpetuate models of social power that drive a wedge between the public commercial market-defined man and the private, socially-irrelevant, self- and human-defined man. The threat, the shadow, of such an imposed dichotomy will have more far-reaching effects, and will generate more far-reaching resistance, than I hear anyone in the industrial part of the DigID discussion suggesting. (Four minutes of power left--good night!)

Winer’s Law, Searls’s Corollary, and AKMA’s Suggestion

According to Doc Searls a few days ago, this is Winer’s Law:

“It’s even worse than it appears.”

To which Doc appends the Corollary:

“It’s more complicated than it appears.”

This appeals to me intensely; my students will attest, as with one voice, that I say this all the time. Now I have back-up from the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, which is worth a lot more than their hoary old professor’s word. (I don’t have a stand when it comes to the historical specifics to which Doc is pointing, save to observe what a sorry mess we humans get into when we start deciding whom it’s necessary to kill.)

Last week, I submitted for verification the proposal that “The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of disruptors to disrupt,” an entropic law of hacking/cracking. Since no one has pointed out that someone else said this first, I hereby lay claim to it as “AKMA’s way of saying something that a bunch of smart people knew all along, but none bothered to say it that way,” which will be my memetic ticket to information immortality. Whee!

DigID Re-re-visited

Well, I’m all chuffed, since Eric likes what I’ve been saying. Or, more to the point, because it sounds as though we’re tuning in to a common wavelength.

As Eric notes in an aside, though, the deep problem won’t be the “digital” end of “digital ID”—it’ll be the part about proving that you are the person to whom the DigID applies. Amplify that by the factors of people who may not be fully cpapable of taking care of something as important as a digital identity plan will be, and we’re facing some big-time problems about what it means fully to participate in the digital dimension of life. Bryan points to this also, at the bottom of David Weinberger’s mega-meta-blog (scroll down to the bottom of the page for Bryan’s spot-on conundrum for the practical deployment of DigID).

This begins to get at what I bent people’s ears about at DIDW. When the world treats our identities as constituted, in non-trivial ways, by numbers or passwords or fingerprints or DNA sequences, that inevitably affects the ways we perceive our own humanity.

Some of my digital friends will scoff, but it was twenty-four long years ago that Bob Seger made a lot of money with “Feel Like a Number”—and if he felt like a number in 1978, how much more so would he feel like a number in DigID times? And what about the people who sympathize with him strongly enough to buy the record? And the people who don’t especially like rock’n’roll, but who themselves mistrust the numerization (?) of identity? The scenes from Minority Report that illustrate the lengths Tom Cruise will go to in order (effectively) to beat the eyescan ID problem, illustrate both the tyranny of strong ID security, and the certainty that people will devise ways around any system we dream up. (The fact that the work-around is fictional doesn’t detract from my point; the screenwriter knew the spirit of resistance enough to know the lengths to which the next generation of hackers, in this case literally “hackers,” would be willing to go to defeat strong security.)

So Eric’s and my agreement about a graduated-security hypermedia environment may not be as encouraging as it felt at the beginning of this blog.

How does one cultivate the decentralized ID system on which Bryan, Eric, and others are working helpfully, without relocating the human particularity of our identities from our appearance, our memories, the sound of our voices, even our fingerprints, to something extrinsic (a massive privacy code, perhaps carriedon a card? but then, what happens when I lose my card?) or something hypothetically unique (DNA sequence) of which I have no awareness? My spouse and friends may know me as “AKMA”, but I’ll know that the electronic dimension of the world knows I’m really a garbled code of digits and letters. “I feel like a DNA code ID. . . ”

Takes a lot to sell that one in Nebraska and Peoria, Eric—but if anyone can, you can.

Reputation

The DigID discussion has been continuing via email, and I’m not sure how much I ought to quote—which makes my job harder, since I have been helped by some of today’s mailings.

So I’ll say just a couple of things, and hope that other people’s good ideas show up in their blogs, so I can bounce off them tomorrow or Monday.

I mostly want to signal my approval of Eric’s “protected net” and “dark net” proposal: a digitally-secure protocol-protected net, where high-stakes commerce and medical records and government functions can hide out, as insulated as they imagine they can be from crackers outside, as opposed to a looser, security-free zone where Other commerce and bloggers and no-need-of-security web functions can connect. This makes a good deal of sense to me, especially since I suspect that most customers will end up gravitating toward enterprises that respect their reticence about hard security. Eric’s; plan allows people to find online connections where they want to be, and that’s about right by me.

Probably because he was “.just spitballin over here,” Eric leaves his notion separate into just two congeries of links: the secure zone and the wild zone. I expect that fairly rapidly, many people would be attracted to an alternative that doesn’t pretend to be Absolutely Secure (a pretense subject to disconfirmation the first time a cracker puts a little effort into invading an inviting target) but also doesn’t suggest that everyone involved is an Mysterious Stranger. I think that’s what Doc and David are talking about: a Web which cultivates a distributed index of the people with whom you’re dealing, so that one person’s bad experience won’t blacklist you, so that many people’s bad experience will, so that who you know does matter, and how well they know you, and that these are not housed at/determined by/owned by a central Identity Agency, but are—in some sense—brokered.

In other words, a form of digital reputation, whereby my willingness to say, “Si’s my son, he’s a good kid, but he doesn’t have two hundred dollars to his name” means that Si would have a positive reputation for his sterling character, but would have a low reputation relative to financial transactions. Once he earns a little money, begins dealing with commercial entities and online friends more fully, his financial reputation might creep upward, and his character reputation would increase not in quality (everyone thinks Si’s a good guy) but in depth (now, more people would be saying so). Moreover, the endorsement of someone with a deep, positive reputation (say, Doc Searls) would weigh more heavily than an endorsement from, say, some guy in Illinois: me. A financial endorsement from Boone Pickens would mean a lot; a financial endorsement from me might help you finance a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s (no, not that much).

The point is that this cumulative reputation would reside not in my hands, as the person under assessment, but in the hands of other people who had an interest in giving a true sense of me (since my actions then reflect on their status as endorsers).

Distributed, not foolproof (as David points out, this is a strength of a system, not a weakness), and optional (as Kevin notes, if you put cash in the clerk’s hand, she doesn’t care who vouches for you).

Past my bedtime. Eric, Doc, Bryan (my AIM client still can’t see you), David, blog more tomorrow, so other folks can benefit from what y’all are saying.

[Sunday AM, before church: I know, this is fundamentally like a credit rating (though less centralized. And my suggestion doesn’t incorporate strong security that guarantees that the person claiming my credibility/credit is actually me—I’m counting on PingID to develop that!). But part of what David’s saying is that credit ratings and credit cards generally work pretty well, and I suspect it’s worth building out from there.

Andy on DigID

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
  Andy Warhol, as quoted on the sheet of postage stamps we bought to mail out our tardy holiday greetings

Starring Margaret

Regular readers may recall that everything clever and pertinent that appears here derives from the inspiration, suggestion, or flat-out dictation of Margaret. She influences whatever I write, but up to now has been caught online only obliquely (for instance, David Weinberger awarded her an arbitrary winner certificate in some long-forgotten JOHO contest, and though the contest itself ebbed from memory, Margaret has cherished the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, someone recognized her as a winner).

All that has changed, now that the hi monkey website has immortalized Margaret’s affection for its eponymous terrycloth primate. Now, millions (if not billions) of web viewers will see Margaret (and Si, in one photo) promenading the monkey around Nantucket Island in pictures from last summer. (Margaret disclaims responsibility for typographical errors.) Can movie offers be far behind?

Moving Toward Identity

Despite Mitch Ratcliffe’s kind invitation to stay in the discussion of exchange value and other topics over my head, I’m going to stick with the premise that impresses me most forcefully: that digital identity (and the commercial dimensions of the ’Net that will depend on some sort of online identity, in the face of the ’Net’s tendency to drive all things to the public domain). That is, why would an ordinary citizen want something roughly like a digital identity?

I can think of at least four reasons:

• Jane Public doesn’t have access to her everyday computer; perhaps she’s on the road, or away from work (or home), or perhaps she doesn’t even have a computer pf her own. In a world where we depend on identity that resides in cookies on a core computer, we have to reconstruct the traces of our identity every time we want to work from a different CPU; if we could walk up to a public terminal and log in as Jane Public, with the various identity-markers that adhere to Jane, life would be considerably simpler. Webmail illustrates this argument; I use my email client for daily purposes, but it’s very helpful to be able to access my email via the webmail interface if need be.
• John’s hard drive crashes. Sure, he ought to have backed up regularly, but even if he did, he may not be sure how to recapture his identity data.
• When Joan Public finds it advantageous (to her) to permit limited access to her identity data for marketing purposes, she’ll willingly participate in DigID (think Amazon’s book recommendations on a larger scale).
• Eric Norlin (who is dead right about the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring) points me to a fourth reason, that of identity theft. Of course, the DigID answer would have to be more significantly secure than the dispersed usernames and passwords of our present I>ad hoc arrangements (lest a cracker immediately gain access to all a user’s digitial prerogatives), but especially given the public’s fears about identity theft in the digital realm, this could constitute a persuasive selling-point in efforts toward a standard DigID system. In Eric’s vivid words, “for the most part, the average everyday person will accept it because they will be told how much more secure their transactions will be; how identity theft and fraud is being fought; how parental controls are now easier—stuff that, in Nebraska and Peoria, plays really damn well.”

I’ll say more about this when I blog about reputation, which I hope to do this evening or tomorrow morning, but the cardinal point in all this is that the impetus for widespread acceptance of DigID will come when it feels like using a credit card. That is, no matter how porously insecure physical-world credit card transactions are (and there’s no mistaking their comically insecure character), a credit card feels safe to most users. A credit card resides in my pocket; I can choose to use it or pay with anonymously cash (sometimes—but the ideology of security tends of conceal the exceptions); my credit card has whoop-de-doo security features like a magnetic strip and a laser-etched hologram, a confirmation code printed on the opposite side, and my own signature right on it. These contribute to a sense that somehow physical-world credit cards are secure, but digital identity isn’t. Give Jack Public the feeling that DigID works like a credit card, and you’ll be most of the way home.

On the other hand, if Verisign (“the value of suspicion”), for instance, uses its position as a DigID broker to determine who’s allowed to have a digital identity and who isn’t, to adjudicate which users may have access to whose web pages, and so on—they could rapidly poison the well of DigID goodwill with vivid enactments of every citizen’s fear of Big Brother.

Keep DigID as close to the edges as possible, give the user more control over DigID than she has over her credit card, and watch the ’Net flourish.

Me, a Hippie?

Well, now we’re getting down and dirty in the N E A/Digital-ID controversy. It looks like the core issue is, “Who is a hippie?” Eric obviously isn’t; David issues a partial disclaimer; the world waits for Doc to make an explicit statement on his hippie status. For my part, I’m willing to say it loud, I’m a hippie and proud.

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?

I think that hereafter, I’ll try to keep my mouth shut about business models, frictionlessness, exchange value, and other stuff about which I know next to nothing, and concentrate on “reputation.” But we’ll see what I actually do.

Digital Friction

Eric’s; point two seems unexceptionable: “2. The Access/Connectivity of the Net leads to a pooling of fragmented interests (nod to Ross Mayfield). This pooling reduces the friction of transactions and thus accelerates the natural curve of commoditization.” The closest I have to a dissent actually crosses me with Kevin Marks, who doesn’t see why “commoditizing something is deemed to a be a bad thing.” One might answer Kevin’s question several ways, but this impresses itself on me most forcefully: everything signifies more than its economic value—but once it becomes defined as a commodity, its social characteristics tend to reduce to its exchange value. That’s; not good, especially with regard to phenomena whose eschange value and whose social significance diverge markedly. If our frame for assess human endeavors relies primarily (or exclusively) on what they’re worth on the open market, we face hard times for poets.

Now I’m sympathetic to Kevin’s; point in the rest of that blog, so I don’t want to be starting a fight over commoditization. The ’Net makes it easier for people who want to break up their collections of Philip K. Dick novels to find eager buyers—thus making the world a happier place for both parties. Eric’s; point, though—that the more a particular sort of exchange has been affected by digital media (and written, aural, and visual recordings head the list), the less that sort of exchange can derive a premium from scarcity. In the familiar economy, the musician gets a premium from the recording company for [scarce] recordings, the record company gets a premium from buyers for copies of these [scarce] recordings, and a host of mediators receive premiums because they can get the [scarce] copies to potential buyers. The digital sledge hammer rearranges that whole model: there's no immediate reason a musician can’t distribute recordings of her own performances; the scarcities at the levels of access, copying, and even (to some extent) recorded performance have diminished and in some cases virtually vanished.

But this returns me to my perpetual refrain that we need a new business model, not a new way of enforcing the old. RIAA and Hollywood might like to use DigID to ensure that one and only one person has the right to listen to my copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but if DigID is going to function as a weapon for enforcing the perpetuation of an obsolescent business model, than we’re much better off without it. Kevin knows this, and is touting Mediagora; others may propose alternative solutions to the breakdown of the familiar model. But again, many, many of us want nothing to do with a systematic implementation of DigID if it’s going to be deployed to shore up a clueless enterprise.

I’ll be honest and say I don’t understand Eric’s point three (except the summary, “the net moves all things toward the public domain”). I could try to work it out, but itRs17 ;getting late, I’m tired, and I’ve already talked too much.

Point four applies the first point to the level of the economic ewxchange itself. Okay, I reckon.

Point five—“5. IF the transaction/exchange that occurs in the Net world is to be made as efficient as it can be made to be (something that economics assumes will happen over time), then the problems of high degree of anonymity and inefficient reputation mechanism MUST be solved.”—begins to push the case from general reasoning about circumstances, problems, and possible solutions, toward the necessity of resolving the matters Eric regards as problems. Remember, though, that not everyone agrees that anonymity should be regarded as a problem, nor does everyone agree that the tenets of market capitalism should determine how we build out the Web’s infrastructure (especially when that building-out seems to favor some participants in economic exchange over others).

Too many solutions to the DigID situation risk privileging one party over another (the buyer, the vendor, the producer) or one participant over another (AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, whomever), or to assign reponsibility for the systems’ security to an unreliable agent. I’m not speaking here as an adversary to any of the systems or institutions that Eric supports (though I’d be willing so to do at a different moment)—I’m arguing that it’s in the best interests of those institutions to make sure that DigID be done correctly, to feel comfortable to the user (as just another extension of the user’s own identity), and to avoid as far as possible even the faintest temptation to bias the DigID functioning to favor any cause but the user’s. When DigID begins functioning on that basis, commercial and civic interests will have ample widgets to play with, to make a nearly-voluntary DigID system work for all concerned.

Till then, as David points out, our current situation works pretty well. Why trade in an adequate compromise for an uncertain, overbuilt, unwieldy “solution”?

PS: A late note to Phil Windley—they can’t know what they’re losing.

No Parking?

Margaret pointed me to this story, especially pertinent in light of last week’s discovery of Jesus’ face on a street sign. . . .

Special Request

Does anyone with 1337 Photoshopping skills feel like making a montage of the three Blogsprogs? I’m editing my Norlin-blog from last night, or I’d hack away at it. . . .

Norlin’s Instrumental

Eric has surfaced a lively discussion, a lively renewal of the discussion on digital identity (current participants include Doc and David, and the blogthread goes backward from these most recent posts). Earlier, Doc was concerned that we were getting “testy” (thatnks for reminding me about that word, Doc—it’s a good one), but I don’t think Eric or I is (am?) feeling any but energized and provoked by an invigorating discussion on a topic we both care about. I trust Eric to let us know when he’s testy.

One wild card in the discussion so far may involve the different interests each participant has in the topic. Eric’s all about digital identity and, specificially, its engagement with commerce; Doc wants to gird up the N E A character of the ’Net; I’m particularly exercised about the ways that crossing over more fully into digitially-mediated reality changes what we think about ourselves as “human”; and Dr. Weinberger is so smart he thinks about all these things at once, plus twelve others, and sounds funny and self-deprecating at the same time. When you put those differences into a discussion, we can get side-tracked, testy, harmonious, and confused all in a matter of moments depending on who has the conversational ball and toward which goal the ball is moving.

So, in response to all this wisdom, I’ll blogback at Eric, point by point, with animadversions involving Doc and David where it suits me.

Eric’s Point One (edited): “1. The Internet brings (in essence) ubiquitous Access and Connectivity, but it does so with a high degree of anonymity and an inefficient implementation of reputation.”

Eric clarifies this to note that the Web is a nearly frictionless environment for economic transactions, but that anonymity engenders a twofold drag on transactions: first, in that “anonymity” makes for awkward transactions. We know that some vendors, given the opportunity to act anonymously, will defraud customers—and vice versa. That sort of anonymity will kill most, if not all, deals.

Eric cites “inefficient implementation of reputation” as a second problem, but that’s really just the other side of anonymity, isn’t it? If we had efficient means of establishing someone’s reputation, their anonymity would be shot, whereas anonymity entails a certain lack-of-reputation.

I agree with Eric that we can’t have both anonymity/lack-of-reputation and frictionless commerce at the same time. But David points out that we have them now, only in divergent loci. I’m not anonymous to Amazon (except when i’m in a hurry, in which case their cookie has always just disappeared), but I can be very anonymous when I visit Umbrella R Us, because I have never bought an umbrella, never plan to, and have no cookie from them in my browser.

One of the catches, though, at this point is that Umbrellas R Us can pop a cookie onto my browaser uninvited (unless I scrupulously monitor all such attempts, which I and most other folks are too indolent to do). That invokes the demon of Big Brother, observing your every click, watching you over your shoulder, and ready to siphon all your identity markers into the central database of Information Acquisition. I’m not fretful about DigID, but John Poindexter (working for George Bush) gives me the creeps; this kind of situation makes me want a way of manipulating my digital profile without putting in hours playing Cookie Detective.

So, relative to point one, my answer to Eric is, “Yes, the two-pronged feature/problem of anonymity and reputation introduces drag into the economic function of the ’Net. But. . . ,”
and I’ll say more tomorrow.

Manana

I was going to blog tonight about Eric and Doc and David’s latest contributions to the DigID blogthread—but I’m about to go to sleep, and I just didn’t get a round to it. Tomorrow.

Meantime, Wendy and Tom are working on Blogsprog 3. . . .

Voice of Sanity

Mitch Ratcliffe says the words that the public needs to hear about the Bush administration's heavy-handed bureaucracy to protect us from “digital doomsday.”

Let’s talk directly:

• “Monitoring” will only protect us from something we know we’re looking for, and the more energy we put into barbed-wire barricades to protect us from what we anticipate, the more vulnerable we’ll be to what we didn’t expect. Did anyone in Washington learn anything from 2001’s disasters?
• The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of idsruptors to disrupt (this must be “Somebody’s Law” already, but if it isn’t, this may be my big chance to go down in history). It’s the hackers’ manifestation of entropy: order costs more energy than chaos.
• The economic costs of illusory “protection” and the convulsions that will result if the illusion fails us amount to very much more than the cost of amplifying the Net’s capacity to route around disruptions. And back-up and redundancy don’t undermine the civil liberties of millions of citizens, or artificially constrain the growth of the single strongest economic engine that the United States presently can rely on.

On the other hand, outflanking problems doesn’t get the positive vibes and the tough-guy persona that wasting money with head-on confrontations generates. So we can expect the present administration to keep fear-mongering, wasting money, and reaping the benefits of high popularity and immunity from criticism.

Et In Arcadia, ID

David Weinberger wonders whether there need be a connection between on online reputation-identities (on one hand) and commerical identities (on the other), and in the comments Cory Doctorow muses that he’s not sure why we need anything other than client-side browser-based identity.

In hasty, spuerficial response, I would reckon that although David may want to keep “reputation” and “commerce” separate, that it’ll be a hard job to pry commercial entities’ tentacles away from conflating the two. I admire David for thinking it’s possible, though, and I support that vision—even if it subjects me to Eric’s aspersions of hippie-osity (hey, in this cultural climate, we could do with a lot more hippies).

As to Cory’s proposal, it sounds good to me, sounds like a set of protocols rather than an odious mediation. All we need is someone to write it and someone to implement it. . . .

Doc, Eric, Mitch, David, Kevin and Me

I’ve been watching closely the on-going brouhaha involving Doc Searls, Eric Norlin, Mitch Ratcliffe, David Weinberger, and Kevin Marks (and most of these principals have blogged more than once on the Big Topic in this recent exchange; it’ll take some clicking backward and forward to make sure you get the whole picture). They all know mountains about technology, about business, about plenty of things, more than I ever will. A wise man would therefore keep his mouth closed and just listen appreciatively.

Since I lack all pretense of wisdom, though, I venture to observe that I think Eric pushes his case too hard in these exchanges. I respect Eric’s position, inasmuch as he’s keeping a hard eye to where the money’s; coming from and going to, and the Net isn’t going to just keep on shooting electrons without someone paying bills somewhere. That much, we can agree on.

Eric also wants to puruse his work on digital identity as an aspect of his concerns about commerce and scarcity. Here’s one of the places I dissent. Identity—whether digital or physical—subsists not as a prop to commercial interests, but as a fundamental part of the way humans communicate with one another (Eric knows this, it’s taking his argument slantways, but bear with me a minute here).

It may look as though “identity” only justifies its continued existence by underwriting commerical exchanges. Plenty of people came back from their “identity-finding” expeditions in Tibet to devote sustained attention to the question of just which bottled tap water best fits their lifestyles. But that appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, “identities” attract such deep and persistent attention in public discussion partly because the debaters sense that the outcome of this debate will shape who we may be in the future. Once the notion of “identity” takes a single, transmittable, reliable pattern online, we’ll begin to think of ourselves as instantiations of that pattern, in the same way we think of ourselves as our job descriptions (“I’m a freelance consultant,” “I’m a writer,” “I’m a software engineer”). When Eric prods us to get comfortable with digital identity—“DigID”—to accept the inevitable commercial interest in DigID, to abandon our communal dwellings on Mars and get down to Earth where people know that “the true beauty of the internet is in the pornography, the capitalism, the conflict and dark corners of the human soul,” I can’t simply appreciate the verve of his presentation and nod politely.

The Internet is not (agreed) a tool for human self-betterment, and even if someone sometime intended it so to be, that particular intention was defeated long ago. It is a locus for human attention and interest that may help us better ourselves or degrade ourselves, to help one another or exploit one another—and here, I think, Eric’s position takes too easily for granted the commercial status quo of early 21st-century entrepreneurship.

Permit me to propose a different way of looking at things. Even if commercial interests (in which I include my own commercial interest in ordering a pair of Land’s End footie pajamas for my Dad, and a diverting book of comic verse for my Mom) require some manifestation of accountable identity online, we err catastrophically if we hand over to them the prerogative to determine how that accountable identity should work.

The cardinal reason for people acclimating themselves to DigID will involve the impulse to deal with people (or something like people) whom we can know through their observable behavior. We will want agents to be accountable for what they do, and we will want the friends and strangers with whom we converse online to offer some earnest stake in candor and trust. So the version of DigID that will succeed won’t succeed because it has the coolest interface, the highest security, the greatest degree of user-manipulation (most users don’t want any more settings on their technology than the bare minimum). The successful version of DigID will offer users primarily a way to know one another, to feel as though the “Snowbunny” with whom one had an, err, intimate discussion yesterday will be recognizable in some way when one encounters her or him today. That’s a desirable end for a mass audience: accountable, persistent, reliable online identity. That’s not what some privacy advocates want, but I’d bet that the preponderance of users would trade in their prerogative to generate multiple “anonymized” personae to preserve the capacity to have a (good) reputation, or to be distinguishable from a maleficent identity-hijacker.

If the people demand identity at this level, the privacy advocates should be sure to put their oar in the process of designing the protocols, because having an accountable, persistent, reliable online persona will appeal intensely to people who have no desire to be other than accountable and reliable, who want indeed to protect themselves from people who crave absolute anonymity. If Privacy won’t collaborate, they may lose their whole stake.

Then let someone figure out how these personae can do business online, and few people will mind. But if you say, “Hi, I’m MegaCorp—trust me, this application that you don’t understand, by which we keep track of your finances and commercial activity online, will make your life simpler and happier,” you will encounter incalculable resistance from people who’ve seen too many science fiction movies on this theme, who’ve read Revelation 13:16f (“[The Beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name”), or who’ve survived enough Blue Screens of Death and security patches to doubt the capacity of any system to withstand the varying demands that a DigID protocol will face.

If DigID is designed for users first, and only subsequently for commercial interests, then users won’t mind (much) sharing DigID with commerce. If DigID is designed for commerce first and thrust upon users, users will resist and evade.

Around Blogaria

Margaret forbade me to report the comment she made about the relative size of Cameron’s; head and Gary’s nose, so I won’t.

Chris Locke got an honest job, writing about business and Blogaria and gonzo marketing for Corante (home of Donna Wentworth’s Copyfight and Hylton Joliffe’s column on blogging, so they’re obviously serious about this)—a sweet gig, and a good combination of his gifts and their venue.

Euan “Obvious” Semple and I were iChatting this afternoon about learning, desire, institutionalization, resistance, and Chris Locke. We regretted ways in which the world shapes children to fit its institutions, celebrated the extent to which no system of political or cultural domination can be so completely effective as not to leave room for resistance, wondered whether the cost of resistance is always worth the gesture, decided that it’s better to burn with resistance than to be quenched by acquiescence, and wished each other well. I’ve never met Euan in the flesh; I love Blogaria.

Finally, it looks as though I’ll be in New York City the evening of January tenth and the morning of the eleventh. I might ought to make only soft plans for the evening—and heaven knows everyone else has more interesting things to do on a Friday evening than quaff coffee with me—but Saturday morning should be clear. Any offers or advice gladly entertained.

End-of-Term

I handed grades in today, on time. I still have to finish commenting on all the papers around my office, but I'm experiencing that all-over-body letdown response. All term, my body says, “Can’t feel fatigue; can’t get sick. Gotta keep functioning.” At the end of term, the body says, “I’m outta here. See you in a couple a weeks. Good luck!”

Which would be all right, I suppose, except that this is a season in which people expect one to accomplish a ridiculous amount of shopping, mailing, party-going, snow-shoveling (some years), church-attending (and for some of us, rehearsing). I’m crumpling up in a heap just thinking about it.

Can You See It?

From the profound to the ludicrous: I can’t decline the opportunity to call to our attention this sign of the times (as it were). Jesus appears at No Parking zone. As Pippa would say in her best Dr. Evil imitation, “Riiight. . . .”

I’m much more ready to believe things than your average Joe Skeptic, but I have to admit that it’s tough for me to credit seriousness to anyone involved in this fiasco. What it looks like from here is a sponge blot grafitto, and the straight-faced claim by Father Mike that “(The Church) can only (make a statement) after a thorough investigation of an event or the assuming appearance on a ‘No Parking’ sign” stretches my patience to the breaking point. That was really Don Novello dressed up as Father Mike, right?

Oh well, at least it’s a moment’s break from Cardinal Law stories. Plus, grades are due tomorrow, which reminds me to urge every reader to dash over to this post on Naomi Chana’s blog. (This afternoon, in my office: Tripp says, “Is grading really supposed to make you nauseuous?”) So after that all I have to do is. . . oh, right, Christmas is coming.

Non-Curricular Learning

Kevin and Doc and I seem to be a in a three-way email thread, which propriety forbids me to quote without permissions I don't have time to seek. But Kevin started things off with what was going to be a comment on my previous post, so I’ll venture to start with that. Kevins says:

I'm not surprised that Doc’s son taught himself to read; the danger is that he may have done it in an inefficient way. Whole word memorisation seems great until you top out at 1500 words or so, and then it breaks down, and he falls into guessing. Andrew [Kevin’s well-named son] largely taught himself to read, but a little extra explanation and help with phoneme-letter mapping (especially with schwa) helped him a lot.

Good materials present words in a sequence that lead the child to a useful abstraction. The Reading Reflex materials are great for this, and the Singapore Maths workbooks are an equivalent for maths.

It is certainly possible to learn basic arithmetic spontaneously, but expecting children to re-derive the rest of mathematics themselves is a little hard on them.

Doc responded with a description of the way that a child might learn new words, or even math skills in dialogue with a Socratic teacher.

Kevin, at last report, was still concerned that children not learn idiosyncratically, but learn an efficient way—and I re-enter the conversation here after a most-all-day faculty meeting, a search committee meeting, and a late-afternoon dean's-house holiday get-together (sorry, I hit a sale on hyphens). Kevin, I saw Nate and Si learn to read on their own steam, very early, and then saw them diverge sharply on how they acquired math skills (or didn’t). Pippa was actually doing some surprising math problems at a very early age, but then it seems to have drifted away from her. She has, though, begun reading at a staggering pace (after having really learned to read only thirteen months ago, or so).

So I respond that I’ve seen such variety in the ways children learn what they want to know, and such agony when a child was made to learn something “the right way,” that I’m still very much inclined to let people (now moving away from just children) learn things the ways that suit them best, to the extent possible. That’s not much of an extent in an institutional classroom; I have enough headaches just herding a class along through 600 years of church history, much less permitting each student to learn as best fits her or him. My effort to allow leeway involves assigning work of varied sorts, so that some part of the course should work for some person some time.

But learning at home, my children don’t have that all-at-once impediment. Pip became a voracious reader at 8, but Nate and Si were reading much more, much earlier. Pip is a spectacular designer; not so much Nate and Si. Nate rapidly became a music whiz when we let him start piano lessons. Si’s more a computer guy, into films and writing (and blogging, sometimes). But they all learned, their own ways, when they were ready. We’re excited for them, proud of them, and if they aren’t as efficient as they might be, neither have they been balked by trying to learn according to a schema that can be proved effective, but just doesn’t suit—them.

Ninth Anniversary

Part of Margaret’s and my joy at welcoming Cameron Fiona Turner into the world this week comes from our pride and delight at our marvelous daughter Pippa, who came home to us nine years ago today (at seventeen (long) days old). Watch out world: she’s got markers, watercolors, books, stamp pads, movies, Legos©, and a fabulously expressive face—and she’s not afraid to use them.

Learning and Desire

Doc and I have been emailing back and forth about our mutual admiration for John Gatto, about the Disseminary, and about Margaret’s and my homeschooling Nate (he’s a music theory major at Eastman School of Music, honest, though you might not guess it from the only online evidence of his existence), Si, and Pippa.

We had begun homeschooling the kids years before we knew John Gatto existed. At first, we considered buying a packaged curriculum; we were petrified at the prospect of flopping miserably at raising well-educated children. Eventually we wound up trying a home-brew, free-form approach to teaching Nate, and in the course of figuring out what was happening Margaret became acquainted with the work of John Holt. That settled things. From then on, we were unschooling the children, following their lead to help them learn as they felt ready, felt the need.

The years have had educational ups and downs, but we have seen before our eyes that children can learn as though they had cartoon vacuum cleaners in their brains, sucking book after book in. Our main educational strategies became (1) frequent trips to the library (spread the meme!), (2) leaving books in the middle of the floor, where the children were bound to stumble over them, pick them up, and give them a browse, (3) feint that we might not permit them to learn this or that, and (4) find others to help them with topics we weren’t ourselves adequately familiar with.

Doc observes,

Well, institutions have huge flywheels. I had a talk recently with a friend, a Ph.D., who had trouble believing that our 6 year old learned to read on his own (as did his older brother, many years ago... math too). Somebody must have taught him, she believed. We are all deeply locked into a belief system that regards education as a manufacturing system in which data gets downloaded from full to empty vessels by a curricular process involving teachers, classrooms, homework and sanctioned books.

This does connect with the Disseminary. Since Margaret and I had seen how our children thrived from learning what they felt the motivation to learn, when they felt the motivation to learn it, we also have observed how much more readily seminarians learn that which they want to learn, that which they care to grapple with as part of their formation for ministry. The Disseminary proposes that anyone who wants to learn about theology and religion should have the opportunity so to do, without the expensive, inessential appurtenances that institutional education entails.

Does this mean that we oppose the kind of teaching and learning that institutional education offers? By no means, as the Apostle said. We simply don’t think that it’s healthy for anyone concerned that “educational opportunities” should primarily entail “participation in a graded, periodic, for-credit, tuition-driven program.”

As I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Disseminary and its relation to my vocation as an institutional (no jokes, please, about “institutionalized”) theological educator, I’ve adopted the terminology of “non-curricular learning.” I encounter that phrase mostly in discussions of literacy, but it manifestly extends far beyond the acquisition of language skills—much of our most important learning comes from sources other than school. With the Disseminary, we’re trying to offer a locus for non-curricular learning about theology and religion, opening up theological inquiry, and thus enriching both institutional and un-schooled (in the Holtian sense) learners.

The Practical Syllogism

The Happy Tutor brought a thrill to my heart the other day when he, entirely without my hinting or coaching, he alluded to the Practical Syllogism (most of the way through the Tutor’s generous encomium and gratis philanthropic advice to the Disseminary project). I strive diligently to help seminarians recognize the utility of the practical syllogism for clarifying the sort of ethical tangles that face clergy every day. Indeed, one of my Michaelmas Term courses was “Biblical Theology and the Practice of Ministry,” a course in learning how to apply the practical syllogism not on the basis of Greek truisms about honor, status, and excellence, but on the basis of scriptural characterizations of wise actions.

To oversimplify, the practical syllogism differs from the scientific syllogism inasmuch as the scientific syllogism concerns logical or mathematical demonstrations of “what cannot be otherwise”—the proofs we studied in geometry and logic classes. In these syllogisms, the major premise states a general truth (“All humans are mortal”), the minor premise states an instance of the general term (“Xanthippe is a human”), and the conclusion predicates the general condition of the particular case (“therefore Xanthippe is mortal”).

The practical syllogism concerns matters that may have divergent outcomes. In the practical syllogism, the major premise invokes a rule or a guideline for action (“People ought to support enterprises that affect their well-being for the better”), the second identifies a particular case as an example of the general rule (“The Electronic Frontier Foundation benefits my well-being,”) and the conclusion is not a theoretical claim but the action itself that the major premise sets forward (in this case, it would involve my clicking over to the EFF and donating some money to help them).

One of the beauties of the practical syllogism lies in its coherence with a narrative approach to ethics; as in all casuistry, everything depends on how you characterize the case in question. This (in turn) fits the way people really make critical decisions in real life (pardon all those “real”s from a postmodern guy). We think of these situations narratively, not taxonomically, and the practical syllogism fits that way of thinking to a tee.

To tack on a response to a central question that the Tutor poses in his response, Yes, the Disseminary should respond very directly to academic “outsiders,” or perhaps more precisely should decline to distinguish insiders from outsiders. The Disseminary aims to offer theological riches to any who care to partake—part of the reason that “credits” and “grades” make no sense in the Disseminary environment.

Law and Justice

I’ve hesitated to say anything about the disastrous turn of events in the Roman Catholic church lately. I’m a pretty pro-Catholic observer, and I have many friends for whom anything said about the Boston archdiocese would give more irritation than lemon juice in a paper cut. Besides, what is there to add to the obvious: people entrusted with power over human vulnerability in its deepest fundaments betrayed that trust, exploited people who turned to them in hope, and (horribly) turned away from the exploited to cover the posteriors of the insiders. What can damn these actions more convincingly than simply restating them?

But then, but then yesterday morning I contemplated other church crises I have known, crises that have enveloped me, and I recognized more complexity to the Boston catastrophe. In situation after situation—and reflection reminds me that this applies not only to church politics, but to civic politics as well—intelligent, temperate people have preferred to support a leader who supported their interests, even when they knew that leader to be flawed (though more often, they staunchly professed reluctance to believe any ill of the leader in question). I hardly ever, ever see someone say, “He may reflect the opposite side on this or that important issue, but he's a good man,” or “She’s always backed me up, but that doesn’t grant her the right to molest children.”

That’s an unnerving thought. I can supply many reasons, some of which are laudable; for instance, just as everyone accused of a crime needs a lawyer to represent him or her in the best possible light, so every sinner needs at least one minister who will not pass judgment. (It’s sad that the church gets heat both for being “judgmental” and for being insufficiently strict. Of course, the church warrants both those characterizations in different places, at different times.)

On the other hand, mere idle self-interest or fear of boat-rocking can becloud one’s judgment about what the best course might be, can rationalize inaction as “compassion for the offender.”

The hard job requires sizing up the situation, risking one’s integrity on the discernment, and calling balls and strikes as one sees them. Sometimes that call entails sitting attentively at the side of someone one knows to have been wrong, at the cost of appearing to mollycoddle an ogre. Sometimes that call entails naming the ogre’s monstronsity for what it is, when so many others would hush things up.

Often enough, though, people will simply line up behind the leader they figure is on their side, offering rationales for his alleged misdeeds. We’re seeing now all too clearly what happens when people invoke their own experience to minimize or invalidate the transgressions that the favored leader has manifestly committed. Our side’s interest trumps our assessment of justice.

We ought by all means to condemn the venal folly of those who callously betray others. And we ought not suppose that our motives escape examination, nor that those who take an opposite view necessarily endorse villainy. It’s all more complicated than that.

Tough to Concentrate

Among the million things going on around here, we’re mostly just relaxing and waiting for the good news from the UK. . . .

It looks like Margaret may win the pool with her choice of Dec. 16. . . .

Phase Two

Well, I’m up past my bedtime, so all bets are off as to the quality of what I’m; about to point out to you, but I cobbled together draft one of the supplemental sketch of the Disseminary proposal.

Trevor and I will be getting together next week (did I mention that classes are over for the term?) to elaborate the sketch, embroider the proposal, and generally fantasize about what we&#8217d; do with a pot of money (rather than think constructively about how to wheedle a pittance out of our grantors). After we’ve had some time to work on it, we ought to be able to spruce it up, some. But I’ve at least posted what I remember of our platform. As always, your feedback is welcome, espcially if you have something encouraging and quotable (special props to Pem, who’s way out ahead of the rest of you laggards in the “quotable” department. Though that bit about “most brilliant proposal in cosmic history” may strike the committee as hyperbole).

A Toast!

As the faculty of the University of Blogaria await the birth of three potential students, as they rest from their academic labors or gird themselves for further authorial, consultative, commerical, or other incoming-producing endeavors, I invite them (and us all) to raise a glass of sarsaparilla to honor the newest member of the University faculty, Elizabeth Lane Lawley.

Prof. Lawley has been garnering plenty of Blogarian attention lately, and rightly so. Shuffle further down the bench, y’all, and make room for her just over there, between you two.

And here’s hoping that her wisdom extends to steering her students away from Prof. Weinberger’s earnest efforts to implant the “spatial”/“place-ial” metaphor for the Web. Not to revive a horse we’ve maltreated so persistently that it’s a wonder David and I aren’t both on PETA wanted posters, we need a richer metaphor for hypermedia than the spatial metaphor. Don’t succumb!

Force of Memory

The other night, the spectacular Pippa watched Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, a show I remember vividly from my own childhood. I may even have watched it the first time it was shown; I recall having the sense that I was about to watch something extraordinary.

Anyway, the representation of Dickens’s narrative just riveted me as a child, and some of the melodies still linger in my memory. The terror that Jacob Marley evoked, the sadness of Scrooge’s childhood, his eventual transformation into a grasping tightwad, and the harrowing third dream—these seared themselves into my spirit. Even the repulsively cloying musical number at the end (about “Razzleberry Dressing”) didn’t attentuate my admiration for the movie.

When in a subsequent year, Mr. Magoo featured in a series of hour-length adaptations of literary works, I was captivated. I still remember Magoo’s Count of Monte Cristo and Robin Hood, his Frankenstein, his Moby Dick, and especially his Cyrano (a masterpiece of typecasting).

These were indeed cartoon adaptations, very far from the grandeur and richness of the literary originals, but they bespoke the animators’ affection and respect for the original works. I don’t know that I’d have read The Count of Monte Cristo if not for the Magoo version. I’ve loved Cyrano in a number of media, but I doubt the premise of the play would have held my attention if I hadn’t already known about the pathos of the litterateur and swordsman (it’s all about honor, Shell!).

I waited eagerly for a second season’s worth of adventures; sad to say, the ratings had been too low, and Mr. Magoo disappeared into animation-limbo, emerging for occasional forays into syndication and “new, improved” series. None held my imagination in thrall as the literary adaptations. I wish I could point my kids to them; I see they may be tracked down on videotape, not yet on DVD.

Whoops—This, Too

John Virtue helpfully pointed me to an obituary for Ivan Illich from the Guardian that gives a more sympathetic account of his importance than did the AP wire story. . . .

Elitism Encore

I threatened to blog my comment to Burningbird’s post on Conferences and elitism, but yesterday was a busy day (so is today, but I’m still in denial) and I didn’t get around to it. Today, since I’m not sure I’ll get to any other blogging, I’ll blogify my follow-up comment to Bb’s follow-up post. To wit (or, perhaps in this case, “To half-wit”):

I wasn’t remembering the whole context of Aaron’s post when I mentioned and linked to it. The language of “normal” ;and “special” does indeed deserve the “elitist” tag. The subsequent question is, “Does Aaron’s elitism qualify as the opprobrious kind of elitism?”

Let’s face it—Aaron is special, and (in the sense he’s using the term, perhaps the only sense in which this is true) I’m normal. Aaron may well not want to diddle away an hour or two of time that he could be spending with Larry Lessig or Dave Winer talking to a geeky priest. I can’t fault him too much for that; I’ve had my ear bent by plenty of people who want to tell me exactly what’s wrong with postmodernism, and how anyone with half a brain can recognize these problems in an instant.

If we turn the spotlight away from elitism and toward alternative ways of looking at the situation, I see several defining problems for this sort of endeavor.

First, who decides who’s normal and who’s special? Shelley might think I’m special, but Aaron not. Who prevails?

Second, how do the “normal” people feel about the distinctions? Aaron’s point has merit to the extent that many “normal” people are indeed willing to subsidize the “specials” whom they come to watch. We’d be doing something rather odd if we determined that it’s inappropriate for me to pay my registration fee and quietly observe a panel with Cory Doctorow, Doc Searls, and Mark Pilgrim just because I ought to feel no less special than they. If folks want to pay for technological stars to riff and jive for them, then more power to all concerned.

Third—and perhaps most controversial, and at the most interesting heart of our conversation—how do we preserve the possibility of somebody coming out of nowhere to make unanticipated, valuable contributions to a “special” conversation? The institutionalization of special-ness drastically vitiates the possibility that a lowly attendee with ashes on her dress may turn out to be the tech-conference Cinderella. Many of us “normals” cherish this as a fantasy about ourselves; some of us think that the wild-card possibility itself should be institutionalized; some don’t see a way around the world’s proclivity to simplify social relations of any large enough pool by stratifying in some way. In other words, we may not be able to structure our interactions in a way that guards against a distinction between normals and specials—but only our temperaments and interests can keep us open to the possibility that that normal-looking geek might in fact be someone more special than we had assumed.

[End of comment, resumption of blog]

That possibility of encountering an unexpected specialness is part of what enchants many of us about the Web in general and blogging in particular—so a bloggers conference would make an odd staging area for enforcing this distinction (as Ryan points out). But what I said about Derrida the other day applies equally to megawatt tech superstars: I can’t assume their lives would be noticeably enhanced by obliging them to meet and talk with me.

What’ll It Be?

David Weinberger can’t make up his mind. Does he want to attend a conference at his house, or not? As Brian of Nazareth said, “There’s no pleasing some people.”

No mind; it sounds as though Dave Winer wants to hold the right kind of conference, and it sounds as though he’s not thinking of holding it chez Weinberger. It’s a cool idea, indeed an idea that aches to be realized. Shelley put her finger on one hitch early on, but has subsequently warmed to the idea and made several further suggestions (and read the comments). Aaron (who actually lives moderately nearby—maybe we’ll meet someday) proposed some sound premises for a productive conference plan; Dave seems to be thinking along similar lines.

Jet lag isn’t as bad if you’re only flying to the central part of the country. What about Chicago or St. Louis?

I’m a Loser

It’s 10 PM in Chicago, well into Wednesday morning in the Turner household, so it looks as though Cam Turner will have to manage without the middle name “Shaft.” Oh, well. Golby’s got next shot in the baby pool; can’t wait to find out what his pick will be.

As for Gary’s proposal that I undertake the “Charlie” voiceover (scroll down) for an infant version of Charlie’s Angels (featuring the new-generation Turner, Matrullo, and O’Connor Clarke)? If it means a chance to work with the other stars, I’d jump at the chance (even if it turns out that one of them is named “Cameron Diaz Turner”).

End-of-Term Countdown

Marking papers today. Don’t hold your breath for thrilling bloggery.

Everybody In

Margaret, the reclusive mastermind behind my blog, has struck on the perfect idea to bring Cameron Turner out into public: we’ll start a pool to pick Cameron’s birthday, with the winner getting the prerogative to choose Cameron’s middle name.

It got started when Margaret asked me, “When do you think the baby will be born?” and I answered, “Tomorrow.”

“Why?” I was stumped by that question, but it got us thinking and the next thing you know, Margaret had dreamed up the pool.

So I have tomorrow, and my chosen middle name is “Shaft”—“Cam Shaft Turner.”

Margaret claims December 16, and she declines to determine Cam’s middle name; she allots that choice to Fiona, who has gotten too little appreciation in this whole ordeal (she says). But if she were choosing, it would be (of course) “Ludwig.”

Your contest entries?

Me, Too

Since Denise and Jeneane and Shelley and Doc are picking their favorite demotivators, I thought I would too:

Havin’ a Conference

David asked for it. Let’s have a tech conference at his place.

Now, it would be wrong to inflict ourselves on Ann and Nathan and Leah, so we’ll have to find out a time that they’re planning to spend in the Berkshires, or Tahiti or something—but I think that WeinbergerCon has real potential. Put on your thinking caps, everyone, and we can begin arranging the program and looking for sponsors. Of course, David gets dibs on the master bedroom, but we can tussle over who gets the other beds. I’ll settle for the couch in the TV room.

The University of Blogaria will dedicate all of its annual fund to supporting this worthy endeavor, and it will without a doubt generate lots of attention in the tech world (as everything that David does), so this would make a perfect occasion for someone to unveil a new killer app, or protocol, or lots of free food and trinkets (so long as they leave behind presents for David’s family).

All paper proposals will, of course, be accepted, and all particpants will be paid as much as the keynote speaker (except that since they don’t live there, they don’t have to stay behind and clean up after). Make your travel reservations now, and we’ll figure out the dates later!

It’s Going Around

Margaret spotted this story in the New York Times this morning, and she thought immediately of Jonathon and me.

I’m always glad to see a celebrity getting in touch with the daily reality of kitchen hygiene, but I tend to wonder whether she’s slumming or a real, dedicated, dishmatician.

Speaking of which, she does not mention the Dishmatique, although she and the columnist makes a big deal out of her high-pressure spray hose (with a big illustration in the print edition). Margaret observed that instead of the friendly and practical Dishmatique, the story featured a device that looked like it belonged in a blog from RageBoy or Wealth Bondage. This comparison, unfortunately, suffers from the lack of an photo in the online version of the story; the implement in question appears in a smaller image in a catalogue here.

Testing and Proving

David Weinberger’s blog on the problems of standardized testing struck a chord with me, as I do what I can to prepare seminarians for the Episcopal Church’s General Ordination Exams (I know from having taught for the Presbyterian Church that they administer ordination exams, too; where Episcopalians fear the GOEs, Presbys dread “ords”).

It’s too late for me to say, “Don’t get me started. . .” but I’ll try to keep it brief. The GOEs are a catastrophic waste because (a) they soak up students’ and teachers’ energy not toward the end of learning and understanding their subjects, but toward the end of avoiding embarrassing failure; (b) they cost an arm and a leg to prepare, administer, and evaluate; (c) they are demonstrably unreliable measures of theological sophistication; (d) different dioceses treat the results differently (and it is alleged that students who don’t pass the exam are usually just given a reading list, or assigned an extra paper, or something).

In other words: GOEs consume significant resources to obtain unreliable results that are, in effect, ignored.

The only rationale for perpetuating this foolish institution is the question-begging assumption that some sort of testing is necessary. My response is, “There must be a way to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses that costs less and that doesn’t require that students run gauntlets of flawed testing instruments.” Must be.

The Disseminary

Well, I’ve finally made a first run at the main page for the Disseminary site. I’m sure there are many changes ahead, but this at least begins the job of making explicit the genealogy and aspirations of our project. Seeing it laid out that way, though, sure makes me itchy to get it started.

Trevor and I will re-draft the grant proposal after classes end this week, but if in the meantime anyone wants to leap to the front of the line, to get in at the ground floor (we promise to name the first pseudo-building after you, and we’ll put a gif of you on the page), just contact me.

I seem to have been getting a number of hits on the Disseminary presentation, and all are certainly welcome, but it would be especially swell if someone sent me some blurb-able comments.

Pressing Onward

Do I have the kindest bunch of Blogarian neighbors or what?

Sixteen years of priesthood, a ministry always changing, and yet this year has brought with it surprises on top of surprises; I’ve changed my mind, a lot, about spiritual matters and the Net. Most of that changing came at the impetus of thoughtful, curious, earnest, kind conversation partners such as the ones who sent generous gratulatory messages on yesterday’s anniversary of my ordination.

I’m humbled, though, by the reminder that Phil Berrigan died this week (I’d note that wood s lot doesn’t have a memorial section for him yet, but by the time I post this and wander over, Mark will no doubt have posted something). There’s momentous work left to be done, speaking unwelcome truths and beating swords into ploughshares. Philip Berrigan won’t be forgotten; Daniel Berrigan should not (especially at such a time as this!) be overlooked; and we can let all the world know that we can’t be baited into barbarity. The only blood we dare shed in the name of peace is our own.

Another Anniversary

Today, December 6 2002, makes sixteen years I’ve been a priest.

It doesn’t seem so long, insome ways. A lot has gone on in that interval, and I recall clearly the years leading up to that evening. Something so vivid in memory can’t be so very long ago. And I am, after all, still the same guy I was on December 5, 1986: rather plain, painfully limited in my wisdom and capacities, trying hard to do my best with the materials at hand.

On the other hand, sixteen years ago Nate was just a sprout, and Si hadn’t yet blossomed (though he was making his advent quite manifest). Margaret and I had celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary (!) and the eighth year of our devotion to one another. I hadn’t even begun my academic career. I had lived through so little of what’s gone past since. I had still only preached a handful of times, and was still a long way from feeling comfortable in a pulpit. I had not a clue about healing ministries (which have subsequently touched my life so powerfully). We were in the midst of the tidal wave of AIDS, but I had only the vaguest notion of what was happening around me, and would have been quite incapable of imagining the stories I would hear, the people I&#8217d; come to know, the gifts I would receive from people to whom I had expected I would be ministering.

Much of the difference I experience can be attributed very simply to the social construction of identity: people treat a priest differently from the way they treat a generally-pious person graduate school. (One day, a muffler shop even gave me a clergy discount.) Some of the difference resists reduction to social roles and expectations though, some of the difference surprises me and eludes me and still unnerves me.

Sixteen years ago, I had a hard time standing at the center of the altar when I said mass. I still have to remind myself not to drift slightly to one side.

Many problems beset clergy; I haven’t lost my grip and fallen into any of them yet, although the damage one can do from this vocation ought to daunt any sensible person. Perhaps to that extent my muddle-headedness will turn out a blessing, for I trudge onward hopefully, thankfully, astonished at all the lovely people with whom I’ve had the opportunity to abide, amid all the turmoil and fury that besets the world. When I see such love and grace in all of you, how can I not answer with my fullest effort to return your kindness, and to share it with all?

Illich and Us, and Miscellanea

One reason we think fondly of Ivan Illich involves our reasons for home-schooling Nate, Si, and Pippa. (I keep thinking that if I link to Si’s blog often enough, that someday Halley will notice and remember that she promised to restore her link to his page if he started blogging more regularly). Both Margaret and I could imagine healthier social environments than the schools in which we grew up, and we wished our children might enjoy the chance to learn without the frustrations we experienced. As we considered affordable alternatives, the one that kept coming back to us was home schooling, which resonated with us for Illich-ian kinds of reasons.

Then too, we haven’t deployed elaborate stratified appointed-hours lesson plans to impose order on our young ones. We simply made space in which they might learn (a shade easier in our context, as we don’t watch television at home). They read, and read, and take classes that interest them outside our home, and read, and do interesting stuff. (One of our favorite tactics has been leaving books in prominent places: in the middle fo the floor, on the dining room table, in the hall. Sooner or later someone almost always picks up the book, begins leafing through it, and eventually becomes engrossed by this unanticipated visitor.) And in so doing they learn a lot, and they don’t learn a lot. They never learn that their primary social group is a herd of other children exactly their age; they’re acutely tuned in to adults as social partners. They don’t learn that they’re supposed to stop thinking when summer comes, or that they aren’t supposed to want to learn, or that guys (or girls) who learn a lot are geeks or dweebs or whatever opproprobrious nickname their classmates might throw at them.

Margaret has borne almost all the burden of overseeing these years. While I work, she keeps them from becoming too interested in incendiary, or permanent-ink, or health-hazardous projects, she answers a thousand little questions, helps them think through and obtain their food (much more complicated than just serving them something), and so one—on top of all her academic work. I’m awfully proud of our kids, and I’m intensely proud of how much Margaret has done, for herself, for them, and for me. . . .

Another Sad Transition

The other day, novelist Alex Golub commented on what great intellectual losses we’ve suffered this year: Pierre Bourdieu, Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Rawls, and yesterday it was announced that Ivan Illich died on Monday.

Evidently he’s not worth the notice of Art and Letters Daily, and even wood s lot has permitted this transition to pass without notice (so far!); the only obit I’ve seen is a plain vanilla AP wire story (Austin American-Statesman), but at least in this obscure corner of Blogaria his presence and testimony will be missed. My friend Wes Avram passed the word on to me; Wes, I believe, studied with Illich, and in daily life and rich conversation Wes has provided compelling testimony to Illich’s resistant insight into the varied means by which modern culture binds us, confines us to living as much smaller, more limited, docile creatures than we may become. . . .

[Update: After I had checked in, wood s lot did indeed post an Illich memorial, with a link to the New York TImes obit (that’s different from the AP version I cited above; registration necessary).

SBL Recap Part Three

I had hoped to have finished reporting everything about the SBL meeting by now, and I’ll have to rush through on a relatively cursory basis. Sunday night was the Major Interview with Jacques Derrida, at which JD was polite, guarded, professedly anxious at the prospect of talking about religion in front of religious-studies scholars—but hs did talk for two and a half hours.

Margaret finished writing her response and wanted to print it out at dinnertime, but we couldn’t figure a way to print it at the Royal York. Trevor offered to try printing it at his hotel—he may have been staying at the Hilton—but that didn’t work either. Margaret is now feeling anxious herself, having only twelve hours before her session started and no prospect of getting her remarks printed out to read from (remember, this is Sunday night). We asked at the desk of the Royal York whether there was a Kinko’s or equivalent within walking distance; they shrugged and said, “we can open up the business center for you.” Great! I’ll get the computer and be down in a second. Came back downstairs, and the attendant who had assured me this was possible was gone. The only attendant whose attention I could get would only offer the prospect of the Xerox center (not the Royal York’s business center) opening up Monday morning at 7.

Fine. That’s the only choice, so it’s fine. We went to bed, slept as much as we could with the uncertainty of Margaret’s prose weighing on us (which was still a good sleep, since we were exhausted from our day), and got up in plenty of time to get to the Xerox center and print out the paper.

Go down to the Xerox center bright and early Monday morning (is this beginning to sound like a Woodie Guthrie talking blues? that’s the way it felt) and the gracious counter attendant looked dubious about the prospect of printing out directly from our computer. “Do you have blank CDs?” I asked. “I’ll burn it onto a CD right here and you can print from that.” She’d have to ask someone back in the office. Time is ticking away. Margaret is getting edgier and edgier. But the person in the back turns out to be friendly and encouraging, and she invites us into the inner sanctum to print the paper. But how would we do it? I don’t have a printer driver for her extremely complicated and powerful Mass Print Job Xerox printer, and she doesn’t know how to get documents from my computer to hers. We tried floppies (the attendant’s floppy drive was persnickety about mounting on my PowerBook). I asked about the network, but it turned out to be password-protected. I finally did burn a CD with the file, but the attendant couldn’t read files in the format she had just asked for. Twenty of nine. Margaret’s hair is standing on end. I burn a CD with every file format I can imagine that the helpful attendant would have; one of them finally opened, she printed it, and at four mintues of nine o’clock Margaret began her sprint from the Royal York to the Convention Center room where she was scheduled to be decorously seated. (I couldn’t go to Margaret’s session, because I had back-to-back grant-application appointments.) The response went wonderfully, from all the reports I heard; Margaret’s heart resumed its normal rate sometime last week, and we learned always to ask about the technological infrastructure whenever we make hotel reservations.

That was the evening of our ultra-elite evening reception with Derrida. We went, and had delightful talks with our friends in the reception room, and could have walked up to Derrida and said, “Hi, Jacques, pleased to meet you. Have you read Small Pieces Loosely Joined or The Bombast Transcripts? Great books,” shaken hands with him, and gone on with life—but Margaret and I decided that the people thronging around him really wanted to talk with him more than we did, so we’d let the others have the chance. Our lives wouldn’t be materially changed by the encounter, nor did it seem likely that his life would be significantly enhanced by meeting us, or diminished by missing us, so we had a couple more canapes and left.

For what it’s worth, and from what we could tell, he’s an exceptionally gracious, gentle, attentive man. Would’ve been nice to have a long talk with him about dishwashing and other matters for theological deliberation, but that opportunity did not avail itself. If you’re reading this blog, Prof. Derrida, just email me and we can set something up.

That left Tuesday. Tuesday morning we had a lovely breakfast with two of our dearest friends, Laura Wood and Shannon Planck, after which we hit the book display for a last-minute carrion sweep. We got to the airport in plenty of time, went through customs (on the Canadian side; I’m not sure what’s up with that), and settled in at the departure gate. Margaret and I pooled our Canadian currency to buy some birthday presents for Pippa (who was nine last Saturday), and as soon as our money was gone, we heard the first of a series of increasingly dire annoucements about the likelihood that we could make a timely departure from Canada.

After several rounds of delays, they came out and told us that they were just going to cancel the flight altogether, that all the other flights were full and probably wouldn’t leave anyway, that we should rebook for the next morning and that we should find some place away from the airport to sleep.

That’s what we did, and arising at 2:45 AM Chicago time, we staggered to the airport, to a plane that did leave on time, to a cab, to home at about 10:00 AM (where Si and Pippa were waiting for us, and where Nate would arrive at any minute). I fell right to sleep again. Then I woke up and blogged.

That’s the end of the story. I left out various exciting encounters, near misses, scholarly disagreements and illuminating conversations, but it was already a week ago that we got back, and I’m beginning to forget most of the details. . . .

Girlism, Grunch, Wounds, and Friends

Among the things I lost when I ran into repeated crashing problems on Sunday was a response to the “girlism” firestorm. There are too many threads to gather them all up effectively; some convergences at Halley’s, Shelley’s, Dorothea’s, Mike’s, Tish’s, Jonathon’s, Tom’s, (nothing blogged at Elizabeth’s place, but she’s been in the conversation), Doc’s, and I’ll add the participants whom I’ve left out as they come to view.

One reason I have’t joined in earlier lies in my fondness for everyone in the room, and my sense that I can see the admirable heart in what each one says, whether or not they’re on the same page as me. And it’s awfully hard to enter this sort of discussion without treading on some toes that already ache from others’ stomping. At the same time, though, I’m at risk of seeming not to care about a deeply important controversy among dear friends if I don’t come out on feminism, girlism, and everyone’s feelings. Let me take a deep breath, and we’ll see what I can do before my Early Church History class begins.

First, feminism isn’t dead, no matter how much it may bore some, however much it may not reflect a mode of self-assertion that some of my colleagues want to adopt. “Boring” isn’t the same thing as “dead,” or I wouldn’t be around to write this blog. And neither Margaret nor I finds feminism boring—and you may draw whatever inferences you want from that assertion.

Second, Halley’s “girlism” seems to involve using men’s assumptions, weaknesses, predatory/objectifying impulses against their [workplace] dominance, a sort of sexual jiu-jitsu (Jonathon, correct my martial arts terminology and spelling, please!); does anyone remember The Waitresses’ “I Know What Boys Like”? I’m against making censorious pronouncements about what women may or may not do to unravel men’s social dominance. I have only the slenderest basis from which to pass judgment on women’s tactics of resistance. Moreover, since I’m one of the Fathers who needs to be knocked down a peg or two, it would be all inside-out for me to think I could give permission or forbid a woman access to the means by which they can accomplish it. Especially if it’s fun, especially if it involves reclaiming power over one’s sexual presence, I’d best keep quiet.

Except, except, it’s so very dangerous a path to take. I don’t assume Halley is clueless on that; we’re pretty well acquainted, and she’s a canny operator (hey, it says “Harvard Business School” on the door where she works). My doubts derive not from worries about whether Halley can handle her way around the obscure dangers of playing with this particular fire.

But we’re talking about more people than just Halley here, and if we talk through the tactics of “girlism” apart from her, I see some painfully vivid effects of girlism. Effect One: it severs women who can and will use this tactic from those who don’t have access to that tactic. I get very edgy about strategies of resistance that engender division; we don’t have to look far, though, to see that girlism doesn’t only advance the cause of “girlists,” but distinguishes “girlist”-women from “non-girlist-women” (and that can pretty quickly be elided to “fun, cool” women versus “uptight, bitchy” women). Effect Two: girlism tends to reinforce men’s latent notions that women are there principally to titillate and delight them. Lots of fascinating women (whom no one has grounds to assume sexually inhibited, though I can’t claim empirical research on this point) don’t want to go anywhere near re-affirming the Playboy Bunny image that haunts men’s expectations of what women should be like.

Nowhere here would I say that all men are drooling patriarchs of lust (though Halley’s tactics would be futile if that condition weren’t moderately common). Few (if any) men, however, haven’t been affected by the cultural definition of women as consumable objects for male gratification—and those are pernicious effects, on men as well as on women. And dissenting vigorously from that paradigm doesn’t mean you hate men, or conventionally-attractive women, or men who like conventionally-attractive women, or. . . I’m losing track. Or anyone.

I’m out of pre-class time. There are important reasons for women to relish their powers, but even more reasons (so far as I can tell) for them to use those capacities with the utmost deliberation, lest their tactics backfire and they find themselves more isolated and powerless than when they started. That’s an effect we all ought to be on guard against, and we should affirm (if we still can) our solidarity against that corrosive isolation.

Only Rock’n’Roll, But It’s Prescient

Hey, Denise—hey, RageBoy! I’m counting on your high-level contacts in the Stones’ entourage to explain why, at this moment, in this nation, they haven’t been singing exactly the right song for our political moment?

You know my habits
Way a head of time
Listening to me
On your satellite

And there's some little jerk in the FBI
A keepin' papers on me six feet high
It gets me down

It’s a sign of how distracted I am (“Sha-dooby—I’ve been shattered”) that I haven’t called that, on of my favorite tunes, to mind any time in the last few months. . . .

DRMA: "Whosoever Will" by Bessie Griffin; "When the Night Comes" by the Boomtown Rats; "Too High" by Stevie Wonder.

I Thought I Said

I thought I had blogged, once upon a time, about the presentation that lies behind my new domain address (not where I’m now residing, but where I eventually will be) at The Disseminary. I can’t turn up a reference to it in my blog, though, and since I know I’ve blogged back and forth with you-all about my postmodernism book, my “integral and differential hermeneutics” essay, and about the “This Is Not a Bible” article, I think I must not have prodded anyone into noticing the Disseminary piece. (Perhaps I traded emails with you about it; what do I know? My memory’s shot this fall.)

Anyway, the presentation is here, at least until a lawyer from Blackwell's looks at their contract with me and sends a complaint. It’s a casual presentation that I cleaned up and published in Teaching Theology and Religion’s special technology issue in February. I’m working on a grant application related to the project, and if any of you (especially those of you with impressive quotable titles) care to respond to the premise, I’d delightedly quote the favorable responses in the grant application. (Unfavorable responses will benefit Trevor and my re-working of the idea, but I won’t necessarily cite ’em when asking people for money.)

Remember

I’ve had crashing troubles today, such that two carefully-drafted versions of this posting (make that three) have evaporated into their constituent electrons already. I just don’t have time to re-compose what I wrought for a third time, so I'll say just this:

I remember Gary Seife, David Weadon, Ken, numerous other folks from my years of AIDS and AIDS-Quilt work, but especially Jerry Miner, the first rector for whom I worked as an assisting priest, who was to Margaret and me a friend, a mentor, and a bulwark in stormy weather.

Remember that there are by now about 42 million people living with HIV or AIDS, most of whom have no access to the sustenance medication that keeps the mortal consequences of the disease at bay. According to UNAIDS, the international commission for organizing efforts to raise AIDS awareness and to contain and treat the AIDS pandemic, last year the rate of infection among pregnant women who tested positive for HIV at clinics in South Africa and in Addis Ababa fell to 15 percent, from 20 percent (in South Africa) and 24 percent (in Addis Ababa). In their World AIDS Day statement (PDF), UNAIDS observes that among those infected in lower- and middle-income nations, fewer than 4 percent receive anti-retroviral treatment and fewer than 10 percent receive appliative medication to ward off the effects of the disease (page 4). The report warns that without a rigorous, coordinated, international commitment to prevent and treat AIDS, “best current projections suggest that an additional 45 million people will become infected with HIV” by the year 2010. That’s a total of 87 million people (page 5), more than one tenth of the world’s population.

Blogarians have lots of other things on their minds, important things. We’ve been talking about gender politics and tactics, about Washington’s offensive against Iraq and the Bush regime’s tawdry deceptions and Total Information Avidity, about the grievous distance that separates Jerusalem from its promised identity as the City of Peace. Among all these crises, don’t forget that AIDS hasn’t gone away, that millions will die for lack of medications readily available to many in the US and Europe, that the number who will die in terrorist attacks, from dirty nuclear weapons, from alleged weapons of mass destruction that an Iraqi tyrant might use, all number far far less than the number of people who stand to be infected by, and die from, a preventable illness. Please, remember, and please, do what you can.