CYBERDAWG BARKING // 11/26/98 // fry them turkeys! a bucket of loose thoughts: Lessee, now that this AOL/Netscape merger can dominate front pages and involve, not millions, but BILLIONS of dollars, I guess that we can resolve that the Internet is truly ubiquitous. Not only that, but we can relax and accept that Bill's world is also Steve's (at a party Steve Case once told a friend of mine that he sees the Internet as a seed community for AOL.) For those who perceive web-based commerce as a true killer app, this is a logical step forward toward second-nature status for the Internet as an integral part of daily life, like the telephone. Cultivation of ubiquity, seen through various niche filters as supportive of fringe culture, teilhardian spiritual evolution, sophisticated memetic envirnonments, community networks, etc., appears to be a Good Thing for many reasons, but ultimately it works because it feeds consumers to the engines of commerce. And though it's often vogue to assume the worst about commercialization vis a vis exploitation, those of us who're building and operating those engines can mitigate the more extreme effects of unbridled capitalism by integrating online markets with community, like the street markets around which human communities have always grown and flourished. We can build online communities and support community networking. These are not the same: online communities are contexts for social gathering and affinity building, and community networks are technological infrastructures for ensuring the broader distribution of Internet access, as well as social infrastructures to provide training and guidance for those who fall under labels like 'traditionally underserved.' I have a whole other danger/opportunity rant knocking around in my head, but no time this morning to flesh it out...more soon. cyberdawg

Cyberdawg: The Y2K Scam I've had enough. A few days ago Jerry Falwell characterized the "Y2K bug" as something like a message from God that we're screwing up, and at that point I'd had enough. Well, okay, if God thinks we're screwing up, she's right, but when were we ever NOT screwing up? And it's true that the Y2K problem results from an inherently human lack of foresight. But the real human failing here is the propensity for kooks and charlatans to construct doomsday scenarios around a manageable technical problem. Even programmers and analysts, who should know better, are overstating the problem, possibly to drum up consulting business and possibly because, even for reasonably intelligent folks, belief is just a swallow away. There are a couple of Y2K myths I'd invite you to consider. Because I don't write code and don't work with systems that are sensitive to century, I won't pretend to speak with complete authority...but I do have some Y2K background, and this is my somewhat informed thinking. First, what is this problem? For the sake of efficiency, programmers of many systems adopted a century-insensitive format for storing dates, like MMDDYY, where YY is the year stored as two digits, 1998 stored as 98. Hindsight tells us that this was a mistake, but nobody seemed to realize how long that code would stay around. Myth #1: We didn't realize we had a problem until it was too late. I was on a state agency's Y2K project team something like 4-5 years ago, and I hear that they're wrapping up the project right now. It is possible that they missed something, but given the time and thought accorded the problem, I figure anything they missed will be relatively minor. My agency wasn't exceptional...many agencies, banks, insurance companies, and corporations with large legacy systems using century-insensitive formats have also been working for several years to analyze for exposure (the hard part) and make fixes where required. The SEC requires public companies to file a Y2K status report. It's simply not true that no one's been dealing with the problem. Myth #2: Because computers and microprocessors are ubiquitous, our systems will crash around us on Jan 1, 2000. I see this one everywhere: "Do you realize how many microprocessors you depend on for your day to day existence? They're in your car, your television set, your coffeemaker, etc." The implication is that, wherever there's a digital system, you have exposure. This is muddy thinking, though, because most systems don't "care" what year it is. Your coffeemaker is not going to be confused when the date rolls over from 99 to 00, even if it's not "Y2K compliant." Where you might have a worry is with something like a credit card which shows an expiration date of 01/00 or later. But as many of you know, those cards were already issued, and some did have problems. Where problems occurred, they were fixed fairly quickly. No Big Deal. I welcome refutation, but disasterwise, I'm a lot more worried about random meteor strikes than about Y2K. If Jerry Falwell wants to save the human race, give him a space ship and a huge net. cy ber dawg

Cyberdawg's 1998 Top Ten List! Absent-minded as I've become, any ten things about 1998 that I can actually remember deserve to be on a list somewhere, so here 'tis, in no particular order... 1) Bill Clinton was busted for bad sex and political hell broke loose in DC, and the party-line divisions within the U.S. generated gaping crevices, sort of like in those earthquake movies, fragmenting the hell out of leadership and punditry. However the economy kept breathing and and ordinary citizens were remarkably consistent in their support for a president whose moral confusion didn't seem to affect his ability to hold the meetings and make the speeches that keep the ship afloat. 2) People in general seemed remarkably complacent about chaotic, often catastrophic weather conditions. As one hurricane followed another, we wondered whether global warming might be more than a nifty subject for an illustrated Scientific American article. Bruce Sterling, ever attentive to heavy weather, started an email list around his Viridian design concepts, building psychic infrastructure for a greening of the elite. 3) The Federal government asked the musical question, is Microsoft a monopoly? And if so, should we Do Something About It? The answers are probably yes and yes, in that order, but the quandary is what to do about it, what remedies the court will suggest. Meanwhile a cocky but elegant operating system called Linux finds increasing market share and mindshare, not because anyone is spending millions on marketing, but because it WORKS. (see #10 below) 4) I'm not sure that it's news anymore when we bomb the living fuck out of Iraq. Maybe they're really building bombs over there, and growing mutant viruses for germ warfare, making mustard gas derivatives, etc. Maybe they're evil, maybe they're scared. Maybe we think we're dead if we don't have a war going on somewhere. I just wish I could have more trust, but I guess I've seen too much. 5) The Internet is an industry. Corporations are spending millions of dollars on web sites and Internet marketing. Investors are pumping kazillions into Internet stocks of unproven value. We suspect that someone has sprinkled pixie dust over Wall Street. It's called "the long boom," and it's as real as immor(t)ality. 6) Then again, the Internet really might work as a channel for retail distribution, in which case some of those investments might just make sense. Retail to consumers over the Internet feels like a killer app; ecommerce projects were coming on strong by the end of '98. Delivery's a big deal here, so UPS, Fedex, USPS, Airborne, and possibly new carriers will benefit from an explosion of net-based commerce (and their infrastructures will be challenged, as well). 7) I always figured that the universe was only expanding until it was ready to contract, i.e. a grand-scale pulsating universe, but I don't know anything about physics or astronomy. It just seemed to make sense. In 1998, space-time theorists gathered paradigm-shattering data using new tools, such as the Hubble space telescope and way powerful new computing systems. I'm not an astronomer and don't have a clue how to interpret the data, but I keep faith in a vision of the universe-as-heartbeat. But who knows? Maybe the Firesign Theatre had it right: everything we know is wrong. 8) This one's personal: I completed a book, _Virtual Bonfire_, in 1998, but it was never published. Though it was probably the wrong book for me to write, I learned a lot while writing it, so the considerable costs of a four month sabbatical, barely impacted by the small advance, were a form of tuition. The concept was to write something like Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' specifically for online activists, but I drifted into the metaphysical, trying to make sense of democracy and political process. Like I said, "the wrong book." Alinsky was more practical than philosophical. Jon L. was trying to be both. The best (i.e. most practical) part of the book, a guide for creating online activist groups, didn't say enough about how to be effective once you've put the group together. Fact is, online activist groups haven't been terribly effective. Those who were most effective in getting the word out managed to orchestrate call-ins, fax-ins, and email petitions, but these had little weight compared to fleshmeets and money. We were unable to prevent passage of the Communications Decency Act despite solid opposition within the online community, and the CDA's content regulations would be law today if not for the ACLU's work on the court case, which took money and time and was quite grounded in the physical. The effectiveness of corporation donations to CDA opposition far outweighed the impact of the substantial efforts to organize the denizens of cyberspace. Jerry Berman of the Center for Democracy and Technology once told EFF-Austin that we should charter a bus and take our members to Washington, DC to visit our legislators where the action is, and let them see that we were real people with real concerns. We're associated now with folks (like Gene Crick of Texas' Telecommunications Research Center) who are visiting DC on a regular basis and working far more effectively than online activists. The book I should've written would have been less philosophical, less a consideration of "nodal politics" (as I called it), and more about practical political realities and solutions. I've moved on, though, and I'll probably never write that book. I wasn't a true activist, just a whacky guy who felt passionate enough about freedom and technology to commit a few years trying to put it all together. Now I'm back where I was in 1992, blending community and technology in a commercial context, and coming more from a context of social aesthetics and networking than from some political/philosophical realm. Real politics is more about taking than sustaining, but our activism was more about holding our own than taking somebody else's, so I like to think our intentions were pure if ineffective. 9) After studying the Amish in 1998, Howard Rheingold came away with a question of deep signficance: "If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?" (See Howard's article in Wired 7.01, January 1999, "Look Who's Talking") 10) There's a whole other 'digital top ten' prepared for the Austin Chronicle (forthcoming), and one of those has really stood out in my thinking since I completed that list. 1998 saw critical mass forming behind the Linux operating system and the Open Source movement. Linux is a computer operating system that runs on PCs, and is based on Unix. It's powerful and relatively bug-free, and it's been gaining users among system-administrator types and other users to appreciate its power and reliability. Linux is a success, not because anyone's aggressively marketing it, but because it works so well. A user-friendly graphical interface called GNOME (g'nome) is in development for Linux, and once it's completed, Linux will appeal to a broader user base. Linux is part of the Free Software/Open Source movement, in which source code for computer software is freely available for any programmers to enhance and improve. Open Source proponents believe that cooperative work among programmers will result in better software, sort of like peer review works in an academic context. This isn't new thinking, but in '98 it became more prevalent as, for instance, Netscape released source code for its Communicator product (the cooperative improvement of which is coordinated through the Mozilla project at www.mozilla.org). Open Source and Linux are looking more and more like real competition for Microsoft and Windows. Though this probably doesn't mean that Microsoft will collapse and die, it does mean that the company will have an effective challenger, and will have to compete, hopefully producing better software. And desktop users who adopt Linux will have an opportunity to learn what it's like to use reliable, effective software. This is cool. //jonl