We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The June edition of technology, futurism and culture magazine Wired has a fascinating piece by Steve Silberman about growing government restrictions in the United States on home-chemistry kits and how this could bar children from learning from, and getting excited by, science. Instead, children are likely to increasingly encounter chemistry and science not up close in a lab and by playing around with kits, but via video or school labs where experiments are conducted in highly protected environments. I can see the thought process here: “If youngsters get home-kits to make chemical experiments, then the odd potential bin Laden brewing up a concoction in his bedroom could go out and try to blow people up.” Small-scale amateur rocketry has already experienced similar bans or restrictions on stuff like the fuel used (“some nut might shoot a plane out of the sky!”).
But the security services are missing the “Pack not a herd” point of Glenn Reynolds and others: namely, that in a rich civil society where lots of people have hobbies and interests including messing around with chemistry, physics and technology in their spare time, it creates a natural “social capital”, if you will, of people who can prove mighty useful in an emergency. The same edition of Wired magazine has an article on how companies like Proctor and Gamble use home-based scientists – what Wired calls “crowdsourcing” – to fix problems that their own in-house professionals take more time and a lot more money to solve. If I were a defence or security official, instead of treating all amateur scientists as potential trouble-makers, I’d co-opt them, issue prizes for new ideas, and so forth. I suppose this links to my point below about the value of X-Prize contests.
So by all means be vigilant in the fight against terror. But if geeky children want to learn more about chemistry at home, I think that is a healthy thing to be encouraged. Our ancestors, such as these fellows, who often arrived at scientific breakthroughs after exploring scientific ideas in a far less regulated environment than today, certainly would have agreed.
I am just having a relaxing weekend out of London. Dublin (and Ireland in general) is a delightful place, and is perfect for a relaxing weekend. The absence of immigration controls between Britain and Ireland means I do not have to spend an hour and a half in the non-EU nationals queue when I get back to London, which is also good. I have been to other parts of Ireland, but somehow I find I have not been to Dublin since 1997, which is far too long. I am presently in a cafe just off Grafton Steet, which has properly civilized free WiFi, and I have been reading Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End in cafes and bars and airports. It is good, but not as overwhelming as A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge is amongst the greatest sf writers currently writing, but I do not think it is quite one of his major works. I will reserve judgement on that until I reach the end of the book.
An episode of Dr Who last year was based on the idea that there was some sort of cosmic energy source in Cardiff, and the Doctor and Rose (as well as the villain of the story) went to Cardiff to in some sense feed on the Energy source. This idea that some places are special, and have deep religious significance and healing properties, or special magical powers, or are the locations of gateways between universes or similar, is of course one which exists throughout religion, mythology and fiction. But when I wander around a city looking for a WiFi hotspot I am struck by the sense that it has become in some ways literally true. WiFi hotspots are places where the magic of the modern world works in a way that it does not in other places. I am fully connected to the world, whereas when I am outside one I am restricted to using cellular networks, which have bandwidth restrictions and pricing systems that are generally so clueless that I am unable to use them in the way that I would like (well, if they are not clueless they are so determined to not lose their voice revenues that there are lot of services and pricing schemes they simply will not consider). This gets much worse when I am outside my own country and I have to pay idiotic roamng charges. Recent studies have actually tended to suggest that for people paying their own bills, reducing roaming charges actually increases revenues rather than reduces them, because halving the cost causes to speak to people for more than twice as long. However, there is again a “We do not want to lose existing revenues” factor, as the majority of revenues presently come from business users who do not pay their own bills.
Of course, it is not an original observation that computers and magic are similar in peculiar ways. Programming a computer is almost literally the same thing as casting a spell. You write down words, and things happen in a real world as a direct consequence of the words you utter. A program is an incantation. You get the words even slightly wrong, and bizarre and unpredictable things happen, just like in so many magical stories and legends. Computer hacker lore is full of references to wizards, and demons, and gods.
Arthur C Clarke wrote a long time ago that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, but I think even he failed to predict the extent to which this has, almost literally, become true (Vinge of course understood this before anyone).
I can not imagine that WiFi hotspots being special places will last for long though. We are going to have ubiquitous and fast wireless data networks almost wherever we go before long, just as we already do for voice networks. Finding a place without the equivalent of a hotspot is going to be like finding a place without cellular coverage – not all that uncommon, but annoying.
By the way, I am in an outlet of a chain called Cafe Java, which in addition to free WiFi and what looks like rather good food, has a fine tea selection as well. There gets a point where I have had enough coffee, and switching to green tea (which is what I am drinking now) or similar is my preferred approach. I wish someone would open one of these near where I live, or indeed a chain of them all over London.
Also, what in the name of Allah is that giant vertical silver thing that has been erected in the middle of O’Connell Street?
While rootling around yesterday for links concerning the Arcelor story, which has a Russian angle because Russians were also trying to take Arcelor over, I came across this story, from Mosnews.com (whatever that is):
Scientists from the Russian city of St. Petersburg have announced they had managed to develop a new, drug-free variant of cannabis which, if grown on industrial level, would cross with wild growing hemp end eventually force it out of existence.
Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Sergei Grigoryev of the Russian Plant Institute as saying that the amount of psychotropic substance in the new variant of cannabis is practically zero. When the new plant is crossed with the wild growing hemp the amount of psychotropic substance in the latter will gradually become less and less. If Russian hemp is grown on industrial level, it could even force the cannabis that is used for making hashish and marijuana out of existence.
This has got to be the perfect Samizdata news story. It has drugs, scientific progress, lots of US foreign policy angles, massive opportunities to disagree about its truth, implications, etc. It has everything we want.
My pennyworth is that, in the event that there is any truth to this story (which I do not assume), then this may be only the first step in a new drugs war, this time between scientists trying to develop and improve this Just Say No cannabis, and scientists working to strengthen the ability of your real, drug sodden cannabis to resist the attentions of Just Say No cannabis, and if anything to become even more drug sodden. Sort of like red squirrels versus grey squirrels but with gazillions of dollars to back each colour of squirrel against the other colour of squirrel.
Far out, man.
I have been watching the Wikipedia story unfold with great interest. I know that many turn their noses up at this ‘militia encyclopedia’ because of its inherent problem: sometimes contributors either do not know what they are talking about or they are not entering information in good faith.
And yet I often find it is my first port of call when I want some information on a non-critical subject because it is just so damn usable. True, I often tend to cross check data with other sources but if it is regarding a subject I already have some knowledge of (say I want to jog my memory about some detail of the war of the Spanish Succession) or fairly trivial (such as what is Eliza Dushku’s ethnic background (and the answer is Albanian)) I usually just use Wikipedia rather hunt for a book or look elsewhere online.
I have no idea how Wikipedia will develop in the long run but it is already an astonishing example of user-generated content that explodes so many long held notions of value exchange and ‘commons’ that I have a feeling that looking back in twenty or thirty years we may see this experiment as one of the internet’s ‘Gutenberg moments’.
Just spoken at vloggercon on the net neutrality panel. It was organised and chaired by the guys from blip.tv – Charles Hope and Mike Hudack, who was recently on PBS NOW programme debating the issue. The panel discussion was heated at times and only reinforced my opinion that this is one of the most important issues affecting the future of the internet these days. The points below reflect my position:
- The telecoms and cablecos are heavily regulated and their cries for free market are false. The industry is already warped and the argument against net neutrality based on the desire to keep government out of ‘markets’ is misplaced.
- The distinction between consumer and user is gone. It is in fact the ‘content’ produced by many individual vloggers that put the social media cat among the old media pigeons. The media industry has smelled the wealth of content and feels the urge to control it.
- A network that is heavily regulated and not very innovative is being used as a model of control and regulation for a network that is amazingly open, innovative in a historically unprecedented manner. So the government is imposing regulation from a closed and cumbersome industry to an agile and dynamic space.
- Nothwithstanding all of the above, net neutrality legislation is not the answer – it is more like ‘casting out a devil with the devil’. There is no fundamental understanding of the internet as a space, marketplace, world or a frontier (for more on this see Doc Searls’ article on Saving the Net). The debate should not be about the internet as a sum of pipelines and wires and content and packets delivered across an infrastructure. It should be in terms of protecting the space in which the individual has been empowered and the emergent benefits of interactions among those individuals that are having an increasingly sociall impact.
There was more but this is what I can think of whilst sitting in the middle of vloggercon still in full flow.
Update: In the heat of the moment, I forgot to mention my ‘solution’ – deregulate telecoms and cablecos so we have something resembling a real competition at the pipelines and wires level. Then the pipeline takers will not have a case to control content and what goes through. Susan Crawford sums it up well:
Think of the pipes and wires that you use to go online as a sidewalk. The question is whether the sidewalk should get a cut of the value of the conversations that you have as you walk along. The traditional telephone model has been that the telephone company doesn’t get paid more if you have a particularly meaningful call — they’re just providing a neutral pipe.
cross-posted from Media Influencer
Not long ago I did a posting here about material progress, as illuminated by a book about the past which described a time before many of our modern comforts had been devised. A commenter commented, as at least one commenter always will during discussions of this sort: dentistry!
He was right of course. And it so happens that I have been reading another work of history, by Charles Spencer, this time about the Battle of Blenheim, in which the primitive dentistry of earlier times gets a particularly memorable mention.
The Battle of Blenheim was fought in 1704 between a coalition of allies under the command of the Duke of Marlborough and various French armies of Louis XIV. Louis XIV is of course the villain of the story, who gets his just comeuppance at Blenheim. However, it turns out that finding all his grand plans of European conquest thwarted by a supreme commander of genius, who, in the words of Sir Edward Creasy, “never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take”, was not Louis XIV’s only bit of bad luck. We learn, from an early paragraph in Blenheim (pp. 20-21 of my paperback edition), that Louis had another huge misfortune to contend with towards the end of his life:
In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonising and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar. However, they were ignorant of the importance of post-operative hygiene, and infection set in: the king’s gums, jawbone and sinuses became dangerously inflamed. A committee of nervous physicians concluded that drastic measures were called for. Louis underwent a truly terrible ordeal: they removed all the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic, the king being fully awake throughout this procedure. The most powerful man in Western Europe was helpless before the primitive medical knowledge of his time. At least the wounds were kept clean on this occasion – cauterised with red-hot coals.
I almost feel sorry for the man. But having got this sad story out of the way, Spencer then goes on to describe what Louis XIV’s soldiers did to the people of the United Dutch Provinces – genocide, basically, to all of them that they could get their murdering hands on – and any sympathy you may feel for this abominable man immediately disappears.
But the point about dentistry remains. The average citizen of an average country now enjoys vastly less painful and more knowedgeable dental care than even the grandest of kings had to endure in earlier times.
Never knock progress.
It appears that so-called “animal rights” thugs’ targetting of scientists and attempted intimidation of investors has backfired, at least in terms of trying to win around public opinion to their cause. Well, it is true that the majority of Britons loathe such groups, but I don’t think these folk are really concerned about winning hearts and minds as so much working out their own damaged psychological problems through a “cause” that gives them a sense of power and fame. The sadness of it all is that the case for advancing animal welfare – hardly a trivial issue – gets lost in the noise. For all that I am an unapologetic meat-eater, I certainly think everything practical should be done to minimise suffering of animals. In fact, one of the great things about growing advances in the fields of biotech, genetic engineering and the like is that it reduces the need for animal testing, possibly removing it altogether.
Green terrorism is not something cooked up by science fiction. It is all too real and threatens immense damage to our economic and material wellbeing. Maybe the famously sentimental British animal-loving public are getting the point.
Recently someone added, or tried to add, a comment on to ancient (July 1st 2004) Samizdata posting of mine, about some great photos taken by a guy called Richard Seaman, of the SpaceShipOne launch. Such are the ways of Samizdata that I got an email about the comment, and was thus reminded about the original posting. Which was quite short and included the following:
Seaman used a Canon 1Ds digital SLR camera, a snip at $8,000.
Seaman is a fine photographer, but much of the genius of these photos lies in the automatic focus system that this camera has in it. More fuss should be made of the people who devise things like this, I think. Boy would I love one of these – but smaller and for nearer $80, in a couple of years time.
Well, even since about last November, I have had just such a system on my camera. This camera didn’t cost me $80. It cost me just under £130. But then, I only had to wait just over a year for it. But in about July of this year, exactly two years after that earlier posting, I reckon that a cheapo digital camera with automatic focussing will probably cost, I don’t know, around … $80?
Imagine a world in which politicians cut there prices for their “services” to the tune of about 99% (or whatever amazing figure it is), over a period of two years. Ah, statists will say. But what politicians do is so much more difficult. But that’s the whole point of capitalism. It concentrates its efforts on that which is not merely desirable but on that which has become, despite all appearances to the contrary, possible. If it can’t be done, they just walk away from the problem, and make a note to come back later when it can. Meanwhile, they don’t throw good money after bad.
Politicians spend fortunes merely shuffling back and forth the fact that this or that problem is indeed a very great problem, claiming all the while that ever more money must be pointlessly thrown at it, right now, so that we can continue to hope against hope for an answer, immediately, from them.
And of course many of the problems of politicians are self-inflicted and impossible. Like: how do you abolish a queue for something very nice that you are giving away, but which you have only a limited supply of? Answer: forget it, fools. Many politicians actually prefer impossible problems, because if their preferred urgent problems were solved, then no more money would be “needed”. (The whole environmental movement is best understood, I suggest, as a search process to invent problems which are impossible to solve, because impossible to really know about, but very, very important – thus requiring infinite money and political interference, for ever.)
Capitalism. I love it. Just so long as nobody tries to make it compulsory reading.
I have never really grokked what makes Apple loveable to people – their style is attractive, sure, but it strikes me as very 50’s “modern.” And it all looks so identical, little rows of computers all looking exactly the same, little iPods all exactly the same, little stores all with exactly the same arrangement, etc. It all seems so mindlessly conformist, these endless plastic rounded boxes all in antiseptic white. It looks totalitarian.
This insight into Apple Computer’s design was made by the reader Balfegor, in response to a post by Ann Althouse on the merits or otherwise of the offerings of that computer company.
I myself am so frustrated with the erratic performance and system bloat of Windoze XP that I am resolved to not purchase another item of software from Microsoft, and I am tossing up between buying an Apple or building my own Linux based system. I have heard great things about Apple’s recent offerings, but I had always had an objection to the company’s products which I could never put my finger on until I read Balfegor’s comments.
Ronald Bailey does not pull his punches when dealing with opponents of biotechnology:
Bioconservative intellectuals are fully cognizant of the tendency for our species to be suspicious of the new and the strange, and they clearly want to harness that suspicion as a strategy to restrain biotechnological progress. To that end they advocate adopting the so-called precautionary principle… it would mean that new biotechnological techniques such as stem cells, cloning, and sex selection should be presumed innocent, and those who propose a new intervention must bear the burden of showing that its promise outweighs its peril.
The problem is that humanity is terrible at anticipating benefits. Consider the optical laser. When the optical laser was invented in 1960, it was dismissed as “an invention for looking for a job”. No one could imagine what possible use this interesting phenomenon might be. Of course, now it is integral to the operation of hundreds of everyday products: it runs our printers and optical telephone networks, corrects myopia, removes tattoos, plays our CDs, opens clogged arteries, helps level our crop fields, etc. It is ubiquitous.
(pages 242-3)
His praise for the idea of material progress reminds of me what Brian Mickelthwait wrote a few weeks back on this blog.
I also liked this passage, where he refers to the unashamed opponent of material progress, Bill McKibben and others:
Respecting the sanctity of life doesn’t require that we take whatever random horrors nature dishes out. Safe genetic engineering, when it becomes possible, strongly affirms the intrinsic value of human life by producing healthier, stronger, smarter people more equipped to enjoy their lifes and to thrive during them.
(page 178)
Bailey’s book is strongly recommended and I pretty much agree with all of it. A point of his that I would emphasise is that of course, people are entitled to say that if they don’t want biotech or whatever, then they should not be made to pay for it. If biocons want to stop tax-funding of stem cell research, then as a libertarian, I entirely defend their right to refuse such funding but of course my view changes if such folk try to actually prevent private funding of such ventures.
Another argument that Bailey confronts head-on is the idea that by penetrating the mysteries of the physical world, we somehow lose our reverence or respect for life. That always struck me as a dumb argument. My amazement at the wonders of space is hardly dented by the insights of a Newton or the glorious photos taken by space probes. Quite the opposite. And whatever some genetic determinists (some of whom are sadly racists) may say, I don’t believe that the argument for free will and Man’s capacity for making meaningful choices in life is reduced one iota by our understanding of genetics. The more we know, the more power that gives us to shape our futures. I think it was a chap called Francis Bacon who said something to the effect that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Bailey is one of the better writers for Reason magazine. I definitely can recommend this book for those looking at controversies in this area, such as this subject.
I am presently on a Singapore airlines Boeing 747 over Afghanistan, on my way back to London from Australia. The aircraft has in flight WiFi. It is for-pay WiFi, but I could not resist. Looking at the physical geography of the place, I really do wonder what the Soviets were thinking when they thought that they could invade and subdue the country. (And what exactly was the point, anyway? What did they have to gain?)
More importantly than that perhaps was that the WiFi is not really that expensive. I am paying $9.99 for an hour, two hours is $14.95, and it gets cheaper from there. (Up to $26.95 for a 24 hour pass, which would just about manage the entire trip from Australia to England). Given that they are managing WiFi in an aircraft, and some sort of link to the ground (presumably via satellite) I can not really complain about the cost.
Intriguingly, this is actually less than my local Starbucks charges for WiFi access. Given that the total cost to them of offereing the service is one £50 router and a £ 25 a month ADSL connection that they probably have already, I think that somebody has their pricing wrong.
Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French ‘Google killer,’ he “doesn’t even know what a mouse is”. And that comes directly from a guy who is a partner in the French non-‘Google killer’. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:
So what is [Chirac] funding? Well, according to Bourdoncle, there will be no single Quaero site. Instead, Quaero is a program, a long term effort to spur various European competitors toward creating better search related technologies. Participants will share R&D, for example, as well as become each other’s customers. In other words, this is a government funded attempt at pulling together a keiretsu of sorts.
Not exactly a European Google killer, I commented. Nope, Bourdoncle responded, and attempting to do that would be a pretty stupid move. I couldn’t agree more. Sounds to me, I thought to myself, that Quaero is simply a way for huge companies like Thompson to insure a steady flow of dollars from its government, and if using the Big Google Is Going to Kill European Culture meme helps along the way, so be it. Before I could even mention that idea, Bourdoncle addressed it head on, saying he was sure folks might see it that way, and he was not one to say if it was true or not. “I’m not really sure what (Thompson’s) strategy is,” he said. “They don’t tell me that.” Sounds like the keiretsu is shaping up nicely, no?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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