2006
371 posts under this date.
Get this: I love the net. There are few human inventions I treasure more; damn, there are few things I treasure more. Consciousness predated the net only by a slight margin in my life, and I can’t help but be a part of the translucent generation it has engendered, the first generation whose values have been shaped by the net.
Yet, I fail to understand what all the brouhaha regarding net neutrality is all about. Of course I’m moved by all the calls to action and won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children threats of impending netdoom, but I fail to see the real problem, the “great injustice”. And beneath the obvious good intentions, the rhetoric with which this argument is being fought by “my side”, the side of prominent netheads (Google’s Vint Cerf for instance), reeks of governmentism, stasism, and don’t-let-walmart-wreck-your-downtown anti-capitalistic sentiment—not my cup of tea.
Frankly, it all seems to me as articulate special-interest groups arguing for the right to impose their vision of the net on telcoms. This may well be the net’s first reactionary upheaval of nostalgia and status quo1, the first symptom of the sclerosis that plagues every human institution. An end-to-end internet is one of the greatest accomplishments of modernity, a vision I personally cherish, and the one that has successfully guided the web up ‘til now—granted. But that doesn’t mean I want it imposed on others, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t allow others to experiment with new visions. If we really cherish it so much, shouldn’t we be willing2 to pay for it its true economic price? If it is truly the one best way, shouldn’t it be able to survive competition on its own merits? It seems like a particularly devious contradiction to call net intervention net neutrality.
With this in mind, it was a blow of fresh air to find T. J. Rogers recent opinion on the issue:
What do you think of Net neutrality?
This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should be able to charge whatever they want for their product. And for other people to come in and force companies to run their businesses and set their prices is absurd. If some of those companies came into being by virtue of a government monopoly—the old AT&T comes to mind—then fine. But to go and tell companies what they can and cannot charge money for—that’s un-American. It’s against freedom. It’s just bad news.
It was only later that I found out why Rodgers sounded so rational: he’s a libertarian. Also to treasure from that interview is this fragment:
Some claim they [CIGS, a type of non-silicon cell] are close to equal to silicon in terms of efficiency.
You go buy one. You know, that’s another problem we’ve got in the industry. There are a lot of con men in the solar industry who say a lot of things that are really, really, very wrong.
Every libertarian I’ve known of has had this respect for personal, boot-maker, contextual, decentralized knowledge, this hard social virtue of refraining from telling other people what to do (expressed even more clearly later in the interview: “I don’t want to second-guess the people that are trying—I’m not an expert—and they’ll surprise you when they do.”). They all recognize the world’s complexity and the great problems of our models of it. So yeah, I liked this guy. I googled him and I found out this most-interesting open letter from him and a book of his on Amazon, No-Excuses Management, that I promptly ordered.
Anyway, back on topic, what do you think on net neutrality? What am I failing to see from this tangle? Why do so many smart, visionary people oppose it?
Lalo—who taught me, with passion, Mexican history and economical development in high school—used to talk somewhat mockingly of some of his scientist friends who lived isolated from the world and, particularly, from politics; they thought themselves beyond it and preferred to live their lifes pondering deep thoughts back in their ebony towers; “they wouldn’t realize a political revolution had arrived until they were shot,” or something along those lines.
I agreed with it then and promptly forgot it with gusto when it was my turn to think deep thoughts in the ebony towers of CIMAT, where I studied Mathematics for some years. These days of alleged post-electoral unrest in Mexico, when most anyone in the country is fed up with politics, and politicians are having a hard time leaving their six-yearly limelight, I remember those words.
A few months ago, coming back to my old high-school and chancing on Lalo, it was interesting to discover his complete isolation from technology, and, particularly, from the web. He used his computer exclusively for email, never searched, had no idea what a blog was, didn’t know about Wikipedia, and in general didn’t think much of digital contraptions of any sort (!).
That may have had a lot to do with age but my point is that he was missing on one most important sphere (my preferred one, of course). “He wouldn’t know the singularity had arrived until he were absorbed into computronium”—or something alone those lines.
Of course I’m exaggerating, but I neither want to mock Lalo nor defend single-minded obsesiveness. It’s just that the preponderance argument could be made on many, many other spheres of life—economy, finance, culture, ecology, art, design, animal trainers… The world is far vaster and far more complex than we like to acknowledge, and we all suffer from interest myopia (the farther from our interests something is, the fainter and blurrier it is in our picture). Arguing for the preponderance of one sphere is usually self-interest lobbying.
Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.
Here they are, lest time forgets:
Vaya! Sergio acaba de prestarme un DVD con 4 gigas de literatura en Español, es desbordante, demasiado. Nuestro futuro mediatico es la saturacion al borde del colapso.
Por lo pronto, encontre por fin esta cita que tanto busque otrora:
La teorÃa dualista fue la primera religión galáctica. Desde su concepción en el mundo
central de Rolf, se erguÃa ante los hombres con la altivez de un monte, tan distanciada de
las cosas mundanas como un cerro de Plutón. ReconocÃa la vida y el final de la vida;
reconocÃa el frÃo de la noche y la longitud de su resistencia; reconocÃa la brevedad del dÃa
y su belleza. SabÃa que más allá de toda alegrÃa se extendÃa un telón de algo demasiado
cruel para llamarlo pena, demasiado noble para llamarlo desdicha; que la carne era una
exhalación que duraba un minuto, pero que en ese minuto, ese tiempo para la acción,
radicaba toda la verdad existente. Era una religión galáctica, difÃcil de comprender y
desalentadora cuando se comprendÃa, y por esa razón fue adoptada por los auténticos
adultos de esos tiempos. No les ofrecÃa ningún fulgor más allá de la tumba, ni hablaba de
las áureas voces de otras esferas; no otorgaba recompensas por la virtud ni castigos por
la debilidad. No tenÃa tabernáculos. Nadie decoraba sus altares con flores, nadie recitaba
sus fundamentos con música altisonante. Pero su austera verdad infundÃa hondura y
fortaleza en el corazón.
Brian W. Aldiss, Galaxias como Granos de Arena
Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.
I just finished reading Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Put simply, I’m floored. They were both deep, beautiful books, and, particularly interesting for me, both were superb criticisms (of, respectively, information design and comics). They both self-consciously embarked on the hard task of developing taste, of teaching how to see.
Charts, diagrams, graphs, tables, guides, instructions, directories, and
maps comprise an enormous accumulation of material. Once described
by Philip Morrison as “cognitive art,” it embodies tens of trillions of
images created and multiplied the world over every year. Despite the
beauty and utility of the best work, design of information has engaged
little critical or aesthetic notice: there is no Museum of Cognitive Art [yet].
This book could serve as a partial catalog for such a collection.
My current appreciation (read infatuation) of criticism has been long coming but perhaps inevitable. As far as I can now grok, there are two and only two genres of education: education in skill and education in taste. Every other truly educational book is a critique.
School would do well to acknowledge this. Skill is how to do, criticism is how to see. Both are pointless without one another and a great mistake of modern education is to concern itself only with the former. It doesn’t generally think of pupils as criticism-capable, which is bollocks, and, much more harmfully still, it perverts criticism by trying to cast it as a skill. That’s how you get to rote equation solving or sickening memorization of periods of literature and its important figures.
The recent and thankfully past presidential campaign in Mexico was a bizarre spectacle of major rifts in each of the 4 major parties. So important they were, it is not far-fetched to imagine that had a party managed to avoid them it would have been an easy victor. The ruling party, the PAN, was torn at the beginning between the incumbent’s pre-candidate, Santiago Creel, and the party’s one, Felipe Calderon; the PRD between the Cardenas family and Lopez Obrador; the PRI between Madrazo and Elba Esther Gordillo.
And that was all childish bickering compared to the hard, unprecedentedly dirty fights between parties. The race had simply never been this close.
It all made for grisly headlines, nauseating TV spots, debilitating internecine wars, and tiring discussion in every reunion you care to name. But now that’s past I can’t help but think of it as progress. You may call me naive or unsophisticated but I’ve oft thought, in what I do not believe to be my least lucid times1, that if there is such a thing as progress in politics it is nothing but the fragmentation of power2.
Yes, fragmentation can be ugly, and noisy, and wasteful, (particularly at its early stages) but we only know one answer to the ancient Latin question of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who shall guard the guards themselves?”) and it is ”each to one another” (Can someone please translate this to Latin?). No matter what convoluted system, ideology, rules, mechanisms, or technologies of any sort we throw into the mix, it always comes down to the people that implement them, “it’s always a people problem.” In fact, the most that can be said in defense of a system is that it fragments the power to do wrong between many people.
Take the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) If it deserves any credibility (and I think it does) it is not because our voting technology ranks among the most sophisticated and expensive in the world (it does) but because there are deputies of every party3 physically overseeing every step of the electoral process.
A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).
I’ve been fiction-starved long enough now.
Erasmo wants to kill the man, I want to do him (I fell in love the moment I read his “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”).
Wondrous book. Truly. I’m buying these 3 extra copies just to pester friends (and family) with.
The only Ender book I’m missing.
I’d read Mencken’s quotes before, of course. But I just became aware of him a couple of weeks ago through, of all places, a Gilmore Girls episode. I couldn’t be more ashamed of my tardiness. I’m diving into economics these next couple of months.
“This is a book in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work—and against ‘education’—learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.” I’m fascinated with education these days.
I dig the Austrian School of Economics (or rather, I think I will, when I know more about it).
Frankly, that Edward Tufte’s wife mother wrote this was enough for me, but just think about it: a syntactic critique of 1000 exemplary sentences. This promises to be a jewel.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” ( Dylan Thomas). For those late deathnights… “[Oliver Sacks’s writings] has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of ‘the human mind.’” (Amazon.com review)
I want to be a libertarian.
I’ve been a fan of Andy Grove ever since that Fortune feature on him.
A wildcard.
Just how would a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government, look?
I guess this is just book gluttony, but I skimmed this book in the New York Public library one rainy afternoon and it’s a happy memory.
Foreign aid debunked. I somewhy feel I need to read this now. I need to know this stuff. I guess a happy byproduct of feverishly reading The Economist is to think of yourself as someone with vast geopolitical and economical impact ;). His Art of Loving became an instant personal classic some months ago. “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
George Soros, long known as “the world’s only private citizen with a foreign policy,” is a most interesting man.
Mindfulness. The title alone was almost enough to buy the book. What a beautiful word.
Yup, I know these children education books are a weird choice but I have a hunch they’ll have much to tell me.
I haven’t read much science lately. The science spark needs some help.
“What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French?”
I admire Starbucks.
”Buffet has the strangest of powers in that he comes across as a homespun billionaire. Now that’s different from just being homespun, the way Sam Walton was, or just being a billionaire, like Bill Gates. Buffet flaunts his wealth and his professional love of money, all the while expressing essential, eternal truths in simple, earthy phrases. When I saw Buffet speak at business school he tapped on the microphone to test it and said ‘testing, testing, one-million, two-million, three-million.’” (Marc Cenedella, Amazon review)
“The need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”
“Without a single gesture toward an explanation, this novel recounts the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices. Different spouses, lovers, children, careers, await them in each go-round of the past 25 years, as well as slightly altered versions of world events. Their deep commitment to one another continues through the centuries of their many lifetimes.” (Library Journal review) I haven’t read this book and I love it already.
Believe you me, I’ll be the first to distrust this bluntly titled book, but I’m floored by who and how many people recommend it.
Pagina numero 3 del Publico de hoy: mi mama! Cosette es hija de una amiga de mi mama y le pidio entrevistarla. La entrevista fue por telefono y por falta de tiempo ya no alcanzo a pasar la version que mi mama pulio despues por escrito, quedaron muchas cosas por decir y muchas se dijeron mal. Pero bueno, por otra parte hasta vino un fotografo a la casa. Notese mi influencia en las quejas sobre Ciberia y sobre la portada.
Cielo azul, totalmente despejado.
(heh, not that I’m gloating or anything (as if there was something to gloat about) but it’s the best post-electoral pun I’ve heard yet and I’m sure it’ll cheer Adolfo up ;)
I was only able (or rather, willing) to do the cool, long screen captures on my previous post because of Easy Screen Capture And Annotation—a nice and full-featured software that allows you to capture the entire content of a scrollable window, among many other things.
It’s shareware ($30), but you can use it for free without any limitation other than a welcome-nag and a red-watermark when saving your image (which can of course be easily bypassed by copy-pasting your capture to another graphic-editing program). Very useful if you ever need to do serious scren-capturing.
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