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Friday, January 3, 2003
Linux bets for 2003 
You are now free to lie about the country
How can you be in five places at once when you're not everywhere at all?
| | I'm in the kitchen, making coffee with the laptop parked on the counter, tuned in to Radio 4. The current feature is on annoying ads, including one featuring our Santa Barbara neighbor (and very good guy) John Cleese. Now there's a feature on the growing "gun culture" in England. Radio 5 has a call-in show on female sexual dysfunction. It's interrupted frequently and annoyingly by "YOU'RE LISTENING TO FIVE LIVE!!" and frequently loops and echoes over itself. Strange. Oh, I see, it's opened the RealOne player, which is playing the same stream, displaced about ten seconds in time from the player that's opened within the browser. Now R5 is reading bacarrat instructions from a James Bond novel... Moonraker? No, Casino Royale. I read them all back in the 60s... God what good writing, so effeciently descriptive. |
| | Okay, coffee's done. Back to work. |
Watching journalism rewrite its own story
Steve does the math
| | Saltire explains why West Virginia surgeons are striking over what amount to $5.75/hour wages. |
Look vs. Feel
Hello, this is Bullshit. I'm home.
| | When I arrived as a freshman at Guilford College in North Carolina in 1965, I nearly died, twice, when I heard two expressions that made me laugh to the edge of siezure. One was "Gooder'n shit" (pronounced Gooder'n she-it). The other was "Fuck me dead" (pronounced Fuck me day-ed). I was a kid from New Jersey, where fuck is approximately the only word you need, and I thought I'd heard every possible expression of it. But I was wrong. |
| | Later I became familiar with a much more useful regional expression: "call bullshit." For example, "Y'know, Luther, I'm gonna hafta call bullshit on what ya'll are sayin'." |
| | I don't know whether it's the New Year, or the pollen, or the end of a collective hangover, but it's suddenly open bullshit-calling season on the folks who sold the crack pipes we used back when the New Economy was getting high off its own exhaust. |
| | Nothing against the guy personally, but Po Bronson needs to take responsiblity for the bullshit mythology his writing and others' helped to create. |
| | I hate to rain on the parade, but Po Bronson is a comodifier of mythologies. He finds a horse and rides it. There were stories that needed to be told when Po Bronson was repeating endlessly the myth of the Entreprenuer Hero getting rich and taking names. Po Bronson only had one narrative then and he's looking for a new one now because that one was a bill of goods. |
| | We are the suckers if we buy snake oil from the same guy twice. |
| | How much more interesting would the world have been in the late 1990s if magazines that accepted articles by Po and his ilk had actually been interested in some OTHER narrative than the Entreprenuer Hero, like the story of waste, or of foolish business plans, or of fiddling while Rome burns? |
| | Still, there was more money in bullshit. |
| | We bought what they shoveled, and we're still paying for it. |
Moredentity
| | And here's Britt, with an equally eloquent visit to the same subject. |
| | ...is there any room here for a Creative Commons-like licensing of personal identity here? |
| | Presently, companies own data on ME, but what if there were a different scheme here where I licensed the use of info on me to them, inside of a customer/company relationship. And in this relationship I am not a consumer, but recognized as an individual who does business with them. |
| | The short answer, I would hope, is yes. |
| | The longer answer has to do with relationships. What we want with DigID is a lot of power, depth (also shallowness) and selectivity about the relationships we have, or don't have, as customers moving about and doing business in the networked world. Chris Locke in Cluetrain talked about "smart markets getting smarter faster than most companies." DigID is a first condition means for this being a good thing, rather than a threat, or a workaround of clueless suppliers. Smart companies will embrace and work with smart markets and the smart customers in them. |
| | Creative commons licenses pay respect primarily to use. Relationship doesn't play much in the scheme of things. But use is a legitimate part of how we want to regulate the information about ourselves that we expose to the world. That information is valuable — far more valuable to us, and important to a smart economy, than the supply-controlled "digital rights" of industrial "content providers." |
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