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Sunday, July 20, 2003
Thoughts for the Summer 
| | Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling? |
| | The shocking possibility that dumb people don¹t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn¹t real. |
| | Here's what he wrote for the Wall Street Journal after he quit teaching — while also serving as New York State Teacher of the Year. |
Waiting for the Third Wave
| | Even today it's hard not to think of a business as a "human resources" machine that's one person wide at the top and many people wide at the bottom. |
In case you forget
| | Paul Graham: Why Nerds are Unpopular. The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. |
| | Thanks to Kevin for the link. |
Towards a Popeye Dentity
| | I yam what I yam, Popeye said. (POP-I puns are invited, of course.) |
| | Somewhere back in the past few months, David Sifry, prophet (and probably also profit) of the Principle of Good Enough (POGE), suggested that the simplest and potentially most useful form of digital identity (DigID) is the email address. Nothing, he said (I know it's somewhere around the Web here), better fits, in a practicable way, the definition of a Tier 1 DigID — one that belongs to the individual, and around which individually-useful services can be built — than one's email address. |
| | As Tier 1 infrastructure gets built out, there are bound to be problems with identities that are assigned by Tier 2 entities — those corporations and other organizations that confer identites upon us. You know what those identities are: your wallet is full of them. |
| | So I called Earthlink, and had a healthy dialogue with a good guy there named Lance. He explained that the only way for me to drop Sprint and keep my Earthlink email address is to (a) drop Sprint, (b) lose that address for up to a month until Sprint sends it, along with a bunch of other dropped accounts, to Earthlink in a batch, (c) sign up for Earthlink dial-up, and (d) add that email address after it's been cancelled by Sprint. |
| | The antediluvian wonders of batch processing could require that much time for this occur, Lance patiently explained. |
| | I somewhat less patiently explained to Lance that my Earthlink address, which I guard somewhat jealously, is now built into a web of relationships - not only with people, but with institutions - banks, credit card companies, mailing lists, billing notifications, etc. etc. It is my "digi ID" which I share as needed to maintain relationships online, and which I really don't have the luxury of turning off, even for a month. |
| | But this "digital identity," although it's the lynchpin of a web-based reailty, is not mine, because Earthlink has locked itself into an antique meatspace business model with Sprint, an industrial telco that sees my email address as its property, to do with as it sees fit. It will run a batch ( sans jouissance, bien sur ) and include me when it feels up to it. |
| | Does it not seem obvious that it should work the other way around? Our online ID is, or should be, a modular element of digital reality which belongs to us, and the ISP, the telco vendors, and the rest need to conform to the exigencies of working with it. How else will it be possible for anyone who is mobile, at least in any international sense, to have any continuity of ID without being subjected to usurious rates? How can we be expected to feel "liberated" by the wonders of, uh, cyberspace if it insists on emulating the dullest forms of meatspace? |
| | Unfortunately, Earthlink's relationship with Sprint isn't the reason Tom's Earthlink email address isn't his. In fact, it has nothing to do with relationships at all. It has to do with Earthlink's own identity as a conferrer of branded email addresses. @earthlink addresses belong to Earthlink. |
| | I see by whois that Tom appears to be the owner of matrullo.com, currently parked at Register.com. Owning one's surname is a smart move. (It doesn't help nonfamily members who share the surname, of course; but it's a useful form of grandfathering to own your own domain — or at least to rent it long-term from a registrar.) In the long run, I believe, we will all need to be masters of our own domains. Some will match up with surnames. Many more won't. What matters is mastery. And we're not going to get that from Tier 2 IDs. |
Interhospitality
| | Where would hotels be like without business travellers? |
| | And where would business travel be without the Internet? |
| | A few years ago, those questions would be silly. The center of gravity in the hospitality industry was centered in motels clustered around interstate highway exits. The Internet was elsewhere — something you called on the phone. All your hotel needed to provide was an extra jack on the side of the phone. |
| | As the Internet ubiquitizes, providing full-speed always-on Internet connectivity will become a hospitality service no less essential than clean sheets and soap in the bathroom. |
| | I believe I speak for a growing number of business travellers when I say I prefer seeing the costs of essential services buried in room rates rather than charged as extras — and that I consider Internet access an essential service. |
Roll modeling
| | My blogroll is has way too many legacy links to sites that are idle, dead or evidence of transient preoccupations from the increasingly distant past. I'm starting to think about ways of improving or replacing it. Same with the list of links over there on the left, which I created about a year ago when I started gathering a pile past posts for a book of some kind — one of many nascent protoprojects that it's my habit to start and then back-burner to oblivion. So: what should I put over there? Dunno yet. Just thinking out loud about it. |
| | One thing's for sure about any kind of 'roll: it has to stay both current and useful. Right now neither is either. |
| | Since maintaining them manually is one more chore on the bottom of a list that's already too long, I'm inclined to favor some kind of automated system. Thoughts are welcome. |
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