Cory Doctorow: illustration and article

This is the last one, I promise. But I'm incredibly pleased with this illustration and article. The article, based on my interview with Cory Doctorow, appeared in this week's issue of The Link. It's called The Digital Backwater, referencing the sorry state of telecom policy and infrastructure in Canada. And here's the pretty picture that goes with it. The copy editor has dubbed the laurel the Wreathernet. This graphic is significantly bigger than the one on The Link's website, for your zooming pleasure. And, finally, if you want to see the article and graphic as they should be, check out the pdf of this issue.

Cory Doctorow interview: the full transcript

It's a little dense, but it's complete. Below, the full transcript of my interview with Cory Doctorow.

12 November 2009
13h15ish to 13h40ish

GC: You said a few years back that you couldn't move back to Canada because of the bad internet

CD: It's getting pretty bad in England. It's certainly pretty bad here.

GC: The CRTC just came down with a ruling on traffic shaping...

CD: Which was basically:you can only do terrible, immoral things in a limited way that we may police if we decide to. Yeah. It was a pretty awful ruling. I think the CRTC is generally asleep at the switch. I mean, the media consolidation in this country has been just disgraceful. So yeah, I'm pretty unimpressed with the CRTC as a regulator. The sheer amount of consolidation, both in media and telecoms and the cross consolidation between media and telecoms has been I think a total policy disaster for Canada. Canada's really lagging in the OECD in access, speed, cost and equality. They keep trying to redefine what broadband is in order to make us look better on the OECD stats. It's broadband if you can download a jpeg in less than a minute. This is not broadband. Broadband is Korean standard: 100MB. And up.

GC:Everyone's really proud of 21MB right now. On the whole 21MB thing, have you heard about this new thing Bell is doing? The turbostick? It's pretty awful. They're going for mobile internet, with a 500MB a month cap.

CD: I think the thing about caps is first of all, it's hard to imagine any other industrial sector that would say “there's a lot of demand for our product, how can we reduce it?” I think on the one hand, this represents a kind of failure of entrepreneurial imagination that's only possible where you have these monopolistic, badly regulated industries. The other thing about caps is what it does to network behaviour, network use. It punishes experimentation because you have to ration your network use. What this does is it undermines entrepreneurship. If you want to start a new Canadian networked business, your capacity to lure customers into your business is undermined by the fact that any customer who clicks on your web page will reduce their remaining bytes for the month. And bytes per month is a really hard measure for the average user, or even a sophisticated user to get their head around. Do you know how many bytes are in a web page before you click it? Or after you click it? We have a very hard time predicting the amount of bits that we have. So it's very hard to contain our use. So we would become even more conservative of our use. As a piece of national industrial policy, if you want to encourage the greatest amount of entrepreneurial activity on the network, the greatest amount of civic participation... Say you're planning for a pandemic swine flu outbreak and you want to produce a bunch of high quality health videos that will help people adequately prepare for the pandemic, do you really want people going “Well, I can spend my bits this month, my allowance, on looking at that health information, or I can spend it on downloading my banking information and I have to make that trade off, or I'm either going to get cut off or hit with some incredibly high overage fee.” Do you really want people making that decision? Is that good national policy? It would be different if the phone and cable companies were not subject to such enormous public subsidy. But they are. First of all, in the case of the phone companies, they got an enormous public subsidy in the fact that they exist at all. All that wire was laid with public expense. But everybody gets public subsidy in the use of the airwaves, in the use of rights of way, they essentially have de facto monopolies. I feel like the CRTC should say “If you don't want to allow a free and open network on these wires, that's your business. We'll either buy them from you at the scrap value of this copper, or you can take them out of our ground and we'll find someone else who'll run those wires. Somewhere out there, there's an entrepreneur who wants to provide the network that Canada deserves. If it's not you, that's fine. We'll have a competitive market. We'll have these guys who want to provide the network that Canadians want and you can provide the network that you think Canadians want. And if you're right and we're wrong, then Canadians will buy your service. But for so long as you're a regulatory monopoly, you have to act in the public interest.”

GC: Actually, how is it in the UK?

CD: It's not great. In general, the quality of governance in the UK is very poor. Partly because the political left has shifted so far to the right that there really isn't... I mean, I support the Lib Dems kind of generally because they're the only party that doesn't expect me to carry a biometric identity card. But as a left wing opposition goes, they're not very powerful and they're not very left wing. Labour, who are traditionally supposed to be the voice of the left, have shifted so far to the right that I think that they're... well... they're Bushites. Right? They went to war in Iraq. They are Bushites. Their policies are in line with those of George Bush. Including policies on civil liberties and so on. As a kind of microcosm of that, the network policy, the information policy is very poor. The government has been really reluctant to release information about its own operation. Quasi-governmental entities like the BBC are arguing for the right to put DRM on their broadcasts even though not only do they get public airwaves, but they get something like six or seven billion pounds a year out of the public's hands from the license fee, by governmental enforcement. It's really unseemly that they would argue for the right to DRM their signal. And now we have the copyright enforcement stuff. On one hand, you've got the anti-terrorism people saying that ISPs should be required to monitor and store all communications. That's also happening on the European level. Then you have the database nation where they're saying that we need, if not a national identity card, then a series of linked national databases that do the equivalent of a national identity card. And then finally, they're saying that we're going to have a three strikes regime where if anyone in your household is accused without evidence or conviction of three acts of copyright infringement you lose your network access and your name goes on a national register of people to whom it's illegal to supply internet access. This is really a dreadful piece of policy. I happen to live there and it's unlikely that I'm going to be moving away any time soon just for sheer inertia and the fact that my wife has a very good job, but they've got lots of network caps, they've got crummy networking policies. BT, who are the equivalent of Bell, really, in terms of being a legacy former national monopoly. BT got done for using something called Phorm, P-H-O-R-M, which I think may have had limited deployments here and in the U.S., I forget where. Initially, what they did was install Phorm as a piece of spyware on your computer without your permission. And what it did was inserted ads based on a tracking of every click you made on every page you visited. And then after they were told they can't install spyware on your computer without your knowledge, they went back and redid it as a piece of network middleware that tracks every click and does dynamic page rewriting again with these targeted ads. It's a revolting way of running a network. They're running it as an opt-out service. There's a huge amount of tracking that they're doing, a huge amount of monkeying with your network connection. It's very bad.

GC: You mentioned biometric ID cards. Of course, that's a pretty hot topic here right now because, of course, the border provinces need to comply with the U.S. Ontario is trying to roll out EDLs...

CD: Biometrics are an incredibly bad idea as a security measure. Partly because any good security token needs to be revokable in the event that it leaks. You need to be able to change your PIN if someone finds your PIN. You need to be able to get a new credit card number if your credit card number leaks onto the internet. What do you do if your finger prints leak? Right? And fingerprints leak like crazy. How many surfaces do you think you left your fingerprints on today? As a great example of this, the Chaos Computer Club lifted the fingerprints of the German chancellor, who was responsible for pushing for biometrics in that country, and made ten thousand copies of them on acetate, which would work in most fingerprint readers and widely distributed them. As a security metric, these are very very poor. And to the extent that we actually believe that we need security at the border, we should have good security, not bad security. That's one really important piece of it. But you know, the general linking of multiple databases, first of all, creates a false sense of security or certainty among the people who run those databases. There's a tendency to believe the database over reality. So if they say “well, the database says you were here and then here,” it's very hard to prove otherwise. The database becomes its own proof. And we know that those databases are very flawed and the more we link them, the more flawed they become. So there's that risk. In terms of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, it's the Tuttle-Buttle risk. If the database says you've done something bad, then you must have done something bad and it's up to you to prove that you haven't. It really shifts the burden of evidence in a way that's very contrary to the general working of liberal democracy. And then, in addition to that, there's the potential that things that aren't crimes but are private will leak out. And we tend to confuse private with secret. There's lots of stuff that's not secret but is private that becomes exposed when you have these big databases. For example, your parents did something private, otherwise you wouldn't be here. It's not a secret what they did, but it's private. It's not on the internet, unless you have extremely extraordinary parents. Everyone who went into that toilet did something private. We know what it was, but again, they don't have a glass door. There's a lot of stuff in our lives that's private, and we behave differently when our private sphere collapses. In terms of cognitive psych, I think that when we are doing stuff, we are cognitive, we think about what we're doing. When we are analytical, we're meta cognitive. We think about what we're thinking about what we're doing. And meta cognitive has its time and place as part of your overall process, but you can't be meta cognitive all the time. I don't think you can write while you're meta cognitive. If you're revising while you're writing, you just stop. It's like asking a centipede how it can walk with all those feet. It stops being able to walk because it's now thinking about how it's walking. If you want to teach someone a sport, say stickhandling in hockey, you say things like try and hit through the puck or try and be a little looser. If you say try and hold your wrist at a 45 degree angle or try and put your left skate forward and lead with your left, most of the time, the people that you're trying to teach fall apart. Coaching is all about being cognitive and not bringing people into a meta cognitive state while they're practising. When you're being watched, you're meta cognitive and there's a whole range of really important creative and daily tasks, everything from an honest conversation to just real learning, that you can't do when you're being watched. It's like trying to teach your kid how to write and looking over her shoulder while she writes the letters and going “no no no, a little steeper with the riser on that letter A, sweetie.” You can't learn to write that way. And you can't be a fully fledged citizen of a democracy that way. That's the second piece. And then the third piece is of course the risk of exposure for things that you may be marginally guilty of but that have historically been outside the import of regime. It's the equivalent of a traffic camera that issues a fine to everyone who edges one mile per hour over the limit. And the corollary of that is Cardinal Richelieu: “give me six lines of an honest man's hand and I'll find you a reason to hang him.” If you have to account for every single thing that falls into a database, it may be that there's things that you can't account for that are a mechanism to make you look guilty even if you're not guilty of anything. This is what the no-fly list has taught us, what Maher Arar has taught us. The database made him look guilty and the Americans won't take him out of the database even though he's been totally exonerated, the Americans still say that he can't fly. The building of a database state, however we conduct it, has these major risks to the common good. It needs to be really closely examined. Given that it won't secure the border, because biometrics are themselves a poor means of doing that, we need to really revisit this. And the fact that the Americans say that we need to do it... I mean, your mom had it right: if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it too? If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That's not a basis for good governance [shouted humorously]! Like Monty Python: Watery tarts lobbing scimitars is not a basis for good governance. That Bush says we need to do it, carried through to the Obama regime, isn't a good reason to do it in Canada.

GC: Your stock in trade is science fiction. You get to constantly imagine the world that you'd like to see. You imagine these really grim things. Some of it's beautiful, but it's pretty grim. What would you like to see in your ideal world? What would you like to see in our future?

CD: I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN declaration of human rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn't have to explain why privacy is important, why neutral networks are important. And I think if we got that, everything else becomes easier. I think that technology has this innate characteristic in that it disrupts the status quo. It's always easier to knock something down than to build it up. If you assume that both attackers and defenders have access to the same technology, which is a good assumption, then the defenders will always be at a disadvantage. That's good and bad. It's good if you want to make things better for people who the status quo have neglected historically: people of colour, people of alternate sexuality, women, kids, all those people have an advantage now that they didn't have before because they have the same organizing tools that the people who have historically tried to keep them down have access to. Only they don't have the baggage that those people have. On the other hand, it does in fact give an advantage to bad people. It gives an advantage to spyware creeps and indeed to terrorists and to people who are exploitative and to people who are human traffickers and all those other people who [mumble, 15:02]. We won't be able to take the technology out of those bad people's hands because they're criminals, so making it illegal doesn't stop them. What we can do is effectively marshal to reverse any gains they've made if people of good will can have access to the same technologies. So, my utopia, my clear eyed utopia, the utopia that I think is plausible, is one in which people of good will don't have the tools to defend themselves against people of good will taken away in the name of stopping bad things. And then we are able, people of good will, to continually organize to rebuff affronts to our dignity, to our security, to our families and so on, using those same tools. That's what I hope for. And I don't think it's an unrealistic hope.

GC: That's lovely.

CD: Thank you.

GC: So much of the world is about the status quo. You prosthelytize, well, prosthelytize is a strong word, you talk about this a lot. What do you do when you run up against people who are resistant to...

CD: Well, there are a couple of good aphorisms about the status quo. One of them is that all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. So the status quo tends to be something that's pretty new and pretty local and pretty contingent and very much honoured in the breach. Often times, you can get around people's [mumble 16:55] about changes to the status quo by pointing out that the thing that they characterize as some original, endemic state from which humanity is falling is actually like seven years old. There's a great William Gibson quote: the seventy year period during which it was possible to make money off recorded music may be at an end. It's seventy years long. It's not as though we've been selling records since the time of the bards. It's this seventy year blip. And it may be over. It doesn't mean that the music industry is over. It means that phase of the music industry's history, that tiny little seventy year blip in the music industry's history is at an end. That's one aphorism. The other is Jim Griffin's aphorism which is that if it's invented before you're eighteen, it's been there for ever. If it's invented before you're thirty, it's the greatest thing ever. And if it's invented after that it should be illegal. And it's often a matter of just helping people understand that those things they think of as having been there for ever and the greatest thing ever, it's just the latest thing in a long history of things. It's about pointing out that the Bronfmans may get to cry piracy now that they're record executives but a couple generations ago, they were drug smugglers, running rum into America during prohibition. That's how they got the money to become record executives. I'm speaking at Bronfman hall at the ROM tomorrow. I always make a point of mentioning this whenever I'm in Canada.

GC: What's the conference?

CD: It's the National Literacy Strategy.

GC: Lovely.
...
CD: I'm a UofT dropout.

GC: Aren't you also...

CD: a Waterloo and a York and a Michigan State dropout.

GC: You seem to have done all right for yourself.

CD: Who needs a degree?

GC: There's hope for the dropouts.

Commercial Web Services as Courseware

Setting up an account with any web service provider means a lot. It means agreeing to terms of service, buying into their framework, playing their game. These services are not provided for free for the benefit of humankind. They serve ads and gain revenue. Some of them sell personal information to third parties. At the very least, when you sign up for a free web service, you enter into a legal agreement with another entity and also into a business relationship, wherein you allow them to sell your attention to others. While most people don't view it as a choice, it is. And it is an individual choice. It should be made, in an informed way, by an individual, without coercion.

Educational institutions decide what their students will learn and which tools they'll use in order to learn. Traditionally, this has meant deciding which textbooks and articles will be read. As any educator bombarded with textbook samples knows, this is not a strictly academic decision, but one with profound financial implications for many different stakeholders. It is in the power of the educator to decide which textbook all her students will have to purchase.

Increasingly, the tools of education are more than just textbooks. The new tools include courseware and software. Academic institutions decide whether to tie their students to Blackboard, Moodle or any other courseware system. What's more, those institutions decide how zealous they will be about the enforcement of their courseware standards. Will they allow one faculty/department/professor to diverge from the norm?

The issue, of course, goes far deeper than courseware. And this is where we come back to the initial discussion of free web services. Educators in less zealous institutions may choose to abandon standard courseware in favour of a third party solution, often a service already favoured by students. A professor may, for example, choose to conduct course discussions in a Facebook group devoted to the class. This decision presents problems. Sure, most students are probably already Facebook users. But it can't be taken for granted that they all are. And what of those who don't already use the service? In order to engage with the class, these students are forced to enter into a legal and (effectively) financial agreement with a third party service provider. And if they don't, they lose out. That dynamic smacks of coercion.

I don't mean to be negative. I am, in fact, all for the idea of using accessible, available, ostensibly free tools with which students are already comfortable. But it bears thinking about. In an attempt to make learning accessible and integrative, an important element of choice may be lost.

Lawbot: not done yet

A few days ago, I said that Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers was done. That wasn't entirely true. There's more going on. I'm (hopefully) working on a version that includes an audio track to go with each page of text. Aside from that, you'll soon be able to find Lawbot out in the wild attached to another project. I'll give details on that when the time comes. I'm also trying to figure out how to get Lawbot into the real world as an alternate reality game. For now, here's a cartoon Lawbot and a less arty, more engaging synopsis of the project.


You may be infringing copyright without even knowing it. Lawbot can help. Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers is a text adventure game created to teach the basics of Canadian copyright law. It drops you into a futuristic world where copyright enforcement has gone mad. On your quest to rescue your partner and set things right, you'll learn about things like fair dealing, infringement and alternatives to traditional copyright. Why would you want to learn about all that? Because you're probably infringing already and it's nice to know exactly what it is you're doing that bothers so many industries so much.

Lawbot: done.

I've mentioned Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers before. Well, now it's done. Or at least, it's in an intermediate state of done. If you click the above link, you'll find a pretty fun (if I do say so myself) text-adventure game that explains certain elements of Canadian copyright law. It may later get either sound or visuals. I'm not sure yet. Here's the little artist synopsis that I wrote about the project:

Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers is, above all, a pragmatic project. The aim behind Lawbot is to broaden the public understanding of Canadian copyright law. Lawbot aims to do this in an approachable, perhaps even fun, and certainly accessible way. To this end, Lawbot borrows thematic elements from both adventure games and spy movies, weaving a slightly absurd, proto-futuristic kidnap-story narrative. Lawbot employs heavy-handed allegory and a pinch of copyright history to get across the point that a litigious approach to intellectual property protection isn't sustainable. Visually, Lawbot riffs off of early text based computer games. Lawbot is written entirely in HTML and JavaScript for optimal online usability and distribution.

Discomfort by proxy: introverts and social networking

I quit Facebook a couple weeks ago because I was sick and tired of the obligation it represented. It makes me wonder: can introverts become uncomfortable by proxy? Is it possible that online social networking could pose the same problems for the shy that overcrowding and over-stimulation in physical space do?

Here's the rationale: As a more introverted than extroverted person, I tend to draw my energy from being alone or with one other person, at most. I find that the energy I build up being alone gets drained when I have to deal with large amounts of social demands. A concrete example would be banking up energy by spending a day alone and then using it up by being social at a party in the evening.

Why should this work by proxy, then? When using services like Facebook, I'm physically alone. But that doesn't seem to detract from the social nature of it. In fact, it may be worse. The structure of Facebook in particular requires constant decision making. And those decisions always have social repercussions. I get a friend request from someone I don't know particularly well but went to school with: do I accept or reject? A group invitation for something I don't care about, but the group was formed by one of my friends: join or not? For people who find that making social decisions is a taxing activity, this can be overwhelming. It doesn't have any of the comfortable downtime that comes with more old fashioned modes of socializing. Instead, it's just a constant stream of demands and obligations.

So, can introverts become uncomfortable by proxy? I say yes, and to an even greater degree than in physical interactions.

Tactile interfaces for digital making

I've got a problem. I've had a lifelong obsession with building things by hand. I love the sensation of seeing something come to life through my efforts. In physical making, there's a certain amount of feedback and consequence. I actually enjoy having to clean the ink out from under my fingernails after screen printing. These days, however, the majority of my work is digital, with very few protrusions into the physical world and with little to no non-digital making. That's gotten me thinking.

I'm planning my day. On my to-do list, I've put the words "update website." I know that I have a meeting later that I'll have to drag myself away from my work to attend. Here's the problem: when I'm only working digitally, it doesn't feel as if I'm actually pulling myself away from anything. The majority of my life, work and leisure time involves interfacing with a screen. Fixing my website doesn't feel like an engrossing task. There isn't a feeling of immersing myself in one thing, mainly because I'm not. I know that in the browser I have open to test my changes, I'll also have tabs going for email and Twitter. I also know that when I leave to go to my meeting, there won't be any tidying up to do. I'll just have to fold down the laptop and go.

It may seem absurd, but I want a way for my digital activities to be a little more demanding. I want to actually need to concentrate and prepare. I want the little rituals that come along with more physical forms of making. I mark things on a physical to-do list because stroking out an entry with a marker feels more satisfying than just clicking on a box. I keep a drawing board because some things are better sketched out by hand than drawn on a computer. How can I make my digital activities more tactile, beyond the standard idea of drawing with a tablet? Why can't I hook a block of clay up to a 3D modeling program and work with hands and knife? And, the big question: what's the tactile analogue of a natively digital activity like web design?

Work in progress: Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers

Do you enjoy text-based adventure games? How about copyright law? Well, I'm working on a text-based adventure game that explains the basics of Canadian copyright law. It's called Lawbot and the Case of the Missing Copyright Infringers, and the first bit of it is online, for your clicking enjoyment.

ginger coons on Open Clip Art Library

Acting on some sage advice from the comments section, I've started putting the svg files of some of my work into the Open Clip Art Library. This means that you can now download infinitely scalable versions of such classics as baby giraffe and hipster shoes.
I'll be putting more up as I get the chance.

Open Colour Standard properganda

Something from the Open Colour Standard project that I feel is worth cross-posting here: my ever so lovely OCS properganda (not propaganda) poster. It sells Open Source graphics programs the easy way: by explaining how cheap they are compared to the proprietary stuff. Enjoy.

EDIT (12 May 2009): Here's a new version of the poster with better kerning. And I'm replacing the downloadable one on the OCS website with this newer, more correct version.

Print has problems

I'm catching up on my reading, going through a textbook about advertising and promotion, reading the bit about social networking sites as promotional tools. As is so often the case with textbooks, the information is out of date. Here's the problem: the book was published in 2008. Important news for textbook publishers: It's impossible to write about the internet in print. By the time the books gets to print and into the hands of readers, what was good, current information is out of date and outmoded. Print isn't fast enough.

What's the solution to this problem, then? A couple things. Thing one, I'd like to see my purchase of the textbook give me access to a pdf of the book as well. (A good example of a publisher doing this is The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Ubuntu Kung Fu, for example, offers a pdf option, as well as couple other neat things that I'm about to talk about.) Offering a pdf version means giving readers something searchable and easier to navigate than a physical book. That's important when the book in question isn't a novel. Thing two, I want to see online errata and updates. I know it's impossible to expect publishers and authors to constantly revise their books, but I'd really like a little community and challenge to build up around textbooks (for an example, look again at Ubuntu Kung Fu). Give me an errata section that users can contribute to, give me updates on the subject matter, give me a discussion board. In short, give me an online portal for the textbook. Make it relevant and timely. For marketing especially, things don't lie still. Timely subjects need timely textbooks, not a new version every couple years.

A Manifesto Stub

Everyone needs access to information, not just those of us with good vision, full mobility, high level language skills and shiny new computers.

Cartoonoculars!

Observe phase one of a super exciting project I'm working on: A nice pair of binoculars. They're proof positive that I can actually do things that look clean.

Being profound isn't easy

When very few people knew how to read or write, it must have been much easier to write profound things. Today, with the huge mass of voices, all demanding to be heard and all distributed worldwide via the internet, it's far harder to write things that people will actually pay attention to and remember. We have such a huge volume of information, now. It makes it nearly impossible to actually process and give consideration to everything. And if I blog that sentiment? It's just another bunch of words in our huge wash of constant data.

Flamebot

I've been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence lately. It's super fun to play with helper bots on various websites (Anna at IKEA, for example). It occurred to me that a surefire way to get an AI to pass the Turing test, at least if it's talking to people used to the internet, is to create a Flamebot. Essentially, an AI that acts like a troll. It might not be identified as intelligent, but that wouldn't stop it from being mistaken for a lot of humans who hide behind their computers and make inane or rude comments. It doesn't even need to be coherent to be thoroughly entertaining.

OCI logo revisited

The OCI logo I was so pleased with yesterday has been replaced by the OCI logo that I prefer today. Behold! Progress! Magenta progress, in fact.
I think this one looks far more dynamic.

OCI logo

I've been building iterations of a logo for a semi-secret project that I'm calling the Open Colour Institute. You can guess what the project actually is, if you want. The important thing at this point is that I've come up with a logo that I think I like. And here it is.

Proper nouns on the Internet

While doing a little writing about traffic shaping and such things, it occurred to me that I don't know whether the name "Net Neutrality" actually qualifies as a proper noun. Many people treat it like a proper noun, capitalizing the first letter of each word, but there are also loads of people who don't. This inconsistency leaves me wondering whether it really should be a proper noun and some people are just being lax, or whether some people are just being overzealous with their capitalization. I've been hunting around to find out what exactly makes something a proper noun in English. According to the Wikipedia, a proper noun represents a unique entity. It then goes on to give examples like cities, the names of people, and specific physical things (like Bill of Rights, which may embody concepts, but has a physical manifestation all the same). But all of the things (not people, not cities, but things) mentioned are tangible. So, can movements and concepts be proper nouns? Net Neutrality isn't tangible. Is it allowed to be a proper noun? I'm thinking yes, given the capitalization of political ideologies and systems of thought. If Marxism and Liberal and Atheist can be proper nouns, surely so can Net Neutrality. I think, then, that I've answered my own question. Is Net Neutrality a proper noun? Yes.

Blogs in print

I've just thought of one of those ideas that qualifies as stupid-smart. So: Blogs use tags. Tags are what allow readers to check out other posts similar to posts that they like. Sometimes, reading things on paper is nicer than on a screen.

My stupid-smart idea: Make little zines or books or magazines of specific tags from blogs. If you were to do that to my blog, for example, you might make a zine based on the "clever ideas" tag. The whole thing would be a compendium of things that I classify as clever ideas.

I'm trying to decide whether this idea has enough merit to actually do. Of course, in the free market spirit, I could just make up a few copies of such a thing, take them to Expozine with me, and see if they have merit.

This is how we blog.

Having recently read an article about creativity (which is here, and thank you, Jasper, for pointing it out), I've realized that I'm losing a lot of ideas simply by not getting them down when I think of them. It happened to me again, just this morning, when I thought of something interesting but was busy writing something else. And now I've lost it. I can't for the life of me remember what it was I thought up. As a result, I've decided to attempt to blog every single damn idea I come up with from now on. "That's crazy talk!" you may say. And that's true. It is crazy talk. But I intend to try anyway. So, starting now, more posts, often shorter posts, less curation, more randomness. Oh yes.

Most entertaining email ever

This has to be the most fun email I've gotten in a while. While it's also edifying that I'm among the hundreds of people being followed by the Liberals, NDP, and Greens, it just kind of tickles me to see these words pop up in my email. Gee golly! Now the Prime Minister will know what I'm eating, how my plants are doing, and when I have a new blog post up. Twitter really is a fantastic way for politicians to pretend to listen.

Another Kubla Khan

I'm kind of addicted to "Kubla Khan." It's a fantastic, profoundly strange and beautiful poem. It's also in the public domain, which lets me do nice things to it without infringing copyright. I've done an illustrated zine version in the past, I think I'm working on another. Just finished, though, is a very strange web based version.
It's kind of concrete poetry on the internet. Find it here.

The Internet is a Copying Machine

Below is my little lay-introduction to the Internet as the ultimate copy machine. It's altogether too easy to forget that this is an instrument built for copying.

Computers are copying machines. They do the job of duplicating even better than photocopiers. The Internet is the hyperactive child of computation in most respects, but especially when it comes to copying. Everything you so much as look at when browsing the Web (No, I'm not using “Internet” and “Web” interchangeably. Right now, I mean WWW.) gets copied onto your own personal hard drive. Let's say that again, shall we: Everything. That's the automatic aspect of copying on the Internet, as practised by our good friends Firefox and Opera (or their mean brother, IE).

Copying on the Internet isn't just automatic. There's also a social aspect to the copying. When you take digitized media, which is what populates the Internet, and put it in the same place as people, copying will inevitably happen. Say I put a photo on my website. You take a look a look at my website (That's what I want you to do, after all. Why else would I put it on a public website if I didn't want you to look at it?). First, your browser, which doesn't have much taste or discrimination, grabs everything my website has to offer and makes a little copy for itself. Then, quite independently, you decide that you like the photo. You like it so much that you download it. Maybe you use it as a background, or even print it out and hang it on your wall. It's perfectly natural. I make my photo available, you see and like. All you have to do to get your own copy is click your right mouse button (or CTRL click, if you happen to be a Mac person). It doesn't feel like work, and I still have my copy of the photo. In fact, my copy and your copy are exactly the same. And the copy that every browser makes for itself when someone looks at my website is exactly the same as our copies. (It doesn't feel like stealing, since you haven't taken anything from me. In fact, it isn't even copyright infringement, since you've only used it for personal study and can claim Fair Dealing. But you don't know that. You just liked the photo and wanted to look at it without coming back to my website every day.) In such a way, the Internet can be seen as a giant (mostly apolitical and amoral) copying machine.

Taft on a Horse

For your enjoyment, a picture I found while hunting through the Wikimedia Commons. It's Taft on a horse. For some reason, it strikes me as an intensely funny picture.

An Easier Website

I was in a design meeting at work today. The complaint: Clients ask for "cleaner" or "more professional" websites. So, the boss muses out loud that we can't just adjust and make a website sixty percent cleaner. It struck me at that point that there should be a way.

Solution: Take a representative sample of people. Give them a word (professional, clean, edgy, etc.). Give them a pile of design elements (colours, layout pieces, whole layouts, typography, all that good stuff). Get them to rate each element on how much it matches their perception of the given word. Look for patterns in the responses. Sort by demographics, psychographics, industries. Take the data. make a website generator with a very simple interface: a white screen with a number of slider bars, where each bar represents a scale of zero to one hundred for a given trait (edgy, contemporary, clean, professional...). Any person who wants a website need only key in a little pertinent information about themself, and then move the sliders to get what they want. Press the button. Don't like the output? Move the sliders some more.

So, I'm sensing another thesis. Doctorate, maybe? The research should be fun and doable. It's just the actual programming that I'm a little scared of. But it could make a good collaboration with a computer science person.

If it actually worked, I'd put myself out of the web design business. On the upside, I'd secure my place in other circles.

The Craigslist System of Need Organization

I've gotten into the habit of hunting for things on Craigslist. First I was looking for a job, then I was looking for an apartment. I found both. Short of looking for a relationship, I'm running short of things to look for on Craigslist. It does occur to me, however, that Craigslist (or indeed, any classified ad directory) presents an interesting system for organizing life. There's housing, jobs, personals, for sale, services, discussion, and community. Those categories encompass what people tend to want out of life. We need jobs in order to get money to live. We need places in which to live. We need people to share our lives with. We need things to fill our spaces. We need activity. Craigslist basically handles all of the necessities of being human.

I'm thinking, then, that we should use craigslist as a complement to more sober systems like Maslow's heirarchy of needs. I'm not saying that we need to throw Maslow out, as there doesn't seem to be a heirarchy evident in Craigslist, but I do think that classified ads provide a very good measure of what it means to be human at this point in time.

Unions as personal shoppers

Some people like to buy North American cars. They think that by buying a GM or a Ford or some such, they're helping to keep jobs in Canada. There's no guarantee, though, that any given domestic car isn't, in fact, made in Mexico. This is the issue: how do you know which car is actually made in Canada? Would you, in fact, be better off buying a Toyota made in Cambridge? Enter a clever idea for a website that I know I'm never going to get around to doing.

If you ask the car salesperson where any given care is made, and where the components are from, s/he isn't terribly likely to have good answers. You could ask the company itself, but that means getting bogged down in automated phone system hell for every make of car you're interested in. It's probably easier to just ask your friendly neighbourhood auto workers union. That's a bit of a hassle, though. It takes a motivated consumer to do such homework. So, why not have a website that aggregates product recommendations from the people who actually make those products? The CAW tells you which cars are actually made in Canada, garment workers tell you which brands give them a reasonably fair deal. I think it would be a very useful little tool. And I'd totally use it, too. But do I look like I need another project in the pipeline?

Twenty million different ways to get the same information

I've noticed something new and exciting. The thing itself isn't terribly new and exciting, but it's exciting that I've noticed it. I've noticed, as the title of this post says, that there are loads of different ways for me to get the same information. I'll give you an example.

Say I want to see what's new on BoingBoing. I could just plug the URL into Firefox and go have a look at the page itself. I do that a few times every day. Another option is to grab a glance at my iGoogle homepage, which has a widget for the BoingBoing RSS feed. Or, and this is increasingly becoming the case for me, I could look in my Twitter feeds and find out what the very latest post is, if there's been anything recently. But wait! There's more. Say I want to watch BBtv. Go to the webpage and look for it? Why bother when Miro downloads it automatically?

One blog, with one set of information, and I look at it in about four different ways. I do something quite similar with the CBC. I'm wondering whether this tendency is a) convenient; b) the wave of the future; c) an obsessive behaviour; d) a quick route to information overload.

Crying in video stores

Another thing I want to study:

Lots of people watch movies when they feel sad. Where do those people get movies from? Pre-internet, unless they wanted to watch something they already owned, they'd need to go to the video store. That means sad people in video stores. Even if they aren't crying, it should be possible to see who is more upset than the average.

Questions, then: In the past, how often would an average video store get a crier? A sad non-crier? Has the frequency of sad video store customers changed? Has it gone up? Down? If down, where have the sad video watchers gone? Or are people finding different coping mechanisms?

Problems: I don't know how I could possibly dig up information on incidences of video store criers and sad non-criers in the past. I can't imagine that anyone has kept records on that sort of thing. Perhaps it's time for a literature review.

Craigslist personals dynamics

I keep thinking up things that I want to study. Most recently, I've been thinking about what makes people reply to personal ads on Craigslist. Do people ever post ads that get no replies at all? What are the factors in a popular ad?

There are variables: Who the target audience is in terms of gender, sexual preference, age, location, all that good stuff; how the ad is written; whether or not the title of the ad is engaging... I could go on, because I think there are loads of factors in the popularity of ads. It's a fun exercise in personal marketing, and I somehow don't think there's a substantial body of literature on it yet.

An open letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

You have access to huge amounts of information about me. You know what city I grew up in, what activities I take part in, what parties I go to. You know what I study and when I'll graduate. You know what interests me and what causes I care about. You know how old I am, what my gender is, even my sexual preference and relationship status. You know where I live and who my friends are.

Why, if you have so very much information about me, do you insist on serving me ads that aren't relevant? You attempt to sell me foolproof scrapbooking supplies, on the assumption that I don't know thing one about design. You'd better tell the design school I've been attending for the past three years that you don't have confidence in their teaching. You'd show gay men ads for dating sites where they can meet great girls, wouldn't you?

Facebook, you have all the power and information in your hands. You have the technology. It's not a new idea. Why can't you serve relevant ads? You know what kind of music I listen to. Can't you give me pertinent ads from HMV or iTunes? You know what sports I like, and yet you refuse to advertise frisbees.

I cannot understand, no matter how hard I try, why a website that collects so much personal information is so bad at personalizing advertisements.

The Vernacular Woman

Finally finished a little site that I've been working on for a couple of months. Why did a small site take a couple months? Because I was trying to take a complicated idea that's also been done to death and make it new and simple. The result is a video with a little scene by scene didactic track down below. It's kind of like those audio picture books that little kids have.
Link

Charlie Angus: master of rhetoric

Charlie Angus has a new manifesto/article/thing up on his site about the currently infamous Bell Canada throttling debacle. It's good and nice and necessary, but what really strikes me about it isn't the content, but the form. Anyone who says that rhetoric is a lost art has clearly never read anything written by Charlie Angus. He piles it on. It's good rhetoric, though. I'm all for clever use of language as a tool in the political arsenal.

Link (maybe I should change my CSS so that my links actually look more like links...)

A traffic shaping manifesto

Capitalism is supposed to be good because it provides consumers with choice and companies with an incentive to innovate. By traffic shaping commercial lines used by other ISPs, Bell is eliminating choice. I've tried Bell. I even used their internet for a year. At the start of that year, the delay in getting my internet running was truly impressive. During that year, my internet was spotty. I rebooted my modem more times than I can count. The support was bad and the service was expensive. Needless to say, I switched. I switched to an ISP I knew and liked. I switched to an ISP whose workings I know and who I can get help from without going through an automated system. I even had the BitTorrent discussion with my ISP. I found my new ISP to be both responsible and responsive. In other words, I switched to a small ISP, one of the ones Bell services. As a free market economy allows me to do, I made my choice.

That's why I'm feeling particularly irate. I have not contracted with Bell in order to get my internet. Traffic shaping their own customers is one thing. But I'm not their customer. I do not have a deal with Bell. Why, then, are they attempting to impose their policy on me? I didn't sign on for this. I am not a Bell DSL customer. I won't sit still and allow a party I have no contract with to decide what I may and may not do on the internet. I want to use BitTorrent in peace, for whatever legal purposes I may put it to (like downloading heavy files and perfectly legal movies like Good Copy Bad Copy). I don't want my bandwidth throttled because I'm using a protocol other than http. I do not want to be bumped because Bell feels the need to marginalize certain protocols.

This is why I say, to Bell, as a customer of an independent ISP:

You're not my ISP. Don't throttle me.


The above is in response to Bell Canada's new traffic shaping policy. Read more about it here.
I'm thinking of trying to go big with this. The groundswell is there and I'd like to see something a little more present than a facebook group. I've worked up the logo that I'm going to shove onto my website in protest, and now I just need to build a website/action to go with it.

Online ads get more obnoxious and depressing every day.

Facebook just asked me if I wanted to not be lonely anymore. That is to say, more specifically, that an ad on facebook asked me if I wanted to not be lonely. Funny thing, I didn't even know I was lonely. Facebook clearly thinks I am, though. Lots of websites also think that I might like to know who my soul mate is. These ads clearly think that I'm not happy as I am. Maybe they think that only frustrated, angry, lonely, desperate people view social networking and news sites. And all of that is without even bringing my SPAM into the equation.

My SPAM thinks that I might like a status symbol watch. Or that I might like to look at wild girls. Or that I'm having troubles with an appendage I don't even have. It's offering me designer shoes for cheap, too.

If I were to judge our social climate by the quality of advertising I see, I'd get the idea that most people are pretty unhappy. I'd get the idea that people are lonely, that they suffer from un-fulfilling relationships and bad sex. And that they don't own enough expensive looking watches. I might think that social problems magically disappear when certain pills and supplements are taken, or at least that people want to think so.

I find that things look fairly bleak, when you judge by the ads.

Conventional media as curator

I'm going to draw a parallel. If I want to see art, there are two things I can do. I could go online and do a search for "art." I'd get over a billion hits (check it yourself if you want to make sure). I'd get to sift through a whole world of art, opinions about art, art history... (Suspend your comments for a moment, if you will, about the non-originalness of the art online. I know that I won't get to see the real painting. But that's not the point of my argument. Forget about it.) My other option would be to go to an art gallery. Doing that would give me access to a limited amount of art, filtered through the perception of a third party. For it to show up in an art gallery, someone has to curate it. I get to look at what they think is interesting.

I think that it would be good for conventional media to operate that way. Let's have an example: Before the internet, it was alright to show one TV show in one country and a different one somewhere else. That's still how it happens, but I'm not sure it's okay any more. If a TV show airs in the UK but not in Canada, and I want to watch it but have no legal way to do so, what am I supposed to do? Am I meant to just not watch it at all? Or do I wait for the DVD to come out and then break the encryption? Or subscribe to digital cable for one show? That's no fun at all. It means that as much as I may want to watch something, there's no sensible, legal way to do it. Why don't they show me what I want to watch on TV? The standard channels only have so much space in their schedules. They have to make decisions about what they think will be successful. They don't have the resources to cater just to me. And yes, I know I could just get BBC Americas or something, but it comes with a large cable package. In order to get one show that I want, I'd have to sign on for a whole lot more. Not very sensible if I don't actually want to spend my free time in front of the TV. So, there's no easy way for conventional media to get my viewership without alienating another large chunk of the viewing public. There simply isn't enough time in the day to accommodate me.

There is, however, another medium that can target individuals quite well. Guess what it is. Did you say The Internet? You're quite right. The internet has all the space necessary to show everyone just what they want to see. That's pretty great. But there are some problems. For one thing, with enough space to make everyone happy, it's sometimes hard to find what you want. Take the art analogy above. A billion hits for the word "art." I'd have to narrow my search down quite a bit to find something that I actually wanted to look at. But that's another problem. Going to the art gallery, or watching TV, or listening to the radio gives me the opportunity to find new things. I might not have known that I'd like it, but when someone else presents it to me, wow! It's a whole new world.

We've established the strengths of conventional media and new media. Conventional media is good at filtering things, at presenting new things to viewers, at curating. The internet, on the other hand, is far better at distribution. You can actually fit all those individual tastes onto the internet. I think that the answer, then, is to make the two work together. Conventional media should become an arbiter of taste, a more curatorial venture, and should leave distribution to new media. Both media could play to their own strengths instead of the constant fear and competition that the current model provokes. Wouldn't that be nice?

Not book reports, website reports

In grade school, I had to write book reports. They usually talked about the plot, the characters, and other basic things. Because it was grade school, I didn't go into much detail. I didn't analyse much or explore deeper issues of imagery and what lies beneath the basic plot. I was writing a reading response today, but it was a little different from the usual. Instead of an article, I was meant to be responding to some websites. As I wrote, it started looking suspiciously like one of those book reports from grade school. So, I'm wondering if, in the future, children in grade school will write website reports. They could discuss what the website is meant to do, the basic layout and structure, what kind of interaction it allows (if any), that kind of thing. Here's to a new artform, then. Or, if not an artform, a new kind of busywork for teachers to assign to small children. At least it promotes media literacy.

Website overhaul

I've given my main website a much needed overhaul. It was old and decrepit. It used tables for layout. I've been ashamed of it for the past year or so. Today, I finally got motivated to give it the work it needed. It's new, it's pretty, it's worth looking at. adaptstudio.ca

Thought Bubbles

I want to make some very small, very low power, sculptural computers. They only need to be able to access wifi networks and browse websites (I'm thinking Wikimedia Commons and Google image search). They very nearly qualify as wearable computers. They're shaped like thought bubbles and are worn sticking up from some kind of hat or other person to computer interface. The idea is that the wearer would be able to grab an image from the internet and display it on their thought bubble screen. It would give the adorable illusion of being in a comic book, and it would give others a little insight into the thoughts of the wearer. Neat.

When word processors are the old fashioned way

I tried to load my blogger dashboard, in order to write the previous two posts. No response, just the generic message from my modem, saying that it wasn't going to happen. Check the modem: no lights out. Check another site, internet working properly. “So,” I though to myself, “blogger must be down. I guess I'll have to write these the old fashioned way and upload later.” The strange thing, though, is that by “the old fashioned way,” I meant in a word processor. Which is to say, a word processor that is actually installed on my physical-right-here-in-front-of-me computer. When did that become the old fashioned way? I'm a little concerned that I might soon be an anachronism. More and more, our productivity apps are moving to the internet (just look at google docs). More and more, the app that people use most is their browser. Will I be hopelessly old fashioned with my word processor and my graphics clients and my email client? The smart money, I think, is on the answer to that question being “yes.”

TV on the internet v. TV on TV

I sat down in front of my TV last night to -amazingly enough- watch some TV. Most of the time, I use the TV for watching movies or playing games. I get most of my TV from the internet. The CBC normally gets my viewership by posting episodes on their website. This, I think, works better for everyone. What's so good about it? The CBC gets a more precise impression of where their viewers are coming from. When I pluck waves out of the air with an antenna, the CBC has no idea that I'm watching. On the other hand, when I click through to the jPod website, for example, it is quite clear that I'm watching. There's a useful corollary to that, too. CBC can more precisely tell their advertisers how many people are viewing, and who those people are. That's quite good. Clearly, the CBC benefits from me watching TV on the internet. What, then, do I gain? I gain flexibility and self determination. I gain the ability to watch shows when I want to, instead of when the CBC chooses to air them. That's useful if I'm not home when the show first airs. I'm much less likely to follow a show if I have to drop everything to watch it. The other major gain is that the show doesn't get interrupted by advertisements. I'd much rather view banner ads on the side or top of a website than ads in the middle of a show.

If TV on the internet is so good, why am I even framing this as a competition? TV is, at this point, still better than TV on the internet in some respects. For one, if I were to watch jPod on the CBC website, the resolution would be far worse than the TV version. Not only that, but the episode would stream, and streaming is inherently jumpy. Also, if I happened to be home on a Tuesday night, it would make far more sense to watch the broadcast, since episodes aren't uploaded until after the show has aired. Problematic. But not just problematic for the viewer. Even though the CBC benefits in many ways from making shows available on their website, there's still a major problem: the cost of bandwidth. Streaming a 45 minute long show takes bandwidth. Bandwidth costs money. They now pay not only to broadcast the show on TV, but also to stream it on demand on their website.

Some questions, then, about the good and bad of TV on the internet. Would I rather watch a low res, slightly jumpy version of a show, or have the story constantly interrupted by advertisements? Why, if the CBC is willing to make shows available online, do they not choose a better distribution method? Would it be so wrong to set up a CBC sanctioned torrent? Such a solution might cut bandwidth costs for the CBC, and it would certainly give viewers a better viewing experience. At the same time, would regular viewers be willing to spend time waiting for a show to download, in exchange for better picture quality? Do regular viewers even bother to watch TV on the internet?

If I value flexibility and self determination in my TV viewing, why did I sit down last night and watch TV on TV? Simply, I was home, I had nothing to do, I wanted something lazy to occupy my evening with. So I turned on the TV. I find, though, that the more committed I am to a show, the more I end up watching it on the internet. Broadcast TV, on the other hand, is admirably suited to casual viewing. Plus, commercial breaks are a great time to go and get a fresh cup of tea.