I like the flat button a lot more.
1,099 karma · joined July 31, 2011
"Every person - not just children - get access to infinite knowledge."
But what about the history of their community's books? The picture books thumbed through by children? Sure, perhaps we'd be better off if everyone read The Casual Vacancy on e-Readers (and many libraries are moving towards systems where demand for popular paperbacks is satisfied by digital) but getting rid of every book? EVERY book?
The value of a book isn't just in the combination of letters. Books are much richer than their raw genotype. There is the feel of the pages, the textures, the heft, the binding, the hundred little details and sense-impressions, from smell, sight, texture, sound, of reading a book - often unique from book to book. To ignore all of these displays is simply ignorant nothing more. This guy just somehow grew up with a completely fucked relationship to books.
Yeah, generally I have no problems with Flash, and I find having to enable everything or stare at gutted pages irritating. Plus, how do I know what an element is until I enable it - so how am I supposed to know which elements I want to enable?
(If you have any tips I'm missing, feel free to fill me in.)
I feel like hits on a big problem for Microsoft. They've come up with a whole bunch of fancy new gizmos (Metro, Surface) - but it's all resting on top of a mountain of random legacy cruft, and they haven't tied it together or done anything really to iron out the weird inconsistencies. Great, here's a brilliant pressure-sensitive pen. What? No, we haven't made anything for you to use it with. Nope, sorry, no accommodations for it in the OS. Sorry man - too busy coming up with crazy new shit (and slapping it onto small portions of the interface)!
I'm using Windows 8 now, and, mixed with Windows Phone 7.5, Outlook.com, attempts to integrate calendar and to-do lists, being forced to use the monstrosity that is the Zune phone software, I have to say, holy shit Microsoft - time to do some spring cleaning. I really hope instead of charging on to the next big thing, Microsoft focuses on consolidation for Windows 9 - delving in to all the random nooks and crannies, clearing out the legacy cruft, unifying the interface, smoothing out the inconsistencies between Metro and Desktop, streamlining their mobile-desktop integration, streamlining their web services. Otherwise, god, how much longer can they go on coming up with the new Next Bestest Thing to mash into the pile of random crap that Windows has become?
Edit: Wow, actually a lot going on in this guy's site. The little animated menus bottom left and right of the article. The filter searchable previous posts. The swivel-transition topic group-changes. The speed-controllable animation. Pretty neat, fanciest blog I've ever seen!
And I've said many times that there are red herrings all over the show with this affair. Those who focus on Aaron's explicit ideology are falling for a major one, I believe. Similarly with the focus on the DOJ. The only relevant issue here is Aaron's psyche, and the trend of reckless, idealistic data-vigilantes trying to place themselves above the law.
I, at least, cannot imagine
Try harder. Yeah, maybe they should have sent Aaron off for counselling. He sounds like he was becoming steadily more and more unhinged. Anyway, Aaron was pretty tenacious in his illegal behaviour at MIT. He wouldn't back down, and he got his hand slapped. That happens when you don't back off.
Aaron fits into a class of young men who believe that, because they have lofty principles which they are sure are correct, and because they are exercising their skill in a novel domain in which they are experts (computers) they are or should be above the law, and society should bend to their desires. Heymann was a critic of this trend - he wrote legal papers on it - and I assume he saw Aaron as an important case in proving a principle - that headstrong young white men with lofty ideas are subject to the same laws as the rest of us. So, his prosecution would have been primarily driven by the deterrence rationale.
Deterrence eh? Seems to be fairly well-established as a prudent rationale for prosecution in law. Lol. Nah, forget that, Heymann was an ego-driven careerist monster! Off with his head!
I made the comparison to lynching for two reasons. Firstly, because I think the basic social DNA is the same, though the phenotype is different. To whit: an angry crowd jumps to a snap decision and demands rapid, extra-legal retribution. In the case of lynching, the crowd is a group of people in a single place whose only mechanism of demanding this retribution is face-to-face and physical. In our situation, the crowd is a dispersed group of people who can interact in relatively anonymous digital channels, and do not have as clear a mechanism to gather together physically and demand retribution in that fashion. (Luckily - this practical difficulty hampers the groupthink tendencies of the internet.)
Secondly, I made the comparison to lynching because it is an effective rhetorical point. Lynching is something which most people today would find shocking and unacceptable. By drawing and defending a comparison between lynching and this current behaviour, I am attempting to reframe and destabilise this modern trend of calling for blood. People that find lynching shocking might eagerly support calls for the firing of Ortiz or Heymann, but if they are confronted with a logical link between the two activities, they may reconsider their motives and actions.
And broadly I am doing all this, as I have explained, because I think while this behaviour is relatively innocuous now, it's growing teeth, and could turn ugly.
2) The hard truth is, that much of the publicly funded research is kept away from 99,9 % of the people, just so a few can make profits.
How about you back up that opinion? Because it sounds like reductive hyperbole.
3) the actual truth is that many laws are written by lobbyists.
I would never deny the influence of special interests, and you misconstrue me if you think I do - or if you think I am arguing that current political systems are perfect. I am sick of this false dichotomy that you can only have two opinions on modern democracy - either you are a raving critic who thinks it is all corrupt and shit, or you are a placid simpleton who thinks everything is fine. I take a middle road - I try and see the good and the bad in balance. The harsh black and white perspectives common among e-activists are severely in need of some balance.
4) the laws are and always have been up to interpretation
Yes, of course. Did I argue that this is not the case, or should not be the case? The question is the mechanism through which laws should be reappraised. Aaron Swartz thought reckless, desperate and illegal behaviour was an appropriate mechanism. People like you seem to think that angry crowds of people on the internet demanding the change they want is an appropriate mechanism. I think that careful, focused consideration of all pertinent issues by qualified experts is the most appropriate mechanism. Shocking, I know, but no, I don't think people on the internet tend to come to particularly balanced opinions on political issues. My greatest sin seems to be that this isn't sexy or modern enough - it is after all a mechanism which modern democracies employ all the time. Apparently that makes me one of the "thousands of people... that chose the way of least resistance" (because it sure is a walk in the park venturing and defending my position against the anti-government consensus on Hackernews...)
5) If you think that the current system will be seen as just in 100 years from now you are probably wrong.
Again, this false dichotomy - can I not simultaneously believe that there is a lot of good to be found in the democratic systems we have developed so far, and believe at the same time that there is room for improvement? I don't see how the two are mutually exclusive.
The problem I think is that people today are not particularly educated about how the history of the development of modern political and economic systems, and they have no understanding of how much they have improved on previous formats, and how many benefits we derive from these advances. They are blind to the benefits of what has been achieved, and can only see problems. So they have no perspective.
6) we must make sure, that everyone has access to current research
We must, I would argue, also make sure that we protect the systems of incentives that allows creative work to be done. This to me is the singular arrogance of e-activists - the belief that anyone profiting from creative work are fatcats, that no allowances should be made for creators in making information free, that anyone affected by the actions of e-activists is just a dinosaur, that the world must adapt to them. It's unhealthy. I think if we really want to accelerate human development we must be careful not to succumb without critical scrutiny to the allure of impressive-sounding causes such as open-everything. How often do e-activists question their actions? How often do they say "what if the things I believe in are wrong and damaging?" Not often, from what I can see.
6) when I hear those people pitying the ones who are trying to make the world a better place, it makes me angry and sad.
Oh, get off your damn high horse.
Secondly, I am actually not saying that I think that, within a week or two, people will be calling for actual blood/lynching. What I'm trying to do is flesh out my sense of a trend which, though driven by the impatience and quick mouse-fingers of internet-users, is a lot slower than that. I think the Aaron Swartz hullabaloo will peter out. But I have noticed a gradual, albeit strong, trend of increasing pressure being wielded by the great undifferentiated masses of the internet. Anonymous. We The People. KONY. Avaaz. These are all facets, I reckon, of the same trend: slowly, a structure is forming which can link together and focus the emotion of the many against the few. Anonymous' Low Orbit Ion Cannon is not a bad example. Anonymous users can join together to attack prominent, exposed individuals or groups. Governments, celebrities, corporations, whatever. The balance of power is stark: targets have little recourse - isolating one individual or another from the crowd is practically useless.
Now, because LOIC is a pretty dramatic example, I should be clear of something: I am not saying that this trend is categorically a bad thing. But I do think it has the potential for evil - not now, but later. You say that what is happening is of little "real" consequence - I would argue that perhaps now that is true (though should be willingly sacrifice a man's career to the appetites of the crowd if he is innocent?), but what about next year, or the next? I am not stupid. I know that there is a buffer between these petitions and the government. That won't disappear overnight. But people are working hard to develop, all the time, these tools of "direct democracy." SOPA was stopped. Action has been effective, and governments do seem in some ways relatively impotent, lacking the technological know-how, focus, flexibility and downright cunning that can be mustered by engaged citizens.
Again, I should be clear: I'm not imagining some cartoonish image of crowds marching through the streets with pitchforks. However this manifests it will suit the manner and technologies of this time.
Also, I'm not defending the status quo. Really. I haven't considered the flipside to these arguments in depth, but it involves something along the lines of the ability of large organisations to negotiate agreements with other large organisations, to engage the bureaucratic infrastructure of society, and develop and deploy large-scale surveillance technologies. I'm not sure how these forces balance up, or how they will pan out, or who's good and who's bad, or who I think should win. I'm mostly playing with ideas at the moment.
Anyway, in this corner of the web, we spend a lot of time worrying about democracy and the rights of the people, standing on soap boxes and shouting about injustice - but what if we're part of a game, what if we're not as pure as we make ourselves out to be? The concept that our actions might be aggressive, confrontational, threatening, is counter-intuitive - a lot of what I'm saying is counter-intuitive (which is why I think people here are reacting so mixedly to it) - but what if this is our blind spot? What if we are the aggressors here - or what if we are the force growing into the role of aggressor/oppressor? What if governments and corporations turn out to be weak before the anger of the crowd?
Well. I don't know, but I think it's interesting to consider. I'm not afraid of effective collective action. But I am opposed to poorly-thought-through collective action. 1) because it tends to flop (Occupy) 2) because it needs to grasp for easy enemies and 3) because it can be destructive. I see that potential today in modern internet behaviour. Maybe tomorrow I might see another side. Who knows.
Above all: I like to know where the crowd is heading before I join in the rush. It seems difficult to get a coherent answer from a lot of these modern cause célèbres.
Yes and no. No, the medium is not important, because groupthink can manifest and has manifested many times at every stage of civilization. Groupthink is of course not unique to the internet.
But yes, the medium is important, because the medium in this case is the internet, the defining medium of our age, and which most importantly is an emerging medium, which I would argue we still don't really understand. I think that we haven't yet worked out, as they say with the development of cinema, the grammar of the internet. This is after all still very early days for a global connected world culture, and there is always the potential for negative developments in such a period, before mistakes have been made, recognised, and effective counter-measures have been developed and deployed. In my view, this period is always dangerous.
>are you just afraid of collective action in general?
Not afraid perhaps but definitely wary. Collective action can be good, but it generally takes a lot of time and hard work and thought by a small group of people preparing and working on the rationale for the action, targeting an issue which is as close to bulletproof as possible. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, is an excellent example of this, but it didn't happen overnight. "Good things take time." And I should mention that from my impression the people involved in civil rights behaved with calmness and dignity, and never would have turned shrill at a small setback or upset. Contrast this with modern insta-rage activism, which in my opinion rests almost always on very shaky intellectual foundations. The screefield of issues thrown up in the wake of Aaron's death are anything, I would say, but bulletproof.
There is a strong precedent in history for collective action degenerating into groupthink and turning very nasty, and thus I think it is perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of collective action today.
Re: your previous post -
> If you fuck up in the public sector, you get sacked.
See that's part of the problem. Yes, of course, employees public sector should be accountable. I have no argument with that. But the implication here is that these employees of the DOJ did fuck up. But did they really? Many, many people judged them more-or-less on the spot as guilty - and based on what? A blog they read? Their political prejudices? Their sympathies to a story about a nice young kid with lofty ideals? Is this issue really so simple, so cut and dried, that it boils down to some bad cops ganging up on a nice kid? I don't believe so. And furthermore, I think that it never bodes well when lots of people are making up their minds very quickly that someone is an enemy who needs to be punished.
That's where normal, democratic mechanisms of accountability are supposed to come into play: to sift slowly through all the ins and outs of issues and avoid quick, heated judgements. Yes, there should be mechanisms for accountability in society. But those mechanisms must be objective, critical - and slow. What modern internet activism threatens is a short-circuiting of whatever mechanisms we have with the worst mechanism of all: mob rule. Regardless of the quality of current mechanisms, that would be a loss. Why? Because mobs move too quickly to reflect on their motives. Because mobs lack the social delineation which allow dissenting voices to challenge the developing orthodoxy. Because mobs lack an organisational structure which would allow the issue to be effectively and calmly analysed. Because mobs demand quick justice. Because mobs intimidate others to get what they want. Because mobs demand assent.
Now, I'm not saying that the current situation is all this. It's much milder than the worst case scenario - but it has the potential to develop that way. Or at least that's what I think. I also think that at any point in time, the people crying the loudest about oppression and freedom are most likely the real oppressors. But that's just a pet theory.
Edit: In my opinion, a demand for someone to be fired shares the same social DNA as lynching. Driven by the same forces: an angry crowd demands that a scapegoat be punished to appease it.
Yes, you misread the word sad. I wrote with pity. Sorry you didn't pick that up.
I've always been of the opinion that the state doesn't need to be reformed so much as dismantled
Well... I think you're ignorant and entitled. Basically. Sorry.
You mean like completely out of proportion prosecutorial aggression to address an issue that the state would instead not like you or anyone else to think too closely about?
No, I mean like the Pope decided that he didn't like Galileo and he didn't like the idea of the Copernican system, and he banned the very idea. One guy stood up and literally said "No one is allowed to believe or talk about idea A. Idea B is the only truth."
The idea that the prosecution of Aaron is in any way comparable to the situation in Counter-Reformation Italy is just... completely retarded. There's no other word for it. If you really believe that, then you're stupid. I'm sorry. It's not "precisely the same thing," it's not even bloody close. Perhaps you could enlighten me: explain who are the people attempting to control contemporary discourse - explain how they are doing it - explain why they are doing it - explain exactly what thoughts they are trying to make illegal to discuss. I'd like to see you try without falling into utterly ridiculous conspiracy theories.
I think it's beyond obvious that there are a very large amount of very stupid laws on the books
Great, welcome to the club: it's called People Who Are Sure They Know Best How Things Should Be Run. Members: basically everyone. I have some grumpy old men who hate welfare bludgers and some young bright-eyed radicals who think money is just, like, this thing that people made up y'know, to introduce you to if you're interested.
Which is, as demonstrated by the magnitude of the horrendous nature of all the things which have been created in precisely the same vein, clearly useless.
From your writing I take it you're educated (in some respects.) By a school? Also, I'd assume you're in reasonable good health. Ever gotten sick? Needed medication? How about this computer you're using? Been mugged or stabbed recently? Your family ever been helped out by reliable insurance contracts? Ever worried about your hometown being invaded and burnt to the ground by neighbouring tribes? Enjoyed a bout of syphylis recently? How about reliable credit and a global economy that is a miracle of efficiency?
Oh yes, I absolutely agree with you: all of these silly laws - completely useless!
If the perspective is that one should simply accept that things are all roses...
Nice work reading your own pet peeves into what I wrote buddy.
Aaron was unhappy his entire life. He behaved recklessly, attracted criminal prosecution, and capped it all of by killing himself. Do you find that noble? I don't. I think he failed: failed to see the world realistically, failed to direct his thoughts and energies in a constructive manner, and failed to achieve much of anything. He puffed himself up and charged into something that didn't budge, and then he lost control. That's not noble to me at all. Just sad.
As for: >aspects of the modern world which could fairly be described as diseases.
Can you elaborate? (And do you mean that these aspects behave similarly to pathological infections in organisms or to epidemiological dynamics among populations?)
And >Galileo
Bad comparison. Galileo was explicitly ordered by the Catholic Church not to "hold or defend" the Copernican system. I.e. the dominant social power of that time and place decided they didn't like the concept, and they suppressed efforts to discuss and spread it. When Galileo edged around the constraint, they clamped down even harder. It was a clear cut case of a social power deciding to restrict free speech to prevent an idea from even being thought about.
In contrast, there is no dominant social power in modern times. No one is in even a remotely comparable position in 2013 to suppress ideas. You and I are free to discuss copyright liberation or whatever we want. Aaron was free to write blogs, tracts, hand out pamphlets, send letters to politicians, make websites, etc etc etc. No one suppressed him in any of those activities. It is only when he crossed the line into illegal behaviour that he was prosecuted - according to open, democratically-developed laws and prosecutorial guidelines - all subject to normal processes of democratic oversight.
>The world needed changing then, and it needs it now.
Dangerous language in my opinion. Nothing "needs" anything. Deciding that the world "needs" changing means you set up a very rigid condition for success. And this is what I think happened with Aaron: inevitably people who think the world needs changing run into roadblocks, which their rigidity does not prepare them for. Then, failing to make the changes they believe are necessary, they fail to meet their rigid victory condition - and because of its rigidity, they fail, in their own opinion, absolutely. Which is devastating, and in Aaron's case, seems to have pushed him past his limits.
A healthier perspective is that the world might be better with some tweaks - but it will probably never be perfect, and you should accept that you might not be able to do everything you want - and so on and so on. Aaron could have done with a bit of that perspective I reckon. How about you?
As far as I'm concerned, all of Aaron's convictions and all of the bickering about the technicalities of the case are red herrings here. The fact that so many people haven't stopped to think harder about all this, and have instead jumped on the instant rage bandwagon is one of, if not THE real issue, I think. It speaks to a real trend of snap-judgement reactionary groupthink, which seems to be prevalent in contemporary internet culture. The angry people yelling about democracy and shouting dissidents down are the real danger to open society.
I think, from reading this, that Aaron was a person with something missing inside of him. To compensate, he tried to change everything around him - everything but himself. People like that have poor odds in life. When the world resists their efforts and they are forced to acknowledge the limits of their agency, their big dreams of quick change come crashing down. They can find themselves with little to retreat to in the aftermath.