World Without Walls 119
The citizens of the Net and the Web live in a world without walls, denizens of a new kind of social geography. Much more than technology, this is the stunning new reality of networked computing.
We go online so often, to so many different places, and browse and download so freely, it's sometimes easy to take our own culture for granted.
But this world without walls increasingly is colliding with the off-line place, the one that's criss-crossed with walls. As these two very different countries interact, the issue of walls and boundaries becomes more intense, even bitter. And the stakes become bigger, for politics, business and for nearly every powerful institution.
The Net is entering its second generation. People who grew up on take for granted their freedom to say what they want, go where they want, download and retrieve what they want. They have little experience with walls. As the Net becomes more central, lucrative and culturally powerful, the outside world is thundering online like a great, frenzied herd. And they're throwing up walls like mad.
Just as furiously as they want to put their walls up, many of us resist. This profound difference puts the Net at odds with most of the important institutions, traditions and instincts in the world.
Walls and institutions, from Congress to Wall Street to the White House, are almost synonymous. All of these places have walls around them, usually thick and heavily-guarded. Walls are the boundaries in our culture that protect institutions and define them. There are walls around schools, stores and, in the legal and copyright sense, ideas and words. Walls are the social and cultural architecture, prevalent in almost every part of life.
The architecture of the Internet is different from conventional ideas about building things. It takes information from almost all institutions and industries - music, journalism, government, the stock market - and absorbs them into a new world, one designed specifically without walls. No wonder conflicts are inevitable.
The Web has its own architects, and they're building very different kinds of structures, as Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville point out in their astounding new book, "Information Architecture for the Web," from O'Reilly Publishers.
"From clay tablet scribes to medieval monks to the folks who organize your daily newspaper, information architects have contributed in subtle but important ways to our world. Information architects have balanced the whims of authority with those of unforgiving users of every stripe, while forcibly fitting their efforts into the constraints of the available information technologies," write Rosenfeld and Morville.
These new technologies, and the architects designing them, are creating kinds of communities that have never been seen in the world before. Hundreds of new websites - this one, for example (Slashdot) - are constructed by architects to work without walls. Not only is the source code that makes them work freely distributed, but they are conceived to be continuously and inextricably linked to other structures, to work in a bottom-up way, rather than the other way around.
To the institutions of the off-line world, day-by-day confronted with the emerging power, reach and influence of the Internet, this flies in the face of the very way in which their world has always worked, and needs to work if they're to survive.
Without walls, there's no secretary, security guard, voice-mail or letters column to hide behind. It's harder to own, license and patent things, even harder to charge for them. Online, we write in immediate proximity to the praise and the criticism, insulated from neither. Online, we can travel freely and quickly, from place to place, from the house next door to the other side of the world. It's different.
In many ways, the issue of whether all these walls can or should come down - or whether we need to erect more - is a civil conflict. In pits one generation against another, one sensibility against another, one experience against another. It is the primary divide between the digital culture and un-wired, neo-Luddite encampments in media, Academe and politics.
Struggles about walls and the Internet are erupting constantly, online and off. The increasingly public and politicized rebellion against Microsoft by Linux and other open source and free software advocates is one of them, as is the challenge to the music industry from MP3 music software. Microsoft's ubiquitous software programs are a series of information walls; people pay tolls to cross over them from the outside world to the Net. Linux seeks to knock the wall down so that people can move about freely. Microsoft, true to the culture from which it came, wants to keep them up.
Earlier this month, Website designers from all over the world were angered when they discovered that Microsoft had received a U.S. patent covering a fundamental technology - "cascading style sheets" (templates that reduce the cost of developing Web sites) - that had been adopted by the World Wide Web consortium, the non-profit group working to standardize the Web.
The new wall-less world challenges entrenched power everywhere it goes. With so much information available online, the role of teachers is under pressure, as well as that of the journalists. Voters have the electronic means to make their opinions known instantly, as they did during the Monica Lewinsky scandal - a source of real and evident unease to political figures.
Institutions use walls to preserve their places as arbiters of culture, civics and the political agenda. Yet when Congress dumped Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton into the culture without walls last fall, it spread to tens of millions of people; many believe that the possibility of removing the President from office ended that way. One kind of wall had collapsed.
The primary response to the wall-less world has been to try to build some. Congress has passed not one but two noxious and blatantly unconstitutional "decency" laws aimed at putting up barriers to the Net's free speech. The issue of whether or not to tax E-shopping has to do with walls. So do the widespread efforts to build walls around adult content sites. Corporations coming online constantly throw walls up as toll barriers - USA Today's reviews of books can't run on Amazon.com, for example, since USA Today has an "arrangement" - a wall -- with Barnes and Noble's Website.
A whole industry of censorship technology has sprouted around the demonstrably false idea that the Internet is too dangerous for children. Millions of noxious blocking software programs have been sold that neither protect children nor guarantee decency, and every one of them is a wall.
The late Jonathan Postel, often called the Father of the Internet, and one of the engineers and scientists who designed it, sensed that the Internet had the potential to become a culture very different from other powerful new media - telephones, radio, TV - which were, from the first, commercialized and corporate. Although his vision almost literally made the Net as free as it is, he's almost known, online or off.
The laws of a capitalist culture are relentless: anything that's powerful and in widespread use is always - always - ultimately acquired by profit-making institutions. In our time, these institutions are of a size and scale even the Robber Barons of the last century couldn't have imagined. So their ability to acquire whole chunks of industry and culture are unprecedented. Nobody will ever know how many smaller entrepreneurs, companies and individual enterprises corporations like Disney, Time-Warner-Turner, Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) have been engulfed and devoured.
One reason the Internet has grown so rapidly - approximately 80 million Americans now have access to it at home, school or work - is that people like Postel created its infrastructure out of the sight and consciousness of business, government or media. It was growing before big corporations were even aware of it.
There should be statues of Postel on the tops of computer monitors. He released the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) specification (RFC 354) in 1972, when he was editor of the Request for Comments.
Postel and his fellow designers saw an opportunity to create a revolutionary new kind of networked communications system, one which depended on the freest possible exchange of information. It's no accident or small matter that domain names and Net protocols and e-mail are free. It's the deliberate absence of walls that makes this so. This ethic marked the Internet from the beginning, and platoons of hackers and cypherpunks and Libertarians have battled furiously to keep the culture free.
Compare that with what happened to TV, which was only a couple of years old before it was regulated by the federal government, then licensed to three network moguls for nearly half a century. The sad fate of TV - until zappers, satellite and cable technology liberated it somewhat - is really a story of regulatory and corporate walls fencing off a medium that was also conceived as a revolutionary communications tool but became something else, although its inevitable fusion with the Internet may yet allow it to fulfill it's original promise.
Because politics, media and business were so slow - perhaps too short-sighted -- to sense the potential reach of the Net, however, they left it alone, permitting a culture of unparalleled freedom and diversity to grow and spread. Although the equipment used to get onto the Internet is sometimes cumbersome and expensive, the Net itself was specifically designed to be wide open, a global network without boundaries or borders. Any company will have to fight very hard, as Microsoft is learning, to conquer cyberspace, or to contain even a large slice of it. Microsoft's mythic "Halloween" document, written by an employee in response to the spread of Linux and other open source software, included ideas about how to change domain configurations to close off parts of the Internet so that companies like Microsoft could charge for access more readily. The proposal was never seriously considered or adopted by the company, but it's very existence was revealing enough.
These kinds of conflicts are erupting everywhere, all the time. This week the four major television networks said they planned to sue DirecTV, the leading satellite TV provider, to force it to stop carrying their programs. The networks decision came after an announcement by DirecTV on Tuesday that it planned to evade a court-ordered cutoff of network programming by supplying network signals directly rather than through another company.
And earlier this week, the Sony Corporation said it plans to propose a new copy protection method that would enable the recording industry to sell music "safely", both on line and in digital formats like CD's and audio DVD's.
The liberation of music online is one of the most visible and comprehensible of the battles about walls. Music lovers by the millions have used new technologies to buy songs and music they like. New artists have found new ways to make people aware of their music. The record industry, which for years got people to buy music they didn't want in order to get the music they did, is scrambling to get some walls up again. But it may be too late. Millions of music fans have been politicized by MP3's, and are now quite used to getting all the music they want for little or no money. They may use even newer technologies to fight back.
Thanks to this history, much of the world's stored information on the planet is now free as well, for the first time in history.
In fact, Net and its subset the Web have spawned a culture with a visceral dislike of walls. The wall-busting nature of the Net has unified, even defined many of the sub-cultures that thrive here -- hackers, nerds, geeks, OSS guerrillas, cypherpunks, programmers, developers, gamers.
The idea of a society without walls is one of the very few nearly universal values in this complicated and diverse realm. The early hackers made it nearly a religion to break down walls wherever they find them. Although companies have gotten much more sophisticated at keeping the hackers out, the hacker ethic still runs powerful and deep.
The idea of a wall-less society exists in opposition with almost everything about the way that other society has been constructed. If anybody can get in or out of crucial institutions at will, or communicate with one another at no charge, or access tons of information for free, then how can political institutions regain control, media organizations maintain their influence, the increasingly large and repressive corporations that dominate American life keep their primacy?
If the MP3 player is a lethal wall-killer, so are audio and video streaming programs that let people anywhere listen and watch to programs almost anywhere else in the world. Walls have collapsed all over Academe. As reports and studies that used to be filtered through committees and take years to be shared with colleagues are now transmitted on the Internet in hours or days. Researchers and scholars can share their work openly with one another, and according to publications like the MIT Technology Review, are changing the nature of research. Term papers and theses are posted on the Web and shared, a frightening idea to many academics, a stirring one to others.
Disney's skillfully designed new portal, Go.Com, is a case study in a giant corporation's wall-building instincts. The site seeks to be self-contained, rather than promote linkage to other places, as so many Websites do; it's about keeping people within a particular entity. So Disney has acquired sports, news and entertainment sites at great cost to keep people within Go.com's boundaries, a clear step towards wall-building.
Microsoft's on-line Slate magazine tried for a year to get people to pay to subscribe - subscriptions are, in media terms, the embodiment of walls --, foregoing the very openness that makes the Web unique in media. A failure, the magazine reluctantly decided to offer itself for free once more. It's primary competitor Salon, understood from the outset that success depending on avoiding, not constructing, barriers.
The open source and free software movements are perhaps the biggest wall-crushers on the Net at the moment. Last week Business Week declared that Linux was Microsoft's "Vietnam."
The idea between Linux and other free software systems and programs is that there should be no walls separating the systems that run the software on the Web, any more than there are walls keeping people on the Net from e-mailing one another.
Beyond the intensely ingrown community of free software advocates, though, it's caused shock and consternation.
"Why should software be free?" Edward J. Zander, chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, asked New York Times reporter Amy Harmon in a story on OSS. "Why should I give away what I pay millions of dollars to develop? Why doesn't General Motors give its cars away for free? Why don't you give me your newspaper for free?"
Good questions, and exactly the ones the chief operating officer of a giant computer software company should be asking, and the country should be talking about. The values of the rapidly ascending Internet suggest that companies may need a more nuanced response when it comes to existing online - such as perhaps giving some things away free some of the time, or charging less for the things they do sell, or selling them in different ways: giving consumers more power in terms of customization -- choice, design, price and quantity.
And hardly anyone on either side of any wall is taking up Zander's elemental question: What would happen if cars were free? If information is? And what would happen if software were free?
Perhaps we'll know soon enough. Increasingly, thanks to Linux, BeOS, open source and free software, it is. ***
As the Internet enters its second generation, it seems clearer all the time that the world without walls and the world with so many are going to continue to collide head-on, like tectonic places shifting before an earthquake.
Technological historians have written that periods of great technological, scientific and artistic advance - the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution - have usually been followed by periods of repression and religious upheaval as institutions and powerful forces fight to regain their eroding dominance, and re-assert their historic right to define morality, control human behavior, and set the agenda. Perhaps the House Managers were more significant than anybody realized.
Will businesses and institutions really sit back in bemused silence while the citizens of the World Without Walls grab all the culture and information in the world for free? Will a society built on the model of power that flows from the top down watch quietly as the world without walls creates a never before seen many-to-many society, one where citizens have as much say as members of Congress, and as quickly? Where people can make their own media, listen to their own music, buy their own stock, punch through taboos about sex, alter business models of and free speech, alter models of purchase and consumption?
In "Web Architecture," the authors acknowledge the anxiety new kinds of information structures causing. "Many librarians [libraries are poignant invocation of a culture with walls, struggling to co-exist in a new culture without any] have responded slowly to new information technologies like the Web. Some librarians feel their value as professionals will be diminished as "virtual libraries" supplant those filled with physical books and periodicals. Many librarians fear that the public will bypass them and go directly to the source via the Internet," wrote Rosenfeld and Morville.
But the truth is, they argue, that skills in information organization and access are more, not less, necessary, in an age when information seems to be exploding everywhere.
Will teachers continue to try and compete with interactive technology by standing in front of computer and Net savvy captive students for hours with pointers and chalkboards? Will colleges overlook the fact that techno-jobs are so numerous and lucrative that growing numbers of kids are foregoing degrees to grab them? Will political parties turn the other cheek as the kind of Net campaigns that bring renegades and outsiders like Jesse Ventura into a political process dominated for years by a handful of rich contributors, journalists and political leaders?
Nobody knows. The history of technology is that its consequences are unpredictable.
Engineer Samuel Florman wrote that technology is inherently tragic, in that it represents the best of the human spirit - the desire to improve the world - and the worst -- a tendency to screw it up.
But technology is also inherently political, and computing, and according to scholars like Douglas Robertson of the University of Colorado, one of the pivotal developments in human history.
Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary and author of "Common Sense," saw the Monarchies who ran the world in his time as suffocating walls around the free movement of ideas and information. They stifled human spirit and individual liberty, he argued. In pleading with his fellow citizens to join in a revolution and knock them down, Paine wrote that "we have it within our power to begin the world anew."
So, it seems, do we, even as we have barely begun to acknowledge it.
mailto:jonkatz@slashdot.org
We have to make all the rules ourselves... (Score:2)
We are the gods of this realm, we can't rely on rules that have been made over time, they have to be made now. Bodies either pass this off as something that isn't important or the complete opposite. There is more to this than just money and when it matters, votes. Some people just don't understand that.
wulf
Be careful what walls you destroy. (Score:2)
BoB
*****
If I weren't insane, I would be.
*sniff* I love you guys (Score:1)
I can only try to add something insightful myself. The biggest wall I see, and it's a long time coming down, is the wall between the net/computer-literate and the non-literate. Our world without walls is still unavailable to most people.
Two Cheers (Score:1)
He's doing a masterful job (Score:1)
This is good, as I said. Personally, I didn't find this article very inspiring, because it seemed too vague and breathless for my taste, but looking at it as a work targeted to a very different audience, I think it's _damn_ effective, just about perfect for that task.
Go Katz! There are guys in boardrooms and positions of power who used to care about what you talk about, went for money in midlife, and are now wondering if they can have their self-validation back. Get 'em frothing about open source! It'd really shake things up and might improve the world in little ways. At least it would get more ideas happening, and more lines of communication open- that's where the action really is.
Good article (Score:1)
Phone Factoid (Score:1)
From information I've seen, the original suggestion (75% of the world's population having never touched a phone) is probably not far off.
step in the right direction (Score:1)
All in all, I think Katz is moving in the right direction here, writing a piece that, while someone said was redundant, is still pretty good.
I think articles that will provoke the mind, and create reactions are good. It stimulates thinking. What I lack sometimes, is a consitency in these kind of postings. There hardly ever come a follow up, where the (varied) views of the public can be presented with views from the very leaders and cooperate people who they attack.
What good is a story if we just provoke feelings and then stroke our backs and say "We're on the right side of this" and then nothing more ?
Just my 2 cents worth on the subject.
Free as in Free Speech, not Free Beer (Score:1)
Free software refers to the fact that it is free to be modified, improved, and distributed not that it costs $0.
Oh come on (Score:1)
Physical labor- an "honest" days work- is far far easier than debugging a solid chunk of code. And less time consuming.
Thought provoking story (Score:1)
This article was very good. I can't wait to get home and play xbill.
Purty good (Score:1)
indeed... (Score:1)
Oo deeeep HA
Cheers
Utopia free zone please. (Score:1)
I always saw that as the role of global nuclear war myself. I don't think the Internet will quite do the job.
Nice article (Score:1)
Nice Job! (Score:1)
What ever happened to his Linux box anyway? I was enjoying those bits...
Walls, self-imposed and otherwise (Score:1)
The Walls Katz writes about are those imposed by others (governments, and corporations with government-backed enforcement) to divide and conquer us and not THOSE that we impose ourselves to keep others away from us.
"Duh, I put up a, er, 'wall' to keep people ouata my house, yeah, dat's it. Dat's good. Walls is good. So, when the gummint puts up walls dat must be good too, eh?"
I guess it's true: half the people you meet (ignoring the difference between mean, mode, and median) are dumber than you, assuming you're of average intelligence. IOW, not only are most people stupid, they're stupider than you think. Explains a long of things in a democracy, no?
Very interesting article. Seen WSJ page B1 today? (Score:1)
The question raised in response to this article by many readers here is "What walls should come down?".
Interestingly enough, the "Wall Street Journal" on page B1 today has an article that is relevant (especially starting with paragraph 8). In the article it is postulated that the fundamental guiding force for all organisms (organic and others such as corporations and societies) is energy efficiency (i.e., losing the battle against entropy as slowly as possible).
While I may disagree with some of the details in the WSJ article, it does raise the interesting question "Can we use energy efficiency as a metric for consciously organizing our society?".
How is this relevant to the article "Word Without Walls"? Isn't the Internet changing the energy consumption profile of the world?
I can get information for very little energy cost to society (compared to a printed book) that helps me achieve my objectives. Therefore, the freer the flow of information at the reduced energy cost the Internet affords, the more efficient society is in general.
Is there information for which the freer flow leads to greater energy costs? It may be that the answer is "yes". For example, perhaps the energy cost to society (both actual and lost opportunity costs) of restricting the instructions for building nuclear devices is less than the cost of dealing with nuclear devices.
Finally, efficiency is gain/cost. For lower organisms gain is simple reproduction. However, for rational humans what is it that we seek to gain? Population? Continued existence of humanity? Something called "happiness"? This question should be considered.
I saw it; interesting. (Score:1)
Yes, the actual "meat" of the article (or at least, the part I thought most interesting) was only in paragraphs 8 through 10 which referred to the ideas of Dr. Frederick of the U. of Pittsbugh.
I thought that some of the extrapolation by Petzinger of those ideas was a little far fetched.
Ignorance? What the fuck is ignorance? (Score:1)
Libre means freedom.
Gratis software (free software) is not the same as
libre software (free software).
-russ
general motors (Score:3)
Well in a lot of those cases, that's what they're doing. General Motors in a certain sense does give away their cars. When I spend $20k on a car, I'm paying a few hundred dollars for the labor of the people assembling the car, a big chunk of money for the cost of parts that are made by the company (frame, body, etc), and a significant chunk for parts made by outside part manufacturers.
Now I've bought my car, its completely open to me. State inspections ignored, I can take all the body panels off my car and tape cardboard spraypainted with fleckstone paint onto it. I can take the engine out and put another in, or rework how the engine works. I can do anything I want with it.
So what's the money paying for? Its for the parts, the time of the people assembling it and part of the profit goes to the company that developed it. If I really wanted to, I could buy the repair manual for the car, go out and buy one part after another and build it from the ground up. Happens all the time with hotrods and restoration cars. The design of the car is completely open. If I want a new cam for the car, I can buy one from the company that made it, but I can also take calipers and such, measure it, and make one myself if I've got the facilities for it or pay someone else to.
So compare that to open source. Sure I can go download all the parts of a Linux system and put it together myself, piece by piece. The manufacturing and materials cost of a piece of software is very low, so they're a lot cheaper than car parts, but those are essentially why they're cheaper. The first Linux system I used was built just that way. But now I tend to use RedHat linux. They build my "car" for me, and I can change it once I get it to how I'd like it to be.
And they sink a lot of money into developing new parts for the "car". I can buy a later model of the "car" if I want or I can aquire the parts and put them on myself.
My point is that the open source concept isn't *that* alien to business -- lots of them have been doing it all along, when you remove costs of materials and manufacturing from the equation. I don't need to go to Ford to build my own Mustang if I've got a good machine shop, skills, and time.
A little dogmatic? (Score:1)
Human nature dictates people will not produce things for nothing. The internet will not change this. The absolute far-fetched best we can hope for is that people will start producing for recognition rather than monetary compensation.
BTW: What economic structure pays for the web backbones? Is it entierly funded by the ISP's that MCI/sprint etc.. sell bandwidth to?
One cheer (Score:1)
You have a choice not to buy Microsoft products, and good for those people who actually make that choice instead of whining.
You have a choice of buying a shiny, fast, euro-yuppie car, or an old beater that gets you there.
You have a choice of what to eat and wear.
You do not have a choice of how much government you buy. You do get to vote, but I would glady sell you my vote for the price of my tax bill.
There are a lot of vile companies out there that would love to build walls for you to pay to cross. But, without government help, the RIAA would not be able to, for example, charge what is essentially a private tax enabled by legislation on all audio recording media.
Sure, it isn't a complete solution, but if you disconnected these rent-seekers from their government protectors, they would be SOL.
Is Katz ready to disconnect teacher's unions, construction worker's unions, and the whole "regulatory compliance" industry from their laws protecting their monopolies?
Sure there are a lot of corporations feeding at the trough. But, unless you think business is run by some international cabal (and some people really do think so), business in general, and most people who make their money capitalistically, would readly throw these trough feeders to the dogs in return for open shops, school funding portability, and a generally slashed tax and regulatory environment.
Those are the really expensive walls.
You all should just be glad... (Score:1)
A few years ago before I turned pro, I used to write on social factors of MUDs and stuff for ISP newsletters and local/regional tech newspapers, and one of these days when I go into semi-retirement on a tropical island (that *is* what I'm supposed to do as a techie, isn't it? world domination and scantily clad women?) maybe I'll have enough leisure time to make the level of "drivel" around here even worse.
Muhahahaha!
And in another very real way... (Score:1)
Subjective (Score:1)
People in glass houses (Score:1)
In contrast, you do seek to do precisely what you argue against, since you believe in universal walls and seek to apply them to me despite the fact that your beliefs are not mine. You are brandishing the gun, not I.
In a world without fences... (Score:1)
T-shirt text, came immediately to my mind upon seeing this article. Surely I'm not the only one.
Ted Turner ... (Score:1)
Funny that Katz mentions Turner ... a few years ago Ted Turner had some weird "contest" for someone who could "write a good ending for the world" (whatever, I didn't get it either).
It seems an ending is being written for his world. So long Ted, Warner, et al. No one will miss you.
Be careless what walls you destroy. (Score:1)
Real walls won't break. Silly cultural taboos will be left in the dust.
Death to morality!
BeOS free? (Score:1)
Factoids (Score:1)
A little nitpicking music, Maestro! (Score:1)
Actually, this one wasn't all that bad, comparitively, but....
"telephones, radio, TV - which were, from the first, commercialized and corporate." No one else had, and was willing to risk, the money to make them happen.
"Although his vision almost literally made the Net as free as it is, he's almost known, online or off." In the future we will all be almost known for 15 minutes.
"Nobody will ever know how many smaller entrepreneurs, companies and individual enterprises corporations like Disney, Time-Warner-Turner, Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) have been engulfed and devoured." It works better if you decide which way you want to word the sentence and stick with that one way, either "Nobody will ever know how many smaller entrepreneurs, companies and individual enterprises corporations like Disney, Time-Warner-Turner, Microsoft (or Wal-Mart) have engulfed and devoured.", or "Nobody will ever know how many smaller entrepreneurs, companies and individual enterprises have been engulfed and devoured by corporations like Disney, Time-Warner-Turner, Microsoft (or Wal-Mart)."
"Compare that with what happened to TV, which was only a couple of years old before it was regulated by the federal government, then licensed to three network moguls for nearly half a century." There was also the DuMont network for a while as well, but the licenses went to the individual television stations (as part of the FCC's stewardship of the public's property, the airwaves) who were free to affiliate with one or more networks or not, as they chose. The current issue of satellite providers not being allowed to provide their subscribers with network programming is about bypassing the local affiliates whose coverage area the subscribers live in. Obviously the local affiliates aren't too thrilled at having their audience siphoned off and the networks don't want the affiliates that keep them alive ticked off. You'll probably find the "none too thrilled about satellite tv" cable television industry lurking in the background of this as well.
"The early hackers made it nearly a religion to break down walls wherever they find them. Although companies have gotten much more sophisticated at keeping the hackers out, the hacker ethic still runs powerful and deep." Congratulations, you just equated hackers with crackers and crooks.
C'mon Jon, get back to the Linux Chronicles, I wanna hear how it's going so I can learn from your misfortunes instead of my own.
something nice to say about this JKA (Score:1)
Katz = verbose form of the "BLINK" tag???? (Score:1)
"The Information Architects of the Web are creating new kinds of wall-less, linked structures never."
Excuse me!!! If he can't control his vowel movements then the only way to deal with him is to buy him some adult diapers and send him off to Time magazine where he can write for print...
I love slashdot.
I find Katz un-useful.
I read the other interesting posts and news articles, most of which offer implicit commentary on what is going on, for those of us who are paying attention.
John Katz writes for some audience that is not the audience that make slashdot, slashdot.
Reading through slashdot and then coming up to a Katz "post" is like those really anoying porn banners that won't go away and spawn new banner windows.
Katz is like spam to slashdot.
Spam Katz.
Splatz.
slashdot has the Splatz.
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
NO MORE SPLATZ!
Don't use "factoid" please (Score:1)
"us humans and others who resemble us physically".
Born Free? (Score:1)
Katz makes reference to "[p]eople who grew up on" the Net. Um, Jon, not many can make that claim, as most people outside academe or the military did not venture online until the advent of Lynx and Mosaic in 1993.
He also says,
Domain names are free? Where?
Only a newbie could suggest that the Internet has never had walls. It wasn't that long ago that you had to know how to address e-mail differently to reach people on bitnet, fidonet, or the Internet, and God help you if you had associates on AOL.
I do agree, however, with the thesis that Internet culture tends to be anti-proprietary. Online culture is, or has been until recently, a gift economy. People share their knowledge of esoteric and mundane subjects free of cost, and freely accessible, for the pleasure of giving, of finding kindred spirits, or even of having a soapbox. The PHBs do not "get" this culture.
All in all it was... (Score:1)
Nice summary. You *are* finished, right? (Score:1)
The variations on the theme of "Geeks against the
world; the Internet will be the champion of
freedom and justice; etcetera..." has lost its
novelty.
I realize Rob is young, and decidely lacking in
discrimination, as are most persons of all ages
these days, but I am still not certain why he
feels your presence necessary here. The majority
of persons who read this site are technologically
literate.
The majority of people in general, are not. Tell
them about the wonders of which you speak.
They wonder why they cannot open a document made
in a later version of a program with an earlier
version of the same program,made by
the same company . The Web flowered
in no small part because of this problem; a medium
to exchange documents easily among different
computer platforms. Yet you come bearing
long-winded opinion pieces about the Web and the
Internet, written with Microsoft Word.
Irony? Ignorance. Ignoramus.
Now go off and preach to your peers.
---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,
Katz +1. (Score:1)
Even old dogs can learn new tricks.
And in another very real way... (Score:1)
Beam Me Up Scotty (Score:1)
But that's exactly what Free Software is, because software is about the only field where unrestricted duplication means that everyone's needs can be met without depriving other people, and where the problem is small enough that single humans can solve chunks of it in their free time.
From RMS and Linus according to their (considerable) abilities; to the rest of us according to our desires. And you don't even have to be a party member to go up and put another brick on the edifice.
Of course, you get some of the problems of communism as well - feedback's not straightforward, because there are so few producers that, if you can't influence any of them, you're stuck. Individual projects tend to end up under dictator-class control, with arbiters of correctness ensuring the project's kept going along the lines they consider right.
But it doesn't matter, in the way that oppression in the Real World matters, because software is a small chunk of the world, and your non-existent right to get your patches into Linux can be abrogated without hurting you.
Ummmm, yeah, so? (Score:1)
Don't use "factoid" please (Score:1)
And in another very real way... (Score:1)
control ever conceived. Eventually, records of everything you read, say, and buy will be easily
harvested, searched, categorised, and analysed.
Meanwhile, the idiots among us will be wallowing
happily in a cable-bandwidth trough of instantly
digestible 'culture'. The Web will replace
television as the new opiate. Fuckit, we must be
free, we've got a million channels to choose
from, 24 hours a day.
Intelligent agents will breed stupid people,
every predilection will be on file, every sordid
detail accounted for in the generation of
the electronic clerks that ring up your latest
video-on-demand purchase, smiling coyly as you
strain to catch a glimpse of a rendered nipple
through impossibly white cotton. As time goes
by, your tastes will be moulded to the media standard, and the agents will have less and less
to do as everyone sleeps, eats, and excretes on
cue.
We'll produce, be silent, and die. And if we're
not silent, it won't matter, as our voices will
be lost in the ever-increasing white noise
scream of a planet ringed with fibre optic
chains.
Who needs walls when the whole world's a prison?
K.
-
P.S. Soylent Green is people!
Two Cheers (Score:1)
The reality is that hackers and the net (and everything else in the world) invented each other in a complex feedback loop of cause and effect and the effects of the effects. To claim that one could have existed in a currently recognisable form without the other is patently ludicrous.
Race? Class? Gender? Nationality? (Score:2)
True, the Net runs the serious danger of getting privatized, but please realize that what wonderfully free information there is or may be, not many people have access to it in the first place. I'm a recent Linux convertee cuz of that (6 months! Painless transition! All I need now is for Adobe to port and a sweet little text editor like NoteTab and I'll never boot Win98 again!)
OSS is one step in creating the information revolution, but one little step that depends on a lot of other more pressing issues. It's funny how often discussions of the Net and WWW - supposedly world wide networkds - always float around a certain sector of the US population: the people who already have access to PCs and the Net (either from home, work or public institutions).
Government regulation, no matter what pseudo-libertarian net heads may say, is not necessarily a bad thing; how many people in North America and Europe would have access to the basic utilities if it wasn't considered a duty of the government to, if not directly provide access, at least to make sure such things aren't completely left to market variables?
Yo, Commander Taco sir, how 'bout a poll on race and nationality? Would be cool, no, to see.
I have two criticisms... (Score:1)
The article was well-written, if not a little long, but I'd like to offer some additional perspective.
First, while there are plenty of entities that engage in "wall-building," both to protect their interests and limit the interests of others, I think people only have themselves to fear - people have a tendency to build their own walls. Take Amazon, for example. It's probably not far from becoming a household word. Familiarity often breeds complacency, and when people become complacent, there isn't much incentive to change (that is, to look at alternatives). So, while Go.com may be building its own walls, I'm not so sure that the average person familiar with Amazon, has much incentive to look elsewhere. So, will the internet truly offer a culture without walls, or will they be just as prevalent, only in different form?
Second, Katz, pointing to the effect that MP3 has had on the music industry, seems to suggest that all of the free music people can access somehow facilitates the removal of walls that have existed in this industry for decades. I take issue with this: what Katz mistakes for "walls" are merely rules for fair play. The rule is, "You download my music, and in return, I get X amount of money. There's no "wall" about it- it's a simple exchange of value. I don't support the RIAA, but I have a real problem with the notion that music should be free.
Why free? (Score:1)
One way to look at you is to think of you as a bunch of information about the positions and properties of particular kinds of particles at a particular moment in time. I suspect you consider yourself to be sentient.
Be careless what walls you destroy. (Score:1)
Strangely enough, I'm a rabid capitalist and an open source advocate. I would hesitate to equate open source with socialism.
Excellent Article (Score:1)
Hmmm... what if GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler actually gave cars away free....
The very idea that the M$ house of ideas actually got a patent on cascading style sheets really points a finger at the US Courts and bureacracy putting an exclamation point on the fact that they don't have the foggiest idea about net technologies nor are they on firm ground when making decisions about it.
Makes one wonder on what the outcome will be in the M$ v DOJ case
In a world without walls...who needs Gates? (Score:1)
He writes about the "walls" which protect institutions and the struggle that goes on between the muroclasts and reactionaries.
The advantage, I would assure him, is with the those who tear the walls down because it is they that are taking an active role in making change, the reactionaries are unable to innovate because they are too weighed down with baggage. They merely react when it is too late. The wave by then has moved on.
Even with the inertial force of social conservatavism this democratic, grass-roots change moves ahead...and that's the essence...it is a moving target.
Information, to which Jon refers, is not a static thing to be weighed and sold by the pound. What is information now tomoprrow is old hat. Consider how important Calculus (Fluctions) were to Newton, for example, but only as a secret to support his prediction of planetary motion. Once it was out, in fact subverted by Leibnitz, it was all over. There was value to the knowledge, but it was available to everyone. The wave had moved on. Information is worth something for a short while only.
Jon mentions Microsoft's ubiquitous software programs as a series of information walls, yet one could say they are bound for the trash heap like any enforced, secret, closed system...IBM's SNA, theories of genetic purity or Communism being other examples.
He says politics and media *were* slow. I say they still are! With their eyes and ears fixated on hierarchic heros, they cannot adapt fast enough and must die in their current form.
The protest of the networks are merely the gasps of dying dinasours. The web *is* commercial, but the capacity for it to meet consumer needs by directed advertising and bringing the consumer into direct contact with the vendors...and able to make much more effective shopping comparisons cannot be equalled by the tired old networks selling TV time by the age or general interest slot. Their source of revenue is drying up...and I say good...bye to Sam Donaldson, Dan Rather and the rest with dry eyes...honest, I hardly knew you.
Neither is it possible for the legislature and political system to stop the jugganaut of internet led change. Litigation is local...the web is ubiquitous!
And as far as political change, oligarchies depend on acceptance of the masses to rule. Well guys (it's mostly guys) the masses have had access to information now. You cannot roll the status back, neither can you deny the plebiscite access to referanda of direct democracy, if you will.
My heart bleeds for librarians...but who uses scribes now with universal literacy? Teachers can concentrate on tutorial work, inspiring the young, conducting the experiments dispensing wisdom. Things aren't over just because chalk boards are out!
Nice article Jon!
The next few years will be very interesting. My tip is wall-destroyers 23 - reactionaries 0.
Be careful what walls you destroy. (Score:1)
I don't believe in any morality beyond the personal.
If you can knock down the walls of reality, they weren't very real.
I don't even know what the walls of purpose are.....
Ummmm, yeah, so? (Score:1)
He's also given me something to show to non-open minded, non-/. types, to help open their minds a bit, perhaps, and help them think about it as well.
-Samrobb
Not a bad article at all, but... (Score:1)
I think Jon misses a fundamental driving force behind all this, behind the falling of the walls. This is simply the fact that the cost of processing and transporting information has become in many cases almost trivial.
Walls existed in the past because these costs were non-trivial, and often times required skills that the general public did not possess. Thus the middle man - the travel agent, the bricks and morter book and computer stores, the ticket adgent, etc... These walls did not exist just because huge evil corporations wanted to keep information away from people, they existed because these corporation found a place where they could provide services that the public wanted.
These walls were not barriers, they were outgrowth of the technological limitations of the time, a result of the high cost of moving and processing information.
In many cases technology now gives us the capabilities to do many of these things for ourselves, much more efficiently and cheaply - thus we no longer need the intermediary. Now the corporations are scrambling to protect the hegemony over information, but the genie is out of the bottle. Informations is free to flow around their old walls. The walls are an anachronism.
But more walls will be built. Walls are not inherently bad. Walls even exist on slashdot. There are still things that other people do more efficiently for me than I can do for myself or with the assistance of technology.
The difference between a good wall and a bad wall is this: A bad wall erects an articificial barrier to information, a barrier that is not inherent in the technology of the day. A good wall provides a value added service, it filters and simplifies, it offers me information I would have a hard time finding on my own. This is a definition based entirely on the technology of a given era. What is a good wall in one era can become a barrier as technology advances.
Jon tries to frame the battle between old and new as a more political conflict. Capatilism versus Communism, free vs. proprietary. It has nothing to do with politics, everything to do with technology. Cars will be free when and if it costs the manaufacturers next to nothing to make a car, or they can come up with a marketting plan that derives revenue from something other than the sale of the car. Technology may someday allow this. Who knows, but it will be technologically driven, not politically.
-josh
Two Cheers (Score:1)
One factual error:
/* Perhaps we'll know soon enough. Increasingly, thanks to Linux, BeOS, open source and free
software, it is. */
Umm, last I checked, BeOS was not gratis, freed software, or even Opensource. It's a great OS in the same sense that OS/2 was a great OS, but it is closed.
I should also point out that ``the net'' has not given rise to the hacker culture, &c. That has been with us through the ages. In recent times, the BBS culture certainly had its share of hackers. My father (among others) was a pioneering computer hacker back in the late '60s; people like Grace Hopper were the hackers of their times in the '50s. Michael Faraday was a hacker of his century; he hacked electromagnetism.
I would even go so far as to say that Christ hacked the ``religious'' apostate hiearchy of his day. Hacking is good: it removes bad things and creates more good things.
But it's not a new concept! The global public internet has simply made hacking easier. May the hacking continue.
Cheers,
Joshua.
Busts? (Score:1)
Cheers,
Joshua.
Not all walls are bad (Score:1)
Watch out for the waveguides (Score:2)
So don't just think about barriers, think about the subtle parameters that guide your choices, and spend some time thinking what might be just outside the walls of the waveguide you're bouncing through.
"Walls"? (Score:1)
I have an explanation for these articles. (Score:1)
tongue in cheek,
s#
No Subject Given (Score:1)
Even as new structures appear in this New World,
it's human nature to Categorize, Shape, Own,
Sell.
Just because the walls are different
doesn't mean none will exist.
And if I can make money from my knowledge, I will,
and so will millions of others. It's
taxing it that's the problem for
Old Worlders!)
Good fences (Score:1)
It is quite possible that the removal of all, or most, barriers protecting private information would eventually lead to a society more respectful of personal privacy than would the continued erection of "good" walls. After all, feeling safe isn't about having unbreakable locks on your door, it's about not needing them.
I, myself, am uncomfortable with the idea of such an open society, probably because I was not raised in one, and because the transition would not be painless. But it is a point of view worth considering.
btw--Jon, nice read. I was beginning to wonder if you could write a paragraph without the word geek.
-tak
Good reasons to repeat things... (Score:1)
For one thing, it will keep these ideas infront of people so that they don't forget them. Ideas that become so 'everywhere' that nobody mentions them are often lost, especially to the younger generation. How many different things are or where refered to as "the ____ that noone will ever forget?" And how many of these is your average american high school age kid familiar with? Or even collage graduates? (There was a specific referance here, but I can't remember what it was. Which is my point, after all...)
Another reason is that maybe it was said in a slightly different manner, that will click with someone who just didn't get it before for one reason or another. By saying the same thing over and over in different ways, you can almost guarenntee that most people will get the idea.
A third reason would be the famous 'propaganda' effect - If you repeat ANYTHING often enough, most people will believe it is true, even if it has absolutely no factual basis at all. The John Birch society, for instance, has communist or socialist or 'bad' conotations in the minds of most americans. While in fact, the opposite is true - they're primarily an organization dedicated to educating voters. (Though in todays' political climate, they would be considered 'right wing extremists' not that that's a bad thing to be...)
So by repeating the idea that the net is a place without walls and which inherently should be without walls, katz is not only making sure that the idea stays alive, but is (in a sense) making it true. After all, the net is information, and so is a belief, is it not?
Ryo
I wouldn't want to be normal, even if I did know what it was!
Barriers to entry - text vs. video vs. audio (Score:1)
You made a bit of a jump there - straight from text, which is relatively easy to produce(good text isn't easy, but it isn't as obvious either), to video, which is difficult, at least right now. (think on the effects of the growing amount of CPU power available and what that could do for the average person's ability to do computer generated animation) You missed an important one - audio. I'm currently a manager for a small internet "radio" station(PaganPaths CyberRadio [paganpaths.org]). All you need is someone on a fast connection(cable modem, dorm ethernet, etc.) to run a server, and then lots of people can DJ.(It takes about a pentium 120 or better, a 28.8k modem, decent ISP, a decent soundcard, and a mic to be a DJ.) Sounds like low enough barriers to entry to me. How low will the barriers to entry on video become in 10 years?
--LeBleu
Beam Me Up Scotty (Score:1)
Actually, something people forget is, what happens without patents? Without patents, companies keep new advances as trade secrets instead, because that is the only way to get an edge over the competition... with a patent, they have exclusive use of it for a certain period of time, but the method is public knowledge. Once the patent expires, anyone can use this new advance.(hence why the Coca-Cola(tm) formula has never been patented)
I think that the problem is that the length of patents hasn't been shortened to keep up with the rate of technological advance. A software patent should be limited to something more like 6 months - 2 years. After that, everyone can use it, and the method is well publicized, instead of hidden away in closed source.
--LeBleu
Ummmm, yeah, so? (Score:1)
I'm going to assume this wasn't meant to broaden my horizens any, or introduce me to new information. Is it possible more of you seem to like this (in the 14 comments that were posted as I write this) because it does a good job of stroking your egos? For the
Ummmm, yeah, so? (Score:1)
For the few flamers (Score:1)
We are in the middle of a huge maelstrom of information and power. Those who realize that will be able to navigate it, and perhaps even manipulate it. Jon is just trying to toss a few ideas on the fire for you to think about these issues.
I don't agree with everything he says, no. But if I wanted to rebut him, I would mention exactly WHAT I thought was 'drivel'. Those whom do not do that, well.. you rate below Bill Gates in my book.
Jon, I liked the article. I have already thought about these issues, in fact was thinking about them some years ago. People then looked at me funny, "It's just email" they said. Hah. Look at them now. *grin*
We live in interesting times...
---
One Thumb Up! (Siskel's Dead...) (Score:1)
"Fuck 'em and their walls...."
I liked the overall gist of the article. Jon makes a lot of good points. He does get a little vague in some areas, but I think he is right. The noosphere (emerging web of global consciousness) gets closer everyday.
We exist as two cultures: Those who have NEVER had to deal with walls of any kind, and those who never knew anything BUT walls. To shift everyone over to the new paradym will take time. Some of us get it - lots of others just don't understand.
But, in another 30 -40 years... they'll all be dead! (like our good 'ol friend Gene Siskel...) Then, we can get on with the real work at hand - redesigning the world anew. The walls will come down.
---
The statement below is true.
BeOS free? (Score:1)
thanks - i feel better now...
Never ceases to amaze me (Score:1)
Did he do something to any of you personally to be treated so venomously? Shag your sisters and rape your mothers? Don't think so. I'm probably about as interested in your spoutings about the anti-christ-geek-wannabee that is J. Katz as you are in what I have to say. So don't read it.
Anyway. on to more important stuff. Whats all this about an anti-vibrator law in Alabama? Now that sounds interesting.
Cheers.
Beam Me Up Scotty (Score:1)
Linux exists as a labor of love. The developers who created it wanted to do something special, further their own knowledge, etc. and devoted their spare time to furthering its cause. That is why it exists, not to create some new fanciful order of unlimited something for nothing economy.
The only reason you are seeing commercial companies adopt the OSS model is because it is the last defense against the Microsoft's thundering herd of hype, misinformation and hysteria. If you think that Netscape and Sun are releasing source code to the development community for any other reason, you are fooling yourself.
Companies exist to make money. There are some with more noble aspirations, such as creating a great product, furthering technology, etc., but when the board meets at the end of the month they ask, "what's our gross, and what's our net". Should said figures be $0 revenue and -$10000000 profit because the intrepid CEO has adopted freeware as the marketing strategy, guess who's head is going to roll.
And please don't lump musicians and record companies into "the music industry". They are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Musicians receive an abysmally low portion of the proceeds from their work. Musicians widely regard MP3 as a great tool to help promote their work. It's the record companies who are throwing red flags everywhere, all they see is a repeat of that cassette tape fiasco in the 70's and 80's. However, I do not know one musician (myself included) that wants to spend months toiling away on an album, have it be a national sensation, and not receive a dime for it.
What people do have to realize is that intangibles are not public property. Information is not "free", public information is free. Proprietary information is not. Just because you can stamp out 100 copies of a CD doesn't mean you have the right to distribute it. And you shouldn't, because it is wrong.
Beam Me Up Scotty (Score:1)
My point is that you cannot justify that all software and other intellectual works should be free by the ease of which they can be copied. That makes no more sense than saying that theft should be legal, as long as you can pull it off without breaking a sweat.
And I am wholesale against patents, software or otherwise. The lack of patents promotes better competition between companies, as it prevents producers from resting on the laurels of a killer product. However, it is imperative for any country that wishes to foster innovation and productivity to guarantee the rights of the producers to their products. Because intellectual works like books, music, and software can be copied with ease, it is necessary to enforce copyrights. If people have nothing to guarantee that they will be able to benefit from their work (assuming it is marketably viable), what the hell makes you think they will pursue such avenues?
Enforcement is the main problem. Especially on the Internet and in the global economy. That's why you have the reactionary thrusts by our government and various private sector interests that border on digital fascism. We've gone from one end of the spectrum, akin to the lawless wild west, and are heading to the other, some Orwellian nightmare where we sport digital thought police processers running the latest version of Windoze CE. So as
we decide exactly how information will be shared between people without trampling the rights of the authors, it is important to vehemently oppose these repulsive affronts to our freedom guised under the tag "protecting proprietary information."
These things are hard to resolve. Throwing up our hands and tossing intellectual property rights out the window is a very uncreative answer to this perplexing problem.
regulations (Score:1)
I loved it. (Score:1)
again and again.