Jay and Ryanne came over to my place and interviewed Jamais a couple months ago.

Here's the end result:

DATE: TODAY - Saturday, March 22, 2008

TIME: 11am and 3pm SLT

Come see my pal Cylindrian Rutabega - along with the ChangHigh Sisters - performing LIVE.

I haven't seen the ChangHigh sisters personally yet, but for those of you, like myself, who are interested in both music artists, and the latest set design and visual performance art in the Second Life space, I hear they're pushing the envelope, and I think you'll be interested in checking out this show.

I'll be at the 3pm show, if you want to meet up there.

Cylindrian was very excited to be branching out a little from the traditional "music gig," and over into a new kind of artistic realm.

Here's a little more from the notecard from Cylindrian:

"ChangHigh Sisters will not only dance their beautiful firedances of an exotic and seductive nature, but will in the show, present the virtuals worlds first 2, 3, 6 and 7 acrobatic pyramids and will jump up in their rotating trapezes and show the harmony and elegance of an almost unseen kind ever before."

Click on the image below for a teleport.

Wow my worlds collide again. I just met Aubrey last October.

Now, he's on the Colbert Report.

(sidenote: I have an 45 minute interview of my own with him that I'll be putting up soon, but I really wanted to present it just the right way. I told him I wanted the "homer simpson version" of what the hell he was talking about, and by golly, I think he gave it to me :-)

Stephen's skepticism actually does a really nice job of framing Aubrey arguments too! Nice work Stephen!

You can find out more by picking up a copy of Aubrey's book too.

Learn more about Aubrey's SENS platform.

All hail The Colbert Report.

Jay headed over to Brewster's to check out one of the $100 laptops. Pretty cool.

Man there's nothing like
someone's First Vlog post.

You never forget it :-)

Chris Paine gets a mention in the opener of a new Time Magazine article about GM's
Green Motors.

No one would mistake Chris Paine for a General Motors shill. In his 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, the filmmaker laid out a damning case against GM for unplugging the EV1, the electric vehicle it manufactured in the 1990s and then discontinued in 2003, preferring instead to produce high-margin but gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. "They were a technological leader, and they fumbled that leadership away," Paine says. Ask him about the U.S. carmaker now, though, and Paine sounds almost admiring. "Their new hybrids are making a difference, and their plug-in technology is a real advance," he says. "GM is making some really good moves now."

Hey LA-based tree hugger peeps!

Time to come out in full force tomorrow evening in Santa Monica for a
March to Save The Trees in memory of Gandhi's Birthday.

Chris Paine, and old friend of mine, and Director of the awesome film, Who Killed The Electric Car, has been helping to organize a series of Tree Saver meetings that have been going on over the past few weeks to save over 50 Ficus trees scheduled for removal under the guise of being diseased (extreme disagreement over this point by experts in the community).

There's a Tree Saver Blog where you can get more information about it all.

Below: The Tree Savers Crew

Here's more about Who Killed The Electric Car too! Lots to talk about on this front in the days - and years, to come: Press/Reviews of Film Why Electric Cars Are Better Cool Scenes From The Film I found on YouTube Trailer Buy The DVD

More info here.

There's an interesting collection of old friends (and one new one) at this event Tuesday night, so I'm gonna try to make it.

I've known RU for years before we ever started working together (via Ron Turner at Last Gasp, who published the graphic novel I edited for Timothy Leary -- Link to phone message from him about the book that I love to link to :)

Recently, I co-hosted an RU Sirius show last October with guest Dan the Automator w/RU and Jeff Diehl -- and also produced the Songs From the Commons Podcasts from 2006 for RU's Mondoglobo.net.

Meanwhile, I just reconnected with Howard Rheingold last week, after about 4 years (!) and took a nice walk out on Mt. Tamalpias, and talked about Second Life, Twitter and Facebook for two hours (and inspired Howard to increase his twittering i think :-)

BoingBoing's David Pescovitz I know well from the old days with Cory when he lived here in San Francisco, and thus I have not seen David for years - so I can't wait to...and...

Jamais Cascio has been a great twitter friend for a few weeks now that I look forward to finally meeting in person...

Let's see if I can make it out of my cave Tuesday night!

See you there!

Kent Bye just recently relocated to San Francisco from Maine, and the Bay Area will never be the same :-)

Just found this cool vid of Kent Bye and Jay Dedman walking through San Francisco discussing the role of citizen journalism's influence on big media and their continued state of denial regarding its obvious impact.

Translation: Turns out that people's opinions do matter after all!

Update 4/13/07 - Kent explained to me that "That vid is actually from NYC way back in October of 2005. :)
Jay shot it and was cleaning up his archives during VBW07"

Front Page of the Sunday Chronicle Baby!

My pal Kevin Burton on the cover of the SF chronicle...the article discusses the new Web 2.0-ish model of just working out of coffeehouses, rather than renting office space...

I knew Chris Paine way back in 1993, when I was working with him on Telemorphix's 21st Century Vaudeville. He was a really sweet, smart, and very creative guy with big ideas about everything. Nice to see him pull it all together to create his little masterpiece, Who Killed the Electric Car?.

Chris Paine On The Daily Show (Quicktime, 15 MB)

Dabble Record for this interview

WHAT: 9/11 Conspiracy Theory Debate
WHO: The RU Sirius Show
WHERE: Off-Market Theater, 965 Mission Street (at 5th), San Francisco
WHEN: Sunday, September 10, 2PM
COST: FREE

http://laughingsquid.com/2006/09/05/ru-sirius-show-live/

Over the last year, RU Sirius and Jeff Diehl have been hosting the amazing RU Sirius Show, a weekly podcast that launched in June 2005 as part of The MondoGlobo Network. It’s featured a stunning line-up of guests, discussing intriguing topics and cultural phenomenon.

This Sunday, September 10th, they will be producing their first ever live show, in the form of a public debate: “9/11: Considering All the Claims”. The show starts at 2PM and takes place at the Off-Market Theater in San Francisco. Admission is free.
9/11: Considering All the Claims

The producers of The RU Sirius Show bring you 9/11: Considering All the Claims. During this rare, FREE public presentation, you will be able to examine all the issues at one event on Sunday, September 10th, 2006.

The backers of the “shadow government” camp have many issues that they believe were not addressed by the authorities in investigating the attacks; the backers of the “Bin Laden-did-it” camp have questions of their own. Both sides have accused the other of perpetrating wild conspiracy theories and hoaxes upon the public, so we thought we’d provide an open examination and critique of the major points, especially given recent polls that show 42% of Americans suspect the government had a hand in causing the destruction of the Twin Towers.

Joel Schalit, a Managing Editor for Tikkun Magazine, will be representing those who are skeptical about the “conspiracy theories.” Fred Burks, who served as a foreign language interpreter for top officials in many countries, including Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, will be representing the “pro-conspiracy” view.

RU Sirius will host the panel along with RU Sirius Show co-host Jeff Diehl.

Posted by Lisa at 12:46 PM

Steve's daughter Genevieve is directing a play Saturday night at the Berkeley Rep. The Chronicle gave it a great review in last weeks pinkie.

Doors open at 7:30. Two one-act plays. Joey Buttafuoco is first, then the other one after a 10-minute intermission.
Teen Council's Target® One Acts Festival

Berkeley Rep School of Theatre, 2071 Addison St., Berkeley. $5-$10.
(510) 647-2972 www.berkeleyrep.org

Danah was on Oreilly Factor and Bill actually wasn't a complete dick. Go figure :-)

Wow. They call her a cultural anthropologist. Looks pretty cool on the screen. That's fer sure.

Nice job Danah.

(Hey I wanna be a cultural anthropologist! Maybe I can call myself that when I finish my masters...)
Update! Hey I'm not trying to be a smartass! I'm just jealous :-)
Sure, Danah looks like an ordinary anthropologist in this clip. But the few times I've met her, not long ago, she always had an extra sparkley dress or stripey pants or a huge floppy hat or something far from ordinary. It's like she's gone undercover.

My friend Steve Michel asked me to take a sec to remember his friend. Hang in there buddy :-)

This just in from R.U. Sirius:

Does transhumanism suck? Will humanity be transformed in 2012? Are
smart homes stupid? Should the editor of a webzine be interviewed by
his publisher about his own book if that book is a history of counterculture?

NeoFiles Vol.1 Num.11

This just in from Ryan Junell:

From: ryan junell
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 18:54:42 -0400
To: free.eddie@texasmonkey.com
Subject: FREE EDDIE!

the rnc video project is in a weird spot... while I was inside the convention hall last night holding up a sign that said "girlymen for arnold" (I voted green in cali, btw)... project producer eddie codel was following the action at one of the protests when he got fenced in by cops arresting everyone on the block. they arrested over 1000 people last night and have detained them at the piers for now over 20 hours.

honestly, I don't know what to do. he has not even been BOOKED yet (I called central booking). I'm about to file a missing persons claim on him because he is really nowhere to be seen.

THE BIG FUCKING PROBLEM is that I think they are holding these protestors in cages down by the water for as long as they can possibly do it so that they don't return to the streets to protest the second they are let out!!! this is BULLSHIT!!! what happened to due process!?!!

anyways.... I think you guys should know this and if you have any insight to the situation please let me know. I'm pretty sure the mass media has agreed to choke this story but there are literally thousands of people protesting this convention. sunday's march was without question over 400,000 if not a full half million. seriously.

eddie is an inspired political activist. we started working together six years ago on an event series about independent publishing on the internet. he's gone on to do work with indyvoter.org, the matt gonzalez campaign, and a ton of other non profit benevolent projects. he's got a heart of gold and a really awesome and gnarly sense of humor.

I feel bad now that I convinced him to come to nyc and work on this project over burning man this year (he didn't need much convincing). right now he could be delirious, tired, smelly and around the coolest people in the world out in the desert instead of delirious, tired, smelly and around the coolest people in the world in the guantanomo by the hudson.

throw money his way via the paypal link at www.junell.net or do a search for "girlymen" on ebay and donate there. or just drop him a line and let him know he's a kickass fighter! eddie@eddie.com

and watch this:

http://in8.com/fucknewyork/Resources/fucknewyork.mov

Here's
an interview that was published last month in OpenP2P.com with Brewster Khale.

"Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

Here is the full text of the interview in case the link goes bad:

http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2004/01/22/kahle.html

Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive and People's Technology
by Lisa Rein
01/22/2004

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian for the Internet Archive (IA). He is also on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The IA started out as just that -- a non-profit organization dedicated to taking snap shots of the entire Web every six months, in order to create a searchable archive.

One of the main goals of the Internet Archive is to provide "Universal Access to All Human Knowledge." It sounds like a lofty task, but Brewster is firmly committed to it, and truly believes that it is achievable. Anyone in his presence for five minutes or more is likely to feel the same way, because his enthusiasm is quite contagious.

Brewster started the IA in 1996 with his own money, which he earned from the sale of two separate Internet search programs: WAIS, which was bought by AOL, and Alexa Internet, which was bought by Amazon. He has been spending his own money to keep the institution going for the last six years. Recently, in the summer of 2003, he was fortunate enough to receive some grants and corporate sponsorship.

Newer IA projects include creating an open source movie archive, creating a rooftop-based WiFi network across San Francisco, creating an archive of the 2004 presidential candidates (offering every candidate unlimited storage and bandwidth to serve up video), and creating a non-profit documentary archive.
Let's Start with the Internet Archive

Lisa Rein: What's the story behind the birth of the Internet Archive? How did it start?

Brewster Kahle: The Internet Archive started in 1996, when the Internet had reached critical mass. By 1996, there was enough material on the Internet to show that this thing was the cornerstone for how people are going to be publishing. It is the people's library. People were using the Internet in a major way towards making things available, as well as for finding answers to things. And, of course, the Internet is quite fleeting. The average life of a web page is about 100 days. So if you want to have culture you can count on, you need to be able to refer to things. And if things change out from underneath you all the time, then you're in trouble. So what traditionally has happened is that there are libraries, and libraries collect up out-of-print materials and try to preserve and make open access to materials that aren't necessarily commercially viable at the moment. The Internet Archive is just a library. It just happens to be a library that mostly is composed of bits.

LR: How did you get the funding for it?

BK: The funding for the Internet Archive came originally from the success of selling a couple of Internet companies on the path towards building a library. So the original funding was from me, based on selling one company, WAIS, Inc. which was the first Internet publishing system, to America Online. And then Alexa Internet, which was a company short for "the Library of Alexandria," to try to catalog the Web. So all of these were trying to build towards the library, and these companies were sold to successful companies and so that gave me enough money to kick start the Internet Archive. At this point, it's funded by private foundations, government grants, and in-kind donations from corporations.

LR: So AOL bought WAIS and who bought Alexa?

BK: Amazon bought Alexa.

LR: What are some of the grants? Didn't you get some good grants lately, during the past year?

BK: Oh yes, we've been very fortunate in this phase of the Internet Archive's life. The Sloan Foundation gave us a significant grant towards helping get the materials up and able to be used by researchers all over the world, and the Hewlett Foundation also gave us a sizable grant to bring more digital materials from a lot of non-profit institutions to give them permanent access.

For instance, a lot of organizations create documentaries that maybe are shown once or twice, but they're not permanently available. But their general approach was to have things to be available. So by having a library be able to digitize and host these materials, we hope to bring a lot of non-profit materials up and out onto the Internet so they can be leveraged and used by people all over the world.

Brewster Kahle speaking at the O'Reilly 2003 Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, CA

LR: How many people work here at the Internet Archive right now?

BK: There are 12 people full-time here at the Internet Archive -- probably 20 if you count, all told. There are a lot of people that come through. We've got a programmer from Norway and a programmer from Iceland here now. We had a programmer from Japan that sort of came through and helped intern and shared the technology that they know and also what we know.

LR: What would you tell somebody that was interested in participating somehow? You're always looking for people to work on projects, right?

BK: We're always looking for help. People are helping in many, many different ways. By curating collections. By keeping good web sites. By making sure that web sites can be archived -- is how thousands of people are helping. But people are also helping curate some of the collections that are here. We have volunteers that are helping with, oh, things like SFLan and some of the technical work that we do. But also, we are growing slowly and we are hiring a few more people -- mostly very technical.

LR: Talk about SFLan a bit.

BK: SFLan is a wireless project that is based around San Francisco. The idea is to experiment using the wireless network to do a rooftop network, to use to use commodity wireless 802.11 WiFi stuff to hop from roof to roof to roof to provide an alternative to DSL and cable for the last mile.

If we can make that both be open and have distributed ownership, then people would own the roadways and they would basically control their network, which is what the Internet really is.

LR: What do you mean by "the last mile," exactly?

BK: Trying to get the last piece from getting from a central location where there might be a fiber that comes to a city, and try to get that distributed so that people in their homes can not only get materials at video speeds, 3-5 megabits per second -- DVD-like speeds -- but also act as servers to make things available to others over the Internet at high speeds.

These are some of the things that are very difficult to do, if not impossible, with the current commercial DSL and cable providers. And we're looking to see how we can not only establish that baseline of video-ready Internet and make it so people can serve video over the Internet, but then, every year, make it better by a factor of two. So the technology follows Moore's Law just like the computer guys do, as opposed to how the telecoms tend to work, which is "here's the same thing, and you'll buy the same thing, and maybe we'll raise the price slightly ..."

LR: And keep paying more for it.

BK: Right.

LR: So you're looking for people with rooftops?

BK: We're looking for people with rooftops. And especially people that can buy a node. A node costs $1,000, and that's a little Linux box with a directional antenna.

LR: Is that a node right there?

BK: This is a node right here (gestures). So this is an SFLan box. This is a directional antenna that points upstream back to a node that's closer to the Net. This is an omni antenna. So anyone who can see this can be on the Internet for free.

And this is a Linux machine that's got a CompactFlash card as its hard drive, and two radios. And you get a wire that comes down into your house, which is the way that power is brought up to this machine. And also, you get bandwidth within your house or office.

There are about 23 of these around San Francisco on rooftops now, and we're actively deploying new software. Cliff Cox up in Oregon is doing a lot of the software development and also hardware development. He's actually the guy that sells these things for $1,000. So Internet Archive's participation is to help fund the project to get it kick-started, and to try to get some active roofs up and running.

LR: How does the Internet Archive decide about implementing new technologies? What's your philosophy about implementing new technologies?

BK: The Internet Archive is extremely pragmatic about new technologies. What we tend to do is look at the least costly, both in the short term and long term. So we are frugal to the core.

We run currently about 700 computers. They're all running Linux. We don't have any dedicated routers. We just use Linux machines. We use the same Linux machine over and over and over and over and over again. Jim Gray's model -- he calls it the "brick model." So we just use Linux machines stacked up, and even though they might be storage machines, or CPU machines, or running as a router, or running as a load balancer, or a database machine -- they're all just the same machine. What we've found is that it allows us to only have one or maybe just two systems administrators being able to scale to many hundreds and, we hope, a few thousand, machines, by having such a simple underlying hardware architecture.

Because we operate on these machines stacked up, we tend to do everything based on clusters. Because our amounts of data are fairly large. We have, oh, several hundred terabytes at this point -- three, four hundred terabytes of materials, and it's growing a lot. So it's difficult to process these if you have to go through just one machine, and a lot of proprietary software is licensed to just be on one machine, or it costs per each.

Open source has the ability that you can go and run it on as many machines as you want. Because we run things and we do data processing and conversions on ten machines or a hundred machines at once, we find that open source is often the most pragmatic, least costly way to roll. We also find that it's easiest for other people to copy our model if we use open source software, so we tend towards using open source software, because we'd like anything that we develop to be actively used by others readily and easily.

LR: How much do you test before going live with new services and things? Do you do a lot of testing?

BK: Do we do a lot of testing? I'd say we do a lot of progressive rollouts. We do testing in-house, but you can only go so far, and then you bring on some number of your users and bring things out. I'd say we're less testing-oriented. We're less service-quality oriented than a lot of places, because we're researching. We're trying to push the edge. So we try to make sure our data is safe, but if there happens to be a hiccup, we are very public about that, and we're looking for help from others to help us resolve these and find them. So I'd say we're not like a commercial company doing lots of in-house testing and rounds and rounds of beta testing, because we only have 12 people to run all of this.

LR: Can you remember a specific situation where the technology could have gone one way or the other, and you decided on a certain way over another way, and why? When there's a fork in the road, what process do you go through to decide which way to go?

BK: Boy, when there're different choices of which way to go, you find that one of the lead motivators in terms of how we decide which way to go is which way people believe it should go. People are always open to testing and pushing back and saying, "Why do you think that's true?" Especially if we've tried going down that road before.

Let's take RAID -- Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. The idea is to run, say, four disks or eight disks as a cluster of disks so that if one fails, it has the information on the other ones, so that it doesn't fail, so you can replace the disk and be able to keep going. Every few years we think that this is the right thing to do, and every few years, we find, unfortunately, that it is the wrong thing to do.

But it doesn't seem to keep us from trying again. Every so often we think, "Okay, they must have fixed the bugs," and that the software must be more reliable, or the controllers must be more reliable, and we'll go and put some number of machines into this new structure and then watch them for six months to a year to sort of see, "Does it work better or worse than what we were using before?" With RAID, we've found with two major tests of RAID that it's been a loser.

LR: Why? What goes wrong?

BK: We're not exactly sure, but it looks like the RAID controllers are just not debugged very well. The software isn't debugged. The hardware isn't debugged. There are failure modes that fall outside of there. "Oh," (supposedly) "if one disk just goes completely corrupt, then you can replace it and everything's fine." Well, we've found out in the latest Linux release that if two disks just hiccup slightly, then it gives it up for lost and it says, "You lose all your data," and so we've had to spend months then going back and decrypting all of the Linux RAID controller file system to be able to recover all of the data that you can actually recover. So I think it's just bad implementations based on not being able to get the reliability up, based on not having enough test cases.

We go along with Hillis' Law. Danny Hillis was one of the great computer designers of all time, and his approach was to have large numbers of commodity components; that basically, price follows volume. So if things are made in more volume, the price is lower. You can say, "Duh. Obviously." But it's amazing that most people don't follow this. Particularly that the price goes down when there's more of it made. You want to use things that cost less, because you might get more gigabytes per hard drive if you're using commodity components, as opposed to specialty components.

But another corollary of this is that "reliability follows volume." That things that are made in large volume have to be more reliable, at least in the long haul, otherwise the company that's making them would go out of business because they'd have too many failures. Another way of saying that is that Toyotas are more reliable than Ferraris. Even though a Toyota might cost one-tenth as much as a Ferrari, they are probably on the road more often. The coupling of this is that if you want a reliable system, and you want one that doesn't cost that much, go for high volume, if you want it available, reliable, etc. And so we find that technologies that are commodity and made in high volumes work better.

Tomas Krag
Wireless Networks as a Low-Cost, Decentralized Alternative for the Developing World

Informal and wire.less.dk are working to promote the use of wireless technologies (mainly 802.11) in the developing world. We are planning a Wireless Roadshow to teach local technology NGOs how wireless technologies can be used to bring Internet and intranet connectivity to those parts of the world not included in the plans of the commercial telecommunications companies.

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
February 9-12, 2004
San Diego, CA

LR: When you say "commodity," you mean "off the shelf," or COTS products, right?

BK: Yes.

LR: Let's talk a little bit about your philosophy now. Could you discuss what you mean when you talk about "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge?"

BK: "Universal Access To All Human Knowledge" is a motto of Raj Reddy from Carnegie Mellon. I found that if you really actually come to understand that statement, then that statement is possible; technologically possible to take, say, all published materials -- all books, music, video, software, web sites -- that it's actually possible to have universal access to all of that. Some for a fee, and some for free. I found that was a life-changing event for me. That is just an inspiring goal. It's the dream of the Greeks, which they embodied, with the Egyptians, in the Library of Alexandria. The idea of having all knowledge accessible.

But, of course, in the Library of Alexandria's case, you had to actually go to Alexandria. They didn't have the Internet. Well, fortunately, we not only have the storage technology to be able to store all of these materials cost-effectively, but we can make it universally available. So that's been just a fabulous goal that causes me to spring out of bed in the morning.

And it also -- when other people sort of catch on to this idea that we could actually do this -- that it helps straighten the path. You know, life, there're lots of paths that sort of wander around. But I find that having a goal that's that far out, but also doable, it helps me keep my direction, keep our organization's direction. And I'm finding that a lot of other people like that direction, as well.

LR: Do you have an overall philosophy about technology and the direction in which you'd like to see it go?

BK: I don't really have a philosophy about technology. I have a philosophy of what future I want to live in, which is probably more of a social and cultural issue than it really is a technological issue. And socially and culturally, what I want to grow up in -- and have my kids grow up in -- is a wonderful flowering of all sorts of really wild ideas coming from all sorts of people doing diverse and interesting things.

What I'd really like to see is a world where there's no limitations on getting your creative ideas out there. That people have a platform to find their natural audience. Whether their natural audience is one person, themselves, or a hundred people, or a thousand people. Try to make it so the technologies that we develop, and the institutions we develop, make it so that people have an opportunity to flower. To live a satisfying life by providing things to others that they appreciate.

And I think our technologies right now are well-suited to doing this in the information domain. In the information domain, we can go and offer people an ability to publish without the traditional restrictions that came before, and to help, with these search engine technologies, to help them find their natural audiences. And so people out there aren't surrounded by stuff they don't want. That they find that the music recordings they want and the video recordings they want, even though they're made a half a continent away, and there are only a hundred other people that also really like that genre.

LR: What kind of projects are you working on with the Library of Congress?

BK: We've been working with the Library of Congress over the last three or four years to help archive web sites. They've got a mission to record the cultural heritage of the United States -- actually also, Thomas Jefferson gave them, more broadly, "the world." And now that publishing is moving, or a large section of publishing, is moving on to the Internet, we've been working with them as a technology partner. They do the curation, and we do some special crawls.

Our first project with them was the election in the year 2000. The presidential election. And they selected a set of web sites, and we crawled them every day to try to get a historical record, and then the Internet Archive made them available to the world to see and use, to see if it was useful to people.

The Library of Congress is trying to move into the digital realm, and they just got a hundred million dollars from Congress to help do digital preservation, and we hope to be participants as that unfolds. We'll see. But the Library of Congress has got a lot of money -- a 450-to-500-million-dollars-a-year budget. We hope that a growing percentage of that goes towards digital materials, whether working with us or others, than currently, which is I think probably less than one percent.

LR: Earlier you said that one way that people could help was to make their web sites "more archivable," basically. What does that really mean? How would you make your web site easily archivable?

BK: Boy. By being straightforward. I think by keeping things fairly simple. If web sites have sort of straightforward links, then that makes things a lot easier.

LR: What do you mean "straightforward?"

BK: Straightforward URLs. JavaScript that's fairly clear-cut or reused from other places. What we have been really stumped on is sites that need a lot of JavaScript or a lot of programs that are needed to even render the site at all.

Probably one way of finding out is going to archive.org and seeing, "Did we get it right?" the last time. We're continuously updating our tools and trying to make things better. But for instance, we've been having trouble with .swf files, Shockwave and Flash files, from Macromedia. If those files have links to other pages inside of them, we're just not able to find those links, so we can't follow them. We also have trouble rewriting those .swf files so that they point to the Archive's version of the links and not the live Web's. So we're having trouble with certain complicated web sites. What we'd like to see is more straightforward use of pointers, because the hyperlink is one of the great ideas of the Internet.

Lisa Rein is a co-founder of Creative Commons, a video blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar, and a singer-songwriter-musican at lisarein.com.

John Perry Barlow has started a blog.

'Bout time! Thanks John Perry!

I've been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do - and, personally, I'd rather pump septic tanks - consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you'd get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.

But then - duh - it dawned on me that I'm under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.

As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You're a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I've never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual....)

Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn't start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn't be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I'd tell myself, "This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow."

This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco's snotty W Hotel - where there is at least free WiFi coverage - and within a few minutes I had a blog.

SPAM CALLED ON ACCOUNT OF DARKNESS

A funny thing happened to this spam on its way to you. I wrote it Friday afternoon, shortly after setting up my first blog. As usual, I dispatched it to my list-server at EFF, from which it was to be flung around the planet in swarms of magnetic jitter. But very near the time it arrived there, a fire broke out in the P.P.& L. substation in San Francisco's Mission District, near the Network Operations Center, wherein resides the server that normally flings my spam.

My mail host is also there and I didn't get any for a few hours - it's amazing how brief the delay was considering the mess in San Francisco - when it resumed I could see that the following message hadn't gone out.

I tried a test spam to see if the list-serve was up. No joy. The mail host was still working, albeit through a soda-straw connection, but the list-serve had crashed. And, so doing, it had apparently blasted this message into electronic nothingness.

Or maybe not. I kept thinking the server might come up coughing and spitting, and burp up for the old BarlowSpam just as I was re-sending it in this form. This kept me from resend it until now.

Timing was important though because I was announcing with it the arrival of my new blog, which, as you will read, is intended to be a place for you as much as for me. I posted the following Barlowspam on the blog at the same time I e-mailed it to you. But its subjects, the new BarlowFriendz blog, and my invitations to join me at Tribe.Net and LinkedIn.Com, are already a reality. So, it's lumpy, but it's happening...

------------------------------------>>>>-------------------------------------------!!!--------------------->>>>>>

HTTP://BLOG.BARLOWFRIENDZ.NET

After skidding through much of last two years on bald tires of unconditional hope, I am starting to feel traction again. The polarity may be about to reverse. New light is perceptible.

Still, things might get worse before they get better, and if I haven't learned anything else during this dreary passage, I've learned that we need each other. I've learned that community, in which I've always placed great rhetorical value, really does count.

Ironically, I've learned this even as I thinned my own belonging in the communities that once sustained me. I have not set foot in the little Wyoming town I still call "home" during calender year. I've bounced around the planet, solitary as an ion, as though in Brownian Motion. Though too alone in other ways, I suspect I'm not alone in this.

So I'd like to do more to increase the density of connection with this little community, the BarlowFriendz. Aside from being bound by the one thing you know you have in common, knowing me, you've been provided with little opportunity to learn about the many other things you have in common.

Of course, many of you knew each other to begin with, and many, many more have come to know each other through BarlowFrenzies over the years, but you've so far had no means of getting generally connected in Cyberspace. My method of communication with you has been generally about as interactive as Rush Limbaugh's. I broadcast and then take a few calls (or e-mails, as the case may be) which I have not shared.

I've often thought about passing them on, because they are usually as wonderful, thoughtful, witty, and intelligent as you are. But I didn't want to burden you with even more e-mail than you're already gagging on. It felt selfish not to share such an embarrassment of riches, but I know that if you start getting too much mail from me, you filter it into another mailbox which you never get around to opening. (Maybe this message is sitting just such a black hole now.)

The solution has been obvious for some time: put up a blog. Then, instead of sending your responses to me alone, you can send them to everyone who reads the blog. Of course, personal responses can still be directed to me. (Though please be careful not to include barlowfriendz@eff.org among the recipients. A couple of months ago, I responded to such a message without checking the To: line and dispatched my reply to the entire list. Just in case you were wondering what that was...)

I've been wary of blogs. Starting a blog looks a little like signing up for treadmill duty. Unless you like to write better than I do - and, personally, I'd rather pump septic tanks - consigning yourself to writing something every day looks like voluntary servitude. Furthermore, when I read some of the discussions on blogs, it looked a little like what you'd get if you invited all of your most socially dysfunctional friends into your living room and gave them plenty of beer.

But then - duh - it dawned on me that I'm under no obligation to post every day. I can continue to write BarlowSpams with my usual infrequency and post them to the blog in addition to sending them directly to you. And there we can discuss them together.

As to the civility of those discussions, there is no reason to think you are as inclined to flame at one another as other blog-posters appear to be. You're a sweet and relatively civilized lot. I've never had to break up a fight at a BarlowFrenzy. Why should I worry about it here? (Actually, there was that party in New York years ago where the anarchists from the Lower East Side went to war with the Italian soccer contingent and they all started throwing hummus at one another, but that seemed unusual....)

Having settled these concerns in my mind, I still didn't start blogging. There remained the simple matter of inertia and technological surface tension. I knew it couldn't be that hard to put up a blog. Over a million others have already done it. But I had a hard time getting myself to believe it when I'd tell myself, "This afternoon you should get your blog going, Barlow."

This is one of the things friends are for. Then, a few days ago, I fell into the too-rare company of my dear pal, Joi Ito, who is like the Blogdom equivalent of Zeus. (Check him out at http://joi.ito.com/.) He sat me down in the lobby of San Francisco's snotty W Hotel - where there is at least free WiFi coverage - and within a few minutes I had a blog.

Of course, it's still a larval thing. I don't have a great designer's eye, nor am I fully on top of the tools yet. Worse, I don't have an instinct for the natural protocols of the medium. Good blog posts are, in my observation, brief and telegraphic. I am orotund and discursive. I do go on. Perhaps I'll adapt. Perhaps you will.

The main thing is that now we have a place where we can get together between BarlowFrenzies, as well as a place where those of you too far-flung to bring your bodies to a party in Meatspace can get to know each other. We have a place where we can start building a community of ourselves, which, though virtual now, might eventually lead to the real thing. (And, believe me, I do know the difference. Virtual community remains one of my favorite oxymorons.) Still, this feels like it might be a kind of home for us. A home in nowhere, but a home.

Finally, I would like to be better connected with those of you who are already in the Blogosphere. If you'll send me your own blog URL's, I'll link them on my blog. And I hope you will link me on yours. By cross-linking one another, we can generate a more audible collective voice. We can make of ourselves a rich and growing ecosystem of opinion.

----------------------------...----------------------->>>>>>>---------------------------@-------------------------->>

NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION

An ecosystem is an information sorting engine. Whether photons entering a rain forest or heat gradients entering the deep ocean, biological systems pass these differences back and forth among themselves, creating increasingly complex matrices of structure. Hence, Life.

And yet, the most complex information sorting system yet devised by humans, the Internet, remains relatively simple and flat, rather as life was before the Cambrian explosion. Every IP address is like a single celled animal, with larger critters yet to emerge.

I've been expecting to see more new forms of order in Cyberspace than I have so far and am always watchful for the substrates of connection that might support it as it emerges. Lately, I've been watching sites that seek to narrow and map the famous 6 degrees of separation, like Friendster, Tribes.Net, and LinkedIn.Com.

I'm not entirely sure these things are going anywhere truly interesting, but they are certainly diverting to observe from a sociological standpoint. The former two are like gigantic singles bars for Burning Man refugees, while the latter seems to function largely as a means to reduce professional surface tension between aspiring business types.

It occurs to me, however, that since I am eager to increase the personal connectivity among you BarlowFriendz and give you better opportunities to know one another without passing through me, these sites might be useful to us. (There is already a so-far fairly quiescent BarlowFriendz "tribe" on Tribes.Net.) At least, it feels worthy of an experiment.

So I hope you won't mind that I'm dumping your addresses into the hopper at all three of these sites just to see what emerges. I don't think you have worry about your privacy. All of them seem to be scrupulous about not revealing e-mail addresses, personal information, or, in the case, of the first two, actual identities.

You will not be bombarded with e-mail, as you were during the infamous PeopleLink experiment back in 1997. In fairness, that attempt turned out to be headed in an interesting direction, at least. Though flawed in execution, PeopleLink was a forerunner of various instant messaging systems like AIM and Messenger.

(By the way, if you feel like trying real-time chat again, my AIM/iChat handle is barlow1. I don't have a video camera set up, but I am using iChat AV on a fast line, so we can use voices if you're similarly enabled. This may prove too distracting, but I will log in for a while and see.)

As I say, this is an experiment. We may find that none of these "social environments" are particularly helpful in bringing us closer together, though, at minimum, we are likely to find ourselves back in touch with people we thought we'd lost (as I already have). Also, since most of you are highly social people, I think if we join together, we can, as a group, find ourselves only a couple of degrees removed from a very large and interesting subset of humanity.

Meanwhile, may your generic holidays be as free of familial dysfunction as possible. May your days be merry and bright, and may Uncle Fred not get too hammered over dinner.

Peace and Light,

Barlow
--
**************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net

AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1

Current Cell Phone: 917/863-2037

Current Land Line: 801/582-5035

**************************************************************

Barlow in Meatspace Now: Salt Lake City (Until 12/20) 801/582-5035

(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: Pinedale, Wyoming (12/20-29) -> San Francisco (12/30-1/8) -> Las Vegas (1/8-9) -> New York, New York...

**************************************************************

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
--
**************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Blog: http://blog.barlowfriendz.net

AIM/iChat AV handle: barlow1

This is footage of Craig Newmark playing with Lawrence Lessig's son, Willem, while in the arms of Justin Hall. (As filmed by me.)

Hey these aren't prepared to stream over the Internet - you'll have to download them to your hard drive!

The "complete" version also has some shots of the party.

This footage was pretty dark so I had to lighten it in Premiere to make it watchable.

Highlights include Craig flapping his arms like a chicken (part 1)!!

Craig and Willem 1 of 2 (Small - 9 MB)

Craig and Willem 2 of 2 (Small - 9 MB)

Craig and Willem and Party - Complete Clip (Small - 32 MB)

Slightly higher res version of same clip (Small - 44 MB)

My buddy Kevin Burton is having a hard time finding just the right programmer for his NewsMonster company.

I know you're out there, just waiting to hear about such a position, so I thought I would take a minute out from my blogging moratorium to let you know that your new job awaits!

Email Kevin at burton@newsmonster.org if you're interested.

Here's the conversation I just had with Kevin:

Kevin: We're still hiring. We're still trying to hire people.

Lisa: Who are you trying to hire?

Kevin: Well, we're trying to hire people with Linux and Java experience. Hopefully people that have *really* strong skills -- like PhD quality stuff. Knowledge of search experience, and knowledge of reputation systems. But they're just impossible to find. Even in this job market. If you're a smart person, you still get sucked up. So it's just impossible to find anyone. It's not impossible, but you just have to spend a lot of time looking.

I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.

Here's an excerpt (complete transcription below):

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I've done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I've adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90's, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing -- the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country's in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70's when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.

And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It's changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It's changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we're now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing... another way to look at it is, in the early 90's we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That's not bad.

Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?

A: That wasn't my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what's going on. To hear about what's going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don't save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We're not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we're growing.

Here's the complete interview:

Q: How did Craigslist first get started? It was an event list, right?

Craig: 1994. I was at Charles Schwab. Evangelizing the Net and saying that the brokerage business would work that way someday. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, particularly on the Well and Usenet news groups, and figured "well, I should do some of that." So, early '95, I decided that I would start sending people notices about cool events, usually ones that involved arts and technology. And from there, via word of mouth, the news of the list spread. People wanted to be added. People wanted more stuff like jobs or stuff to sell posted there. And then I said "how 'bout apartments?" and it just grew like that. People wanted more, had suggestions. We did it. And that's the pattern to this day.

Q: What technology did you originally use for Craigslist?

A: Originally, it was borrowed kind of stuff. Simple cc: lists for email. That broke in the middle of '95. Started using majordomo by virtue of a friend's donation. Then I realized I could write code to turn the email logs into web pages. Used Perl for that. Ran on friend's machines. Linux servers usually. At one point we actually got a cheap Sun/Solaris machine, but that lasted less than a year. And from there just went on to Linux systems. Now using all sorts of open source. Apache, MySql, Squidcache, Qmail, and lots of Perl.

Q: That was what you used then? Or what you use now? Don't you have more sophisticated filtering and things?

A: Nowadays, we use all open source stuff. Everything we do is custom made beyond that. But we only switched over to a real database in late '99. Prior to that, I actually used a simple old email tool called "Pine" to manage the contents of those log files. They were effectively our database then, which is crude but effective in a very deep sense. Pine as a mail tool is really good. It's a text kind of tool, but it operates for me better than anything point and click.

Q: What made you decide to go to a real database from the Pine system you were using?

A: We figured that using Pine to manage email logs was going to break down fairly quickly as volume grew. It's just not a very efficient tool for anything but a very tiny database. And it was still kind of tiny in '99. Now we have going on about 1.5 million postings every month.

Q: And how many did you have in '99 before you made the switch? Like at what number did you decide "we can't do this anymore?"

A: I'm honestly not sure, but it would be I think in the thousands -- something like that. That was just one city back then, and now we have 23 cities with an expansion scheduled very soon, and that may add, depending on, well our guess of what we can take, we might add anywhere from 4 to 20 new cities.

Q: In the United States?

A: United States and maybe a few beyond. Maybe Canada. Maybe a little Europe. We're in London now, which has stabilized at about 800,000 page views a month.

Q: And what database do you use?

A: MySql.

Q: How do you feel in general about implementing new technologies?

A: Some of the new software technologies, particularly Java-based, are exciting. Some of the possibilities intrinsic in social software, reputation management, are pretty exciting, but first we got to do basics, and we got to do basics right. We have to do what people need from us, and we have to keep it really fast. That's more important.

Q: Than implementing a new technology just cause it's neat?

A: Right. We're not interested in technology just because it's cool.

Q: Can you think of a situation in the past where you implemented a new technology and thought it was going to help, and then it ended up creating more obstacles, and you ended up going back to whatever you were originally using?

A: Well, since we have introduced new function, new technology, carefully and gingerly, we've only had one setback. In the middle of 2000, we anonymized all postings. That is that we implemented an email relay system and applied it to everything where it said "anon-number@craigslist.org," like "anon-6073@craigslist.org." Again, that helped preserve people's anonymity in personals, plus, if a spammer gets a hold of that, well, it will expire soon.

So as a mechanism for minimizing spamming, that worked pretty well. But, a lot of people liked seeing other email addresses there, so we backed out of implementing that for everything. And now, that's an option. I think that's the closest we've ever come to backing out of something....Oh, also, at one point, I did use some Java servlets for some things, like subscription management, but the big problem back then was that the Linux libraries for Java, specifically involving networking, were flaky. But this was in 1997, when servlets were just in alpha mode.

Q: So you ended up...?

A: Everything's in Perl now. In fact, most of it's migrating to be ModPerl.

Q: So when you did that Java servlet thing, you just went back to Perl, because of the Linux libraries?

A: Yes.

Q: Can you think of a specific situation, again, where things kind of forked? I'm looking for a situation where there were a number of different options, and you ended up choosing one of the others and why?

A: Very little of that actually happened. The only such choice that comes to me is when I decided on a directory structure where postings would go after I generated them, even for different parts of the bay area, now doing parts of New York City. And I made a decision then, which, well, looks wrong now, though we're still not sure, but we're sticking with it just because it's not worth changing.

Q: Could you elaborate?

A: It just has to do with using separate directories for each sub area, rather than just relying on posting identifiers to differentiate postings in much bigger directories. And this gets into the arcana of Unix and Linux systems, and it's just a detail which no one else, you know, no one sees, but I've agonized over in the past.

Q: What have you been agonizing over?

A: Well, it's just the use of an extra level of subdirectory in path names for postings in the Bay Area or New York now, and it just goes down a level deeper than I might have chosen otherwise.

Q: So what are the pros and the cons of doing the subdirectory thing?

A: In the subdirectory case, I thought it might be faster since Linux systems, Unix systems are to be better at more directories with smaller numbers of files, as I recall. I could be wrong about that, and the tech people talk about it, but I haven't thought about the issue for a long time.

Q: So that's the pro. What would be the con of doing that?

A: Don't know offhand. I've forgotten most of the issues.

Q: How involved are other people in your decisions at Craigslist? And again, we've been talking about the technology, but include the social aspects too in your answer.

A: For the most part, day-to-day decisions are made by the people who have to implement them, which is to say the tech people, the billing people, and the customer service people. So we've driven decision-making power down to the line workers. Jim and I will still make overall directional decisions, but often only after soliciting feedback from the team and from the community.

Q: How many people do you have working for you now?

A: There are a total of 13 of us right now, and I'm pretty much positive that we'll have one more tech person rejoining us in a couple weeks.

Q: Now is that less than you used to have?

A: Yes. I think we've had 18, maybe 19 at most.

Q: So you had to scale down from before?

A: We did scale down, especially as we entered the recession after the bubble burst.

Q: Do you have any kind of overall philosophy? We touched on it a little bit before when we talked about new technologies and how it's better to keep things going and maintained well than to implement new stuff kind of for the sake of itself...

A: Do you mean the philosophy of Craig's list? What would you like?

Q: I guess social philosophy...

A: I just realized that I have a number of books that pertain...Like, there's a number of books on networking theory, like there's 6 degrees there, "Linked" by Barobasi..there's Smart Mobs...a book called Sync...

Q: I'm more interested in your philosophy...

A: Those have influenced me though.

Q: Oh okay.

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I've done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I've adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90's, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing -- the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country's in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70's when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.

And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It's changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It's changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we're now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing. Possibly Clark and Kerry. In addition, it's started to influence the passage of law. For example, the Financial Privacy Law passed in California was influenced this way. Same is true of in California of the anti-spam law. And I may end up working more with Consumer's Union on this because they're starting to put a lot of energy into this. Maybe I'll have to give AARP a call too, since I'm a card-carrying member. AARP being the American Association of Retired People.

Q: You're not going to retire anytime soon, are you?

A: You can join as early as 50. And I wanted to be a card-carrying senior citizen.

Philosophy -- another way to look at it is, in the early 90's we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That's not bad.

Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?

A: That wasn't my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what's going on. To hear about what's going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don't save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We're not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we're growing.

Foo Camp Movies: Celebrity Death Aikido Match

Here's a celebrity death aikido match between Paul "Schmoo" Holman and Jeremy Borenstein.

This was shot on October 12, 2003.

Jeremy was nice enough to provide me with a little explanation:

"Pablos and I originally met because we were both training in the same
aikido dojo. This movie shows us, out of shape and out of practice
but still having fun trying to maul each other. There's a variety of
aikido techniques more-or-less demonstrated there. Pablos takes some
nice high falls (when he leaves the ground completely for a time) and
doesn't get hurt, which is a testament to his skill."

Man does John Perry have a way with words.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build...

Hey, maybe he'll turn out to be a terrific Governor. Weirder things have happened, and lately in abundance. Maybe he will demonstrate such administrative genius that he will surgically remove 9 billion dollars of fatty deposits from California's budget without devastating public services. Maybe he will get the state back on track without either raising taxes or holding Enron accountable for the billions they swindled from his state.

But I kind of doubt it. This is a man who wanted to be adored just like Hitler, as he himself put it. This is a man whose record of boorish sexual impositions would bar him from employment in any Fortune 500 company. Not only is he macho, he *is* macho. He is arrogant, distorted, and possibly the most narcissistic person in Hollywood. (Which would make him, I guess, just about the most narcissistic person in the Milky Way galaxy.) His primary assets are good bones, great teeth, killer name recognition, and a wife whose loyalty exceeds even Hillary Clinton's. Yet the people of California turned out in record numbers a couple of Tuesdays ago and gave him everything but a blowjob.

Here is the full text of the email:

---------> B a R L o W F R i e N D Z ----->

I do try to keep this list to actual friends - by that I mean folks who might bail me out of jail. Some of what I report here is too personal to be of general interest. Nevertheless, please feel free to post or forward anything you think merits wider distribution.

I'm sure his blog will be as great as he is!

This is right before Ben Hammersley's Talk At Etech 2003.
Movie of this.

Welcome Joi!

Creative Commons Welcomes Joi Ito to Board of Directors
(Creative Commons Press Release)

Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to expanding the world of reusable content online, announced today that Joichi Ito has joined its Board of Directors. Ito is a venture capitalist, technologist, and internationally popular weblogger and commentator based in California and Japan.

"We are thrilled to have Joi Ito join the team," said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University. "His unique breadth of experience in technology, business, and policy — and his well-earned reputation as an innovator on an international level — make him a perfect new colleague for our growing organization."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/3721

Creative Commons Welcomes Joi Ito to Board of Directors

Monday, June 16, 2003

San Francisco- and Tokyo-based venture capitalist, technologist, and policy expert joins leadership of the Silicon Valley nonprofit

Palo Alto, USA — Creative Commons, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to expanding the world of reusable content online, announced today that Joichi Ito has joined its Board of Directors. Ito is a venture capitalist, technologist, and internationally popular weblogger and commentator based in California and Japan.

"We are thrilled to have Joi Ito join the team," said Lawrence Lessig, chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University. "His unique breadth of experience in technology, business, and policy — and his well-earned reputation as an innovator on an international level — make him a perfect new colleague for our growing organization."

"Protecting the commons is essential for enabling emerging technologies and businesses in networked consumer electronics and the Internet," said Ito. "It is critical for Japan and the rest of the world to understand and embrace Creative Commons‚ principles and tools. I am honored to join this world-class organization to help make it happen."

Ito joins a Board of Directors that includes Lessig; fellow cyberlaw experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, and Molly Shaffer Van Houweling; public domain web publisher Eric Eldred; filmmaker Davis Guggenheim; MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson; and lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlawyer Eric Saltzman.

More about Joichi Ito

Joichi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, http://www.neoteny.com, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002.

More information at http://joi.ito.com.

More about Creative Commons

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works — whether owned or public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school's Center for Internet and Society.

More information at http://creativecommons.org.

Contact

Glenn Otis Brown
Executive Director
Creative Commons
1.650.723.7572 (tel)
1.415.336.1433 (cell)
glenn -AT- creativecommons.org

Joichi Ito
jito -AT- neoteny.com

Neeru Paharia
Assistant Director
Creative Commons
1.650.724.3717 (tel)
1.510.823.1073 (cell)
neeru -AT- creativecommons.org

Okay so I won't hold up the rest of these clips waiting for the tour pages.

I've still got the rest of ETech to do, then I'm going back to my Spectrum Conference and SXSW 2003 footage.

Here's the Howard Rheingold Etech 2003 presentation. The tour page will go up in a day or so.

I've broken down some of these files for easier download over slower connections.

Howard Rheingold at Etech - Video in two parts:

Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 2 (Small - 30 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 2 (Small - 50 MB)

Video in three parts:

Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 3 (Small - 40 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 3 (Small - 40 MB)
Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 3 of 3 (Small - 30 MB)

Audio in two parts:

Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 2 (MP3 - 35 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 2 (MP3 - 37 MB)

Audio in four parts:

Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 1 of 4 (MP3 - 20 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 2 of 4 (MP3 - 20 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 3 of 4 (MP3 - 16 MB)
Audio - Howard Rheingold at Etech Part 4 of 4 (MP3 - 17 MB)

Photos:

The dynamic duo of Science Fiction (Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross) are writing their next creation, "Unwirer," using a blog to keep track of the process.

The story's already sold. It will be published in ReVisions when it's finished.

Here's how they describe the story:

...is an alternate history in which the copyright industry's 1995 bid at the National Information Infrastructure hearings to redesign the Internet was successful. Now, America labors under a kind of MiniTel hell, where every online transaction costs a few cents and you can only field a website with the phone company's permission. Meanwhile, the French IT giant Be, Inc., has launched a global revolution with the first WiFi AP, and American guerrilla networkers are running through the hills on the US side of the Canadian and Mexican borders, establishing meshed access-points, working to provide end-to-end meshed IP from sea to shining sea.

Here's a clip from the story itself:

He'd lost his job and spent the best part of six months inside before his attorney plea-bargained them down, from a twenty years-to-life infoterrorism stretch to second degree tarriff evasion. The judge sentenced him to time served plus two years' probation, two years in which he wasn't allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn't been as bad for him as it could have been -- unwirers got respect -- but while he was inside Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out he'd lost everything he'd spent the last decade building -- his marriage, his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the unwiring.

It was this experience that had turned him from a fun-loving geek into what $NAME [[need credible name for Chairman of the FCC]] called "one of the information terrorists undermining our homeland's security." And so it was with a shudder and a glance over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key in the lock of the house he and Dan rented.

Barlow on Brazil, our police state, and Delta Airlines CAPS plan in action.

Shortly after I wrote the words above - somewhere over Cuba - I dozed
off. When I awoke, I was in America. It feels like waking from a
beautiful dream into a nightmare. The people at Customs were all
straight out of Brazil, the movie, not the country. Automatic rifles
are everywhere...

The process involved in my boarding this aircraft makes me seriously
question whether I will be able to remain in America.

Maybe I just have to do some readjustment. But I've been flying all
over Brazil, a free country, for the last five weeks and have only
rarely had to produce an ID. My bags were never opened. What metal
detectors existed were set to go off in the presence of pistols and
not trace elements in the bloodstream, and everyone at the airport
was friendly.

This is not how it was at Laguardia.

Despite the fact that I am a Delta million-miler, the counter girl
treated me as though I were armed and dangerous. Worse, as soon as I
hit security, I found that she had marked me for special treatment. I
spent the next 45 minutes watching three of God's less favored
children go through my bags with meticulous literal-mindedness. They
weren't very bright, but they certainly were hostile. And utterly
paranoid.

"What is this, Sir?"

"That's a pen. Here. Let me show you."

"And this?"

"That's a battery for my laptop. Look, it has Apple's logo on it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I, uhhhhh...."

"Sir, could you tell me why you have three cigarette lighters in your bag?"

"I didn't know I had any cigarette lighters at all." I didn't either.

And so on. I'm not kidding. Meanwhile, they went through nitrate
detection swabs like toilet paper in a cholera ward. They even
swabbed my boarding pass. I knew that neither levity nor irritation
would be my friend, so I struggled to maintain a perfectly blank
affect. I haven't felt such a combination of boredom and terror since
an occasion, 35 years ago, when I was held for an hour by
machine-pistol-toting East German police while their commandant
removed all the politically inappropriate features from my maps with
a lovely little pair of silver scissors.

I'll probably acclimate, but right now I don't know that I can handle
contemporary American reality. Even overlooking frequent humiliations
by the TSA, I think it will be very hard to behold all these furtive
American faces, knowing that behind three of every four resides
support for our President's criminal adventure in Iraq. Then there is
the New Grimness. I've become so accustomed to smiles. But I detected
not a single one at Laguardia. I kept feeling that all this
seriousness accompanied a willingness to regard it a necessary evil
that we're using napalm - a weapon of mass destruction by my
standards - on groups the Iraqis. See
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/000923.php.

EXILED TO AMERICA

Now I'm over the Amazon, headed north. After five weeks in the
accommodating bosom of Brazil - longer than I've been in *any*
country, my own included, in quite some time - I am returning to the
Belly of the Beast.

I can't tell you how apprehensive I am at the prospect of leaving the
most emotionally healthy culture on the planet and returning to the
most pathological. I can only imagine how much more pathological it's
become after being "embedded" in CNN and the war for 10 days. Or how
mean it will get as the war drags on and sets us all against one
another.

In Brazil, on the other hand, they are trying to get as little of
this stuff on them as possible. Indeed, the city council of Rio
yesterday declared George Bush persona non grata in their city. While
this has roughly the same practical effect as Mill Valley,
California's declaring itself a nuclear-free zone, I can certainly
see their point. It has been nice being in a George Bush-free zone.
But now I am about to re-enter a social condition in which
practically every aspect has been sickened by this man's afflictions,
whether personal, cultural, or political.

I am also leaving the company of someone who is, in his essence, the
Anti-George Bush: Gilberto Gil. I've spent a lot of the last five
weeks with Gil (as he is known to everyone in Brazil) and he has
only risen in my admiration and affection during that time. This is
saying something, since, as you will recall, I was pretty high on the
guy when we met.

I feel that Gil glows with the perfected version of my own soul and
is the embodiment of all the virtues I would seek to manifest in
myself. I've learned an enormous amount from him about how to be a
graceful human being. If only I can incorporate his examples into my
own way of stumbling through this material world...

He may have been born this way, but Gil knows how to *be* love,
giving it freely and sincerely to the crowds that continuously
surround him, and, more importantly, accepting it from them with
humility, as willing to believe that he deserves it from them as he
is to believe that they deserve it from him.

At a Carnival stop in a very poor neighborhood of Recife, the crowd
saw Gil and many in it began to weep with emotion. Later, I said,
"You have the most amazing emotional effect of people. A lot of those
people were crying at the sight of you."

"Well, I was crying too," Gil smiled, and I saw the glint of salt on
his cheeks.

The people of Brazil do love Gilberto Gil. Universally. They don't
love him mythologically, as fans loved Evis Presley, or Jerry Garcia,
or John Kennedy, Jr. or any number of other virtualized
mega-celebrities. They don't simply love him for his lyrical music,
though most Brazilians can sing the greater part of his repertoire
and do. They certainly don't love him because he's now the official
steward of their culture, though they love the fact that he is. The
Brazilians love Gil for the right reason. They know what and who he
is, and they love him for himself. I love him too. I feel better
about my species for knowing that we can occasionally produce a
Gilberto Gil.

But now I'm flying away from his enormously encouraging company into
a culture which is, I fear, incapable of nurturing a heart like his,
or worse, specifically inclined to punish such unarmed decency. But,
as I mean to follow his example, we'll see what it does to me now. I
fear that to be dedicatedly good in a country that's gone as bad as
ours may require more courage and faith than I can muster. But if I'm
to be exiled in America, I'll just do my best to be a Brazilian
missionary, spreading generosity, hope, and the soul of samba. Wish
me luck.

As to the tales of my travels, the textures and tastes of this long
adventure, I don't know where to start or stop. For once, I'm sorry I
don't keep a blog, since I would have been reporting these
experiences as they occurred and I wouldn't have such an
unreadably/unwriteably huge backlog of marvels to convey. Actually,
as I said in my last spam, I probably wouldn't have kept up with a
blog, since I was too enchanted by the moment I inhabited to return,
for raconteureal purposes, to some other moment already passed.

Even before I met up with Gil in Salvador, I was tossed into the deep
end of Brazilian culture. My first night in Rio, I was taken by my
friends Hermano Vianna and Cora Ronai to a party at the home of
singer/composer Caetano Veloso, about whom I knew little then.
(Mountain Girl had given me his autobiography as I was leaving for
Brazil, but at that point I hadn't read it yet.) As a consequence,
this experience was a little like how it would be if, upon arrival in
England, you went to a party at Mick Jagger's house, without ever
having heard of the Rolling Stones.

Just about everybody who was anybody in Rio was there, but since I
didn't know who any of them were, I was able to enjoy getting to know
them without blinded by their local hugeness. There were musicians,
actors, writers, soap opera stars, and miscellaneous gorgeous people,
most of whose immediate presence would seriously alter the behavior
of the average Brazilian. Brazil has its own pantheon, very well
known throughout that huge country but generally unknown outside of
it. In any case, my ignorance was a blessing, since whatever their
fame, most of these folks were very interesting and accessible. (I
would drops names, but these would be meaningless to all but the
Brazilians, who would likely find it a vulgar self-aggrandizement.)

I also got my first taste at the party of a personal deficiency that
would frustrate me throughout my stay. I don't speak Portuguese. This
is a problem. Being restricted to English in Brazil is like being a
stroke victim. One might as well be deaf and dumb. This country is as
mono-lingual as the United States. Indeed, I would go so far as to
speculate that the percentage of Americans who can communicate in
Portuguese is probably higher than the percentage of Brazilians who
can speak English.

Fortunately, Brazilian body language is eloquent. And they are
empathic almost to the point of telepathy. Just as I love the sound
of Brazilian Portuguese, I have enjoyed watching it being spoken.
They are constantly telling long, elaborate stories or delivering
themselves of little orations on the nature of life that are poetic,
philosophical, and spiritually complex. I know this despite
understanding only about one word in ten. If I am to spend a lot of
my remaining life in Brazil - and, at the moment, I intend to - I'm
going to have to learn the language. The fact that it is my favorite
sounding tongue should at least ease its acquisition a little.

From Rio, I went to Salvador de Bahia, the city which is, for most
Brazilians, the capital of Carnival. It is a much more African town
than Rio, with all that implies. It's a good place to learn about
patience. Nothing happens very fast. But they dance better in
Salvador and they're sexier, the hybrid vigor having kicked in big
time. Also, there are mysterious energies that can be felt erupting
there, probably in ways connected to Condomblé, the local religion
they've cobbled together out of spare parts from Catholicism and the
Yoruban Ifa religions of Nigeria. This is the same set of beliefs
that became Voodoo in Haiti. Condomblé is less scary than that, but
it still has a pretty comfortable relationship with The Shadow. You
wouldn't want to mess with its devotees. But you wouldn't want to
mess with them anyway. They're much too nice.

Every city and town in Rio has a different take on Carnival, as I was
to learn from the sampler that Gil had prepared for me, as well as
Jack and Monique Lang. (Jack was the French Minister of Culture for
about 15 years and is, in spite of that, a really lovely and amusing
guy.)

The Salvadoran version was my personal favorite since it's the most
participatory and energetic. Carnival in Salvador is almost certainly
the best and biggest party on this groovin' globe. A couple of
million people turn up from all over Brazil, putting in 10 hour dance
days for nearly a week, discarding their few sexual constraints, and
digging one another deeply. Cacaça, a mind-altering local sugar cane
distillate, flows like a flash flood. (But, interestingly, despite
the strength of this stuff and the fact that everyone but me seemed
to to be drinking it constantly, I never saw anyone falling down
drunk and I only witnessed two angry scuffles.)

The central feature of Salvadorian Carnival is the "trio electrico,"
a semi-trailer truck turned into a gigantic mobile stage, full of
generators driving eardrum-bruising speaker banks and light shows.
The band rides on top of the trailer and is generally crowded in
among a mob of distinguished guests, primarily featuring the
ubiquitous soap opera stars and other cultural notables. These creep
along about a five mile stretch of oceanfront boulevard, along which
about half a million people are dancing in a paradoxical combination
of abandon and unity.

(The name trio electrico is an artifact of their original appearance
back in the early sixties, when the Brazilian inventor of the
electric guitar rented a flatbed truck and cruised along the parade
route with a electric bass player, a drummer, and a crude PA. Every
band that rides one of these behemoths now is much larger. Gil's trio
band, which included 4 of his kids and an evolving array of guest
stars, probably numbered around 12 at any given moment, though I
never got a hard count.)

Some of these trios are sounded by a cordoned battalion of dancers,
each wearing an identifying t-shirt. These groups are called blocos,
and they are a kind of club organized to celebrate Carnival together.
In Recife or Olinda, a bloco would be led by a little brass and drum
corps and doing traditional dances like frevo. In Rio, they would be
an entire samba club of five or six thousand elaborately-costumed (or
nearly naked) celebrants with huge floats and an overall appearance
that combines Las Vegas, Carmen Miranda, Burning Man,
pharmaceutical-quality LSD, and a Terry Gilliam film.

Membership in these blocos can be pricey, up to 700 Reais. Given the
fact that minimum wage in Brazil is about 200 Reais a month, this
makes for a pretty expensive t-shirt. True to Gil's inclusive
principles, his trio had no bloco, which meant that anyone who wanted
to dance alongside it could do so. This made its immediate vicinity
about the most hyper-energized zone I've ever seen that didn't have
its own solar system. Spontaneous combustion seemed a distinct
possibility.

The lightning rod for all this energy was Gil, who has mastered the
art of gathering the juice, amplifying it with his own spiritual
lens, and spraying it back out into the field. He is 61 years old,
but he played at 11-on-a-scale-of-10 for five and a half hours a
night, never taking a set break or even refuge in the occasional
ballad. I was in his reactor core for all three nights his trio
rolled, sometimes down in the boiling samba on the street, sometimes
up on top (where there was a lot more oxygen). Despite its full-tilt
velocity, his band was tighter than God's wrist-watch. It was an
incredible delight to watch them digging him, one another, and the
holy gift of music.

At one point, he asked me, somewhat rhetorically, if I were having
fun. I considered it for a moment and realized that I was having as
much fun as I am capable of having. And I am something of a fun
veteran.

<<< A Pause for Re-Entry >>>

I'm not having fun now.

Shortly after I wrote the words above - somewhere over Cuba - I dozed
off. When I awoke, I was in America. It feels like waking from a
beautiful dream into a nightmare. The people at Customs were all
straight out of Brazil, the movie, not the country. Automatic rifles
are everywhere.

Eye contact is impossible here and I've just spent five weeks in a
condition were eye contact is so customary and naked that one could
probably live off it. (The only Brazilians who avoid eye contact are
the pickpockets - which is why they are pretty harmless to the
observant - and some, though not all, of the military police.)

I arrived in New York at 7:30 am and took an extra hour to get into
the city since the cops had, to no sensible purpose, narrowed access
to the Williamsburg Bridge down to one lane.

I spent a couple of hours regrouping in my apartment, and I took some
solace in a visit from from my sweet pal Simone Banos and her old
daughter Emma Victoria. I helped deliver Emma Victoria. She is my
surrogate infant and has been a luminous presence since her arrival
11 months. They were the only thing that has made this day tolerable.

At the present moment, I am flying *back* down the Eastern Seaboard
to Disney World, the anti-Brazil, where I will spend the next three
days trying to edify and inspire the American Society of Association
Executives. I guess life is fair, and I have a lot of good times to
pay for, but surely it doesn't have to be so starkly fair as this.

The process involved in my boarding this aircraft makes me seriously
question whether I will be able to remain in America.

Maybe I just have to do some readjustment. But I've been flying all
over Brazil, a free country, for the last five weeks and have only
rarely had to produce an ID. My bags were never opened. What metal
detectors existed were set to go off in the presence of pistols and
not trace elements in the bloodstream, and everyone at the airport
was friendly.

This is not how it was at Laguardia.

Despite the fact that I am a Delta million-miler, the counter girl
treated me as though I were armed and dangerous. Worse, as soon as I
hit security, I found that she had marked me for special treatment. I
spent the next 45 minutes watching three of God's less favored
children go through my bags with meticulous literal-mindedness. They
weren't very bright, but they certainly were hostile. And utterly
paranoid.

"What is this, Sir?"

"That's a pen. Here. Let me show you."

"And this?"

"That's a battery for my laptop. Look, it has Apple's logo on it."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I, uhhhhh...."

"Sir, could you tell me why you have three cigarette lighters in your bag?"

"I didn't know I had any cigarette lighters at all." I didn't either.

And so on. I'm not kidding. Meanwhile, they went through nitrate
detection swabs like toilet paper in a cholera ward. They even
swabbed my boarding pass. I knew that neither levity nor irritation
would be my friend, so I struggled to maintain a perfectly blank
affect. I haven't felt such a combination of boredom and terror since
an occasion, 35 years ago, when I was held for an hour by
machine-pistol-toting East German police while their commandant
removed all the politically inappropriate features from my maps with
a lovely little pair of silver scissors.

I'll probably acclimate, but right now I don't know that I can handle
contemporary American reality. Even overlooking frequent humiliations
by the TSA, I think it will be very hard to behold all these furtive
American faces, knowing that behind three of every four resides
support for our President's criminal adventure in Iraq. Then there is
the New Grimness. I've become so accustomed to smiles. But I detected
not a single one at Laguardia. I kept feeling that all this
seriousness accompanied a willingness to regard it a necessary evil
that we're using napalm - a weapon of mass destruction by my
standards - on groups the Iraqis. See
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/000923.php.

Do I have enough love to forgive my countrymen? Do I have wisdom
enough to hate only our sins and not those who commit them? Will the
presence of this horror simply defeat me?

I must be careful not to guru-ify Gil. He would hate it . Still, I
find myself wondering how he - who spent time in jail and exile as a
dissident - would relate to this tragedy. I think I know.

At one point, we were driving through a heart-rending zone of
poverty. "Gil," I said, "you seem to have an unusually dilated
empathy valve. How do you handle the suffering this must produce in
you.

"Oh," he said, "I let it be. I do everything I can to change it, but
beyond a certain point, I simply have to let it be."

I wonder if I can let it be. Particularly since it appears I have no choice.

Well, as you might imagine, I have a great deal more to say about
Brazil, but my plane is landing in the Green Hell. Tonight I have to
dine with the association executives, getting to bed early enough so
that I can address them at 8:00 am tomorrow. So. I must cut this off
for now..

I will re-engage this enterprise as soon as I get some time.

Meanwhile, I'm going to do my best to let it be.

Flickering hope,

Barlow

CONTEMPLATING WAR IN THE LAND OF PEACE

...This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we
began to construct during Gulf War I. Ask a knowledgeable American
how many people died in that conflict and you will probably be told
that the death toll was somewhere around 150. (I seem to recall 138
American fatalities.)

You will probably not hear about the roughly 400,000 Iraqis we killed
during that bully outing. You will almost certainly not hear about
the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were
incinerated on the highway from Kuwait on the orders of war
criminal-turned-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. While I think that Gulf
War I may have been justified and even necessary, the fact that we
were able to conduct it with so little empathic memory does not bode
well for Gulf War II. We should still be in mourning for all the
unwilling conscripts who died at the point of our surgically sharp
sword rather than wielding it again with so much less moral
justification.

But this is just one aspect of how we have blunted our national
conscience with media. Even more dangerous is our new willingness to
believe that America's agenda is more important than the preservation
of international law. The United Nations Charter explicitly prohibits
one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the
sanction of the UN Security Council. If our attack of Iraq is
self-defense, then I would be equally innocent if I returned to
Wyoming and killed everyone in Pinedale who is well-armed, doesn't
like me, and beats his wife. (This would require quite a killing
spree...)

Even if this war is so sophisticated that very few "collateral
damages" are inflicted, even if the Ba'ath regime folds immediately
and our troops enter Baghdad festooned in the garlands of a grateful
and liberated populace, even in the extremely unlikely event that we
find a cache of Iraqi nuclear weapons, all packed up for delivery to
Al -Qa'ida , it will still be illegal and immoral. Victory will not
change that.

It is also profoundly impractical, when one considers the larger consequences.

Even if victory is swift and painless , we will have wounded, perhaps
mortally, the peace-waging capacity of the United Nations.

We will have sewn deep discord within the European Union and badly
damaged relations with two of our most important allies, France and
Germany.

We will have destroyed remaining popular support for the governments
of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, our three most important allies
in the Middle East.

We will have established - and not only for ourselves - the
legitimacy of preemptive attack.

We will have radicalized half a billion young Muslims, transforming a
monster into a martyr in their eyes.

We will have installed ourselves as the rulers of an energy colony
that will not be easy to govern, given the bitter - and, to us,
inscrutable - divisions that exist between its Shiites, its Sunni,
and its Kurds.

We will have brought ourselves to the brink of active hostilities
with Turkey, formerly a strong ally.

We will have bankrupted the teetering American economy.

We will have inserted long-term instability in world financial and
energy markets.

We will have devalued the currency of American moral authority to the
vanishing point. We will have turned America, long the hope of the
world, into the most feared and hated of nations. We will have traded
our national capacity to inspire for a mere capacity to intimidate.

And for what? To avenge 9/11 by punishing a regime that had no proven
role in it? Out of humane concern for the Iraqi people, whom we have
been, by our own policies, starving and impoverishing for the last
decade? In order to destroy possibly mythical "weapons of mass
destruction" in Iraq, even while we abide their proven existence in
such potentially irrational countries as Pakistan, Israel, India,
France, and, hardly least, the United States? The Administration
attacked before it ever provided a justification that would satisfy
any but the most TV-enchanted Christian soldier.

From: John Perry Barlow
Date: Sun Mar 23, 2003 9:04:55 PM US/Pacific
To: barlowfriendz@eff.org, John Perry Barlow
Subject: [BarlowFriendz] 9.2: War and Paz, the View from Brazil
Reply-To: barlow@eff.org

CONTEMPLATING WAR IN THE LAND OF PEACE

I was deep in the heart of Brazil when I got the news.

I was in a serene little jewel of a former diamond-mining town called
Lençois. It's located in a remote part of Brazil's Bahia state called
the Chapada Diamantina, improbably beautiful country that would look
like Monument Valley if the buttes and spires of Southern Utah rose
from a blanket of rain forest.

I had been completely out of touch with the rest of the world for
three days at the International Rainbow Gathering, held even deeper
in the Chapada, eight hours of astonishingly bad road away from
Lençois.

But even if I'd been in downtown São Paulo, the events in Baghdad
would have seemed distant. Brazil is a floating world, a parallel
universe of such size and cultural density that little enters or
escapes its gravitational field. It is well accustomed to shrugging
at Northern madnesses and continuing to pursue its own profoundly
complex affairs.

Brazil is the world's largest Inside Joke. It is, to those who get
it, sufficiently involving to render even such external
considerations as the possible outbreak of Armageddon slightly
irrelevant.

Besides, it seems to have an instinct for peace that runs the length
of its history and is wisely aware that even opposing the bellicose
behavior of less enlightened cultures adds energy to the cyclone of
war. Brazil doesn't study war no more. The only organized conflict
Brazil is likely to enter involves no weapon more lethal than a
soccer ball.

The cobble-stoned streets of Lençois were filling with the nightly
promenade of beautiful, chocolate-skinned young people when my cell
phone rang. "The war has started," said Lotte, my former Swedeheart,
in a voice as bleak as a Strindberg play.

Immediately, I lunged for a fat information feed, but there was
little to be had. The pousada where I was staying didn't have a
phone, so I couldn't jack my computer into the Internet. I found a
television, which is never hard to do in Brazil, but of course I
couldn't find one with any English programming. Why waste a channel
on CNN? Absolutely no one here speaks English and they certainly
don't need any more hallucinatory propaganda from The North.

What news I could find in Portuguese seemed to regard the outbreak of
American aggression against Iraq as just another news story. It was
nothing worth preempting the evening's soap operas over. I went to
bed even more in the dark than usual.

I had another 8 hour drive to Salvador the next day. I scanned the
radio constantly for news and heard little. I did hear President Lula
de Silva making a statement in the matter, which I later leaned
contained this perfectly reasonable statement: "All of us want for
Iraq not to have atomic weapons or weapons of mass destruction," he
said, "but that does not give the United States the right to decide
by itself what is good and what is bad for the world."

Now I'm Rio. I know everything that CNN and the New York Times web
site permit me to know, which seems to include things that might not
be true.

I know that, according to the Gallup poll, 76% of the American people
support the attack on Iraq. (Since I can only think of 5 people in my
considerable multitude of diverse acquaintance who share this
opinion, I have to wonder about this figure.)

I know that we can turn Baghdad - a town with 2 and a half million
children - into telegenic Disney Hell with several thousand tons of
high explosives and injure only Bad Guys. (Indeed, watching CNN, one
might wonder if anyone gets injured at all in this marvelously
surgical new form of war.)

I know that we have a lot of really cool toys in our arsenal. I know
that A-10 Warthog can fire over a thousand rounds a minute. (Though
no one in the media has mentioned that each of these bullets consists
of depleted uranium that will be radiating birth defects into the
Iraqi gene pool for many generations.)

I know that the only truly powerful country on the planet is
continuing to manufacture the perilous, conscience-stunting myth that
technology can make war relatively safe. Indeed, we are so delusional
on this subject that we believe that bombing the shit out of the
Iraqis is a humanitarian act.

This is a continuation of the same national system of denial that we
began to construct during Gulf War I. Ask a knowledgeable American
how many people died in that conflict and you will probably be told
that the death toll was somewhere around 150. (I seem to recall 138
American fatalities.)

You will probably not hear about the roughly 400,000 Iraqis we killed
during that bully outing. You will almost certainly not hear about
the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were
incinerated on the highway from Kuwait on the orders of war
criminal-turned-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey. While I think that Gulf
War I may have been justified and even necessary, the fact that we
were able to conduct it with so little empathic memory does not bode
well for Gulf War II. We should still be in mourning for all the
unwilling conscripts who died at the point of our surgically sharp
sword rather than wielding it again with so much less moral
justification.

But this is just one aspect of how we have blunted our national
conscience with media. Even more dangerous is our new willingness to
believe that America's agenda is more important than the preservation
of international law. The United Nations Charter explicitly prohibits
one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the
sanction of the UN Security Council. If our attack of Iraq is
self-defense, then I would be equally innocent if I returned to
Wyoming and killed everyone in Pinedale who is well-armed, doesn't
like me, and beats his wife. (This would require quite a killing
spree...)

Even if this war is so sophisticated that very few "collateral
damages" are inflicted, even if the Ba'ath regime folds immediately
and our troops enter Baghdad festooned in the garlands of a grateful
and liberated populace, even in the extremely unlikely event that we
find a cache of Iraqi nuclear weapons, all packed up for delivery to
Al -Qa'ida , it will still be illegal and immoral. Victory will not
change that.

It is also profoundly impractical, when one considers the larger consequences.

Even if victory is swift and painless , we will have wounded, perhaps
mortally, the peace-waging capacity of the United Nations.

We will have sewn deep discord within the European Union and badly
damaged relations with two of our most important allies, France and
Germany.

We will have destroyed remaining popular support for the governments
of Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, our three most important allies
in the Middle East.

We will have established - and not only for ourselves - the
legitimacy of preemptive attack.

We will have radicalized half a billion young Muslims, transforming a
monster into a martyr in their eyes.

We will have installed ourselves as the rulers of an energy colony
that will not be easy to govern, given the bitter - and, to us,
inscrutable - divisions that exist between its Shiites, its Sunni,
and its Kurds.

We will have brought ourselves to the brink of active hostilities
with Turkey, formerly a strong ally.

We will have bankrupted the teetering American economy.

We will have inserted long-term instability in world financial and
energy markets.

We will have devalued the currency of American moral authority to the
vanishing point. We will have turned America, long the hope of the
world, into the most feared and hated of nations. We will have traded
our national capacity to inspire for a mere capacity to intimidate.

And for what? To avenge 9/11 by punishing a regime that had no proven
role in it? Out of humane concern for the Iraqi people, whom we have
been, by our own policies, starving and impoverishing for the last
decade? In order to destroy possibly mythical "weapons of mass
destruction" in Iraq, even while we abide their proven existence in
such potentially irrational countries as Pakistan, Israel, India,
France, and, hardly least, the United States? The Administration
attacked before it ever provided a justification that would satisfy
any but the most TV-enchanted Christian soldier.

As you BarlowFriendz know, I thought Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld were
bluffing. I still think they were. But they painted themselves into
a terrible corner by failing to recognize the irrationality and
intransigence of Saddam Hussein as well as the powerlessness of his
people. When all their terrorism failed to either frighten him into
exile or frighten the Iraqis into thinking it would be safer to
attempt his overthrow, they had no choice but to pursue bluster by
another means, to paraphrase Von Clauswitz. (In his press conference
today, Rumsfeld said, repeatedly, words that amounted to: "Ok, we're
getting really mad now. If you don't pack up and go, Saddam, we'll do
something truly shocking and awful." As if we hadn't already...

Now, of course, these events have acquired all the terrible machinery
of tragedy. They have become horrible juggernaut that will roll
across the world leaving horror and change, mostly for the worse, in
its tracks. I doubt that even Dick Cheney could stop it now.

Meanwhile, life goes gloriously on in Brazil. While the North erupted
on Saturday in war and angry protests against war, Brazil was mainly
concerned with the championship match between São Paulo and
Corinthes. Indeed, the only visible war protest I saw were some
banners in the audience at the soccer game. (Though Michael Moore got
a huge cheer from the Oscar party I attended tonight when he took
after George Bush...)

As you might expect, I have much more to report from down here, where
I've now spent an utterly transforming month. Until now, I've been
having too much fun having adventures to spend my energies on turning
them into information.

I have just taken what is almost certainly the best short course in
Brazilian culture that anyone ever received. Just experiencing
Carnival - in Salvador, Recife, Olinda, Rio, and São Paulo - in the
immediate and continuous company of Gilberto Gil would have been a
lot. In addition to being the Minister of Culture, Gil *is* Brazil in
a way. In his music, his open heart, his sweetly melancholy optimism,
his energy, he represents everything this place rightly loves about
itself.

If Gilberto Gil were a member of our cabinet - if we had the kind of
country that would make him a member of the cabinet - we would be
waging peace rather than war and the world would be a lot more like
Brazil. One can only hope that one day it will be.

Paz e Amor,

Barlow

--
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

**************************************************************

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth
to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth
from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O
Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with
our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms
of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with
the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste
their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the
hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to
turn them out roofless with their little children to wander
unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and
thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of
winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the
refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord,
blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter
pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears,
stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it,
in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is
ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek
His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

-- Mark Twain

I'm a big fan of t r u t h o u t.

These guys are a group of human agents that go out and scour the internet for important articles from reputable sources (like the NY Times, Washinton Post, and other "accepted" sources of the mainstream -- so the powers that be can't just say that we saw it in the lefty news).

When I wake up at 6am. My list of articles is waiting in my mailbox for me.

I doubt I could even put a price on the amount of time they save me every day.

But now they're in trouble, and need your help to stay afloat. They provide their service for free to everyone that needs it, and then they ask for those of us with a little money (read: very little these days) to pitch in even $5 or $10 dollars a month to keep them afloat.

The thought of this organization going away when we need it more than ever prompted me to write this pitch on their behalf: help out if you can.

Here's a wav file of the last part of the birth.

A record 15 minutes out the door! (After many hours of preparation :-)

(It sounds like it would feel like a million trillion quadrillion minutes in Quinn-in-labor years.)

Photos and more audio

My friend Quinn is having a baby (like, as we speak) and blogging about it online, as it happens. (Yes, they're having the baby at home.)

It's just a webpage, so you have to manually reload it to see the updates, but they're steady...

9:37pm. We're looking after Quinn's backache (it's a posterior-facing baby for now, so backache is par for the course). "Birth would be fine if it wasn't for the contractions". [danny]

9:51pm. Note to Heather: back births suck.

10:22pm. The hormones have her shivering, and freezing cold. Thank god for lots and lots of blankets. [ gilbert ]

10:35pm. can i have a shower?

10:41pm. six centimeters-plus dilation. this is a good thing.

What Matt Haughey talks about the panel he'll be on and some of the things he's looking forward to at this year's South By Southwest conference.
Matt Haughey On SXSW (Hi-res 17 MB)
Matt Haughey On SXSW (Lo-res 5 MB)

What Dana Robinson is looking forward to at this year's South By Southwest conference.
Dana Robinson On SXSW (Hi-res 25 MB)
Dana Robinson On SXSW (Lo-res 7 MB)

Video and MP3s Of Craig Newmark On CNBC, Friday, February 7, 2003.

Craig talks about trends in job placement etc., as observed on Craig's List.

Things are really getting interesting now that I have my camera hooked up to the stereo (with an analog cassette player).

Fifteen years of cassette archives. Yowza.

Here's Timothy Leary leaving a message on my voicemail in August 1995 to thank me for the work I did on his graphic novel, Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel.

(Note: this file is an MP3 from a cassette tape I managed to record the voicemail on to in 1995 (through a crude patch into a friend's computer) -- and then back out from his computer onto a cassette tape.

And all that -- only so I could play it back into a video camera and recapture it into a computer seven years later. Funny, isn't it?

John Perry Barlow has come up with a great idea for what to call this decade: THE Uh-Oh's.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh...

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

Here is the full text of the email:

THE Uh-Oh'S

Exactly two years ago today, I peered into the thickening fog that was the decade we now uncomfortably inhabit and proposed a name for it. It didn't take. This weird period remains unnamed. So I'm going to take another run at it.

I suggest once more that we call them The Uh-Oh's.

As I wrote in the embers of the 90's:

I predict changes that will to cause so much consternation among the traditionalists and ambiguiphobes that such creatures as the Unibomber, Pat Buchanan, or the Ayatollah Khomeini may become common as laptops.

The weird will turn pro, in the words of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, and the pros will turn weird.

I could go on, and at length, but you get my drift. For these and many other reasons, I therefore propose that we call the coming decade The Uh-ohs.

As in: Total loss of privacy. Uh-Oh. The death of copyright. Uh-Oh. Children more powerful than their parents. Uh-Oh. Bill Gates ruling the world. Uh-Oh. Ten million Americans in prison. Uh-Oh. Black market plutonium. Uh-Oh. Absolutely everyone packing a cell phone. Uh-Oh. And constantly talking to everyone else. Uh-Oh.

Hey. as it turns out, I didn't *even* know from Uh-Oh back then. I was kind of like The Grateful Dead thinking it had already been a long, strange trip in 1969.

I mean, I ask you, how many times in the last two years have you found yourself thrust into a ripe opportunity, whether public or personal, to say "Uh-Oh?" Or, at the very least, something that translated into "Uh-Oh?"

Like, first plane. Uh-Oh.

Second plane. Uh-Oh.

America turning into a mad, homicidal bully with 7000 nuclear weapons and a stated willingness, as well as a proven ability, to use them. Uh-Oh.

As I said back then, you get my drift. I sure as hell don't need to spell it out now. Nor need I detail, Dear Friends, all the pending Uh-Oh's visibly in the pipeline. And I refer merely to the ones we can predict without going as orthogonal as things like to get these days. Uh-Oh, indeed.

So, the next time you're looking to refer to this decade by a name, please consider my proffered suggestion. I think it's a meme that bears spreading, and not merely because I dreamed it up. We have to call them *something.* Might as well be a name that requires no adjective - as in Psychedelic Sixties or Roaring Twenties - to evoke their essential flavor.

And they certainly do have a flavor. They are, it seems to me, one huge pop quiz from God in the matters of Love and Faith.

Whether as a species or as individuals, we are all getting our faith tested at the moment. I don't know anyone who hasn't been sorely challenged in the last two years, and I know a lot of people well enough so that when I ask them how they're doing, they actually tell me. Good relationships have exploded. Serious illness, particularly cancer, has become incredibly fashionable. Death has not been taking a holiday .And just about everybody - save for the plutocrats we allowed to steal our country - is broke.

We are also getting plenty of opportunities to assess our actual capacity to love. In this, I refer to what Gandhi was getting at when he said, "It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. "

Both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have taught us a lot about that kind of love in the last two years. (I also remember that the Dalai Lama, asked who had been his greatest teachers, replied, "The Chinese, of course.) Nor do we have to turn to televised bogeymen for such teaching. Most of us have lately found excellent faculty far closer to home.

Of course, not everyone is willing to make himself available for class. The American people, taken as a group, appear to be truant. We seem unhesitating in our willingness to hate whatever villain du jour the Administration and CNN designate, whether it be Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, or the rising new star, Kim Il Jung.

Our faith seems faithless. Rather than actually trusting in the God we so loudly profess to worship, we trust military force alone to keep us safe, even if it means staging unprovoked assaults on countries that have in no way proven themselves capable of harming us, nor even expressed any interest in doing so.

Actually, I have finally figured out what's going on with a great many of us. Shocked into a kind of political catatonia by the multitudinous Uh-Oh's of the Uh-Oh's, we are pretending to be asleep. This is the only explanation I can think of for our political passivity.

If we were actually asleep, we would have been shocked into alertness by the wanton ruin of our economy in only two years, the overnight establishment of an oligarchy that makes Mexico's look enlightened, the detailed repudiation of the Constitution enacted by the USA PATRIOT Act, and the breezy willingness of our government to commit us to simultaneous wars in separate hemispheres.

If we had really been sleeping, these and many other shocks to the conscience would have us bolt upright by now. The real patriots would be well out of bed, rushing to defend America against the Junta, rather than ratifying it with their absence from the polls.

But there is an old Navajo proverb you've heard me quote before: "It's impossible to awaken someone who is pretending to be asleep." Never has that phrase seemed more bitterly and poignantly true than now. It is also impossible to teach someone who's pretending to be asleep. And, finally it is impossible to administer a pop quiz to possum players.

True as this may be of the American Collective, it doesn't seem at all true of the many of you I've encountered recently. Despite the slings and arrows you've each absorbed, despite the outrageousness of your current fortunes, despite the undeniable truth that the Uh-Oh's suck huge, I see growing in you the same groundless hope I've been attempting to nurture in myself, with spotty success, since Cynthia died years ago.

Back then I wrote that "groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind there is." I understand those words far better today than I did then. Now I can find very few rational supports for my optimism. Every curve I plot, macro or micro, plunges toward an abyss of war, pestilence, famine, and terror. But now I know in my heart what could only have moved there in times like these, that hope with a logical basis isn't hope at all. It's just planning. I've pretty much given up on planning. "Man plans, God laughs," goes the Yiddish expression, and It must be laughing a lot these days.

No, the hope I feel now, the hope I feel in many of you, is a blind and crazy hope that deserves the holy name of Faith.

There is also Love.

As I've written this little sermonette, I've been passing over Donner Summit in the Sierras with daughter Leah at the wheel. Also on board are the other two Barlowettes, Amelia and Anna, as well as a young man, Eli King, who's been a surrogate son since he was literally half his current height. We've been driving all day from Salt Lake City on our way to join up in San Francisco with our larger "family" in the String Cheese Incident for New Year's. The weather over the pass has been vile as is customary this time of year. We're all exhausted and wedged in this heavily laden little car like early astronauts.

But there is a lot of love in the manifest as well. Each of us has just endured one of the hardest years of our lives, but we have been mostly gentle with each other on this drive. We've laughed a lot, even if some of the humor was a little dark. We just found out that that the hotel reservations we thought we had in San Francisco never got made owing to a miscommunication on my part, so our immediate future is a little sketchy (though by the time I actually dispatch this, it will have sorted itself out). Love has seen us this far. Love will see us through.

May Love and Faith see you through tonight as well. And through 2003. And through the all the Uh-Oh's that sill await us.

Unconditional Hope,

Barlow

--

*************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

**************************************************************

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

Craig Newmark at the Creative Commons Launch - 18 MB

Craig Newmark at the Creative Commons Launch - 10 MB

Audio - MP3 of Craig Newmark at the Creative Commons Launch - 3 MB

Aaron Swartz at the Creative Commons Launch - 27 MB

Aaron Swartz at the Creative Commons Launch - 16.5 MB

Audio - MP3 of Aaron Swartz at the Creative Commons Launch - 5.5 MB

Complete with new and exciting reasonable file sizes!

Below are links to a high resolution and low resolution QuickTime movies and audio MP3 file. Let me know if you need another format.

Brewster Kahle and son, Caslon, at the Creative Commons Launch

Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch - 25 MB

Brewster Kahle at the Creative Commons Launch - 14 MB

MP3 of Brewster Kahle at Creative Commons Launch - 5 MB

Here's an old favorite of mine (originally published in 1994 and continuously updated ever since) that will make a great new addition to the commons!

Matisse Enzer has released his
Glossary of Internet Terms under a Creative Commons Share Alike License.

The story I just blogged about the nano tech talks at the cryonics conference reminded me that Timothy Leary wrote about Alcor in the book I worked on with him (Surfing the Conscious Nets). (Contrary to popular belief, however, Tim did not freeze his remains.)


I went and dug up the reference to Alcor, just for fun. For those of you with a copy of Surfing the Conscious Nets around, it's on page 16. For the rest of you, I've created a scan here:




I'm sure this is OK with both Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner, who is a friend of mine, and would consider it promotion for the book, and Tim Leary himself, because he told me in 1995 that it was his dream to have all of his works freely available online. A dying wish, if you will.
(Yeah, we're talking everything. So I'm sure he wouldn't mind a few scans.)

On the bright side of the ledger, John Lilly, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips have escaped with their "souls" intact. So far! Several of the lesser known Gabor sisters, rumor has it, had their pretty heads sliced and diced by Dr. Sidney Cohen's gang. Elvis Presley? Who knows? Walt Disney? Janis Joplin? Jim Morrison? Just who exactly still lives frozen in blessed hibernation in the re-animation vaults of the Alcor-CryoCare Cryonics Foundation, in Riverside, California, as Jimi Hendrix does? -- no thanks to Nick Rogue--all credit to Michael Hollingshead.

Then Andy Warhol started phoning me day and night. Cryonics is all Andy thinks about these days. So he says.

Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow have written a short story (being published on four parts) that's already considered a classic in my mind.

I've already read the whole thing, and I can't imagine reading this story in pieces -- so I'll re-blog accordingly after all four pieces are up.

I don't want to make any more comments about the subject matter so as not to risk giving any of the story away, but let's just say that since reading this story, I think about meatspace a lot differently now.

I whole heartedly recommend taking ten minutes to treat yourself to a little glimpse of one possible future.

In many ways, we're already there...Jury Service

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.

The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth's RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.

A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There's always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let's-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There's always a fucking geek who'll do it because it's a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.

Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.

But until that happy day, there's the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.

Cory Doctorow's short stories and novels grab you very early on, and you just kinda don't want to put them down until they're finished. He gives you just enough of a glimpse of his worlds to sear images of them into your brain forever -- leaving you ready and waiting for the next voyage to begin.

Here's an excerpt if you want to check it out first before purchasing the novel at 30% off:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

So what do you say? You can save 30%, you won't be disappointed, and you can help Cory get a bigger contract for his next novel!

Here is the full text of the excerpt in case the link goes bad:

http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/excerpts/down_and_out1.html

The Infinite Matrix

an excerpt from
down and out in
the magic kingdom

by Cory Doctorow

illustration

The Liberty Square ad-hocs were the staunchest conservatives in the Magic Kingdom, preserving the wheezing technology in the face of a Park that changed almost daily. The newcomer/old-timers were on-side with the rest of the Park, had their support, and looked like they might make a successful go of it.

It fell to my girlfriend Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.

Lil was second-generation Disney World, her parents being among the original ad-hocracy that took over the management of Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island. She was, quite literally, raised in Walt Disney World and it showed. She was neat and efficient in her every little thing, from her shining red hair to her careful accounting of each gear and cog in the animatronics that are in her charge. Her folks were in canopic jars in Kissimmee, deadheading for a few centuries.

I caught her backstage at the Hall of the Presidents, tinkering with Lincoln II, the backup animatronic. Lil tried to keep two of everything running at speed, just in case. She could swap out a dead 'bot for a backup in five minutes flat, which is all that crowd-control would permit.

It had been two weeks since Dan's arrival, and though I'd barely seen him in that time, his presence was vivid in our lives. Our little ranch-house had a new smell, not unpleasant, of rejuve and hope and loss, something barely noticeable over the tropical flowers nodding in front of our porch. My phone rang three or four times a day, Dan checking in from his rounds of the Park, seeking out some way to accumulate personal capital. His excitement and dedication to the task were inspiring, pulling me into his over-the-top-and-damn-the-torpedoes mode of being.

"You just missed Dan," she said. She had her head in Lincoln's chest, working with an autosolder and a magnifier. Bent over, red hair tied back in a neat bun, sweat sheening her wiry freckled arms, smelling of girl-sweat and machine lubricant, she made me wish there were a mattress somewhere backstage. I settled for patting her behind affectionately, and she wriggled appreciatively. "He's looking better."

His rejuve had taken him back to apparent 25, the way I remembered him. He was rawboned and leathery, but still had the defeated stoop that had startled me when I saw him at the Adventurer's Club. "What did he want?"

"He's been hanging out with Debra — he wanted to make sure I knew what she's up to."

Debra was one of the old guard, a former comrade of Lil's parents. She'd spent a decade in Disneyland Beijing, coding sim-rides. If she had her way, we'd tear down every marvelous rube goldberg in the Park and replace them with pristine white sim boxes on giant, articulated servos.

The problem was that she was really good at coding sims. Her Great Movie Ride rehab at MGM was breathtaking — the Star Wars sequence had already inspired a hundred fan-sites that fielded millions of hits.

"So, what's she up to?"

Lil extracted herself from the Rail-Splitter's mechanical guts and made a comical moue of worry. "She's rehabbing the Pirates — and doing an incredible job. They're ahead of schedule, they've got good net-buzz, the focus groups are cumming themselves." The comedy went out of her expression, baring genuine worry.

She turned away and closed up Honest Abe, then fired her finger at him. Smoothly, he began to run through his spiel, silent but for the soft hum and whine of his servos. Lil mimed twiddling a knob and his audiotrack kicked in low: "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined could not, by force, make a track on the Blue Ridge, nor take a drink from the Ohio. If destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author — and its finisher." She mimed turning down the gain and he fell silent again.

"You said it, Mr. President," she said, and fired her finger at him again, powering him down. She bent and adjusted his hand-sewn period topcoat, then carefully wound and set the turnip-watch in his vest-pocket.

I put my arm around her shoulders. "You're doing all you can — and it's good work," I said. I'd fallen into the easy castmember mode of speaking, voicing bland affirmations. Hearing the words, I felt a flush of embarrassment. I pulled her into a long, hard hug and fumbled for better reassurance. Finding no words that would do, I gave her a final squeeze and let her go.

She looked at me sidelong and nodded her head. "It'll be fine, of course," she said. "I mean, the worst possible scenario is that Debra will do her job very, very well, and make things even better than they are now. That's not so bad."

This was a 180-degree reversal of her position on the subject the last time we'd talked, but you don't live more than a century without learning when to point out that sort of thing and when not to.

My cochlea struck twelve noon and a HUD appeared with my weekly backup reminder. Lil was maneuvering Ben Franklin II out of his niche. I waved good-bye at her back and walked away, to an uplink terminal. Once I was close enough for secure broadband communications, I got ready to back up. My cochlea chimed again and I answered it.

"Yes," I subvocalized, impatiently. I hated getting distracted from a backup — one of my enduring fears was that I'd forget the backup altogether and leave myself vulnerable for an entire week until the next reminder. I'd lost the knack of getting into habits in my adolescence, giving in completely to machine-generated reminders over conscious choice.

"It's Dan." I heard the sound of the Park in full swing behind him — children's laughter; bright, recorded animatronic spiels; the tromp of thousands of feet. "Can you meet me at the Tiki Room? It's pretty important."

"Can it wait for fifteen?" I asked.

"Sure — see you in fifteen."

I rung off and initiated the backup. A status-bar zipped across a HUD, dumping the parts of my memory that were purely digital; then it finished and started in on organic memory. My eyes rolled back in my head and my life flashed before my eyes.

After I was shot dead at the Tiki Room, I had the opportunity to appreciate the great leaps that restores had made in the intervening ten years since my last death. I woke in my own bed, instantly aware of the events that led up to my death as seen from various third-party POVs: security footage from the Adventureland cameras, synthesized memories extracted from Dan's own backup, and a computer-generated fly-through of the scene. I woke feeling preternaturally calm and cheerful, and knowing that I felt that way because of certain temporary neurotransmitter presets that had been put in place when I was restored.

Dan and Lil sat at my bedside. Lil's tired, smiling face was limned with hairs that had snuck loose of her pony-tail. She took my hand and kissed the smooth knuckles. I dug for words appropriate to the scene, decided to wing it, opened my mouth and said, to my surprise, "I have to pee."

Dan and Lil smiled at each other. I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom. My muscles were surprisingly limber, with a brand-new spring to them. After I flushed I leaned over and took hold of my ankles, then pulled my head right to the floor, feeling the marvelous flexibility of my back and legs and buttocks. A scar on my knee was missing, as were the many lines that had crisscrossed my fingers. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that my nose and earlobes were smaller and perkier. The familiar crows-feet and the frown-lines between my eyebrows were gone. I had a day's beard all over — head, face, pubis, arms, legs. I ran my hands over my body and chuckled at the ticklish newness of it all. I was briefly tempted to depilate all over, just to keep this feeling of newness forever, but the neurotransmitter presets were evaporating and a sense of urgency over my murder was creeping up on me.

I tied a towel around my waist and made my way back to the bedroom. The smells of tile-cleaner and flowers and rejuve were bright in my nose, effervescent as camphor. Dan and Lil stood when I came into the room and helped me to the bed. "Well, this sucks," I said. I ran the bare, soft soles of my new feet over the tile and considered the circumstances of my latest death.

After the backup uplink, I'd headed straight for Liberty Square through the utilidors. Three quick cuts of security cam footage told the story, one at the uplink, one in the corridor, and one at the exit in the underpass between Liberty Square and Adventureland. I seemed bemused and a little sad as I emerged from the door, and began to weave my way through the crowd, using a kind of sinuous, darting shuffle that I'd developed when I was doing field-work on my crowd-control thesis. I cut rapidly through the lunchtime crowd toward the long roof of the Tiki Room, thatched with strips of shimmering aluminum cut and painted to look like long grass.

Fuzzy shots now, from Dan's POV, of me moving closer to him, passing close to a group of teenaged girls with extra elbows and knees, wearing environmentally controlled cloaks and cowls covered with Epcot Center logos. One of them is wearing a pith helmet, from the Jungle Traders shop outside of the Jungle Cruise. Dan's gaze flicks away, to the Tiki Room's entrance, where there is a short queue of older men, then back, just as the girl with the pith helmet draws a stylish little organic pistol, like a penis with a tail that coils around her arm. Casually, grinning, she raises her arm and gestures with the pistol, exactly like Lil does with her finger when she's uploading, and the pistol lunges forward. Dan's gaze flicks back to me. I'm pitching over, my lungs bursting out of my chest and spreading before me like wings, spinal gristle and viscera showering the guests before me. A piece of my nametag, now shrapnel, strikes Dan in the forehead, causing him to blink. When he looks again, the group of girls is still there, but the girl with the pistol is gone.

The fly-through is far less confused. Everyone except me, Dan and the girl are grayed-out. We're limned in highlighter yellow, moving in slow-motion. I emerge from the underpass and the girl moves from the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse to the group of her friends, Dan starts to move towards me. The girl raises, arms and fires her pistol. A self-guiding smart-slug, keyed to my body chemistry, flies low, near ground-level, weaving among the feet of the crowd, moving just below the speed of sound. When it reaches me, it screams upwards and into my spine, detonating once it's entered my chest-cavity.

The girl has already made a lot of ground, back toward the Adventureland/Main Street, USA gateway. The fly-through speeds up, following her as she merges with the crowds on the street, ducking and weaving between them, moving toward the breezeway at Sleeping Beauty Castle. She vanishes, then reappears, forty minutes later, in Tomorrowland, near the new Space Mountain complex, then disappears again.

"Has anyone ID'd the girl?" I asked, once I'd finished reliving the events. The anger was starting to boil within me now. My new fists clenched for the first time, soft palms and uncallused fingertips.

Dan shook his head. "None of the girls she was with had ever seen her before. The face was one of the Seven Sisters — Hope." The Seven Sisters were a trendy collection of designer faces. Every second teenage girl wore one of them.

"How about Jungle Traders?" I asked. "Did they have a record of the pith helmet purchase?"

Lil frowned. "We ran the Jungle Traders purchases back for six months: only three matched the girl's apparent age; all three have alibis. Chances are she stole it."

"Why?" I asked, finally. In my mind's eye, I saw my lungs bursting out of my chest, like wings, like jellyfish, vertebrae spraying like shrapnel. I saw the girl's smile, an almost sexual smirk as she pulled the trigger on me.

"It wasn't random," Lil said. "The slug was definitely keyed to you — that means that she'd gotten close enough to sample you at some point."

Right — which meant that she'd been to Disney World in the last ten years. That sure narrowed it down.

"What happened to her after Tomorrowland?" I said.

"We don't know," Lil said. "Something wrong with the cameras. We lost her and she never reappeared." She sounded hot and angry — she took equipment failures in the Magic Kingdom very personally.

"Who'd want to do this?" I asked, hating the self-pity in my voice. It was the first time I'd been murdered, but I didn't need to be a drama-queen about it.

Dan's eyes got a far-away look. "Sometimes, people do things for reasons that seem perfectly reasonable to them, that the rest of the world couldn't hope to understand. I've seen a few assassinations, and they never made sense afterwards." He stroked his chin. "Sometimes, it's better look for temperament, rather than motivation: who could do something like this?"

Right. All we needed to do was investigate all the psychopaths who'd visited the Magic Kingdom in ten years. That narrowed it down considerably. I pulled up a HUD and checked the time. It had been four days since my murder. I had a shift coming up, working the turnstiles at the Haunted Mansion. I liked to pull a couple of those shifts a month, just to keep myself grounded; it helped to take a reality-check while I was churning away in the rarified climate of my crowd-control simulations.

I stood and went to my closet, started to dress.

"What are you doing?" Lil asked, alarmed.

"I've got a shift. I'm running late."

"You're in no shape to work," Lil said, tugging at my elbow. I jerked free of her.

"I'm fine — good as new." I barked a humorless laugh. "I'm not going to let those bastards disrupt my life any more."

Those bastards? I thought — when had I decided that there was more than one? But I knew it was true. There was no way that this was all planned by one person: it had been executed too precisely, too thoroughly.

Dan moved to block the bedroom door. "Wait a second," he said. "You need rest."

I fixed him with a doleful glare. "I'll decide that," I said. He stepped aside.

"I'll tag along, then," he said. "Just in case."

I pinged my Whuffie. I was up a couple percentiles — sympathy Whuffie — but it was falling: Dan and Lil were radiating disapproval. Screw 'em.

I got into my runabout and Dan scrambled for the passenger door as I put it in gear and sped out.

[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]

Cory Doctorow has been writing and selling science fiction for a dozen years or so, and after a blizzard of stories appeared, in 1998, 1999, and 2000, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, SF Age, Interzone, Amazing, On Spec, and other magazines, a grateful public awarded him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is the author, with Karl Schroeder, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, and his articles have appeared in Wired, Speculations, and other magazines. Cory blogs for boingboing, evangelizes for OpenCola, and generally keeps busy. You can find out more on his website, Craphound.com, if he ever gets around to updating it.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will be published by Tor Books in Fall, 2002.

The Infinite Matrix

an excerpt from
down and out in
the magic kingdom

by Cory Doctorow

part 2
illustration

The Mansion's cast were sickeningly cheerful and solicitous. Each of them made a point of coming around and touching the stiff, starched shoulder of my butler's costume, letting me know that if there was anything they could do for me. . . I gave them all a fixed smile and tried to concentrate on the guests, how they waited, when they arrived, how they dispersed through the exit gate. Dan hovered nearby, occasionally taking the eight minute, twenty-two second ride-through, running interference for me with the other castmembers.

He was nearby when my break came up. I changed into civvies and we walked over the cobbled streets, past the Hall of the Presidents, noting as I rounded the corner that there was something different about the queue-area. Dan groaned. "They did it already," he said.

I looked closer. The turnstiles were blocked by a sandwich board: Mickey in a Ben Franklin wig and bifocals, holding a trowel. "Excuse our mess!" the sign declared. "We're renovating to serve you better!"

I spotted one of Debra's cronies standing behind the sign, a self-satisfied smile on his face. He'd started off life as a squat northern Chinese, but had had his bones lengthened and his cheekbones raised so that he looked almost elfin. I took one look at his smile and understood — Debra had established a toe-hold in Liberty Square.

"They filed plans for the new Hall with the steering committee an hour after you got shot" Dan explained. "The committee loved the plans; so did the net. They're promising not to touch the Mansion."

"You didn't mention this," I said, hotly.

"We thought you'd jump to conclusions. The timing was bad, but there's no indication that they arranged for the shooter. Everyone's got an alibi; furthermore, they've all offered to submit their backups for proof."

"Right," I said. "Right. So they just happened to have plans for a new Hall standing by. And they just happened to file them after I got shot, when all our ad-hocs were busy worrying about me. It's all a big coincidence."

Dan shook his head. "We're not stupid, Jules. No one thinks that it's a coincidence. Debra's the sort of person who keeps a lot of plans standing by, just in case. But that just makes her a well-prepared opportunist, not a murderer."

I felt nauseated and exhausted. I was enough of a castmember that I sought out a utilidor before I collapsed against a wall, head down. Defeat seeped through me, saturating me.

Dan crouched down beside me. I looked over at him. He was grinning wryly. "Posit," he said, "for the moment, that Debra really did do this thing, set you up so that she could take over."

I smiled, in spite of myself. This was his explaining act, the thing he would do whenever I fell into one of his rhetorical tricks back in the old days. "All right, I've posited it."

"Why would she: one, take out you instead of Lil or one of the real old-timers; two, go after the Hall of Presidents instead of Tom Sawyer Island or even the Mansion; and three, follow it up with such a blatant, suspicious move?"

"All right," I said, warming to the challenge. "One: I'm important enough to be disruptive but not so important as to rate a full investigation. Two: Tom Sawyer Island is too visible, you can't rehab it without people seeing the dust from shore. Three, Debra's coming off of a decade in Beijing, where subtlety isn't real important."

"Sure," Dan said, "sure." Then he launched an answering salvo, and while I was thinking up my answer, he helped me to my feet and walked me out to my runabout, arguing all the way, so that by the time I noticed we weren't at the Park anymore, I was home and in bed.

With all the Hall's animatronics mothballed for the duration, Lil had more time on her hands than she knew what to do with. She hung around the little bungalow, the two of us in the living room, staring blankly at the windows, breathing shallowly in the claustrophobic, superheated Florida air. I had my working notes on queue management for the Mansion, and I pecked at them aimlessly. Sometimes, Lil mirrored my HUD so she could watch me work, and made suggestions based on her long experience.

It was a delicate process, this business of increasing through-put without harming the guest experience. But for every second I could shave off of the queue-to-exit time, I could put another sixty guests through and lop thirty seconds off total wait-time. And the more guests who got to experience the Mansion, the more of a Whuffie-hit Debra's people would suffer if they made a move on it. So I dutifully pecked at my notes, and found three seconds I could shave off the graveyard sequence by swiveling the Doom Buggy carriages stage-left as they descended from the attic window: by expanding their fields-of-vision, I could expose the guests to all the scenes more quickly.

I ran the change in fly-through, then implemented it after closing and invited the other Liberty Square ad-hocs to come and test it out.

It was another muggy winter evening, prematurely dark. The ad-hocs had enough friends and family with them that we were able to simulate an off-peak queue-time, and we all stood and sweated in the pre-show area, waiting for the doors to swing open, listening to the wolf-cries and assorted boo-spookery from the hidden speakers.

The doors swung open, revealing Lil in a rotting maid's uniform, her eyes lined with black, her skin powdered to a deathly pallor. She gave us a cold, considering glare, then intoned, "Master Gracey requests more bodies."

As we crowded into the cool, musty gloom of the parlor, Lil contrived to give my ass an affectionate squeeze. I turned to return the favor, and saw Debra's elfin comrade looming over Lil's shoulder. My smile died on my lips.

The man locked eyes with me for a moment, and I saw something in there — some admixture of cruelty and worry that I didn't know what to make of. He looked away immediately. I'd known that Debra would have spies in the crowd, of course, but with elf-boy watching, I resolved to make this the best show I knew how.

It's subtle, this business of making the show better from within. Lil had already slid aside the paneled wall that led to stretch-room number two, the most-recently serviced one. Once the crowd had moved inside, I tried to lead their eyes by adjusting my body language to poses of subtle attention directed at the new spotlights. When the newly remastered soundtrack came from behind the sconce-bearing gargoyles at the corners of the octagonal room, I leaned my body slightly in the direction of the moving stereo-image. And an instant before the lights snapped out, I ostentatiously cast my eyes up into the scrim ceiling, noting that others had taken my cue, so they were watching when the UV-lit corpse dropped from the pitch-dark ceiling, jerking against the noose at its neck.

The crowd filed into the second queue area, where they boarded the Doom Buggies. There was a low buzz of marveling conversation as we made our way onto the moving sidewalk. I boarded my Doom Buggy and an instant later, someone slid in beside me. It was the elf.

He made a point of not making eye contact with me, but I sensed his sidelong glances as we rode through past the floating chandelier and into the corridor where the portraits' eyes tracked us. Two years before, I'd accelerated this sequence and added some random swivel to the Doom Buggies, shaving 25 seconds off the total, taking the hourly through-put cap from 2365 to 2600. It was the proof-of-concept that led to all the other seconds I'd shaved away since. The violent pitching of the Buggy brought me and the elf into inadvertent contact with one another, and when I brushed his hand as I reached for the safety bar, I felt that it was cold and sweaty.

He was nervous! He was nervous. What did he have to be nervous about? I was the one who'd been murdered — maybe he was nervous because he was supposed to finish the job. I cast my own sidelong looks at him, trying to see suspicious bulges in his tight clothes, but the Doom Buggy's pebbled black plastic interior was too dim. Dan was in the Buggy behind us, with one of the Mansion's regular castmembers. I rang his cochlea and subvocalized: "Get ready to jump out on my signal." Anyone leaving their Buggy would interrupt an infrared beam and stop the ride-system. I would keep a close watch on Debra's crony.

We went past the hallway of mirrors and into the hallway of doors, where monstrous hands peeked out around the sills, straining against the hinges, recorded groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it — if I wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place to do it? The attic staircase — the next sequence — seemed like a good bet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloom of the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward the graveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I were staring straight at him? I swiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.

He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staring at him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down the staircase, facing up, listening to the clamor of voices from the cemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of the quaking groundskeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled. I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride-system shuddered to a stop.

"Jules?" came Dan's voice in my cochlea. "You all right?"

He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of the Buggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture of surprise and pity.

"It's all right, it's all right. False alarm." I paged Lil and subvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was all right.

I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety-bar, my eyes fixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'd been running. The demo was a debacle — instead of shaving off three seconds, I'd added thirty.

I debarked from the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaning heavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My head swam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.

I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask me what had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facing the elf.

He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone running a language module. "Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung."

I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in the close heat of the Florida night. "Julius," I said, startled at how much like a bark it sounded. Careful, I thought, no need to escalate the hostilities. "It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all have done with the Pirates."

He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile. "Really? I think it's pretty good — the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, really clarify the vision. Beijing — well, it was exciting, but it was rushed, you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there was another pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra used to send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep our Whuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have the opportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show."

I knew about this, of course — Beijing had been a real struggle for the ad-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over. Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to a series of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It was faster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation for pursuing expedience.

"I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure," I said, and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him look embarrassed, then horrified.

"We would never touch the Mansion," he said. "It's perfect!"

Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte.

Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support. They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted through me. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand in mine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively. She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coveralls whose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.

"Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me war stories from the Pirates project in Beijing."

Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. "That was some hard work," Dan said.

It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally an instantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented. I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garnered from people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high — higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respect from the elf — Tim, I had to remember to call him Tim — would carry a lot of weight in every camp that mattered.

"So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?" I asked Tim.

Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth, pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. "We're doing good stuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in the old days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing with broadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives: newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers. It'll be like having each President inside you, core-dumped in a few seconds. Debra said we're going to flash-bake the Presidents on your mind!" His eyes glittered in the twilight.

"Wow," I said. "That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physical plant?" The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed from a hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would be like redesigning the stars-and-bars.

"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I could have one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want."

"That would be fine," Lil said, taking my elbow. "I think we should be heading home, now, though." She began to tug me away. Dan took my other elbow.

"That's too bad," Tim said. "My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on the new Hall. I'm sure they'd love to have you drop by."

The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sit by their fire, learn their secrets. "That would be great!" I said, too loudly.

[ Part 1 ] [ Part 2 ]

Cory Doctorow has been writing and selling science fiction for a dozen years or so, and after a blizzard of stories appeared, in 1998, 1999, and 2000, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, SF Age, Interzone, Amazing, On Spec, and other magazines, a grateful public awarded him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is the author, with Karl Schroeder, of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, and his articles have appeared in Wired, Speculations, and other magazines. Cory blogs for boingboing, evangelizes for OpenCola, and generally keeps busy. You can find out more on his website, Craphound.com, if he ever gets around to updating it.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom will be published by Tor Books in Fall, 2002.

Joey DeVilla has created an 0wnz0red Glossary to go with Cory's latest story.

Here is the entire text of the glossary, in case the link goes bad:

http://kode-fu.com/shame/2002_08_25_archive.shtml#85394171

An annotation for Cory Doctorow's "0wnz0red" (page 1)
You've read Cory Doctorow's wonderful little short story, "0wnz0red", but got lost in the jargon and hacker cultural folderol. What's a layperson to do? Well, for starters, you can read my annotation...

If you haven't seen it yet, go to Salon and read Cory Doctorow's 0wnz0red.

0wnz0red, like Cory, is steeped in the culture and lingo of the high-tech world, and just in case you got lost, you can consult my handy-dandy annotation. This is the first installment, which covers page one. It's going to take me a while to annotate it completely, as the story's a dense dwarf star of Silicon valley folderol. The terms are listed in order of their appearance, unless a supplementary definition is required.

(Special note to my programmer friends, especially Dan: this is written for non-geeks, and I may be skimming over some details. I'm going for layperson undertsanding rather than strict technical correctness here. If you feel you must, feel free to correct me in the comments.)

1337: “leet”, a shortening of the word elite, which means “in possession of computer knowledge.

1337speak (also 13375p34k): “leetspeak”. Hacker slang. While it’s often used for speaking, 1337speak really comes into its own when used in the written medium of the Internet, where character substitution is used. For example, the character “3” looks like a backwards “E” (a la Eminem), so it’s used as a substitute for that letter. In 1337speak, the word “beer” becomes b33r.

haxor (also H4X0R): hacker.

X0R is often used as the suffix “-er”; for instance “fucker” becomes “fuX0r” in 1337speak. Often a 1337speak noun ending in X0R becomes a present tense verb when followed by “s” or “z” or a past tense verb when followed by “ed”. For instance, “this beer sucks” becomes “this beer sux0rz” (or, if you really want to go whole-hog, “+|-|1z b33R sUx0rz”.

0wnz0red: owned, which means “screwed over”. If someone has cracked your computer’s security and taken it over or beaten you in a game of Quake, that person has 0wned (or 0wnz0red) you.

It also is used to describe a computer that cracked (taken over by someone who's not supposed to), as in "Back in 2000, Mafiaboy 0wned a mess of vulnerable machines and used them attack eBay and other major Web sites."

Note that this is different from the term 0wns (owns), which means “is very good” or “rules”. An example: “I love my new computer! It 0wns!”

pr0n: porn. “pron” is a common typo that eventually got accepted as a synonym for porn; it then was made more 1337 by turning the “o” into a zero.

censoring proxy: a proxy is a computer that acts as a go-between between your computer and the rest of the Internet. Many offices, in an attempt to keep workers from slacking off and viewing “inappropriate” web sites, install web proxies that block access to these sites.

Let’s say you worked in an office with one of these proxies and you were surfing the Web. You’d enter an URL into your browser, and the request for that page would go to the proxy. The proxy would then check the URL against its list of inappropriate sites. If the URL you entered was not on the list, the proxy would allow your request for the Web page out onto the Internet, and you’d be able to view your page. If the URL you entered was on the list – say a job search site or ratemyrack.com – the proxy would not forward your request to the Internet and would simply give you a Web page saying that you weren’t allowed to look at such a page on company machines and company time.

CVS: Concurrent Versions System. This is software that keeps track of revisions made to documents by one or more people. One of the most important features of CVS is that it allows you to backtrack to any prior version of a document, which is incredibly useful if you’ve “painted yourself into a corner” with what you’ve written and would like to start from where you were a couple of days ago. Another feature of CVS is that it allows more than one person to work on the same document at the same time; it attempts to merge the changes that several people make and usually alerts you when your changes would stomp on someone else’s.

You might be wondering what this has to do with programming. Programmers use programming languages to write source code, which are just documents that consist of instructions for the computer to follow. Source code is saved in CVS.

CVS is treated like a library; many people even use library terms when using it. When you want to edit some source code, you check it out of CVS, and when you’re done with it, you check it in.

A piece of software called a compiler turns source code (which is understandable by humans, or at least humans who program computers) into executables (which is understood by computers). This process is called compiling. Compilers (and a good number of computer programmers, for that matter) are fussy, pedantic sons of bitches. Any slight error in the source code and they will simply refuse to compile it into an executable.

It is considered to be the mark of a bad programmer and a mortal sin to check code into CVS that doesn’t compile.

Orange County: A suburb of Los Angeles. Home to a number of second- and third-generation punk (and punk-ish) and third-generation ska (and ska-ish) bands including Save Ferris, No Doubt, The Offspring, Reel Big Fish and Goldfinger, to name just a few of the better-known names.

Moore’s Law: The looser, layperson-friendly version of Moore’s Law is that computing power doubles every 18 months. The practical upshot of this is that in 18 months, you can buy a computer twice as fast with twice as much memory as you bought today.

The more strict definition of Moore’s Law is here.

Named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who made this observation in 1965.

Hongcouver: One of the clever names that Canadians use for Vancouver, a city on the west coast of Canada. Refers to the large number of immigrants from Hong Kong who came to Vancouver before the British lease on Hong Kong expired in 1997.

azz: ass. One of Cory’s favourite expressions of approval is “this kicks all kinds of ass”.

Fourbucks: Starbucks. A reference to how much it costs to get a coffee there.

Swedish Disposable Moderne Desque: A reference to Douglas Coupland’s “Swedish semi-disposable furniture”, which in turn is a snide reference to IKEA, official furniture supplier to Generation X. Coupland himself is a furniture designer, and oddly enough, his stuff would fit in perfectly in an IKEA showroom.

strike price: In the case of an employee who gets stock options in a company for which s/he works, the strike price is the specified share price at which s/he can sell his/her options as soon as s/he’s vested (that is, s/he’s owned the shares long enough and is now allowed to sell them – assuming they’re worth anything, that is).

Canadian pesos: Canadian dollars, with a mocking reference to how weak it is next to the “real” dollar, the U.S. dollar. I used this term around Cory a lot; he may have gotten it from me.

Ah, screw it. He got it from me.

G0nzored: gone.

Fi0red: fired.

Sh17canned: 1337speak for “shitcanned”.

Vangroover: Another clever name that Canadians use for Vancouver. Refers to the fact that like its counterparts in the U.S., Vancouver’s west coast-ness tends to attract a lot of hippies and its year-round mild climate is excellent for growing weed. “Vangroovy” is another oft-used variation on this theme.

Honorable Computing Initiative: A play on Microsoft's "Trusted Computing Initiative". Read more about it here.

API: Application Programming Interface. Code that’s already been written that a programmer can use to work with other people’s code, whether it be a software component like QuickTime, or a whole operating system. An example: when writing a Windows program, the programmer doesn’t actually have to write all the code to create a new window; s/he simply calls a pre-built piece of code in the Windows API that creates new windows.

secondment: One of Cory’s favourite terms. It’s just a ten-dollar word for “temporary reassignment”.

posted by Joey deVilla at 12:46 PM Eastern Standard Time

Salon has published a brand-spanking new novella by Cory Doctorow that gives a new meaning to the term "Human Computer Interface":

0wnz0red.

The API was great, there were function calls for just about everything. He delved into the cognitive stuff right off, since it was the area that was rawest, that Liam had devoted the least effort to. At-will serotonin production. Mnemonic perfection. Endorphin production, adrenalin. Zen master on a disk. Who needs meditation and biofeedback when you can do it all in code?

Out of habit, he was documenting as he went along, writing proper tutorials for the API, putting together a table of the different kinds of interaction he got with different mods. Good, clear docs, ready for printing, able to be slotted in as online help in the developer toolkit. Inspired by Joey, he began work on a routine that would replace all the maintenance chores that the platform did in sleep-mode, along with a subroutine that suppressed melatonin and all the other circadian chemicals that induced sleep.

Like this one:

is what the Internet is all about.

A friend of mine was recently hassled off of EBay for selling his Star Wars Holiday Special VCDs and video tapes. I think I'll buy a bunch for this year's no-brainer holiday gift. (You know -- those last-minute gifts that anyone will love for the people you always forget.)

The Luke Skywalker/Miss Piggy photo above is actually from a Star Wars Muppet Special that comes free with all PayPal orders for the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Lawrence Lessig will be speaking (along with the FSF's Bradley M. Kuhn) at Affero's FSF Benefit Party (Full Tilt for Software Freedom) going on TONIGHT at 525 Howard Street in San Francisco from 6pm to midnite.

Get there around 8pm if you want to see the speakers.

See you there!

The latest wave of spam bots have their own love-starved human
knowledge workers:

The bot who loved me.

here's the article in case the link goes bad:

page 1

The bot who loved me
Are those secret-admirer e-mails real -- or just the latest excrescence of an Internet marketing machine grown unfathomably sleazy?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Katharine Mieszkowski

printe-mail

Aug. 7, 2002 | He has blond hair, blue eyes and a sarcastic sense of humor. He's an artist, writer or musician, between the ages of 28 and 32. His idea of fun on a first date is a walk in the park, but he hankers to go on an African safari.

And this man -- whoever he is -- likes me. The Internet told me so.

Just a few walks in the park from now, I could be on the savanna in Zaire with Mr. X, trading acerbic remarks about the redoubtable mating habits of wildebeests.

There's just one hitch: I'm not convinced that this secret admirer actually exists. He may just be the bot who loved me.

____

Sign O' the Times: Pop's last great double album in 'Masterpiece'

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

A flirty e-mail from matchmaker@someonelikesyou.com tipped me off to this mystery man's tender crush. "You have a secret admirer!" gushed the message. Like half a dozen similar Web sites -- eCrush, Crushlink and SecretAdmirer.com among them -- SomeoneLikesYou plays Internet go-between. The gimmick: An anonymous e-mail crush notification service can pave the way for romance without the risk of rejection.

But while most of these "crush" sites operate above-board, proudly listing the founders' names and e-mail addresses, the cupids behind SomeoneLikesYou and its corporate sister site, Crushlink, play hard to get. The sites conceal the identities not only of the source of your crush note, but also of the people who run the services. Even some of the publicly available domain-name registration information about the sites is fake.

This secrecy, along with the sheer volume of admiring messages spewing from crushmaster@crushlink.com and matchmaker@someonelikeyou.com, has raised speculation that there's less romance than savvy marketing going on here. Competitors accuse Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou of spamming any old e-mail address they can scrape off the Net with love notes, building membership by preying on sad-sack lonely-hearts -- then peddling affiliate programs to those members to bring in some cash.

"My dog has gotten 'someone has a crush on you' e-mail messages -- she's a cute dog, but no one has a crush on her," says Karen Demars, co-founder of eCrush. "My belief is that they are sending 'someone has a crush on you' messages to people who have not been legitimately crushed."

One consumer advocacy group in California is even threatening a lawsuit against Crushlink for misleading consumers about their love lives. And vigilant webmasters and anti-spam crusaders, suspicious that the sites are simply cynical e-mail harvesters, charge "spam!"

Forget "Who's my crush?" The more interesting question is: who's the crushmaster?

Is Mr. Crush really Mr. Spammer in a cupid's costume, breeding false hopes among the lovelorn with fake messages about nascent crushes that don't really exist? Or could the crushmaster be a scorned lover turning his vindictive rage on the Net's lonely millions in a frenzy of mixed messages? Or, maybe, just maybe, there's actually this much latent love out there on the Web, just waiting for the right database to come along and play yenta.

All the accusations of nefarious behavior and the secrecy surrounding these sites has made unmasking the identities of the frenzied cupids behind them a true Internet whodunit. After all, for geeks, speculating about the identity of a mysterious webmaster is as captivating as thinking about who might have a crush on you.

By following the geeks' trail in the ether, I found out who the crushmaster is -- and just like Mr. Right, he's the kind of guy you'd least expect.

page 2

SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink represent a more extreme version of what all crush sites do. They inspire you to reveal your own crushes' e-mail addresses by dangling the lure that they know who wants you.

To find out what guy would be such a fourth-grader as to reveal his interest in me in this cheesy way, I first registered at SomeoneLikesYou, giving away a bevy of valuable demographic facts about myself in the process, like my date of birth and my ZIP code. Then I filled out a profile from a fixed menu of canned choices, indicating my hair color, eye color and ideal first date.

Finally, I was invited to offer all my own crushes' e-mail addresses up for sacrifice.

If I guess who my secret admirer is and turn over his e-mail address to the site, our identities will be revealed to each other, and we could be pricing safaris before the week is out!

____

Sign O' the Times: Pop's last great double album in 'Masterpiece'

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

But if there's no love connection, every address I've given to the site will get a message announcing "You have a secret admirer!" and the whirlwind of anonymous, crazy-making romantic madness just spreads.

What makes SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink different from the rest of the sites in the genre is this: they bait hopeful visitors to hand over as many e-mail addresses as possible by trading clues for e-mail addresses.

The more e-mails that you reveal to SomeoneLikesYou, the more hints you get about your admirer's identity, like his hair color and his approximate age. Five e-mail addresses generates one clue. I gave away more than two-dozen e-mail addresses before the system ran out of hints about my admirer. Not even the most love-sick puppy has that many real crushes.

So, what's stronger -- the hunger for any clue that might unmask your own admirer, or the desire to protect the in-boxes of your friends, loved ones and colleagues from random romance spam, which could potentially embarrass you in the process? "She has a crush on me! Yikes!" And is it really spam if friends or colleagues have sold out your address in their own search for romance?

I elected to take a middle road, which wouldn't embarrass me or abuse my friends' trust, but might turn up enough hints to reveal my crush. I gamed the system by entering random, made-up e-mail addresses, potentially muddling the in-boxes (and sanity) of total strangers in pursuit of my own love interest.

Crushes -- they make people do crazy things.

But the system anticipates this simple ploy. If a made-up e-mail address I turned over bounced, SomeoneLikesYou just demanded another one.

This clues system helps explain why the SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink romance virus has spread so far. A single wistful crushee hankering to know who likes her can generate dozens of "crush" messages to people she doesn't even know, which will likely spur some percentage of those suckers to spread the love as well.

That's got the California Consumer Action Network, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, considering filing a lawsuit against these online cupids, according to the group's attorney, Joe Hughes. He charges that the site is violating the state's laws against unfair and deceptive advertising.

"We're concerned about the fact that it's a spam generator. They're implying to the user that they're going to find out if the e-mail address they enter is someone who has a crush on them, although it's probably more likely that someone is doing just what they're doing, which is guessing who had a crush on them." Could a class action lawsuit of lovelorn crushees hurt by messages about fake admirers be far behind?

The more I learned about the "someone" who likes me, the less real he seemed.

The e-mail that I got from this "secret admirer" came to an official corporate address that no friend would use. Besides, the "hints" I received about my admirer bore an uncanny resemblance to what I told the system about myself when I registered.

Maybe my account had just become a bit of currency to buy someone else a "hint." But the competitors to SomeoneLikesYou and Crushlink in the online crush space say that it's more than just this hints system that's generating all those befuddling crush messages.

Clark Benson, the co-founder of eCrush, says: "Crushlink must have bought tons of spam lists. The site went from nothing to a million visitors in no time. In about two weeks, everybody's accounts here were getting Crushlink e-mails." Among the addresses at eCrush that have gotten "crush" messages from Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou: webmaster@ecrush.com, bizdev@ecrush.com, jobs@ecrush.com and Maggie@ecrush.com, a joke account for his co-founder's dog, which is published on the eCrush site.

Demars, the eCrush co-founder who owns Maggie, charges: "They're obtaining e-mail addresses in a way that is either technically generated or generated out of a hostage marketing situation (want a hint? Just give us five e-mail addresses!) that are just not truly the product of someone having a crush on you."

Miles Kronby, the founder of SecretAdmirer -- the grandfather of the concept, launched in 1997 -- won't name names, but says that he's watched the e-mail crush concept take a hurtful, debauched turn: "The problem is, some unscrupulous people running these things decided to abuse this system as a kind of spam generator," he sighs.

Perhaps the most extreme is the Crush007 site. (Note: Clicking on the link will open a lot of advertising windows.) Based in Malaysia, it sends a fake crush e-mail to an unsuspecting stooge. The site then goads the sucker to reveal all kinds of personal facts, including "how many times does she/he masturbate a week?" and "names of his/her biggest crush." The homepage makes no secret about its motives: "We have developed this website just to help you find out who your friend's crushes are, and also not to mention, their biggest, most well kept secrets." Fear for the dorkiest kid in the class, thrilled that someone actually has a crush on him, who is about to be the victim of an Internet humiliation machine.

But carping competitors aren't the only ones who think that all these anonymous romance e-mails have taken a sick and twisted turn. Several geeks, webmasters and spam fighters have put these love messages to the spam test and gone on a Web vigilante mission to find out who's behind them. If they couldn't find out who had crushes on them, at least they could figure out who was generating all those love notes!

. Next page | Unmasking the crushmaster

page 3

"Warning: crushlink is a spam scam," warns "Steve," a geek who refuses to reveal his real identity for fear of being sued, on a Web page set up to discuss his experience with the site. After he received a "crush" message, he became convinced that Crushlink was a system for harvesting e-mail addresses, so he registered for the site with an account at his own domain that he'd never used for anything else. Several months later, this account got a message from something called "Jennyslist."

Justin Beech, the webmaster behind Broadbandreports.com, went on his own sleuthing mission to unmask Mr. Crush after webmasters on his site groused that Crushlink and SomeoneLikesYou were fomenting spam, not romance. Although the WHOIS records for both sites are at least partially fake -- for instance, the phone number for Crushlink is listed as 800-000-0000 -- their Web server IP addresses don't lie. Beech linked both sites to Jumpstart Technologies LLC, a "direct-marketing" company. His research led him to finger Johann Schleier-Smith, a Harvard graduate and currently a physics grad student at Stanford, as Mr. Crush.

But it was Rob Whelan, a 40-year-old CIO for a retailing company in Tennessee, who finally turned up the guy who will admit to being the president and co-owner of Crushlink, Mr. Crush himself.

When Whelan got his "crush" message from Crushlink, he was immediately suspicious: "I'm not 12, so it seemed odd that I would get a message like this," he says. He contacted anti-spam organizations, the Federal Trade Commission and CyberAngels, a group that protects children online. After a few weeks of mucking around, threats to sue prompted a nervous phone call from one G reg Tseng, another Stanford physics grad student, who also went to Harvard as an undergrad.

____

'Some Like It Hot', Billy Wilder's manic, magical farce in 'Masterpiece' presented by Lexus

Start your Summer Fling @ Matchmaker

____

As a sophomore in college, Tseng started a dot-com called flyingchickens.com, which sought to take on Harvard's Coop by selling textbooks. (Johann Schleier-Smith, also then a student at Harvard. co-founded the site.) Flyingchickens soon merged with something called Limespot.com, a college-event listing site.

In short, these two embodied the late-'90s, dot-com poster-boy ideal -- techie, entrepreneurial undergrads so brimming with Big Ideas that they couldn't wait for graduation to start launching companies.

These weren't the stereotypical lowlife spammers that Whelan expected to find on the other end of his Crushmail. "Greg Tseng is a very bright young man, and unfortunately he's chosen this vocation for himself," sighs Whelan. "He does have a good entrepreneurial spirit, but I think that he's just misguided."

Whelan worries about the hurt feelings of kids who won't think twice about dumping their friends' e-mail addresses into a system that will send anonymous messages misleading them that romance is just at the other end of an "@" sign. "These guys think they're going to make a lot of money and not hurt anybody, but they're really just going to make a lot of money," says Whelan. "And they're not going to ever know or see or hear from the people who are hurt by this."

But worse than teenage false hopes, Whelan is concerned that parents have no way to opt their kids out. And he charges that the system lures kids to lie about their ages to Crushlink's and SomeoneLikesYou's marketing partners, who don't want 12-year-olds as customers. That's because one way to get "hints" to your admirer's identity on Crushlink is to register for an affiliated site's marketing program, like Netflix, which pays Crushlink a bounty for every person who signs up. SomeoneLikesYou takes this scheme even further. Even if you guess your crush correctly, you either have to sign up for an affiliate's program or pay $14.90 to find out who your admirer actually is.

After much stalking, both online and off, I finally tracked Tseng down. Although he demurely refused to speak to me on the phone or answer any specific questions about the charges leveled against his online love-note machines, he did send a few comments in one e-mail.

He maintained that the secrecy surrounding who's involved in the company is simply because they're in "stealth mode." But he outright denied spamming anyone with missives that might breed romantic delusions: "We do not sell or rent our user list to third parties (a.k.a. 'spam')," he wrote. "We do not purchase lists or harvest e-mail addresses. All of our outbound e-mails are either user-generated notices or communications with our registered users. We send precisely zero e-mail advertisements."

At least in one limited instance, this statement appears false. Remember Jennyslist, which messaged "Steve," after he registered for Crushlink with an address that he'd used for nothing else? A business acquaintance of Tseng's reveals that Jennyslist.com is a project of Jumpstart Technologies. Isn't this advertising? Tseng declined to comment.

Oh, maybe we're all just such doubting Thomases about the idea that anyone might actually like us that we can't face the possibility of new romance, even when it shows up right in our in boxes. Tseng seems to think so: "Some people may be confused about the origin of the 'Someone has a crush on you' notices but actually every single person that receives such a notice was listed as a crush by a registered user (and they should come to CrushLink to find out who!)."

Really? Then, prove to me that this person who claimed to admire me really exists, I demanded. But Tseng stayed mum. He had the perfect excuse, not that he bothered to offer it: Selling out the guy who likes me (if he exists) would violate the site's whole premise -- crush notification without the risk of rejection.

So maybe the evil genius of SomeoneLikesYou isn't that it's a love machine at all, but that it's an Internet Narcissus' pool. In this scenario, the love automaton feeds you hints about your "secret admirer," based on the profile you entered about yourself. You have so much in common!

More likely, the messages I got from SomeoneLikesYou came from someone who offered up my e-mail address when he or she tried to game the system to find out who likes them -- just as I did.

Or maybe there really is some blond-haired, blue-eyed, sarcastic guy biding his time surfing African safari Web sites, while he nurtures his fervent hope that the Internet will be our go-between.

Only the matchmaker knows for sure, and that pathological flirt's not telling.

The Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley is presenting a showing of films from the Prelinger Archive.

Check out the line up for this week and next week too.

Survival of the Fittest

Though these films were meant to consider the moment, they are often concerned with issues that irascibly linger. Here contradictions between Man, nature, and social byproducts duke it out.

Ant City (Almanac Films, 1949). Recut from a captured German science film, Ant City abuts images of the social life of ants with surreally dissociated narration. The effort to describe ant life in anthropomorphic terms leaves us feeling that such attempts to "humanize" other species are bound to fail. (9:56 mins, B&W)

A Nation at Your Fingertips (Audio Productions for the Bell System, 1951). For many, freedom to communicate instantly over a wide area didn't begin with e-mail, but with the telephone. This film dramatizes the exciting impact direct long-distance dialing had on isolated families. (10:19 mins, B&W)

Freedom Highway (Jerry Fairbanks Productions for Greyhound Lines, 1956). A bus transports us on a mysterious journey through the landscape of American mythology, overlaid with roads, battles, and Manifest Destiny. Its passengers, who include Tommy Kirk, Angie Dickinson, and Tex Ritter, learn that the space we inhabit can't be separated from the events that occurred there. (34:45 mins, Color)

Perversion for Profit (Citizens for Decent Literature, Inc., 1964-65). Banker Charles Keating and several others founded CDL in the early 1960s, producing "film essays" as part of their effort to influence anti-pornography legislation. Perversion for Profit shows examples of everyday erotica, reaching new heights of prurience in its efforts to censor offending body parts. (29:23 mins, Color)

# (Total running time: 85 mins, All films U.S., 16mm, From the Prelinger Archives)

PFA FILMSERIES: Films that Haunt the Future: Ephemera from the Prelinger Archives

PFA PLAYDATE: Thursday August 8, 2002

******

Artful Adaptations

Ephemeral films document all aspects of human life, from birth unto death. What follows are four films about people at odds with their environments, and how they try to help themselves.

Safety: Harm Hides at Home (Rodger Landoue, 1977). As usual in safety films, the everyday world is a minefield of potential risks, menaces, and jeopardy, but "Guardiana, the Safety Woman" and her supernatural powers are here to protect children from harm. (16 mins, Color)

Age 13 (Arthur Swerdloff for Sid Davis Productions, 1955). Sid Davis's most compassionate film and certainly his most unusual, Age 13 enlists Buñuelian surrealism and a neorealist sensibility to follow the emergence of an "at-risk" young teen from immobilizing anger to self-expression. In its inability to come to terms with customary film language, this might well be called an outsider film. (26:40 mins, B&W)

Social Class in America (Knickerbocker Productions, 1957). This sociology film obeys the conventions of educational films, but packs quite a wallop. Following three boys who grow up in a small company town, it shows the limits that social class imposes on mobility. An unusually downbeat (and realistic) document of disappointment in the fifties. (14:49 mins, B&W)

Boredom at Work: The Search for Zest (University of Oklahoma, 1963). From a remarkable series on the emotions of everyday life, The Search for Zest shows the efforts of a bored, desexualized, and neurotic engineer to find happiness through therapy. Borrowing from film noir and late 1950s TV drama, it might be read as a case study of a rural man trapped by his discontent with urban life. (25 mins, B&W)

# (Total running time: 83 mins, All films U.S., 16mm, From the Prelinger Archives)

PFA FILMSERIES: Films that Haunt the Future: Ephemera from the Prelinger Archives

PFA PLAYDATE: Thursday August 15, 2002

R.U. SIRIUS UNPLUGGED
--One of the earliest adopters of cyberculture, the co-founder of Mondo 2000 has drifted away from tech-chic. Klint Finley asks him about then and now.

S: To change the subject somewhat, where do we stand on the war on drugs right now? Is it more or less important than it was, say, two years ago?

RU: It’s all sort of integrated into the war on terror, and there’s a lot of complex connections there. It’s amazing that it’s all happening in Afghanistan, which is sort of a nexus for the drug underground and also turns out to be the nexus for Al Quaeda and the place where America wants to build an oil pipeline and the place where we have our troops and bombs. And all those things converge. Narcopolitics, as much as class, is at the center of politics in our time. I don’t think any of that has changed. You also see this integration in Columbia where they’re fighting over drugs and they’re also fighting against leftists and they’re fighting for their oil interests -- it’s still rather the same story. On the positive side of course, Europeans almost uniformly are liberalizing drug laws. I don’t know how things are in Canada... I think Vancouver is pretty liberal.

S: Do you think there’s a potential use for psychedelics in psychotherapy?

RU: Yeah, I’ve always thought it was a useful tool. The great thing about having a guide, rather than doing it on your own or in a party, is that it grants permission to take a pretty walloping, great massive dose and go through changes without having to worry about what kind of incursions might occur during the trip. I think if it could be approved for psychotherapy, that would be a tremendous step in the right direction. There’s basically two schools of thought on ending the drug war. One is the libertarian point of view, which is that it should be legalized because it’s a cognitive liberty, a matter of personal choice. And then there’s the attempt to medicalize the situation... harm reduction and so forth. And while I agree with the libertarian view on that, I think medicalization is more likely to be allowed.

So I know what you're thinking: "Well Lisa, are you going to spend all of your blogging time on shameless self promotion, complaining about the Shrub and whining about the rapid demise of our constitutional freedoms?" (Blah, blah, blah blah-blah blah.)

Well I suppose I could lighten up long enough to watch a nice Shockwave Animation from my friend John Gentry that really helps put it all into perspective:
Rockin' Chair Planet.

I met a bunch of cool comics, poets and writers last weekend at Charles Ander's Writers With Drinks spoken word variety show at San Francisco's Cafe Du Nord.

Heather Gold gave an awesome and spontaneous stand-up performance with lots of uncomfortable political material I don't even feel comfortable repeating in print :-)

Analee Newitz had some insightful thoughts on the rather fundamental differences between stem cell cloning and human cloning.

I also bought books by performers Daphne Gottlieb (Why Things Burn) and Lynn Breedlove (Godspeed).

More on them later...

Anyway, if you're in San Francisco, my advice to you is to check out the next Writers With Drinks on July 13th at the Cafe Du Nord...

During our celebratory Creative Commons dinner a few weeks back, Cory and Aaron were arguing about the randomness of numbers that come after the first billion numbers after the decimal in pi (3.14nextbillionnumbershere...then what dammit?) (Specifically, they were arguing about whether the distribution of digits in a non-repeating number is also Gaussian -- the answer is no, because of distributions such as 1001110011001010 -- Aaron won :-)

At one point, Matthew Haughey commented: "Oh my god, they're arguing over pi over dessert."

Marc Perkel was interviewed by Jennifer Liberto and asked if he knew about Media Whores Online, to which he explained he didn't. She then proceeded to print an article saying the project got started with some funding from him -- and now Salon won't amend it or pull the piece.

Here is the exact language in question:

As best can be determined, Media Whores Online originated in Tulsa, Okla., in 1996 when a self-proclaimed "ADD Catholic with an IQ of 64" began an irreverent left-leaning e-mail listserv called RL-LNW, short for "Rush Limba -- Lying Nazi Whore." Shy yet passionate, its low-profile editor, Terry Coppage, took on right-wing agendas with cutting and often crude humor. He received some financial help from Marc Perkel, an eccentric computer programmer who ran against incumbent John Ashcroft in the 2000 Missouri Republican Senate primary, garnering 10 percent of the vote with almost no campaigning. Soon Coppage began publishing his commentaries on a Web site called Bartcop, and adopted the moniker "Bart."

Since the HTML version of the article in question cannot be accessed by the public at large, I've also created a plain text version for everyone's convenience.

Here's the actual Letter To Salon from Marc Perkel, but he also explained some of the details to me in an email:

I talked to her as she researched the article. She came across as if she were doing a pro-media whores article and asked questions relating to how sites like mediawhoresonline.com were a reaction to the failures of traditional news media.

In our discussion she asked who was behind the site and I made it clear that I had no idea - which is true. We talked about Bartcop.com - a site that I am behind and founded - with a guy in Tulsa OK in 1996 and I talked about why I was doing that.

I do think Bartcop did coin the term "Media Whore" so there was enough of a connection for this writer to deliberately confuse the facts. I think that mediawhoresonline was a bartcop inspired publication as are many sites on the web.

As best I can tell - this all started with people on CNN crossfire started arguing about who is behind MWO and made it out to be some sort of mystery or secret. This reporter who wrote the Salon piece did it from the perspective of smearing the left and to out the secret author of MWO. Having failed to get the facts as to who MWO is - she decided to out me and Terry as MWO.

Bartcop has dedicated an issue to her with links to many other sites that reacted to Salon's story and Salon's refusal to pull the story after Salon realized it was a false piece.

Check out:
http://www.craigslist.org/craig.vs.hollywood.html.

Craig Newmark, a ReplayTV user (aided by the EFF) is suing Turner Broadcasting (among others) and seeking a declarative judgement asserting his right to space- and time-shift TV programming -- and to skip commercials while doing it -- using a PVR.

Right on dude! You big sweetie! Stand up for our right to watch shows later and go to the bathroom during commercials! (Has it really come to this?)

Craig vs Hollywood
Thursday, June 6, 2002

Hey, folks, you know that craigslist has a strong commitment to political issues that affect the online community, like privacy and free speech. We figure we should focus on what we know something about, and otherwise, provide you a platform for whatever you want to discuss.

The major Hollywood companies could be embracing new technologies, serving their customers better and making more money, for themselves, and for artists. A lot of people in Hollywood know this.

However, a lot of folks in entertainment seem to be panicking, taking bad advice and trying to get anti-consumer laws passed, to restrict personal freedoms, like what you do when you buy something like a CD or DVD, or record a TV program.

To help everyone out, Craig is suing Hollywood, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a major pioneer in the fight for online rights.

To oversimplify, the Hollywood lawyers are telling us that when we view TV, skipping commercials is a copyright violation... and it gets worse from there.

Craig and others are telling them that this ain't okay.

Craig is not representing craigslist in this regard, but we figure you should know about this.

(For that matter, he can even help people figure out good ways to prevent actual piracy, which could help out artists and the named companies.)

The idea is that Hollywood and also the tech industry are really well-represented, but no one stands up for ordinary citizens and consumers. (No one really stands up for the artists, and the industry is encouraging piracy by its current actions, but that's another fight.)

Hey, whenever you can, please help us out: support our legal challenge in whatever way you can, stay informed, and tell people in your company and even Congress that you're concerned about this. I'd appreciate it if you were to join EFF or any group concerned with your online rights.

More info is available on the EFF site here.

thanks!

Craig

Evan Foster of The Boss Martians plays guitar and bass on a bunch of my Vagrant Records sessions (including Shake All Over).

Evan and the rest of the Boss Martians are currently on a U.S. Tour. Check them out if you're over on the East Cost this month and early June:

* MAY 23 (THUR) - Toledo, OH @ The Bottle Rocket w / Chopzilla
* MAY 24 (FRI) - Philadelphia, PA @ w/ TOILET BOYS @ The North Star Bar
* MAY 25 (SAT) - Providence, RI @ Jakes Bar & Grille
* MAY 27 (MON) - NY, NY @ Mercury Lounge w / The Irreversible Slacks / Candid Daydream
* MAY 28 (TUE) - Cambridge, MA @ Middle East (Upstairs) w/ Bottom / Men of Porn / Binge
* MAY 29 (WED) - Washington DC @ The Black Cat w / Ruff Bucket (ex-members of Black Market Baby)
* MAY 30 (THUR) - Charlotte, NC @ Fat City Deli w / The Cherry Valence
* MAY 31 (FRI) - Atlanta, GA @ Echo Lounge w / Quintron & The Subsonics
* JUNE 1 (SAT) - New Orleans, LA @ El Matador
* JUNE 3 (MON) - Houston, TX @ Rudyards British Pub
* JUNE 4 (TUE) - San Antonio, TX @ Tacoland w / Where the Action Is
* JUNE 5 (WED) - Austin, TX @ EMO'S w / The Sir Finks
* JUNE 6 (THUR) - Dallas, TX @ The Trees w / Bob Schneider
* JUNE 7 (FRI) - Oklahoma City, OK @ The Green Door

See you all there at the Craig's List Afterdark Party going on tonight at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco.

Cory Doctorow has written some wonderful words to end the year with for the O'Reilly Network. See: 2002: The Carpetbaggers Go Home .

In case it's escaped your notice, the economy is also circling the drain. Once-proud giants like Yahoo are shutting down weird little community-driven divisions like webrings.com. The traditional business press is full of gloating editorials from columnists who insist that they were never fooled for a second, they knew from Day One that the Internet was just hype and horseshit, a waffle-iron married to a fax machine, and here we are, the bubble burst, fortunes lost, hardy-har-har. (Even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a day.)

Having spent billions trying to make 95-percent-reliable services function at 97 percent reliability, the Captains of Industry are off for greener pastures (cough biotech cough), leaving behind a horde of underemployed html jocks, perl obsessives, pixel-pushers, and pythoneers. What are these reborn slackers doing with their time in a down economy?

Exactly what they've done all along, only more so. The spare-time economy has yielded a bountiful harvest of weblogs, Photoshop tennis matches, homebrew Web services and dangerously Seattlean levels of garage-band activity.

Webloggers aren't professional journalists; they don't adhere to the code of ethics that CNN et al are nominally bound by, and they often can't spell or string together a coherent sentence, let alone pen an inverted-pyramid story. Nevertheless, bloggers are collectively brilliant at ferreting out every little detail of a story, wearing its edges smooth with discussion, and spitting it out again. Further, bloggers are spread out across the Internet, mirroring, quoting, and linking back to one another, collectively forming a Distributed Provision of Service that is resistant to CNN-killing catastrophes like 9/11. Blogs are about 95 percent of the way to being full-fledged news-sources, and the difference between the bloggers of the world and CNN is a couple of percentiles and several billion dollars.

Even as cable modem companies are knocking hundreds of thousands of subscribers offline, untethered forced-leisure gangs are committing random acts of senseless wirelessness, armed with cheap-like-borscht 802.11b cards and antennae made from washers, hot glue, and Pringles cans.

Even more frightening is the idea that the government could use its new, expanded role for subtler purposes than accusing someone of breaking a law. Consider the case of Bill Maher, who made a controversial comment on his Politically Incorrect show, which now faces cancellation. Ari Fleischer, spokesman for the White House, condemned Maher's statement, then uttered this chilling remark: "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is." Whether or not you agree with what Maher said, his right to free speech is one of the essential principles on which our country was founded. Fleischer's threat that Americans always need to watch what they say and do addresses my fear: that security measures put into place to catch these terrorists could eventually be used to silence dissenting voices within our media and populace. To surrender the right to say what we think is to give up what we're trying to defend in the first place.

Assuming for the moment that the civilized world is not about to come to an end, we must be careful not to grant our government too much power, because it will be nearly impossible to reclaim what we've given away after the current threat is dealt with. If the government installs its Carnivore surveillance machines in our ISPs now, it could be hard to get them removed once everything (hopefully) returns to normal. Given what happened 17 long days ago, it seems a bit strange to write about holding onto our freedom to exchange the odd MP3 over the Internet. There are so many more serious issues at hand. But with any luck, we will again start caring about the things that concerned us before that tragic morning changed everything. When that day comes, I want our civil liberties to be as strong as they are now. The combination of the Internet and computers could be the perfect tool for control and surveillance of our citizens. In our quest for justice and security, let's try to hold on to some measure of our freedoms.