He’s sketching the history and dimensions of his (and Chris Locke’s) identities. These are all so convoluted, they intersect in such unpredictable ways (I typed “unproductable,” which I like more) that managing is out of the question. If you’ve been reading Doc over the past eight months or so, you’ll be acquainted with the narrative that undergirds his point (including intersecting identities, end-runs around big corporations, gonzo marketing and so on).
What DigID needs is something that catches fire. The Big Co.s aren’t going to do it; one of us will have to make DigID desirable, necessary.
He quotes Craig Burton as saying, “The Net is a hollow sphere made entirely of the people and resources it connects. It’s the firs tworld made by people, for people. We’ve only beguin to terraform it.”
Commercial interests want to control infrastructure, whereas the technologists who make infrastructure, who carry the burden of supporting commerce, want to do their work without commerce to “control” them. They’re willing to support commerce, they like that, but they don’t want commerce to govern. Commerce doesn’t understand infrastructure. Rob Glazer points out the now, infrastructure is changing faster than fashion and commerce.
Doc suggests a conflict of metaphor between commerce (which views the Net as a pipeline) and technologists (who view the Net as a space). The software industry is like the construction industry; it belongs to project-oriented builers, designers, architects.
We need to get past the conflicting metaphors. Commerce doesn’t recognize the elements of infrastructure, and the free-software and technologists don’t see the creative power of commerce [on this I’d want to push Doc further.]
Web services are the result oif infrastructural chaos. In the chaos, no pre-existing rule governs behavior. A chaos-adopting something will drive a standard to ubiquity. How do you crate ubiquitous infratstructure and make money at the same time? By causing chaos, then taking advantage of it.
Infrastructure supports commerce; commerce contributes to infrastructure.
But Hollywood’s efforts will fail; we are the Web, and we will not conform to that model. DigID will be built around fully sovereign individual IDs (so that we become customers rather than consumers [I’d rather be “AKMA” than a customer, too]). Doc wants DigID to be part of relationships. Markets are relationships.
When Doc or AKMA can come to businesses as participants in relationships rather than as generic consumers [and Margaret and I are shopping for a used car now, so we are especially attuned to the perils of being just generic consumers], then DigID will catch fire.
David Weinberger comes to the mike and points out how great it could have been if Doc had spoken on the first day and thus conditioned the rest of the conversation. Doc says, “I’m not trying to say, ‘Can’t we all just get along,’ I’m trying to make a world in which dependencies are better understood.”
By the way, Doc is a first-class PowerPoint artist—and I hate PowerPoint. I could watch Doc do his stuff for hours.
I’m disappointed in several ways, too, and I think this doesn’t reflect negatively on the amazing work that the DigIDW people have accomplished in bringing this conference together and making it fly. The heavy emphasis on technological and business solutions, though, has overshadowed on-the-ground users.
But users count. Users are people, they are subjects, they’re the center of all the interests that converge at this conference, and they are not simply nodes where information converges. People will respond to DigID initiatives not on the basis of disinterested reason or of a fascination with groovy things technology can do. People have been trained by years of popular culture to harbor a deep suspicion of DigID—and probably for good reasons. When gargantuan corporate concerns work out DigID solutions without deep engagement with civilians’ attitudes, they only amplify the likelihood that their deep investment in particular devices will encounter resistance whose scale they haven’t begun to estimate.
Users, people, count most fundamentally because the impulses that generate any interest whatever in DigID derive from the needs and concerns of users; without users, the topic is moot. Users (especially naive users) will make or break proposed DigID mechanisms, and a conference on DigID ought to keep the technologists’ feet close to the fire of popular sentiment.
My second disappointment involves the ways that the big corporations present here have addressed the radical changes at work in the spheres of digital reproduction and distribution. The leaden inheritance of copyright law has dominated the presentations and panels, where spokespeople for more flexible, adaptive responses to digital distribution have mostly had to raise their questions from the floor. (The interactive politics of the conference thus reproduce the distributive politics of technology: corporations on the spotlit stage, pirates harrying them from the margins.)
This is not about “piracy”; it’s about dealing with the digital transition on digital technologies’ own terms, rather than trying to constrict digital technologies to the capacities of analog technologies. The entrenched interests and their apologists try to limit the discussion to terms and legal concepts that derive their cogency from industrial conditions that no longer obtain, rather than trying to respond to the transformative effects of digital distribution by transforming their missions and business models.
That strikes me as a short-term, dysfunctional tactic. Digital distribution will transform (not simply “change”) businesses that have depended on analog reproduction and distribution for their revenue. As Doc says this morning,
It's only natural for the industry to protect itself. But there also needs to be some introspection about the changed market conditions that invite the piracy in the first place. The Net and the CD-R are facts of market life now. What the industry is trying to protect is an obsolete and overpriced distribution system.I wish that this conference and the businesses that have gathered here demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with that transformation, rather than gazing fixedly at the hypnotic swinging pendulum of “intellectual property.”
[B]ecause they are the only ones stupid enough (in the world of ‘emotional intelligence’) to believe that trust is a commodity that can be bought and sold; that trustworthiness is a pose to strike in the service of competitive advantage rather than a stance in life. In this construction, trust is a ‘product feature’ that encourages customers to do what you want them to do in spite of their better judgement or economic self-interest. Paradoxically, in urging us to trust them, they reveal an utter absence of understanding of the concept. This, in turn, lets us know they are entirely untrustworthy. Quite perfect in its symmetry, if you think about it.I couldn’t agree more.
These are where-it’s-at questions. Go, David!
I try hard to extend my understanding into the fissures and technicalities of all the questions I engage, but on this topic I’m content to push a partisan case that runs something like this: the notion of copyright depends for its cogency on an obsolescent industrial model. We need the next idea, not complicated ways of perpetuating the old idea—especially when the ways of perpetuating the old idea end up forcing constraints onto the tremendous capacities of emerging technologies.
Nikolaj started the ball rolling by giving Mark Foster a hard time over a Forbes magazine article relative to Neustar CEO Jeffrey Ganek’s plan to mine the database of all North American phone numbers and phone calls.
Brett Glass pushes on the use of whois as a spammer’s source for email addresses. At this, Esther scolds the panel and the audience that “spam is not the problem—privacy is the problem” (Elliott says that Esther likes spam).
Ken Klingenstein comes back and asks the panel about federation (that’s one of the big words at the conference). The panelists seem positive about the prospects of federation.
Good, but not hypnotically fascinating panel. Elliott was especially helpful.
Did you get that, Gary?
and David and Doc were recursively photographing one another and me.
Denise is starting the discussion by summarizing the state of the question.
Now, Bala is explaining his company’s approach at Smarte Solutions. Now Brad is presenting Microsoft’s angle.
Ken suggests that we have DRM, and we’re losing it. We’re conceiving digital rights too narrowly.
Microsoft (both Brad and Craig Mundie) refer to having a 360° perspective on DRM. Denise and David keep pointing out that the technological transition to digital media is being limited by habits and conventions that derive from analog media. David insists that DRM allow leeway for uses that don’t adhere strictly to a producer’s dictates.
Brad wants his auditors not to vilify either Microsoft or the studios & record producers.
Ken speaks up on behalf of authorization & attributes as parts of the solution (these work well in Shibboleth).
He’s talking about keeping kids away from inappropriate material now; it sounds good, but I get suspicious about their moving toward the emotionally-charged, hard-to-argue terrain of child protection. They’re demo-ing an approach to parental controls that steers children to “age-appropriate” materials, that sets up barriers against “age-inappropriate” material, and (get this) emails the parent when Junior wants to look at a page that isn’t specifically permitted.
Imagine, for a second, getting an in-box full of messages saying that Junior wants to go to sites X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Now you go to all these sites, decide whether Junior can cope with them, pass along okays—how long does that take?
How soon before Junior has a strong incentive to learn to outflank the barriers? (And the notion that they won’t be able to depends on parents’ naïve assumption that their children find computers as incomprehensible as the parents do.) This looks like a very superficial scheme to me.
Mundie treats MS’s Palladium project as though it were a necessary response to security and DRM questions; he completely bypasses the question of the hardware’s relation to other OS platforms. Linux? Mac OS?
Michael notes that there’s a deep problem with the outlook that says, “If it’s not illegal, it’s okay.” He laments the lack of a sense of responsibility.
Esther keeps hammering away on the necessity of transparency; she’s right, she’s right. The way to short-circuit fears about privacy involves living in ways that don’t suffer from public exposure. That’s a message that many of my seminary students resist—I expect it’s even more unwelcome in secular circles. Still, it’s not just a matter of morality or constitutional law—it’s a pragmatic necessity.
That Weinberger—you can’t get him off his pet topics.
We had an exciting, wide-ranging conversation about everything from digitial ID to Byte magazine to working in government to preaching. I knew of these gentlemen, and respected their stuff, and was not surprised when they turned out to be terrific conversationalists.
Now, someone tell Gary to get the chalk.
Doc also suggested that Dubya “sounds like Ross Perot played at 33 RPM, with the needle skipping.”
All that is on top of an intriguing, illuminating conference.
Some will recognize my discomfort at listening to Verisign in this connection. De Silva probably did not approve the policies that pull domain names from duly-subscribed customers, and he (I am sure) would explain that this happens only rarely, and that Verisign would remedy the harm caused by such lapses.
At the same time, public lapses damage “trust” much more than a rosy corporate pitch can acknowledge. For the corporation, “trust” comes down to verifiability; it’s almost mathematical. That’s good as far as it goes; David Weinberger reminds me that he wants that kind of trust in his hosting service and other agencies, and he’s got a fair point there.
At the same time, trust extends beyond “what you could check up on if you needed to.” Trust involves not simply a referential function, but also a speculative function. If I left the room for a few minutes to phone Margaret, I would have to trust the people among whom I’m sitting—at least one of whom looks pretty seedy—not to make off with my computer. There&8#8217;s no mathematical angle on this dimension of trust; at most, one can articulate a probability function. That still differs from the discernment that impels me to think that I’ll leave the computer unguarded, or take it with me.
That prospective aspect of trust matters a lot more than Mahi De Silva seemed to allow, more (I think) than he can allow, granted Verisign’s allegedly spotty track record. (Consumer Safety Warning: David Weinberger told me about a wonderful experience he had as a Verisign customer, so they’re not only Bad Hats.) So long as Verisign has a dubious reputation that’s grounded in as few as one or two undisputed examples, they can’t presume on our prospective trust. Still less can such a corporation afford to make “trust” the theme of their promotional campaign, lest they immediately invoke a strong negative response.
Tony Scott from GM is going now, and although his talk does involve DigID, it’s not permeated by DigID issues. I’m learning about the auto business, though.
Margaret, heroic soul, voluntarily got up to drive me to O’Hare; we got there in plenty of time.
Landed in Denver a shade ahead of schedule, smoking that slow-poke Weinberger, whose plane landed just on schedule (not having made up any time between Boston and Denver; I’ll collect on your wagers later).
Roll into the Hyatt Tech Center, Eric Norlin greets us at the registration table, we skulk in the back of the opening session and some guy hails me (me?)—it’s Doc. Hey, there’s Denise. (Eric said, “We’ve got a lawyer and a priest. We’re ready to go.”) Now, where’s Frank?
On the other hand, I’m flying out of O’Hare.
So what odds do you give on the dark horse from Boston versus the fleet flyer from the Windy City?
[Maintaining two parallel blogs is a pain in the neck! I can’t wait to settle in at a new, unified home.]
I had been using a third-party wireless card that the laptop inherited from my previous machine (which could’nt use an AirPort card); it was functional, but had some kinks (though its open-source driver was in almost every respect amazingly good) that AirPort itself finesses.
The only problem was that the card installs differently on my PowerBook than on my wife’s iBook. On hers, it just pops into a friendly little slot under the keyboard; on mine, one has to unscrew the bottom plate. Unscrew, that is, with a Torx T-8 screwdriver. I used to have one of those till I absent-mindedly tried to take it through a security checkpoint. (Idle fantasy thought: “If you don’t yield control of the plane to me, I’ll install 512 megs of RAM into the nearest laptop.” Okay, I’m sure that a Torx driver could be used as a lethal weapon in a pinch, but mercy, it dosen’t even have an edge to speak of.)
Does anyone I know have a Torx driver that they can lend me tonight? Three Mac geeks at Seabury; three no’s. Dashing to the office, I printed off handouts for tomorrow’s class. I casually glance into my desk drawer (translation: “I rummage furiously through my desk drawer in desperation”) when—surprise!—there’s my trusty Torx. It was some other screwdriver that security nabbed.
AirPort installed, Torx coming with me to Denver just in case (in checked baggage), time to pack my bags and go to sleep.
Today: Not quite. I’m furiously preparing for DIDW, fulfilling responsibilities, arranging for others to cover responsibilities for me, and blogging has fallen off my list. I havent even read any blogs today. Did you say anything interesting? I’ll rejoin Blogaria as soon as I possibly can.
The turnout was modest but sterling; Jason from somnolent.org (metafilter user number 117!), and Kurt Heintz, from e-poets.net, and Andrew from me3dia.com [whose name escaped me before] and Cinnamon, and more. One kind visitor already sent an appreciative note—thanks, Earl!
After a while, she asked what I taught, and I answered that I teach NEw Testament and Early Church History, with a little Greek thrown in. She said, “You know, my dad left a lot of his books to us, and I know there are a few Greek books downstairs. You’d be welcome to have them, if they’re not too old.”
I observed that Hellenistic Greek hadn’t changed much since the sixties, and that I was hesitant to diminish her store of memories from her dad, but that I was always delighted to find an appreciative home for books. “Well, we have a ton of them; you should take any that you like.” Again, I demurred, by she noted that her husband would be thrilled to clear the space in the basement. “All right,” I conceded, and her husband gave me directions to their home; I could stop by after the second service.
“Do you need any vestments?” she asked. Well, I have only the ones I was wearing,plus one alb and a cassock. “Because I have some of his old stoles and chasubles, and you should look those over, too.”
I drove home with three boxes of books, some quite delicious, and a lovely purple chasuble, two red stoles, a somewhat worn cincture, and—amazingly—a lovely cappa nigra, a litrugical cloak often worn at funerals, but useful on any number of outdoor occasions. Mercy sakes! What a kind, generous soul—and she wasn’t even a blogger!
He seems like a nice guy.
Has he written any books?
Would he come speak to us?
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