Even if you’ve been following the social-software boom for the last couple of years, you will probably find some eye-opening insights in “You Are Who You Know,” Andrew Leonard’s great two-part feature on the subject in Salon this week (part one, part two). If Friendster and its spawn remain a mystery to you, the series will be even more essential to you. When Andrew took up the editor’s hat here, Salon (largely) lost a great reporter and writer. Good to have him back in such fine form.
Archives for June 2004
Browsers? Yes, browsers
Don’t just bitch and moan about the Microsoft monoculture — do something about it! Ditch your no-improvements-since-before-the-dotcom-boom Internet Explorer Web browser. You’ll be affected by fewer viruses and you’ll discover that software didn’t have to stop dead in its tracks in 1997.
I’ve always been partial to Opera, a great little browser out of Scandinavia, available in free (ad-supported) or paid versions. But if you’re allergic to ads and don’t feel like paying a paltry sum for the piece of software you probably use the most, there is also an entirely free browser that is much, much better than IE: the open-source Mozilla Firefox has just released its “0.9” version.
The numbering suggests it’s not “done” yet, but the Mozilla people are just hugely conservative with their labeling. Firefox is ready for prime time, from what I can tell, and it’s super: fast, compact and full of features you just can’t get from Microsoft. It’s also available on all the major platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX).
Things have been real slow here while I tried to catch up with various other aspects of my life. Now I’m giving up. Back to the blog! I’ve still got some interesting notes from the D conference to transcribe. Soon…
1980 election — a squeaker?
Some folks in the comments below and elsewhere are contesting my statement that Reagan’s 1980 election was a close one.
Reagan won 43.9 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million. Anderson won 5.7 million votes. (The electoral map looks much worse, as it usually does.) Certainly not a squeaker like 2000, and not as close as I remember it, but not at all the landslide it’s often recalled as, or that Reagan’s subsequent victory in 1984 really was.
If you look back at the coverage from that year you see that in fact the polls remained much closer till near the very end. The debates were evidently decisive — debates that we discovered a few years later had been seriously tampered with: William Casey had stolen the Carter campaign’s briefing book to prep his candidate. (And then there is the murky matter of the October non-surprise — we’ll almost certainly never know the full story of what did or didn’t happen between the Saudi-friendly Reagan-Bush operators and Iran, but speculation remains strong that they exerted great effort to make sure those hostages stayed hostages till after Election Day.)
In the hazy glow of post-mortem memorials we can delude ourselves that today’s bare-knuckles Republicans are a nastier species than their Reaganite predecessors, but the truth is that dirty tricks have long run in the party’s genes.
Steve Jobs at ‘D’
Steve Jobs spoke here this morning and introduced a nifty new product, Airport Express — an all-white plug-in Wifi adapter that’s little bigger than a cigarette pack and doubles as a music bridge between your computer and your stereo. For $129. Available in July. “This doesn’t solve every problem in the world,” Jobs said. “But it’s very very simple, and it works.”
Here’s some of what Jobs had to say:
“Longhorn’s basically a copy of Mac OSX a year ago. Microsoft is chasing our tail again, and that’s kind of fun.”
“What Apple’s great at is inventing cool technology and making it easy to use.”
“A lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven’t grokked software.”
Mossberg asked Jobs the same question he asked Gates — whether the computer will be displaced at the center of consumers’ digital worlds. Jobs had a similar answer: “Where are you going to put your 5000 digital photos? Or your 5000 songs? You’re not going to put them on your cell phone.”
“The hardest part of making smart products is figuring out something that people want to do.”
Jobs said he’d called the Kerry campaign up to “offer them help on advertising” and a week later he read that he was serving as an “economic adviser.” He wouldn’t comment further on politics: “It’s a personal thing, not an Apple thing.”
About the gulf between Hollywood and Silicon Valley: “Technology people don’t understand the process these creative companies go through to build the things they produce. And the creative people don’t appreciate how creative technology is.”
“The biggest threat to Hollywood is not the Internet but the DVD burners.”
Bill Gates at ‘D’
[Internet access here at D is really flaky, so I’ll see how much I can get posted here over the next day or so.]
The dinner at the Four Seasons Aviara Sunday night was accompanied by wines selected by the Wall Street Journal’s wine columnists, John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, so when Kara Swisher kicked off the Bill Gates interview with a serious question about security, Gates offered a crack about what a great question that was after three glasses of wine — and then delivered an anecdote about Warren Buffett, at a dinner where the costly wines had been seriously fussed over, covering his glass as the waiter came by to pour and remarking, “I’ll take the cash.”
Gates seemed far smoother and more relaxed than on previous occasions that I’ve heard him speak,and better able to parry challenges without getting that impatient, “why are you bothering my superior intelligence?” look of yore. Either age has mellowed him, or he’s just grown into the role of Richest Geek in the World. Here are some of the things he said:
“Longhorn [Microsoft’s next revamp of Windows] is about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup. Longhorn brings the idea of an object-oriented database to the wayinformation is stored.”
“Already there’s a class of users who basically stay in e-mail. So when they go out of e-mail to the shell, they get disoriented.”
The Journal’s Walt Mossberg asked whether Longhorn was more radical a change than Windows XP or Windows 95: “Radical sounds negative. It’s just way more of a switch in terms of the model of how you think about data.”
Eventually, “Search will be based on semantics, not just keyword matching.”
Users will benefit from the “galvanizing effect” of Microsoft’s competition with Google in search.
About digital music, the Ipod and ITunes: Mossberg asked, “Can you succeed in music without a hot device?”
Gates: “We’ll have dozens of hot devices… We just have a different model.”
Mossberg: “That’s fine, but it’s a failed model at the moment.”
Mossberg: As digital devices proliferate, will they remove the PC from the center of things?
Gates: “Where else are you going to organize your memories?”
Gates said he devotes 10 hours a week to his foundation work. “That’s the time other people are mowing the lawn.”
Mossberg: “So you just let it grow?”
Gates: “Somebody comes and does it, I don’t know how. Maybe it’s astroturf.”
John Battelle has a fuller report on Gates’ comments on Google here.
Last night’s post about Reagan has elicited a good and spirited back-and-forth in the comments. I’ll let that debate be, with one clarification: When I wrote, “America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president,” some readers seem to take that to be synonymous with “America was a lot better off in 1980 than in 1988 (when Reagan left office).” Of course things changed in 8 years, some of them for the better. Was Reagan responsible for all those changes? Would a different president have seen inflation decline (Paul Volcker did more to accomplish that than Reagan, and guess who appointed him?)? Or seen the Soviet Union begin to decline and fall? Could the positives of the Reagan era have been realized without the hefty negatives? Could a real leader rather than a Potemkin-village leader have done a better job? This is the direction in which my comment was aimed.
And no, I do not think that — outside of popular music (even Elvis Costello managed to produce one bad album!) — the ’80s were a dark age. But the moment at which Reagan won office felt to me, as a young man who’d come of political age in the ’70s, like a closing of horizons and a snuffing out of hope. (If I’d been writing in the morning instead of at midnight, the sentence would have read, “that moment felt like the start of a dark age.”) In retrospect, that feeling was plainly unwarranted. But the world looks different to you at 21 than at 44. If it doesn’t, something’s probably wrong!
I’m here at the Wall Street Journal “D” Conference, where I finally got the Internet connection in my room working after an hour of fiddling (problem turned out to be — no joke — a loose cable, but not a loose ethernet cable; rather, a loose connection from the mini-hub to the wall-jack– sheesh!). So I’ll have to post notes on Bill Gates’ talk tomorrow.
But first, a note on the passing of Ronald Reagan. This conference began with a moment of silence in memory of the 40th president. (It is, after all, a Wall Street Journal event.) I’m sorry for his relatives and friends that he’s dead; I had a relative who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I know how painful that is.
But can we stop with the canonization, please? Maybe too many Americans are now too young to remember, or maybe Reagan looks good by comparison with the current occupant of the White House, or maybe the passage of time just makes us all forgetful.
But Reagan — however “nice” a man he was — was no saint, and in fact in most ways he was a terrible president. I know, de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that, but there is a great whitewashing going on in the media, and I can’t stand it.
I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.
It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.
Late night thoughts on barbarism
I liked Josh Marshall’s summary of the opera-bouffe-like character of the slow-motion Beltway meltdown underway, in his commentary on the Tenet resignation:
…Beside the possibility that the White House’s favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country’s own spies, I’d say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine. |
It does seem as though one of George Bush’s chief legacies may be the complete implosion of the C.I.A. — at a time when the nation desperately needs its services. (Bush’s father served as director of the C.I.A. for many years. Is there some sort of Oedipal lunacy at work?)
So now Bush will be running on a platform of — competence? Effectiveness in the war on terror? Isn’t a war on terror first and foremost a war dependent on good intelligence? At what point can we declare this charade of Republican knowhow at an end?
If you’re a pragmatist, you should be running from Bush as fast as you can, out of sheer desire to see the nation’s business restored to good management. If you think in moral terms, of course, it’s even worse.
My friend Charlie Varon recently e-mailed me with a pointer to a diary Wallace Shawn published in The Nation on the eve of the invasion of Iraq over a year ago — a piece of writing I missed at the time of its publication. It’s a typical slice of Shawn’s brand of self-lacerating thought, which will infuriate those on the right who disagree with him, trouble those on the left who might be thought to be in his camp, and cause any reader to think hard.
Shawn has always tried, in works like “The Fever” as in this diary, to unearth the connection between the comfortable lives of Americans — Red and Blue staters — and the privation and suffering in other parts of the world that seems to make our comfort possible. The position is beyond bleeding-heart — it’s spurting-arteries-of-guilt liberalism. However you feel about that, it has the singular virtue of cutting through abstract cant and partisan rhetoric and talking about the particulars of real human suffering.
All of which is a roundabout way of introducing this observation by Shawn:
Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It’s as if there were some sort of gentlemen’s agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible power they will have over so many other people, by the thought of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they’re planning, the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror. |
Now, I’m sure this sounded over the top when Shawn published it in March 2003. And it may still sound over the top to you today. What a thing to say about a president! Or about any human being!
Still, it’s always seemed critically important, in trying to understand the Bush administration’s march of folly, to remember that its entire top leadership (with the exception of its one half-hearted multilaterist at the State Department, who nobody listens to) consists of men (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) who never served in combat. The next level down of leadership — the architects of the Iraq policy, men like Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle (and let’s not forget Rove) — have no record at all of any military service. For such leaders, I can’t help thinking, “the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror” must necessarily remain abstractions — at best, matters that one can turn one’s gaze away from (as the government has literally done with the taboo photos of returning military coffins), and at worst, as Shawn argued, bearers of vague quasi-sexual excitement (as we saw with the pumped-up macho display of the “Mission Accomplished” tableau, now so painfully embarrassing).
The experience of combat service doesn’t inoculate a leader against making mistakes, nor does it turn more than a few people into pacifists. But surely in most cases it burns into the brain an awareness of the essential seriousness of war. And that, finally, seems to have been Bush’s failure with Iraq, one that even conservative supporters of the president — like the historian Paul Johnson in today’s Wall Street Journal — are beginning to admit.
Bush drove the nation to war and threw an army into the field without taking the enterprise seriously enough. He didn’t plan, he didn’t study, he didn’t question, because these are things he does not do. He has told us as much. And the people he trusted to do these things for him were equally unwilling to treat the situation with the gravity it deserved, instead using it as an opportunity to settle political scores or put into motion long-hatching schemes and delusional geopolitical chess moves.
I can’t help thinking that, had more people in the White House ever been on the receiving end of a bombing raid or taken barrages of enemy fire, this administration might have proceeded with somewhat less criminal a level of recklessness and incompetence.
Upcoming events of note
June is always a time that’s slightly crazed for me (in a good way): it’s the month when I celebrate both my birthday and my wedding anniversary; plus it’s solstice time, when the days are longest and (for light-seeking souls like me) spirits highest. It’s also the period, in the trough between Memorial Day and the start of high vacation season, when lots of events get planned. Here’s some that are on my horizon:
This Sunday I’m heading off to the Wall Street Journal’s “D” Conference, run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — featuring, among others, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Last year, I understand they shared a stage (I wasn’t there to confirm the executive convergence). We’ll see if that tradition continues.
Next Friday, the same Long Now Foundation series that hosted Brian Eno’s amazing talk last fall will present Bruce Sterling, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. If you’ve ever heard Sterling’s seemingly free-associational — but really, I’m convinced, carefully choreographed — riffing, you know it’s a treat. The topic? “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole.”
Last year, the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona was a blast. I can’t make it to this year’s event — June 10-12, in Sedona once more — but it promises to be even better, with J.D. Lasica talking about his “DarkNet” project and lots of other folks presenting their work.
Finally, Supernova returns to the Bay Area June 24-25. A year and a half ago, Kevin Werbach’s first conference served as a great intro to the issues around Wi-Fi, Web services, and other grassroots-driven, geek-centered technologies whose adoption has begun to fuel a new wave of Silicon Valley buzz. It’ll be interesting to see where Werbach takes these subjects now that it has begun to move from the edge to the mainstream.