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Indefensible missile defense

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In the world of research and development, as in the world of entrepreneurial capitalism, there’s this notion of a “proof of concept.” A proof of concept is a small-scale test or prototype demonstration that takes some new idea and subjects it to some stress-testing by reality — not a full dose but enough to show that the idea might be worth pursuing. Prove the concept, and maybe you’ll risk fully funding the idea. Can’t prove the concept? Give up. Move on to something else.

For two decades now, ever since Ronald Reagan unveiled his “Star Wars” vision, a faction of the defense-industrial complex has been trying to produce a proof of concept for missile defense — to show that we can, with some level of reliability, defend the U.S. by shooting down hostile incoming missiles.

This week, they failed, again.

As proofs of concept go, this was not a cheap one — the single test cost $85 million. We’ve spent $80 billion to date on this program, and President Bush wants to spend another $50 billion in the next few years.

But the real issue is not cost but methodology: The whole point of the proof of concept approach is that, if you can’t prove the concept, you pull the plug while you’re still in the R&D phase. The Bush administration is instead ignoring the simple reality of the results of its experiments and barreling forward.

I guess it’s just being consistent: If you don’t accept simple budgetary arithmetic and you don’t accept the results of weapons inspections in Iraq and you don’t accept the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, why should you break the pattern and accept the data from your missile-defense experiments? After all, that might be inching uncomfortably close to the “reality-based community.” (See Fred Kaplan in Slate for a more detailed argument: “We can’t even count on the rocket getting out of its launch silo, much less the millions of minute operations that must follow. President Bush fielded a half-dozen antimissile missiles and called them ‘operational.’ But they’re a ruse.”)

What we have here, aside from a massive and repeated technical failure, is a proof of concept for our government’s new, proof-of-concept-free approach to spending our money. If we can get away with this reality-denial, the Bush administration’s logic goes, let’s keep doing it on a bigger and bigger scale! And indeed that’s what’s unfolding as the comic opera known as the Bush economic plan plays its overture to Act Two.

Let’s see, we had enough money to support Social Security until we cut taxes repeatedly and manufactured a crisis, which is now being used to justify a ridiculous privatization scheme. But we still have enough money to pour into the black hole of missile defense.

I hate to be cynical, and certainly a lot of this is being driven by stupid blind ideology, but there is a common thread here: There’s profit to be made by parking billions of Social Security money on Wall Street. And there’s money to be made in missile defense.

Hey, maybe some of that money will be kicked back in 2008, when it’s time to find and fund another Republican to keep this con game going!

Critical credo

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I’ve been enjoying reading music critic Alex Ross’s blog over at “The Rest is Noise” for some time now. This thoughtful comment on the role of the critic caught my eye — it pretty well sums up what I aspired to in the many years I devoted to writing about theater and movies:

“As a critic, I’m obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can’t sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It’s a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I’m working on it.”

Ecco unchained

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Ecco Pro — the outliner/PIM that I have written about periodically and am still using today, despite the fact that it has been orphaned by its owners and not modified since 1997 or so — looks like it may be released as open source. (Thanks to Andrew Brown for the link.) Whether this means that the heart of Ecco will be transplanted by enterprising programmers into some newer, modern body — or just that Ecco devotees will have an opportunity to tweak and debug the trusty application — it’s wonderful news, if it actually happens.

Google and the public good

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For those of us who are still consumers of those bundles of printed content known as books, the importance of today’s news of Google’s library deal is almost impossible to overstate. It’s just huge.

While the Web has represented an enormous leap in the availability of human knowledge and the ease of human communication, its status as a sort of modern-day Library of Alexandria has remained suspect as long as nearly the entire corpus of human knowledge pre-Web remained locked away off-line between bound covers. “All human knowledge except what’s in books” is sort of like saying “All human music except what’s in scores.” There’s lots of good stuff there, but not the heart of things. Your Library of Alexandria is sort of a joke without, you know, the books.

Now Google, in partnership with some of the world’s leading university libraries (including Stanford and Harvard), is undertaking the vast — but not, as Brewster Kahle reminded us at Web 2.0, limitless — project of scanning, digitizing and rendering searchable the world of books.

Google’s leaders are demonstrating that their corporate mission statement — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — is not just empty words. If you’re serious about organizing the world’s information, you’d better have a plan for dealing with the legacy matter of the human species’ nearly three millennia of written material. So, simply, bravo for the ambition and know-how of a company that’s willing to say, “Sure, we can do it.”

Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature provides a limited subset of this sort of data. But where Amazon has seemed mostly interested in providing limited “browsability” as a marketing tool, Google has its eye on the more universal picture. And so the first books that will be fully searchable and readable through this new project are books that are old enough to be out of copyright. The public domain just got a lot more public. (And presumably, as John Battelle suggests, we’ll see a new business ecosystem spring up around providing print-on-demand physical copies of these newly digitized, previously unavailable public-domain texts.)

This is all such a Good Thing for the public itself that we may be inclined to overlook some of the more troubling aspects of the Google project. Google is making clear that, as it digitizes the holdings of university libraries, it’s handing the universities their own copies of the data, to do with as they please. But apparently the Google copies of this information will be made widely available in an advertising-supported model.

For the moment, that seems fine: Google’s approach to advertising is the least intrusive and most user-respectful you can find online today; if anyone can make advertising attractive and desirable, Google can.

But Google is a public company. The people leading it today will not be leading it forever. It’s not inconceivable that in some future downturn Google will find itself under pressure to “monetize” its trove of books more ruthlessly.

Today’s Google represents an extremely benign face of capitalism, and it may be that the only way to get a project of this magnitude done efficiently is in the private sector. But capitalism has its own dynamic, and ad-supported businesses tend to move in one direction — towards more and more aggressive advertising.

Since we are, after all, talking about digitizing the entire body of published human knowledge, I can’t help thinking that a public-sector effort — whether government-backed or non-profit or both — is more likely to serve the long-term public good. I know that’s an unfashionable position in this market-driven era. It’s also an unrealistic one given the current U.S. government’s priorities.

But public investment has a pretty enviable track record: Think of the public goods that Americans enjoy today because the government chose to seed them and insure their universality — from the still-essential Social Security program to the interstate highway system to the Internet itself. In an ideal world, it seems to me, Google would be a technology contractor for an institution like the Library of Congress. I’d rather see the company that builds the tools of access to information be an enabler of universal access than a gatekeeper or toll-taker.

The public has a big interest in making sure that no one business has a chokehold on the flow of human knowledge. As long as Google’s amazing project puts more knowledge in more hands and heads, who could object? But in this area, taking the long view is not just smart — it’s ethically essential. So as details of Google’s project emerge, it will be important not just to rely on Google’s assurances but to keep an eye out for public guarantees of access, freedom of expression and limits to censorship.

Semper stickies

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Today I confronted the sheer vastness of the topic I have chosen to write my book about. I indulged my vertigo for about 15 minutes. Then I borrowed a page from some of the people I’m writing about.

A while back, the team at OSAF, in an effort to wrestle the schedule of their project to the ground, temporarily moved their planning process off the wiki and onto a whiteboard. They broke their project down into roughly equal chunks of work and wrote the name of each chunk on a simple yellow sticky note. Instantly, the outlines of a schedule became easier to discern.

Stickies (a k a “Post-It” notes)! I’d seen play- and screen-writing friends do the same for their projects. I’m a devotee of outlining software, and I’m using a venerable outliner to organize my research. But I needed a different approach to get beyond the sense of “Oh crap, how do I find a way out of this swamp and onto that mountain range?” Somehow, laying all the pieces out in an open-ended, non-hierarchical way on a two-dimensional plane just helped: Something about being able to take in all the pieces in a map-like overview rather than peering in through the keyhole of screen real estate.

My stickies are now marshalled out on a 3′ x 4′ foamcore board and looming over my desk. Over the next few months I will add to them, rearrange and reorganize them, then remove them from the board one by one as they pass from concept into actual pieces of writing.

One day the board will be empty. And I’ll be done with a first draft.

Bonfire of the C-90s

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Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of cassette tapes. Typically, I’d own LPs (later, CDs) but I’d transfer them to cassette to listen to them in the car. You could fit two LPs on one C-90, so it was efficient, and everyone knows that music and driving go together like, say, cinnamon and sugar. (Convenience of this sort is, of course, on the wane as the world of “digital rights management” tries to lock down everything it can.)

This was my mode for many years; I still remember debating whether it was worth dubbing my multi-LP set of Laurie Anderson’s “United States” to listen to during the cross-country drive in 1986 as I moved my life from Boston to San Francisco. I knew I’d made the right choice somewhere on I-80 on the long, slow climb up from the plains on the Nebraska/Wyoming border. Anderson’s voice intoned its futuristic alienations and fragile hopes as I hung suspended between two coasts and two lives, and the wind began roaring down from the mountains, buffeting my old car back toward the past. (I also listened to a lot of Buddy Holly — alienation only gets you so far.)

I’ll keep those tapes, and a handful of others. But I’ve got hundreds more that just duplicate music I have in other, better formats. So what does one do with several hundred old cassette tapes? They were once reasonably high quality blanks; it seems criminal to toss them in landfill. I’d welcome any ideas.

Dan Gillmor’s new venture

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Congratulations to Dan Gillmor on his announcement that he’s leaving the San Jose Mercury News to launch a new venture in the field of grassroots journalism/citizen reporting. Whatever Dan comes up with will be worth watching. Gillmor writes:

  A friend who knew about this ahead of time asked the question I’m sure some others will ask: “Are you nuts?”

That is precisely the question people asked me and my colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner when we left nine years ago to start Salon. I’d been at the Examiner roughly a decade, the same amount of time Gillmor’s been at the Merc. I haven’t regretted the leap into a more entrepreneurial fray, and I don’t think Dan will either. Perhaps being nuts is, you know, underrated.

Spolsky in Salon

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I’ve been an admirer of Joel Spolsky’s writing on software since I started reading it several years ago. Last month when I was in New York I sat down with Joel and had a good long talk about software development, partly for the purpose of my book research and partly because I knew he’d be entertaining and thoughtful. Today’s Salon features a write-up of the interview, pegged in part to the publication of a book collection of Spolsky’s essays.

Broken comments

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Comments were unusually slow here for a while and now I know why. They’re broken: you get a “403 — access forbidden” message when you try to post them. Sorry — we’ve alerted Userland, we’ll cross our fingers and hope for a fix soon. And thanks to Real Live Preacher for raising the alarm!

Postscript: We got them fixed soon after this post. Some changes Userland has been making to help control comment spam seemed to cause this problem on the Salon blogs server.

Spitzer in bloggerland

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Eliot Spitzer, a guy I went to high school with, has been making headlines for a few years now. In a decade that has seen a retreat from progressive politics across the board, he’s picked up the tools available to him as New York State attorney general and used them creatively and effectively to represent the interests of ordinary citizens. His investigations and prosecutions in the securities, mutual funds and insurance industries have exposed longstanding practices by which insiders profit at the expense of the public they ostensibly serve.

In a better world, the bodies that are supposed to be the watchdogs in these areas would be doing their jobs. Since they haven’t been, Spitzer’s investigations have represented the public’s last line of defense.

I haven’t agreed with every position Eliot has taken in his career (for instance, I don’t support the death penalty), but there isn’t any other Democratic politician out there right now who has been more effective at fighting the self-dealing, cronyism and plundering of the public good that characterize Bush-era business.

Today, in what was a long-expected move, Spitzer announced that he’s running for governor of New York in 2006. And he announced it on a page labeled “Eliot’s Blog” — that appears to be a real, functional weblog. Welcome to the blogosphere, Eliot — I think you’ll like it.