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What hath spam wrought?

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Things are usually quiet in mailing-list land over the holidays, but today I was distressed to find in my inbox a report from a fellow Salon blogger that the comment system for Salon Blogs, which is operated for us by our partners at Userland, seemed to have developed an odd political bias: If you tried to post a comment that included the word “Socialist” or “Socialism,” the server refused to post it. I double-checked for myself, and sure enough, this seemed to be the case.

Now, I know that no one at Salon has any interest in censoring the political slant of comments on blogs. (And even if we were that conspiratorial, this particular choice of verbiage to block would seem to go against the stereotypical grain of our hotbed of freedom-hating leftie bias.) All sorts of peculiar things are known to happen in the world of software, so I checked in with Userland, and got the explanation that, if I’d really been thinking carefully, I might have guessed at.

Like all blog software developers and service operators, Userland is doing what they can to stem the flood of comment-spam. Recently, it seems, they’d introduced a keyword-based spam filter for the comments server. Now, if you take the word “Socialism” and remove the “so-” and the “-m,” you are left with the name of a certain male-potency-enhancing drug that is among the most popular wares peddled in spam circa 2005. (I’m also regularly in receipt of offers for something called a “rash guard,” and I haven’t a clue what that is — it sounds like some sort of medical unguent for use in activities better left undescribed, but most likely it’s far more innocent, right?)

Chalk up this “censorship,” then, to fallout from a turn in the spam attack/countermeasure cycle. “Socialism,” you are an innocent bystander in the war on Cialis advertising!

Random links (yearend clearance dept.)

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## The Dynamic of a Bush Scandal: Peter Daou’s cynical but depressingly accurate precis of how the Bush administration and its allies shrug off and spin away scandal after scandal. Peter predicts the current cycle of outrage over the government’s flagrantly illegal domestic spying will pass like each previous cycle. He might well be right.

## David Edelstein says Munich is the best film of the year: “Today, saying our enemy is ‘evil’ is like saying a preventable tragedy is ‘God’s will’: It’s a way of letting ourselves off the hook for crimes committed in our name. Not incidentally, it’s also a way for our enemies to let themselves off the hook.” Guess I’ll have to see it now!

## Doc Searls continues to advance the conversation on the “unbundling” of media (my small contribution, on the unbundling of the newspaper, was here):

  What will happen, I wondered, when Toyota does the math, realizes how inefficient local TV advertising is, and drops its dealer advertising co-op program? Is this not inevitable? Why don’t we have better ways for sellers and buyers to inform each other? Terry puts the onus on advertisers, who are on the supply side; but why not equip demand to notify markets about what it desires? Why should I not be able to publish, selectively, and in a private yet usefully exposed way, that I would like to rent a 4+ bedroom house on Younameit Beach for the last week in April? Why should I have to go hunting among sellers for the same thing, ignoring all the promotional crap that goes with the seller-controlled nonconversation we call marketing?

## Salon readers know Laura Miller as a co-founder of the site, our one-time books editor and longtime book critic, who has shone a bright and steady light in all her work. Years ago she recommended Philip Pullman’s magnificent “His Dark Materials” trilogy to my wife and me, and they were the only books I can remember being able to finish — indeed, being compelled to finish — in the months of harrowing sleep deprivation I experienced during my twin sons’ infancy. Now Laura has written a beautiful profile of Pullman for the New Yorker, “Far From Narnia” — which his work truly is, in the best possible way.

Meanwhile, The Guardian also has an interesting profile of Ursula Le Guin, another great fantasist of our time.

Storyville

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Earlier this year I ripped out a clip from the Times that I meant to quote. It’s economist Robert Frank, writing about teaching economics by asking students to apply the abstract principles they’re learning to some specific interesting question they’ve personally encountered in daily life.

It’s also a great piece about why we spend so much energy writing stories and telling tales.

  The initiative was inspired by the discovery that there is no better way to master an idea than to write about it. Although the human brain is remarkably flexible, learning theorists now recognize that it is far better able to absorb information in some forms than others. Thus, according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, children “turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection.” He went on, “If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over.” Even well into adulthood, we find it easier to process information in narrative form than in more abstract forms like equations and graphs. Most effective of all are narratives that we construct ourselves.

If this is true — and, based on my own experience, I believe it is — then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

Nullification, 21st-century style

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In order to understand the nature of the strange constitutional crisis President Bush has dragged the country into through his bizarre extralegal domestic surveillance program, you have to dig into the vaults of your brain’s American history storehouse and drag out the word “nullification.” The doctrine of nullification, a legal concept that enjoyed a brief moment in the sun in the antebellum South, held that individual states had the power to disregard, or “nullify,” federal laws that they didn’t like. It led to various crises during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, and the conflicts between Washington and the Southern states did not get fully resolved until the Civil War settled them once and for all, establishing the force of the federal writ through the force of the federal arms.

Today, the Bush administration has been steered into dangerous waters by veterans of the Nixon/Ford era, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who have pursued a decades-long quest to reassert the glories of the imperial presidency they cherished as young men and then saw shamed and dismantled in the aftermath of Watergate. Most Americans at the time concluded from that scandal of executive privilege that absolute power corrupts absolutely; Cheney and Rumsfeld believed instead that Watergate had crippled and emasculated the presidency. 9/11 gave them an opportunity to bring back the good old days of enemies’ lists, intelligence-doctoring and (now we know) domestic surveillance — and even to extend the tradition of the imperial presidency into hitherto unexplored regions of White House-sanctioned torture, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and war without end.

And so we find ourselves entering a period of conflict with peculiar overtones of that “nullification” period. Only now it’s not the states attempting to usurp the federal authority; in the Bush version of nullification, it’s the Executive Branch that has begun to claim for itself the arbitrary and absolute right to disregard the explicit will of the legislature — not through the exercise of constitutional veto but through secrecy, legal chicanery and sheer chutzpah.

In claiming that the president’s basic role as wartime leader and commander-in-chief gives him the broad authority to disregard any law that he (and he alone) decides is impeding his goal of protecting the nation, the Bush administration’s lawyers are granting the occupant of the Oval Office a unique authority to step outside of the constitutional process by which laws are passed by Congress and signed (or vetoed) by presidents and reviewed by Supreme Court justices. Forget checks and balances, we’re being told; in the age of terrorism, they no longer obtain.

Let’s understand the chronology here: throughout the 1950s and ’60s and well into Watergate, federal agencies spied on a vast population of American citizens — civil rights leaders, anti-war protesters, journalists who ran afoul of J. Edgar Hoover or the president, people who looked the wrong way at someone in position of authority. A handful of the thousands under surveillance might even have been real threats to the Republic. But there’s no evidence I know of that any actual threat was ever foiled by the mass wiretaps.

In reaction to revelations of these programs, and out of disgust at the wholesale violations of basic constitutional rights, Congress passed a whole slew of laws intending to make sure that such abuses never happened again. One important part of this legislation was the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. It is the main law in question in the current controversy, the one that the Bush spying program violated. FISA laid the groundwork for an orderly review process by which U.S. intelligence services could obtain permission to conduct wiretaps and otherwise spy on people it had reason to suspect were engaged in terrorism. FISA was amended through the years and extended by the USA Patriot Act in the days after 9/11.

The Bush administration says it has needed to ignore FISA’s requirements of judicial oversight because, in the war on terror, it needs to act fast, and the judicial bureaucracy is too slow. Only today FISA already allows U.S. authorities to go ahead and spy on anyone they want to and then retroactively go back and tell the oversight court. So that’s just a smokescreen; something else is going on here. Experts are speculating now that the Bush administration chose its constitutional end-run in order to open the way for some new technological approach to domestic spying — some sort of data-mining approach that involves casting a wide net through vast quantities of domestic communication in search of terrorist missives.

That’s entirely credible. And I’m even willing to accept the Bush team’s argument that such techniques might be a good way of foiling the next terrorist plot. But none of this excuses or justifies what appears to be a three-year-old spying program of huge proportions and gross illegality. If the president wanted the authority for such a program, all he had to do was ask for it — and in the post-9/11 atmosphere, when all sorts of dubious civil liberties compromises were being rolled into the Patriot Act, he’d surely have gotten it. Alternately, he could have turned to the FISA court itself, which has a long record of approving thousands of government surveillance requests and turning down a mere handful.

But our executives were unwilling to request authority from the Republican-controlled congress or to obtain it from the judiciary. Why? Because they don’t believe they have to ask. Doing it without asking is the very point of the exercise. Aggrandizing presidential authority is not a means toward the end of better protecting the nation; the threat to the nation is simply a convenient occasion to establish the principle that being president means never having to ask for authority.

If Bush and Cheney had been willing to pursue their surveillance plan within the constitutional system they’re sworn to uphold, they wouldn’t be facing the uproar and consternation that they confront today. They wouldn’t be in the position of distracting the capital and the nation from the real crises and threats we face by provoking an unnecessary and fruitless showdown between the branches of government. But as with Iraq, so with the surveillance scandal: When faced with a choice between effective pragmatism and grandstanding brinkmanship, the Bush team has always chosen the riskier path.

POSTSCRIPT: Brad DeLong asks why Bush and Cheney wouldn’t worry that their Doctrine of Presidential Infallibility, if allowed to stand, wouldn’t hand the same absolute power to some “future left-wing president.” “There are two possible answers: (a) They are really stupid. (b) They are really evil–they do not intend for there to be a left-wing president ever again. I vote for (a) myself. I wish I could suppress the still small voices in my head that are whispering (b).
I hate the way this administration has turned me into a nutbar conspiracy theorist.”

POST-POSTSCRIPT: David Cole dips into another era of American history, President Truman’s Korean-War era effort to nationalize steel plants, and finds clear Supreme Court precedent showing just how illegal the Bush program of warrantless domestic wiretapping really is. Expect to be reading more in coming weeks about Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

The immediate jewel of our souls

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“Namespace” is one of the great terms from the world of programming that I encountered in the course of my book research. A namespace is a defined set of labels (in programming, usually for variables or addresses or the like) in which each label can be assumed to be unique. “Namespace collisions” happen when two such sets overlap and cause unplanned-for ambiguities: the word “fender,” for instance, has one meaning in the namespace of auto parts and another in the namespace of electric guitars.

The original namespace, the ur-namespace, as it were, is the set of names we use for one another — the names in the phonebook. In the age of the global Net and search engines, this namespace has become pretty unstable. People with names like “John Smith” have always had to cope with identity confusion, but today, we all face collisions with other people who share our names.

My name isn’t quite so common, but not so uncommon, either, I have learned. When I worked as a theater and movie critic in the ’80s and early ’90s for the San Francisco Examiner, I discovered that a screenwriter who bore my name was beginning to have a successful career. For years I received congratulatory notes, including one from a fundraiser for an educational institution I once attended, who had to be disabused of the notion that I had newfound riches to share. I still get occasional emails from aspiring screenwriters begging me to look at their work.

Over the years I also discovered that there is a Scott Rosenberg in the Bay Area who is a jazz musician and composer. Since I confine my musical efforts to friends and family, this was less of a problem.

Now, though, it seems there is yet another Scott Rosenberg who is actually writing movie reviews for the San Francisco Examiner — which is, itself, not in any way the same newspaper that I wrote for a decade ago (that Examiner’s entire staff was absorbed into the Chronicle; the new Examiner is a freebie owned by conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz). This is distressing — and I can foresee a lifetime of search-engine confusion for both this newcomer and me. I wish he’d, like, have used a middle initial in his byline. (I’m sure he wishes I had done the same.)

There’s a new industry of startup companies and Web services trying to help organize the human namespace on the Internet. I’d heard of one called Zoominfo, “the search engine for discovering people, companies and relationships,” and I figured I’d see how well it handled the profusion of SRs. Not good. First name on the list is one Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Who’s that? Zoominfo says it’s me — Salon exec and writer, former SF Examiner writer, and so on. Only where’d the “Mitchell” come from? My middle name is “Alan”! Zoominfo also lists another “Scott Mitchell Rosenberg” as a luminary in the comics world. Ahh — this must be the guy who let the “scottrosenberg.com” domain lapse a few years ago, allowing me to obtain it.

Zoominfo actually lists a “Scott Alan Rosenberg,” but it claims that he’s the jazz musician. Could the jazzy Scott and I have the same middle name? Or is Zoominfo just hopelessly confused? It’s got a whole bunch of other Scott Rosenbergs, including one who is the president of something called “The Rosenberg Group.” (That “the” is a little optimistic; Google says there’s a whole slew of “Rosenberg Groups” out there.)

Wikipedia has developed a practice of providing “disambiguation pages” so that when you search for information on, say, “Python,” you can say whether you want the page about big snakes, the page about the programming language, or the page about the British comedy group.

I think that the Net needs disambiguation pages for people. Really, the whole world does, too.

Technorati’s tortoise

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I like Technorati, the blog-based search engine. I’ve been a user since the early days, I know people who work there, and I put in some time to add Technorati links to Salon’s pages. I’ve read Dave Sifry‘s honest admissions of the company’s scaling problems and the efforts they’ve made to improve the response speed and up-time of their service. The Technorati site indeed seems to work a lot better these days.

But I’m still finding that, for my blog at least, it’s simply not doing a very timely job, and “real-time search” is what Technorati is supposed to be all about. For instance, right now it’s reporting that I haven’t updated for three days, even while it lists several links to my newer posts. And the RSS feed for the search on links to my blog — which I subscribed to many moons ago — has been broken for ages; the search you do on Technorati proper returns plenty of results, but the feed almost never includes what’s in the site search. Have they given up on RSS? Is Technorati still hobbling? Is there something I should be doing that I’m not? What’s the deal?

More on melting papers

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Some followups on the melting newspaper meme:

Ryan Tate asks, “I don’t understand why people would want to continue to read national news in print but not local and state news in print. And are you saying that even giveaway local papers like the altweeklies and the Examiner will go away, as well?”

I guess I wasn’t clear. I actually think that most newspapers as we know them — big and small — will vanish. Paper will get more and more expensive, and people won’t want to read a static medium.
I don’t think in the long run that the Times and the Journal will survive in their present form, just that they will survive as institutions — their newsrooms and brands will transition to whatever new devices and media emerge. The locals don’t have the same resources, flexibility or raison d’etre, and I think it’s far less likely that incumbent local papers will cross that gulf.

Ryan writes: “My theory: the ossified incumbent local daily papers may very well die, opening room for some pretty vigorous competition among new, energetic newspapers bundling information in new ways, mostly but not entirely to narrower niche markets.” I agree, with the proviso that the vigorous new competitors are simply not going to be on paper. The cost structure is too high, and as the Net continues to mature and serve more mobile devices better, the idea of delivering these bundles of information on paper is going to look increasingly wasteful and inefficient.

Dave Winer says some very kind things about me (thanks!) but also offers some challenges. Winer argues that efforts to devise new sorts of bundles will “run out” as we move deeper into an era of disintermediation: “What’s under attack is much bigger than newspapers, it’s all forms of aggregation. Aggregation can now be customized, and it can be done by machine… Once we’ve disintermediated the San Francisco Chronicle and NY Times (unlike Scott, I don’t think any news organization is going to escape) the next target is AdSense. No need for a middle-man there either. So it’s the whole notion of value in bundles of information that’s going by the wayside. Bundling is not going to be a way to make a living in the future.”

Dave has a pretty enviable record in this area, so I take his perspective extremely seriously. I hope he’s wrong, because it’s the very concept of bundling that has made it possible, for the past century or more, to support a number of enterprises that are fundamentally not supportable on their own. Sending reporters abroad, conducting months’-long investigations, plowing through mountains of court documents — these cost lots of money, and generally advertisers don’t particularly care for the result.

Certainly, today’s papers haven’t always delivered as much of this costly but valuable work as they could have; many have forfeited their muckraking role. But if we give up on the idea of bundling, or if it simply becomes impossible, then the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time. Much great work can be pursued that way, and there is a grand tradition of the gentleman (and woman) muckraker that is being reincarnated in the clothing of today’s citizen journalism movement. Still, if we become unable, for instance, to hand some of the New Yorker’s fashion advertising dollars over to Sy Hersh to tell us what’s really going on inside the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” it will be a big loss.

I’m hopeful that, even as the power of networked software kicks in and the passions of millions of empowered individual publishers ignite, there will still be a place for creative bundling, for good editors to lay bets on unlikely stories and pay for those bets with their winnings from more surefire investments. Doubtless this place will be a diminished one. As I wrote before, the survivors will have to be smarter, work harder, offer better services and insights. But I think, and hope, they’ll still find a niche in the next-generation news ecosystem.

All that is newspaper melts…

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Joe Menn of the L.A. Times talked to me for his story gauging the dwindling fortunes of the San Francisco Chronicle as a bellwether for the fate of newspapers in the Net era. It’s a good piece, and he quotes me accurately, but as always the quote is a snippet of a much longer discourse. Since my words are now part of this record I’d like to fill in the rest.

I told Joe that the newspapers I grew up loving and that I worked for during the first half of my career represent a model that we’ve taken for granted because it’s had such longevity. But there’s nothing god-given or force-of-nature-like to the shape of their product or business; it’s simply an artifact of history that you could roll together a bundle of disparate information — news reports, stock prices, sports scores, display ads, reviews, classified ads, crossword puzzles and so on — sell it to readers, and make money.

Today that bundle has already fallen apart on the content side: there’s simply no reason for newspapers to publish stock prices, for instance; it’s a practice that will simply disappear over the next few years — it’s sheer tree slaughter. On the business side, it is beginning to fall apart, too. It just makes way more sense to do classified advertising online. And it’s cheaper, too, thanks to Craigslist, the little community (I am proud to have been a subscriber to Craig Newmark’s original mailing list on the Well back in 1994 or 1995 or whenever it was) that turned into a big deal.

The loss of classified revenues doesn’t doom newspapers, by any means. But if classifieds represent — as Menn’s piece says — 27 percent of newspaper revenue, and the newspaper industry is accustomed to a 20 percent profit margin, well, your industry just went from a healthy black to a nasty red.

What should be really alarming for newspaper owners is that the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect their other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives.

It’s not a happy picture. I still read two newspapers a day, but I’m in the field, and I know there’s no chance my kids will. As Menn’s piece accurately recounts, these changes are rolling through the Bay Area first because we’re the advance guard of the transition from print news to digital delivery.

But what’s happening here will happen everywhere. A handful of large newspapers that perform national and international newsgathering and that serve as “opinion leaders” will survive and prosper, assuming they don’t make gargantuan business goofs: The Times and the Journal, surely; the Washington Post and the LA Times, probably; a handful of others. Local papers will vanish into the ether; there’s no reason for them not to. I love hearing the last-ditch arguments here, like, “Hey, you can’t read your laptop/cellphone/PDA on the subway!” But of course you will, soon enough. (BART is getting wireless as we speak; even the IRT will get there.)

Even as the newspaper industry begins to see the writing on the wall, the news profession and the practice of journalism are engaged in a difficult but valuable process of self-examination and reinvention. Newspapers may wither but people still need to know what’s happening in the world. The old newspaper bundle-of-stuff that supported a thriving industry from the 19th century to the threshold of the 21st is falling apart. The challenge for all of us — most definitely including us at Salon — is to find new bundles-of-stuff that make enough business sense to continue to support the function of full-time professional reporting.

Today, free online alternatives are numerous and often high-quality. But journalists shouldn’t wring their hands — the competition is healthy. It means there’s even less room for the kind of inertia, laziness and sloppiness that our predecessors often got away with, and that a comfortable, long-established, often monopoly business model protected. As always, we have to provide essential work; as never before, we have to be creative about supporting it.

Waste land

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Today I undertook one of those early 21st-century activities that my grandparents could never have imagined — the Trip to the Household Hazardous Waste Recycling Facility. The used batteries have been piling up in the basement ever since I became a parental maintainer of battery-operated devices. The storeroom had those two cartons of strange substances in spray bottles and old paint cans left by the house’s previous owners. There was that old thermostat with the sticker on it that said, “Contains mercury — dispose of properly.” I did the right thing, finally, after ten years; I loaded up my trunk and hauled my vehicle down 880 to some godforsaken industrial zone in Oakland and waited in line to empty my vehicle of dangerous fluids.

The line was lengthening, and people were turning their engines off and stretching their legs, and the guy in the car behind me walked over and smiled and I realized it was Leonard Pitt — a performance artist who I’d gotten to know back in my theater-critic days. Somehow he and I had both chosen the exact same moment on the exact same day for our once-a-decade pilgrimages. When I knew his work Leonard was a movement artist and teacher and co-founder of the Life on the Water theater; these days he’s working on books — including “A Walking Guide to the Transformation of Paris,” which has been published in French and which Leonard says will soon have a U.S. edition. He has also founded the Berkeley Chocolate Club.

We left our cans of paint and thinner and such and said goodbye. The landscape was post-industrial wasteland, but it felt like East Bay small town anyway.

Working press

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I started working with Andrew Leonard at Salon when he joined us in early 1997, and for several years I happily served as editor for his inspired technology reporting. At the height of the Internet boom I helped him conceive and execute a book project that we unfolded, chapter by chapter, online, in an early instance of a practice that has now become positively trendy. The Free Software Project had to be scuttled as Salon’s business went south, but even in its incomplete form I think it represents some of the best writing anywhere on the history of open source software development.

Today Andrew and Salon unveil the latest effort of this technology writer par excellence — a blog called How the World Works, in which Andrew will dig into some of the thorniest, gnarliest and most complex stories that reveal the strangely mutating dynamics of early 21st-century global capitalism. You can read Andrew’s introduction here. Or read about the strange saga of the run on polysilicon. The How the World Works RSS feed is here (or will be very soon!).