Joseph Weizenbaum — creator of the Eliza chatterbot and author of “Computer Power and Human Reason” — passed away recently. Running through all the obits was a quote that seemed to summarize this computing pioneer’s critical perspective on technology:

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay. There are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they can sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

This line appeared in outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Valleywag. Caught my eye, too.

The original quotation was in a New York Times article from 1999. But it’s not the whole story.

Weizenbaum wrote a letter to the Times after the article appeared:

I did say that, but I went on to say, “There are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.”

Amazing what a little context can do!

Interestingly, although Weizenbaum’s critique of computing centers on the limitations of algorithmic problem-solving, it was Google’s pattern-matching prowess that unearthed this connection for me. I’d never have found it on my own.

Weizenbaum, whose family fled Nazi Germany in the ’30s, was right to urge us not to discount the value of the human compass in navigating our lives, and not to abdicate our judgment to machines. But I think he might have been a little too ready to dismiss the ability of machines to help us find informational gold and contextual pearls.

This past summer I paid a happy visit to the Motley Fool — in downtown Alexandria, just across the river from D.C. proper — to meet the technical team there and give a talk on Dreaming in Code.

I was pretty impressed with the people I met and the lively atmosphere at the company — unpretentious but serious about the important stuff. Anyway, the Fool is now looking for a new CTO. I know from experience that that’s a tough position to fill, but maybe one of you reading this is interested — or knows someone who’d be. More info here.

Regular readers here know that I count Josh Kornbluth among my very oldest friends. (”Oldest” as in long-term, of course; Josh is only a month or so older than me. Why is English so balky around this?) I’m proud to say I knew Josh before he was “Josh the incredibly funny monologuist” and “Josh the guy who creates those monologues by improvising in front of live audiences” and “Josh the great interviewer on KQED.” I am one of a tiny group of people who is qualified to say, based on personal experience, that Josh is, beyond those things, also a really great copy editor. Or at least he was, way back when; who knows what the decades have done to his punctuation?

Last weekend I attended the opening of Kornbluth’s new show, “Citizen Josh,” at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. All Kornbluth’s work is autobiographical, but the new piece goes even further than its predecessors, “Love and Taxes” and “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” in making a visceral connection with public life and the political moment.

The theme is, how can a passive, inward-turning citizen find it in himself to become engaged? The tale includes, among many other things, a college thesis that is a quarter-century overdue; a prematurely born baby rescued by a father’s determination and insight; and a misshapen play structure in a Berkeley park that offers good cell-phone reception, lessons in modern art and a hidden history of radical democracy.

“Citizen Josh” has got all the stuff Kornbluth’s fans have come to expect from one of his performances: stories that loop and twist through what seem like hopelessly overextended digressions only to pull themselves together into beautiful perfect knots; veins of playful, offbeat humor running the length of the 80-minute performance, submerging for a few minutes, then popping back into the light; and a passion for trying to understand just what we are all doing together on this planet. The show is a great chance to see a great talent contending with a great issue. You should see it!

As an adviser to Jay Rosen’s newassignment.net I thought the best way to help the project, and learn in the process, would be to participate. So I signed up to interview Howard Rheingold for NewAssignment’s Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced inquiry into the nature of crowdsourcing.

The full interview is now posted. I didn’t, in truth, do things a whole lot differently than I’d do them were I conducting the interview for Salon or any other more conventional outlet. What may be less conventional is what happens to this material from here on in. My interview was one of dozens that are now up at the Zero site. The material is going to be somehow shaped by Assignment Zero itself, and also I think for Wired, and it will be fascinating to see how Jay and his staff orchestrate everything. It’s not the pure anarchy of the blogosphere; it’s not the traditional writer/editor pipeline of the old-fashioned newsroom. It’s — something we might be discovering. Or at least learning about.

It was a pleasure talking to Rheingold about the state of the participatory Web. I have always found him far less a starry-eyed idealist or utopian than he is sometimes painted. He’s been thinking about how technology and online social practices “coevolve” longer than virtually anyone else, and his perspective continues to be incisive and challenging. Here’s a choice passage:

Crowdsourcing is a name for something that’s new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it’s going to have that connotation. I’m going to bet that “crowdsourcing” is what most people know it as five years from now. And “non-market-incented commons-based peer production” is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can’t argue with that.

The journalist, who died in a car crash near the Dumbarton Bridge here in the Bay Area, was 73. (SF Chron; Mercury News.)

I first read his 1972 masterpiece, The Best and the Brightest, as a curious teenager trying to figure out how and why our country was stuck fighting a war that could not be won on behalf of people who plainly did not want us to do so. It’s fair to say that the book shaped my view of U.S. foreign policy, and of the need to curb our government’s predilection for fighting unnecessary wars. Halberstam’s chronicle of the arrogance of power illustrated how the confidence of Kennedy’s Harvard-trained managers meshed with the cupidity of the Cold War military-industrial complex to produce the Vietnam quagmire. The title, in other words, was ironic.

In some of his later works Halberstam allowed his reputation as a Pulitzer-garlanded star to inflate his style. But The Best and the Brightest was taut and tragic. Today it reminds us that the “Vietnam complex” was not some debilitating national illness that needed to be shucked off; it represented experience of imperial power’s limits, hard-won through an ill-begotten war. How shameful that those lessons vanished from Washington so soon, and that another generation of Americans must once more seek the answers I found in Halberstam’s book.

UPDATE: This from Clyde Haberman’s Times obit:

William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

Josh Kornbluth, the monologuist and KQED host, has posted an account of a Kafkaesque experience with MySpace that should give any operator of an online business pause.

It seems that some malicious person posted a phony profile under Josh’s name, filled the profile page with gross porn, and then sent Josh’s superiors at KQED outraged emails demanding that he be fired. Josh’s posting offers a painfully vivid account of how hard it can be to attempt to communicate directly with a company that has chosen to make itself unavailable to the public.

MySpace’s meteoric rise is legendary, of course (it claims 70 million users these days). The company is in the crosshairs of the online decency brigade, under pressure from its new corporate owners (Rupert Murdoch) to clean up its act and open new revenue streams, and in constant danger of losing whatever buzz it possesses to whichever site is next on the fickle teen radar.

Still: If you’re doing business, you have to make it possible for human beings to get in touch with your company. Online enterprises always want to shunt all communications into online channels, but, you know, if someone was impersonating you, framing you as a perv and then trying to get you fired, you might want a phone number to call, too.

Maybe MySpace hasn’t consciously chosen to make it hard for people to get in touch with it; maybe it’s just overwhelmed by success. Either way, if Josh’s tale is any indication, it seems pretty clear that MySpace has lost control of its pages — and begun what will doubtless be a meteoric slide into a swamp of spam, phony pages and scammy crap.

I was lucky enough, as a high school senior in New York City in the mid-’70s, to take an elective course in “urban studies.” The course consisted of reading a bunch of real books, not textbooks, and talking about them. (Later I came to understand that virtually every college course, at least in the humanities and social sciences, proceeded along the same lines.)

I’ve forgotten all but one of the books we read. But the one I remember, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I remember vividly, for its calm, reasonable, and, to me, profoundly persuasive rejection of the Big Central Plans approach to urban design — which had previously made perfect sense to my 17-year-old mind. Diversity matters, Jacobs argued; people crave variety in their experience of their surroundings, and engagement with other people, and living cities offer people wide and varied opportunities for hanging shingles and rubbing elbows and delighting others.

Jacobs’ book gave me a lifelong, visceral understanding of principles that I would later see popping up in other, unexpected contexts, thanks to writers like Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson, and experiences I’d have in helping build one small corner of the online cityscape.

Jacobs died today at 89 [thanks to Kottke for the news].

## Mitch Kapor resumes his blogging at a new Web address with updates about Chandler and Foxmarks, a new project he has launched — it’s a Firefox extension for seamlessly synchronizing bookmarks across multiple instances of the Web browser.

## Chad Dickerson, a Duke alumnus, writes about the sense of privilege at that university in light of the Lacrosse team rape scandal there.

## The full text of the great Bruce Sterling talk at ETech is up here. Bonus: audio from Sterling’s South by Southwest talk.

I loved the two Bloggercons I participated in, and I share the enthusiasm expressed by Dave Winer and the BarCamp people and the MashupCamp people for the whole “unconference” idea — the notion that great gatherings can happen when you put great people together in rooms without programming lots of speeches and panels and product demos.

Still, I’m not ready to give up on the occasional old-fashioned lecture, under the right circumstances, and there are some people in whose presence I will gladly say, “I am an audience member — you talk, I’ll shut up.” Bruce Sterling is one of them. He spoke tonight here at Etech.

I haven’t heard Sterling in several years, and I’d forgotten his peculiar cadence — a kind of incantatory precision that you first mistake for superciliousness and then realize, no, wait, those pauses and touches of drawl aren’t affectation, he’s just savoring those words, he loves them, he doesn’t want to say goodbye to them quite yet.

Sterling’s ostensible subject was “The Internet of Things,” and he talked a bit about the stuff he’s been talking about for some time now: spimes, physical objects trackable in space and time, material things that are — like items on today’s Web — linkable, rankable, sortable and searchable. It’s a fascinating topic, even the second or third time around; but the heart of tonight’s talk was a series of observations on language and technology.

“Computer,” Sterling argued, was simply an awful name for these machines that arrived in the middle of last century. “Computer” led us straight to “artificial intelligence,” down the dead-end street that had us thinking the machines could become smart — that they were “thinking machines.” We should have picked a word more like what the French chose, “Ordinateur,” suggesting that the devices, uh, ordinate things. They are card shuffling tools. They do what we see the Google-ized Web doing so well today — link, rank, sort and search. “I think we could have done better words,” Sterling said — and if we had, we might have gotten Google 20 years sooner.

He went on to parse some Web 2.0-speak, first decoding Tim O’Reilly’s definition of the phrase, then dissecting scholar Alan Liu’s critique of the phenomenon, at every turn reminding this crowd of “alpha geeks” that the labels they pick for their innovations really do make a difference.

“You don’t want to freeze your language too early,” Sterling advised — that stops creativity in its tracks. Hype, he suggested, is underrated: “Hype is a system-call on your attention.” Buying into it blindly is a disaster, of course, but “if you soberly track its development, hype is revealing…. In politics, the opposite of hype is the truth, but in technology, the opposite of hype is argot, jargon” — language that has no traction in the real world. And “if no one is dismissing you as hype, you are not being loud enough.”

Sterling cited a recent interview with Adam Greenfield, the author of a new book called Everyware that’s also about a version of “the Internet of Things.” In the interview, Greenfield said he coined the term “Everyware” to describe his take on the concept others have labeled “ubiquitous computing” because “I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles.”

But wait, Sterling cried — “getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles” is exactly where we should be when we’re inventing new things. This is “the wetlands of language”, where we “use words to figure out what things mean.” The struggles count; they help us understand and shape what we’re doing. Choosing a label for a technology, he argued, “really matters — it’s like christening a baby.”

There was much more. If the good folks at ITConversations post the audio, or if Sterling posts a text, I’ll link so you can experience the whole thing — including the full shtick about Alan Turing’s head in a box, which I’m afraid I failed to take good notes on, since I was too busy laughing.

It would take a good video, though, to capture the funniest moment of the evening: Sterling was displaying examples of “receding tech” (”things that do not blog or link”) — a rusty engine block half-buried in desert sand, a mountain of discarded tires — when the projection screen flashed a warning window: YOU ARE NOW RUNNING ON RESERVE POWER. Then the laptop went to sleep. He was wrapping up, anyway.

My friend Josh Kornbluth, in Philadelphia to perform his great Ben Franklin solo show as part of the city’s celebration of the Franklin birthday tercentenary, got robbed — but that didn’t stop him from posting this moving little story and tribute to Franklin, the power of song, and more. Go read it.