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Miscellany: SAI, Crooked Timber, MediaBugs and “Inception”

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Part Three of “In Defense of Links” coming later this week! Some little stuff in between:

  • I have begun an experiment in crossposting some of my stuff over at Silicon Alley Insider/Business Insider. Same writing, grabbier headlines! As it is, my posts appear here, and then also at Open Salon (where Salon sometimes picks them up). And I pipe them into Facebook for my friends who hang out there. The folks at SAI have picked up some of my pieces before, and I’m curious about how my point of view goes over with this somewhat different crowd.
  • Henry Farrell was kind enough to post a bit about In Defense of Links over at the Crooked Timber blog, and the discussion in comments there is just humblingly good — as well as entertaining. Would every single person who has ever issued a blanket putdown of the worthlessness of blog comments please pay this estimable community of online scholars a visit, and then pipe down? Thank you.
  • Just in time for the release of his new novel, Zero History, William Gibson has a great op-ed in the Times:

    Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory.

    In the ’90s I had the pleasure of interviewing Gibson a couple of times — here’s the 1994 edition, in which we discussed why the technology in his early novels never breaks down, and here’s part of the 1996 one, where he talks about building his first website and predicts the rise of people who “presurf” the Web for you.

    I recently caught up with Inception, and was amazed at how shot-through it is with Gibsonisms. Inception is to Neuromancer as The Matrix was to Philip K. Dick’s worlds: an adapation in everything but formal reality.

“Perfecting Sound Forever”: great book on history of recording

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I’ve written a bit here about the curse of over-compression in recorded music:

For those of us already unhappy with the music industry’s bungling of the transition to digital distribution, here’s another thing we can blame them for. Seeking to have their products “stand out,” they entered a sonic race to the bottom… The irony is that we can only perceive loudness through contrast, so the contemporary recordings sound miasmic, not punchy. When you crank up all the dials to, as Spinal Tap would say, 11, everything sounds the same, your ears get tired, and you wonder why music doesn’t sound as good as it did when you were younger.

So when I discovered, belatedly, that Greg Milner has written an entire book about the birth, history and present plight of recording, I grabbed it. It’s called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.
If, like me, you have always cared about sound quality but never had much of a vocabulary or structure for discussing or understanding it, it’s a wonderful read.

Milner’s tale starts with Edison’s famous “sound tests” (where they’d pit live vs. recording in front of an audience) and carries through to our MP3-muddled present. It’s fascinating to see how certain threads follow us from the days of sound cylinders up to the iPod era. Each successive generation of technology promises — and, for everyday listeners, seems to deliver — the utopia of perfect, life-like sound, sound captured so well that you cannot distinguish the recording from reality. But you soon realize a truth that Milner elegantly excavates: this “reality” is a chimera — an unobtainium of the ear. Our norms for “realistic sound” are hopelessly subjective. If Victrola recordings that crackle in our ears today sounded like “reality” to 1920s listeners, what will music-lovers of the 2120s think about the over-compressed recordings our culture is now producing?

There’s so much that’s fun and unexpected in Perfecting Sound Forever: the early religious wars between the proponents of acoustic recording and believers in the electrical approach that won out (presaging today’s analog vs. digital argument); how the advent of recording tape began to move us from the notion of sound reproduction to the idea of composing in the studio; how competition between radio stations upped the compression ante until we reached the point where the Red Hot Chili Peppers became “the band that clipped itself to death”; and much more.

Music criticism has fallen on hard times today, what with the fragmentation of the audience and the collapse of the industry. But Milner’s book is one case where writing about music most certainly isn’t like dancing about architecture — it’s more like dancing with ideas. Here’s a taste:

We never fully agree on what perfect sound is, so we keep trying, defining our sonic ideals against those of others, playing the game to the best of our abilities, in whatever position we occupy on the field. We add more reverb, we pump up the bass, we boost the treble, we compress dynamic range, we send the band back into the studio because we don’t hear a single — and we then remix that single, we press the song on vinyl, on disc, as a ghostly collection of ones and zeros that we send around the world. We do what we can to make it sound right and then we hear the sound flow from the speakers and we call it perfect.

With this post I intend to begin more regularly reviewing the books I’m reading, right here on Wordyard. Because, as my friend Laura Miller keeps reminding us, readers are scarcer than writers — or, as Gary Shteyngart was just saying on Fresh Air, “Nobody wants to read but everybody wants to write.”

Well, I intend to keep doing both! And, just so you know, I will also be wiring up my links to Amazon with partner codes; these will funnel a tiny bit of change back to me so I can keep buying those books.

“Stealing MySpace” review in Washington Post

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It’s been about a decade since I did my last book review for the Washington Post, of a Marshall McLuhan biography, so it was time for a return engagement, I guess! Yesterday’s Post featured my review of Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin’s new book on the story of MySpace. (Here’s the book’s site.)

The book is very thorough, dogged business reporting, worth reading if you want to know about MySpace’s origins in the murk of the Web’s direct-marketing demimonde or if you’re interested in the corporate maneuvering around Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 acquisition of the company. It offers only some brief glimpses of the culture of MySpace, though, and I think MySpace is more interesting for the vast panorama of human behavior it provides than for its limited innovations as a Web company or for the ups and downs of its market value. Here’s the review’s conclusion:

Angwin tries to cast MySpace as “The first Hollywood Internet company” — freewheeling, glitzy, “where crazy creative people run the show” — in contrast to what I guess we’d have to call the Internet Internet companies, like Silicon Valley-based Facebook, where programmers rule the roost. But that’s a bit of a false distinction: Programmers can be crazily creative people, too, and plenty of creative types have learned to master technology. (See, for example, Pixar.)

You can’t help getting the impression from “Stealing MySpace” that MySpace’s founders, however smart and dogged they may have been, were also opportunists who simply got lucky. That leaves us wondering about the wisdom of Murdoch’s acquisition. Facebook surpassed MySpace long ago in innovation, buzz and, more recently, actual traffic, according to some tallies. It has thereby stolen MySpace’s claim to being “most popular” and rendered Angwin’s subtitle obsolete.

Sic transit gloria Webby. Was Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace a savvy coup or just a panicked act of desperation, like Time Warner’s far more costly AOL mistake? It will take at least a few more years before we know for sure. By then, no doubt, both MySpace and Facebook will have been elbowed aside by some newcomer nobody has heard of today.

The Gift keeps on giving

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I read the recent New York Times magazine profile of Lewis Hyde with some interest. As it happened, I wrote a review of Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift just about 25 years ago as one of my early assignments at the Boston Phoenix. My editor at the time, Kit Rachlis, thought I might find Hyde’s uncategorizable mixture of literary criticism, sociology and anthropology intriguing, and he was right. (As the profession of editing moves into eclipse, let’s not forget that this matching of writer and subject is one of the subtle arts that we do not yet know how to automate.)

At the time, Hyde’s effort to establish a language of value separate from the financial marketplace spoke hauntingly to me — as a disaffected young liberal stunned by the Reaganite rise of free-market, anti-government ideology. The book’s themes feel somehow timely again today, at the end of the arc of history that began a quarter-century ago, as we scrabble through the ruins that said ideology has left of our economy and try to imagine rebuilding along different lines.

I was fascinated to learn from the Times piece that in the years since, The Gift has become a volume of almost totemic stature to writers like David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and others whom I admire. I’d written that Hyde’s book would “probably be most read and appreciated by those who already grasp its lessons, the visionary writers and artists from whom Hyde draws so many examples.” It appears I was right. But I’m glad to know that the book has had such perennial success — and that Hyde, now a fellow at the Berkman center, has moved on to studying the concept of the “commons,” newly relevant in the Web era. I’ll look forward to his work on that topic.

In the meantime, if you want to read more, I’ve reposted that 1983 review of The Gift, which holds up pretty well, I think (though today I’d write a less involuted lead!).

Sarah Lacy’s Once You’re Lucky: Money doesn’t change everything

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I’ve just finished Sarah Lacy’s book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, and I’m feeling a little…green. Lacy’s portrait of this decade’s Web industry is so relentlessly shaped by the yardstick of cash — how much money this entrepreneur made, how many millions that startup is valued at — that by the end of the book, you can’t help having absorbed a little of that world view.

As I put down the volume, I found myself thinking, gee, why didn’t I start a company in my dorm room and pocket tens of millions before I turned 30? Then I slapped myself in the face a couple of times and reminded myself that the last time I lived in a dorm room, the Web didn’t even exist — and that when I set out to become a writer the idea wasn’t, how can I make millions, but rather, is it possible to support myself doing what I love? (I was lucky enough to have the world answer “yes!”)

To be fair, Lacy’s a business reporter; she’s written a business book; business is all about money. She paints a colorful and absorbing portrait of the world of Silicon Valley’s latest wave of smart kids to strike it rich. On the other hand, I can’t accept that her account offers an accurate portrait of “the rise of Web 2.0.” Because, in a way, I feel like I was there, too, at least in the earlier phases, talking with many of the same people and companies that Lacy writes about, showing up at many of the same conferences, witnessing the same phenomena. And it just looked, and felt, different to me: at the start, it was much less about retaining control of one’s company and much more about giving control to one’s users.

First, the good stuff about Once You’re Lucky: It’s full of amusing anecdotes, some of them illuminating, and it offers some valuable insights into the motivation of many of today’s young Web entrepreneurs and the complexity of their relationships with their financiers. It gives a great tour of how the startup and venture capital games have changed over the past decade, as the cost of launching a company has dwindled, reducing the need for big upfront investments that dilute founders’ stakes, even as the prospect of everybody-gets-rich IPOs has grown rarer.

I fault the book in a few areas. In tracing the emergence of the Web 2.0 era’s emphasis on social networking and user contributions, Once You’re Lucky is neglectful of the long history of these phenomena that predates the Web 2.0 era. From Amazon book reviews to the Mining Company (later About.com) to the AOL “guides” and on and on, the so-called “Web 1.0” era was actually full of content created by “the crowd.” Its most overinflated and notoriously flaky IPO, in fact, that of TheGlobe.com, was entirely a “community play” (though in a way that betrayed the best possibilities of online community). The Web of the day just wasn’t as efficient as the later generation of companies at organizing the material contributed by users, and there weren’t nearly as many contributors, and Google hadn’t come along yet to help the rest of the Web find the contributions (and to help the companies profit from them).

My biggest beef with Lacy’s book is that its choice of which companies to focus on seems capricious. Maybe it was just based on who she got access to. Plainly, Lacy got lots of great material from one of her central figures, Paypal cofounder Max Levchin, and she paints a thorough profile of the driven entrepreneur. But, his company, Slide, just isn’t all that interesting or innovative. After reading several chapters about it I still can’t tell you exactly what the company’s driving idea is. It does slideshows on MySpace! It’s big on widgets! It out-Facebooks Facebook with apps like Super Poke! But, you know, if you were stuck in the proverbial elevator with Levchin, could he actually tell you what Slide is all about?

There are other stories in the book whose inclusion makes more immediate sense. Few today would argue against Facebook’s significance, and it’s worth the time Lacy spends on it (though one might look for a little more skepticism). Ning may or may not prove important, but Marc Andreessen’s story is valuable in itself. What’s most interesting about Digg is its model for group editing (which, again, is based on “Web 1.0” roots via Slashdot), not its so-far-unfulfilled quest to sell itself.

Lacy might have delivered a more comprehensive portrait of Web 2.0 by offering more than cursory mentions of the companies that, in my book, really created the template for that phenomenon: Flickr, Delicious, the short-lived Oddpost (which got absorbed into Yahoo Mail). These small startups, growing like mushrooms out of the mulch of dead dotcom treetrunks, pioneered virtually all of the tools and technologies we now think of as “Web 2.0”: easy sharing of media creations; tagging of content to create user-generated “folksonomies”; Ajax techniques for inside-the-browser applications; and so on.

It seems that even though these services and companies were at the heart of the invention of Web 2.0, they don’t figure prominently in Lacy’s narrative because, by the financial yardstick, they were relatively small potatoes (all three were acquired relatively early by Yahoo for amounts rumored to be in the low tens of millions). Levchin is a lot richer than the founders and creators of these companies, but in my view, their work was far more significant.

As someone in the middle of writing a book on a related topic that is inevitably going to face similar criticism (how could you write about this blogger and not that one?), I know that Lacy couldn’t possibly cover every significant company. It’s just not clear what criteria she used to make her choices beyond the will-o’-the-wisp that is market valuation (especially wispy when your company is not actually traded on the market).

So this is where I say: the importance of a company does not lie in how rich it makes its founders, but rather in how widely its ideas spread. The business reporter who is too easily mesmerized by the number of zeroes in a company’s valuation is like the political reporter who is only interested in the horse race.

By themselves, numbers are dull. To me, the fluctuations of a company’s market value, like the ebb and flow of a politician’s polling numbers, is only of interest as part of a larger picture: How is that company, or politician, influencing our world?

[The book’s site is here, and here’s Lacy’s blog. Katie Hafner’s critical review is here. The SF Chronicle review by Marcus Banks is here.]

Marshall McLuhan and the Web: Hot, cold, or…

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Today Nick Carr — whose new book, The Big Switch, comes out in January — has an interesting piece about McLuhan and today’s Web. Although Wired hoisted the Canadian media theorist into the digital era as its “patron saint” (the company’s book imprint even republished a couple of his collaborations with Quentin Fiore), it’s always been difficult to figure out how, exactly, to apply McLuhan’s theories to the Web. I took a stab at it in 1995 (an effort to which Carr kindly links), suggesting that the Web was neither a “hot” medium nor a “cold” one but rather some weird new lukewarm hybrid:

It remains almost exclusively a medium that transmits and reproduces vast quantities of text at high speeds. McLuhan interpreted the evolution of writing from ideograms and stone tablets to alphabetic characters and print reproduction as a “hotting up” “to repeatable print intensity.” By that standard, the Net is boiling.

On the other hand, its functional characteristics match those McLuhan identified as cool. There’s no question that the Internet is among the most participatory media ever invented, like the cool telephone. And its cultural patterns — with its oral-tradition-style transmission of myth and its collective anarchy — match those of McLuhan’s tribal global village.

…McLuhan said that all media are tranquilizers, but these hot-and-cold media have an especially potent numbing effect: They seduce us into lengthy engagement, offer us a feeling of empowerment and then glut our senses till we become indifferent.

My view of the Web has probably grown more positive since then; my own experience over the past 12 years has been one of growing engagement rather than creeping indifference. I think I was too pessimistic about the downside of glut.

But I think McLuhan would probably have shared that pessimism. He’s usually remembered in his high-priest-of-the-’60s mode, as a critic all too willing to dance on the grave of print. What I found when I dug deeper into McLuhan’s writings in the course of reviewing his biography for the Washington Post in 1997 (that piece is no longer available online so I’ve posted it here) was considerably more complex. He was, it turned out, most decidedly a lover of print himself.

In a 1959 letter, decades before the popularization of the Internet, he predicted: “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer, with all its languages and cultures recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant and impossible, no matter how precious.”

Ultimately, McLuhan’s perspective remains valuable more as a provocation to critical thought than as a fully worked out critical framework. He overloaded so many meanings on terms like “hot” and “cold” media that they could come to mean whatever you wanted them to mean. But there remains lasting value in McLuhan’s grand challenge to us — that we step out of the media bath in order to understand its effects on our organisms. What we most remember is his descriptive writing that mapped the impact of new media forms. We forget his prescriptive goal, of “immunizing” us from the worst influences of those media.

Carr reminds us of this in recalling McLuhan’s prophetic warning about the manipulative power of corporate media: “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”
[tags]marshall mcluhan, media studies, nicholas carr[/tags]

Interview: David Weinberger

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This seems to have been my “interview very smart people” month. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend an hour talking with David Weinberger about his fascinating new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. The full interview with Weinberger is now up at Salon.

I highly recommend the book: it’s a sophisticated, deep discussion of one of the issues that the Chandler developers in Dreaming in Code were grappling with, as they tried to break personal digital information out of application-based “silos” to create the sort of “miscellaneous soup” that Weinberger celebrates.

Everything is MiscellaneousIf I have any disagreement with Weinberger, it’s that I think he is so enthusiastic about the manifold opportunities digital organization presents — and so gifted at explaining them to us — that he is a little dismissive of the frictional drag created by practical implementation details. He makes a compelling theoretical case for “third order” systems that let us try out multiple organizational schemas. But in practice I think a lot of this stuff remains out of reach and will continue to do so for a long while. In my and I think many users’ experiences, the sheer difficulty of creating good software means that the digital realm remains far less responsive to our changing needs than is modeled in Everything is Miscellaneous. To paraphrase the great William Gibson line, the miscellaneous is here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Following the break, a relevant chunk of the interview which didn’t make the cut for Salon (pretty high geek quotient).
[Read more…]

Denise Caruso’s “Intervention”: What we don’t know can hurt us

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Biotech is not a field I’ve immersed myself in, and I have been — like, perhaps, many of you — content to place a simple boundary on my worries about its impact, on the assumption that smart and dedicated people were already deeply engaged in assessing and managing the risks we are taking in that area.

Then I read Denise Caruso’s eye-opening new book, Intervention, and realized that such complacency is a very bad bet. Intervention is a passionately argued, carefully documented critique of our society’s narrow approach to defining, and dismissing, the potential risks of biotech products.

I worked with Caruso many years ago at the San Francisco Examiner, and since then have followed her career as a technology pundit and more recently a nonprofit think-tank founder with admiration, mostly from afar. When I heard that she’d self-published her book after a publishing-house deal fell through, I set up an interview with her. It’s now live on Salon. Here’s a brief excerpt:

You spent years writing about the technology industry. How did this book come about?

It was sheerly out of reaction to meeting [molecular biologist] Roger Brent. He laughs when I say this, and I say it with all the love in my heart, but he’s one of the most macho scientists I’ve ever met in my life. His lineage — in academics, that means who your Ph.D. advisor was — is a guy named Mark Ptashne, whose Ph.D. advisor was James Watson. When I met Roger, his attitude was: What’s a nice girl like you doing being afraid of eating genetically modified food? Don’t you know that you could eat 10 kilos of Bt potatoes [Bacillus thuringiensis is used to modify crops transgenically for insect resistance], and nothing would happen to you?

I didn’t know that much about biology. But when he said that, I said, “I don’t think you actually know that to be true. I don’t know how you could know that to be true.” And we went back and forth on it, and he finally conceded — which I was really surprised about. He said, “So how do we protect the public, but not stop science from progressing at the same time?”

Steven Levy talks about his iPod book

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Steven Levy came to Sylvia Paull‘s Berkeley CyberSalon at the Hillside Club tonight to talk about the iPod and his new book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. I haven’t read the book yet (Farhad Manjoo has, and his Salon review is a wonderful meditation on what, both good and bad, the iPod is doing to the experience of listening to music). There’s a nice excerpt online in Wired; Levy’s also got a blog on the topic.

Levy started off by largely disavowing his superlative title. Of course, he admitted, the iPod is far from perfect, from its too-easily-scuffable skin to its too-confining conception of digital rights management. He said the device represents more of a “perfect storm,” a perfect summation of all the issues that arise when a medium goes digital.

I have to say I didn’t find this too persuasive (maybe he makes a better case in the book!); it might be better just to say, “Book titles are chosen to get your attention,” and move on. Because everything else Levy has to say about the iPod is fascinating, amusing and important.

Levy sees the iPod’s shuffle mode as the key to its meaning — so much so that he got playful with the book, writing each chapter as a discrete unit so the whole book could be put on shuffle mode. There are four different sequencings of The Perfect Thing out there; no telling which one you’ll get. (Once upon a time, in my previous life as an arts critic, I did something similar in channeling the spirit of John Cage for a review of a celebration of his music.)

He asked the Hillside Club crowd how many listened to their iPod with shuffle on; I’d say about half the audience raised their hands. I wasn’t one — though I find shuffle an amusing novelty, mostly I love digital music for the control it offers me, the chance to be my own DJ, so why would I want to go random? After listening to Levy, I think I’ll try it more; he made a good case for seeing what interesting juxtapositions turn up between the music you’ve chosen and the moment you’re experiencing.

I asked Levy whether the pro-shuffle and anti-shuffle tribes divide by age, hypothesizing that maybe a forty-something like me is still rebelling against growing up listening to bad radio, whereas a younger person who grew up with digital music might be craving more serendipity. But Levy said he hasn’t noticed an age skew between pro- and anti-shuffle-ites (he’s a bit older than me and is a shuffle-ite himself). He guessed that it’s more like the division between people who have the patience to organize their lives around PIM (personal information management) software and those who can’t be bothered. That makes sense — the PIM devotees (I’ve long been one) would also have the patience to program their own listening.

Levy also talked about the strange experience people have when they find that their ostensibly random shuffle mode seems to play favorites; for him, Steely Dan just kept on showing up. A column he wrote on this topic evoked a torrent of amusing email, some of which he read. Deeper investigation among mathematicians led him to conclude that Apple wasn’t lying when it said that shuffle really is random — and that the experience people had of shuffle “favorites” is actually a statistical phenomenon known as “clustering” that turns up in nearly any random distribution.

Lee Felsenstein asked Levy about what the iPod’s triumph has done to narrow public space, now that so many of us are walking around with our own private soundtracks. Levy’s answer made sense for a New Yorker: “When I’m on the subway, I don’t really intend to do much social networking.” But what about outside of dense urban conglomerations (the kinds of places Steven Johnson celebrates in The Ghost Map)? Do we need more alienation in the cookie-cutter exurban communities where human connections get more and more tenuous? The “don’t bug me” message is useful on mean streets; but out in the vast wasteland, iPod-induced solitude may be worth worrying about.
[tags]steven levy, ipod, shuffle[/tags]

Steven Johnson interview — plus: where I’ve been

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Tonight on Salon’s cover — in our brand-spanking new home page design, which we’re quite proud of — you’ll find my interview with Steven Johnson. It’s about his fine new book, The Ghost Map, as well as sundry other topics, including his new tool for organizing the local Web, Outside.in; why cities aren’t environmental disasters; why nuclear terrorism is more of a long-term danger to city dwellers than bioterrorism or epidemic; how innovators change a scientific consensus; and more.

Johnson has been one of my favorite authors ever since his Interface Culture, which I wrote about back in 1997, so I relished the opportunity to talk with him once more.

Apologies for light blogging here. My spare time has been devoted to hunkering down on a big freelance project. It’s almost done, so normal programming here — including a return to Code Reads after an unplanned one-week break — will resume shortly. I have a couple of posts I wanted to make from OOPSLA, and a few other interesting things lined up.
[tags]Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map, cities[/tags]