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## Mitch Kapor’s talk at Web 2.0 — a call to technologists to help propel a new populist reform movement — deserves much wider circulation beyond the conference hall: “We’re thinking a lot about the election just a few short weeks away. No matter who wins, I believe the kind of fundamental change we need to repair a damaged system will not come from the political establishment of either party. It must come from a popular reform movement, one which is heavily Internet-based, and comprised of a broad cross section of the American people.” Kapor has posted the full text
 over at Of By and For. Alternet has a good interview with Kapor as well.

## William Gibson is blogging again. He explains his return to the fray: “Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succinctly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln. And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, ‘At times, to be silent is to lie.’ ” [via Tim Jarrett]

## Real Live Preacher’s book is out! It’s been a great gift to read this Texan preacher-turned-blogger’s moving tales from the pulpit and beyond here on Salon blogs. Now new stories and some of the best of the Web stuff is collected between hard covers. Check it out. (You can buy it at the Preacher’s favorite San Antonio independent boookseller.)

## “Joshtoberfest” in the Bay Area: Josh Kornbluth’s got a new movie of his autobiographical monologue “Red Diaper Baby” opening at the Mill Valley Film Festival and then at two theaters. And his great and timely monologue, “Ben Franklin Unplugged,” returns for a new production at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. More details here. Josh — who I’m proud to count as a longtime friend — is certainly one of the funniest people alive, and he has held tight over the years to his artistic compass, his political bearings and his remarkable impromptu punning ability. “Red Diaper Baby” is where you will, for instance, find Josh’s priceless joke about Communist economics: “We’ve learned from history that it’s very important after feudalism to stop in capitalism before moving on to socialism — because that’s where you get your appliances.”

## Alex Cohen’s Underground Clips site is an interesting and increasingly valuable experiment in fair-use-based posting of politically relevant video clips.

## I’m experimenting with this new bullet-point style. I used to use one that was an image, and that seems like overkill. I want to maintain ASCII purity. I’ll probably keep, uh, iterating.

Random links

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This fast-cut edit of Republican convention rhetoric strips the Bush campaign down to its essence.

John Darnielle, the amazing singer-songwriter mastermind of the Mountain Goats, also runs a Web site of writing on popular music called Last Plane to Jakarta. He recently switched to using blog software on his site, so there’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to. I have.

Flickr, the superb photo-sharing web application I wrote about last month, is now selling “pro” accounts for people who expect to upload a lot of photos. (“Preview pricing” is about $40/year, discounted for now from the planned full price of $60.) I’ve signed up for two years. Great design and good service online are worth paying for.

Link-o-rama

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For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.

The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:

  We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia. As the “predominant world power,” it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that’s foolish from a more long-term perspective.

Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)

  There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures. But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there’s a growing middle-class of fame – a whole world of people who aren’t really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they’re fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious).

Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:

  I’m often told that social networks are the future of the sociable Internet. Guess what? They were the cornerstone of the Internet, always. What is different is that we’ve tried to mechanically organize them, to formalize them. Doing so did not make social networks suddenly appear; formalization meant that they became less serious, more game-like. All other Internet social networks are embedded into another set of practices, not seeking an application to validate their existence.

Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?

Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:

  The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me.

And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class:

  “Journalism is chores. Journalism is bondage unless you can see yourself as a private eye inquiring into the mysteries of a new phenomenon.”

The robot heart of software

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Isaac Asimov was one of the science fiction authors whose works I avidly consumed when I was in my early adolescence, and though even then I could tell that his writing lacked a certain level of nuance and style, I loved it for its cleverness and its imagination. Standing at the podium at science fiction conventions, expounding on any subject under the sun, he was like a polymath Woody Allen with the neurosis circuits disabled, and his optimistic rationalism — even in the 1970s, an era during which optimism was hard to make credible — was infectious. (Read Cory Doctorow’s appreciation of Asimov in Wired for more.)

So I don’t think I’ll be able to bear going to see the new movie “inspired by” his “I, Robot” stories — those inventive chestnuts about what happens when robots programmed with “the three laws of robotics” tangle with the chaos of human affairs. (Chris Suellentrop in Slate offers an overview of how the movie betrays Asimov that makes me feel my decision is completely logical.) But I was glad to read this editorial in the Sunday New York Times, which thoughtfully nailed exactly what made these stories such fun:

  Each of the stories in “I, Robot” works out a problem in the application of these laws, usually caused by an unforeseen implication or contradiction. Asimov’s robots are perfectly logical, and therefore all the real problems are caused by humans, who are shockingly unaware of the way their intentions and emotions run counter to logic. What look like manufacturing flaws in the robots nearly always turn out to be faults in the way a command was articulated. Humans, it turns out, are mainly good at bossing other humans around. Our computers remind us of this every day.

The “I, Robot” stories, in other words, are exercises in logical debugging that happen to take the form of miniature mysteries.

Saying “the real problems are caused by humans” is, of course, awfully close to saying, “It’s the user’s fault!” — an excuse that conscientious software developers and designers shun. Yet, as I dig deeper into work on my book about software, I’m learning a lot more about exactly how hard it is to make the absolute logic of computing serve the messy ambiguities of human desire, when all the pressure of the undertaking is to make things work the other way — to force us human beings to conform to the rigorous precision of machines. Asimov’s wonderful stories pre-imagined this dilemma for us. Maybe someday he’ll find a filmmaker who can do his particular imagination justice.

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked

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Two decades ago I had the odd and daunting experience of defending my undergraduate thesis, on several of Shakespeare’s plays, before a panel of scholars. While hardly as rigorous as the real orals a PhD thesis is supposed to be subjected to, this encounter was part of what my department at Harvard required for graduation, and I faced it with some trepidation.

When I walked in, I was introduced to William Alfred, the playwright, poet and English professor. I hadn’t studied with Alfred, and had no idea what to expect from the rumpled man. He broke the ice with a simple question: At the start of “King Lear,” Cordelia refuses her royal father’s demand for a profession of love. There’s a foreign phrase that describes her act in legal terms — what is it?

I’m not sure how many layers of my brain I had to dig through to find it, but somehow I retrieved the desired answer, the medieval label for an injury to the royal office: “Lese majeste!” Alfred’s eyes twinkled; my response seemed to satisfy my interrogators’ basic requirement of literacy, and from there, all went swimmingly. (Alfred, a brilliant and generous soul with whom, alas, I only had a handful of further conversations, died in 1999.)

Of all things, this distant recollection popped into my head after I finally caught up with Michael Moore’s much-debated “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Many words have already been flung across the political spectrum about the movie. I will limit my contributions to this one phrase: What Moore has, I think, accomplished, particularly in the movie’s more coherent and better-assembled first half, is an outrageous and highly effective act of lese majeste.

George Bush campaigned as an informal man of the people, and he did not carry a very dignified bearing into the Oval Office. (Remember that strange boil on his face during the Florida recount?) But from 9/11 on, his team of handlers began to weave a cocoon of larger-than-life pomp around him. Partly, it was what the nation wanted; it was also smart political opportunism. It has, to be sure, frayed some since the Iraq war and its attendant scandals. The “Henry V”-style bullhorn at ground zero struck a chord with many Americans; the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier stunt backfired.

But “Fahrenheit 9/11” methodically dismantles this president’s carefully manicured dignity: It says to the viewer, “Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — he’s smaller than life.” The movie’s most indelible sequences are those that show our president as he really was in the face of the great crisis of 9/11: Not, as we were told by Showtime’s “DC 9/11,” a stirring take-charge commander, but a passive photo-op participant who sat paralyzed for achingly long minutes of “My Pet Goat” rather than take the initiative to say “excuse me” to the class and leave the room.

My colleague Andrew O’Hehir drew a connection between Moore and Dario Fo, the Italian playwright/performer most famous for his assaults on the dignity of the papacy. To be sure, Moore has none of Fo’s skills as a physical clown and only a fraction of his instincts as an entertainer; Fo is an artist, while Moore is chiefly a propagandist. Still, it’s a good comparison: The two men share a willingness — more than that, a ferocious determination — to strip away the niceties of ceremony from powerful men so that we can see their misdeeds.

That refusal of deference is, after you get past all the various problems with “Fahrenheit 9/11” as documentary and as history, what counts. The TV networks (though they thought nothing of rummaging through the details of Bill Clinton’s tawdry sexual escapades) have decided to protect Bush from unflattering images. It falls to Moore to dig up the footage of protesters pelting his inaugural limousine with eggs, and play it for us again.

By the end of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore has flung his own messy indictment at the presidential portrait, and it won’t be easily cleaned up. The filmmaker is deliberately, methodically, overflowingly disrespectful at a moment in our history when there’s far too much respect in the land. When the throne holds an ignorant, incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic duty.

Stop, hey, what’s that sound?

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People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).

This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.

Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”

Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.

The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.

I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)

The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.

The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.

There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.

So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.

Random links

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Fascinating tale of documentary maker Errol Morris’s “Interrotron” device, which makes his interviewees appear to be addressing the camera directly, while they’re really talking to a teleprompter-like image of him as the interviewer (Link courtesy Kottke)

Dan Bricklin reports on an interesting onstage conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Scott Kirsner.

Transcript of brilliant Bruce Sterling rant, turning the saga of an open party he throws each year at South by Southwest into a parable for Internet development, electronic security and more.

Get more Goats

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If you were reading this blog earlier this year you may recall my recently kindled enthusiasm for the music of The Mountain Goats. This enthusiasm has not waned as I have explored the back catalog of this “band” of (mostly) one. It has, if anything, waxed.

As I wrote about my delight in this discovery I uncovered the existence of kindred spirits here at Salon, including our jack-of-all-trades editorial operations director Max Garrone, who swears by “The Coroner’s Gambit,” and our Renaissance-man IT support manager, Jim Fisher.

Perhaps you’ve read some of Jim’s in-depth reporting for Salon on technology and the environment, or some of his great poems that we’ve published. (I’m not the only one who thinks highly of his work; he has recently won a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.)

Anyway, I learned that last year Jim had written an in-depth critical essay on the music and lyrics of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle. For various reasons the essay never got published in Salon. It is perhaps of more interest to those already hooked on this work than those not yet familiar with it. But the piece deserves a home on the Web, so I’ve published it in this blogspace, here.

Jim’s piece was written months ago, at the time of the Mountain Goats’ release of “Tallahassee.” Earlier this year saw the release of “We Shall All Be Healed.” I’m not sure Jim agrees with me on this, but I think that album fulfills the prediction at the end of his essay of an “all-studio masterpiece” from this artist, much of whose previous work was recorded direct-to-boombox.