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RIP, Jane Jacobs, urban visionary

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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].

Random notes

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## 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.

Sterling language

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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

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.

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!).

Powazek’s Cole Valley tale

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Derek Powazek and Heather Powazek Champ now live in the neighborhood I called my home for seven years, San Francisco’s Cole Valley. (I moved to Berkeley right as the area hit the steep part of the trendiness hockey-stick curve.) It’s a little place, sandwiched between UCSF’s hilltop campus and the wilds of Haight Street, with Cole Street’s two-block commercial zone serving as Main Street, and the N-Judah as a lifeline to the rest of the city. Recently, Derek told a heartwarming tale of collective action in the face of inconsiderate auto-owner behavior. It made me nostalgic for my Cole Valley days of mornings munching on cinnamon snails from the long-gone Tassajara Bakery and evenings downing Liberty Ale at the Kezar Pub. (But I don’t miss the perennial fog.)

Edelstein moves on

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My friend, the movie critic David Edelstein, has been writing wonderfully alive and intelligent pieces for Slate from its very beginning in 1996. That makes him a true Web old-timer. (He’s also on NPR’s Fresh Air.) But today the news broke that he is leaving Slate for Adam Moss’s revamped New York magazine, which will begin featuring his reviews beginning in January. Congratulations to David — the Web’s loss is New York’s gain, and those of us beyond the five boroughs now have one strong reason to point our browsers to nymag.com.

Crunch, fuzz, twang

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I must have been ten years old or so, and my older brother received a copy of The Who’s “Tommy” as a promotion for starting a new subscription to the then-young and wild new publication out of San Francisco, Rolling Stone. A free double album was something, in those days, and I fell in love with it — in particular, with a thick, crunchy, percussive-yet-harmonious sound that kept recurring on so many of the tracks.

I asked my older brother what instrument this was that sounded so great, and he — always one with great musical taste but less reliable musical knowledge — told me he thought it was a bass guitar. Years later I learned that, no, this was Pete Townshend’s electric guitar, playing what, even later, I learned to call power chords, with an edge of distortion I had come to love in many other songs on many other albums.

Link Wray, who died this weekend, is generally considered the inventor of that sound. To create the menacing yet (to me, at least) joyous chords in his 1958 “Rumble,” he apparently poked a pencil through the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier — a trick that would later be emulated by the young Ray and Dave Davies to obtain the rumbling sound of their first hit, “You Really Got Me.”

I have spent decades, now, in love with this kind of distortion. So RIP, Link Wray, 1929-2005 — thanks for the sound.

In this interview John Vanderslice, singer/songwriter and producer extraordinaire, talks about distortion and why we need it:

  The holy grail in lo-fi is often how to produce distortion, how to get low levels of distortion that are complicated and beautiful, distortions to balance out the beauty of western harmonic music. Distortion to my mind equals sex and violence, and if you don’t have sex and violence in rock ‘n’ roll then you’re totally done for. It might be the kind that’s on an Eno-Fripp record, but it’s still there — there has to be a dangerous quality to it somewhere. It may be supersubtle but it has to be there.

Manifesto destiny

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My old friend, game designer extraordinaire Greg Costikyan, has been ranting about the depressing state of the games industry recently. Tonight he announced that he is getting off his rhetorical duff and going to try to do something about its problems. He quit his job and is forming a new company called Manifesto Games.

  Its motto is “PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Retail Chains!” And its purpose, of course, will be to build what I’ve been talking about: a viable path to market for independent developers, and a more effective way of marketing and distributing niche PC game styles to gamers.

Greg is also planning to write about the whole process of launching the company on his blog. Since he’s argued that one of the roots of the industry’s malaise is its business structure, he intends to write publicly about the fascinating game of financing his startup. He’s a sharp writer and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so that should be…fun!