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Random notes

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I noticed with some amusement and glee on Monday that the Wall Street Journal published a list of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the latest jobs report, and what was at the head? “Internet content producer”! OK, it’s not 1999 all over again, and thank goodness for that; the actual number of new jobs in the field (2000) was small. But hey — after what this business has been through, any good news is good news.

I haven’t gotten it together to spend the money on one of those PC-to-stereo bridges that lets you stream music from your computer to your home audio systems, but when I do, I’ll look first and most closely at the Slim Devices Squeezebox — not only because it looks like a good product, but because the company that makes it lets anyone play with the open-source software that runs it: Slimserver. I’ve been having fun with Slimserver: You install it on the computer that has your music library and you can then access your library from any remote computer with a decent Internet connection. Requires a little effort to get the hang of it, then seems to work like a charm. A browser interface lets you control what’s playing. Very cool.

I’ve turned on “item level titles and links” in Radio Userland, so instead of handcoding my little headlines, they should appear in RSS 2.0 feeds as properly coded titles. You can do this too — just look under Radio’s preferences under “item level titles and links.” Thanks to Tim Bishop for the tip.

Another useful piece of open-source software I’m making a note of (thanks to Jon Udell for the pointer): Audacity, an audio-file editor.

Free Press milestone memories

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The Wall Street Journal Online published a good piece earlier this week by Carl Bialik capturing a small but significant (and, to me, personally important) moment of Net history. Ten years ago this coming November, I had my first real experience of Web publishing as part of the team that created the San Francisco Free Press, a short-lived by valuable experiment in publishing an online newspaper during a strike against the S.F. Chronicle and the Examiner (where I then worked). Carl quotes me a couple of times, noting that, for me, the choice between (a) marching a picket line in circles while chanting slogans and (b) working on editing and posting files to the Web was a no-brainer. Like just about everyone else quoted in the Journal article, I told Bialik that the Free Press experience changed my life. Afterwards, the return to the Examiner newsroom — the strike only lasted two weeks — was an immense anti-climax, and there was no question in my mind that I’d be moving my career on to the Web as fast as I could manage.

Our broken-record president

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It’s always seemed as if President Bush had a bizarrely inhuman ability to latch onto a single idea or phrase or message and stick to it regardless of changes in circumstantial reality that discredited the idea. We saw this in action with his tax cuts, which, as Paul Krugman bore witness, began life as a way of disposing of the federal budget surplus and then got repurposed into an antidote to the recession after the economy went south. One policy — fits all events!

Now Will Saletan of Slate has prepared a remarkable chronological record of presidential quotations that demonstrates this phenomenon at its most damningly, painfully extreme. We’ve all heard, one time or another, Bush’s boilerplate rhetoric about “Saddam’s torture chambers and rape rooms.” As the other rationales for the Iraq war evaporated, this one, at least, seemed rock-solid: the U.S. invasion had shut down those torture chambers and rape rooms. This sounded great, until we learned to our horror and disgrace that in fact those enterprises had simply undergone a change of ownership.

Go read Saletan’s quotes, in which Bush and his men keep parroting the line about torture chambers even as the scandal of American-sponsored torture in Saddam’s notorious old prison was grabbing headlines worldwide. No matter — the old message just kept on trucking.

On April 30 — two days after CBS had broadcast its photos of Abu Ghraib — Bush, like some malfunctioning android, was still saying: “And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq.” Again, on May 3, he says essentially the same thing. The images that have much of the globe reeling were apparently unable to dislodge this message-of-the-day formulation from the president’s cranium.

In a struggle against a global enemy that demands the utmost of nimble flexibility on our part, we are cursed: our leader has a brain of clay. Once the mold is baked, the mind is set, there’s no give.

J.D. Lasica’s book

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“Editing by committee” is a phrase that strikes terror in many writers’ minds, but J.D. Lasica is unfazed. He’s working on a book, Darknet, on a subject dear to my heart: “exploring the idea that digital technologies are empowering people to create, reuse and reinvent media.” And now he’s posting the book, chapter by chapter, on a wiki, which means that anyone can go in and edit the book. Take a look and wade in with your (metaphorical) red pen.

Rip this joint

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For years I was a happy user of MusicMatch to organize and play my digital music collection, and I even paid the company for “lifetime upgrades” to its software. A few months ago MusicMatch did one of these “upgrades,” apparently to support its new online music store, which I have no interest in, and somehow the software developers broke the product. It crashed on my Windows 2000 box, a lot. It froze, it coughed, it was generally unreliable.

MusicMatch provides one of those “automatic update” services so I crossed my fingers and prayed that its programmers would fix the bugs fast. And to their credit, they took care of a lot of the problems. But one stubborn bug remained: I couldn’t get the program to rip my CDs without freezing after one or two songs. Since my habit these days is to rip a CD as soon as I buy it, this was a disaster.

This weekend I finally gave up on MusicMatch and decided to spend $20 on the latest Real jukebox, even though that meant changing habits. Sure enough, Real ripped my CDs just fine. Ironically, a day later MusicMatch updated itself again — and fixed the ripping problem.

Frustratingly, MusicMatch offers almost nothing in the way of serious, in-depth technical documentation on its Web site — or if they do, I couldn’t find it. Consumer software: still a mess!

The going gets weird

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Two gems from this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The first requires no comment at all:

  Republicans’ exasperation with the administration and the president himself was evident in a private meeting of Republican Senate committee chairmen this week in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s office. Mr. Frist at one point said he’d like to sit down with Mr. Bush and ask which two or three people in the administration could tell him what’s really going on with Iraq, according to one person in the room. “I don’t think he knows who could do that,” replied Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar.

In the second, Newt Gingrich rides to Don Rumsfeld’s defense in a piece headlined “Double Standards on Abu Ghraib,” arguing that we should discount outrage abroad at the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners because Arab governments and media failed to denounce previous Mideast atrocities:

  Some have called for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. However, he has led the process of exposing the wrongdoing and investigating the charges. Moreover, he will see to it that the accused get a fair and honest trial, where there is a presumption of innocence until guilt is proven and the guilty are punished. That due process is something we as Americans should be proud of, and unequival about… While we publicly uncover and explicitly demonstrate our commitment to punish the guilty for their crimes under our rule of law, we should not play into any double standard where America is allowed to be condemned by anyone who accepts Arab viciousness, terrorism, mutilation and barbarism as normal behavior.

So let’s put aside the small matters here — like that Rumsfeld’s “leading the process” didn’t seem to involve actually finishing reading the Pentagon’s own report on the prison torture. Let’s not waste too much time pointing out that, whatever the historical record, the war for the trust of the Iraqi people has become our fight, and Abu Ghraib was a disastrous, perhaps decisive defeat, and on that ground alone, before you even begin to weigh justice and morality, you have to judge this as Rumsfeld’s failure.

The heart of this is simple: Yes, Newt, there is a double standard here. The double standard is that, on the one hand, our leaders steadfastly insist (all the way up to the Supreme Court) that their treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror” is and must be outside the law — and on the other, the moment that we learn that awful things have happened in our lawless prisons, we suddenly get religion and invoke “due process.”

The soldiers, contractors and commanders responsible for the Abu Ghraib horrors deserve “due process,” for sure. So does every single human being incarcerated by the U.S. government. These are not disconnected matters — something to keep in mind as we hear Abu Ghraib written off as an isolated case, a few loose cannons, a handful of bad apples who rolled off the reservation. As Sidney Blumenthal argued earlier this week, and Anthony Lewis points out in today’s New York Times, when you set up a prison system and explicitly declare that it is beyond all legal oversight, you can hardly be surprised when the atrocities start.

Ghosts

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It’s hard to talk with your jaw dropped, and that is the position I — along, I imagine, with vast numbers of other people around the world — find myself in as the revelations of U.S. mistreatment, humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners continue to emerge.

One aspect of this fiasco that I haven’t seen much noted, though I’m sure it must have been observed by many, is the location. Why on earth did the U.S. ever choose Saddam’s most notorious prison — a scene of so much of the abuse and torture by the old regime that President Bush has taken so much credit for ending — as its own jail? Don’t some places become so tainted by their past that you just don’t recycle them? Would you take a concentration camp and reuse it as an interrogation center? Doesn’t anyone in the Bush administration understands the power of symbolism?

The U.S. employment of Abu Ghraib as a prison was iffy enough before we knew that Iraqis were being tortured within its walls on our watch. It was of a piece with the American occupation’s setting up camp in Saddam’s old palaces. From the beginning we have displayed an unfathomably tone-deaf approach to the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis in the post-Saddam era. With the pictures from Abu Ghraib, it’s hard not to sense that we have now lost the whole psychological war. (From today’s New York Times: “Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, has told one Bush adviser that he believes that it will take a generation for the United States to live this scandal down in the Arab world.”)

Tom Friedman yesterday argued that the only way the Bush administration could begin to change things at this point would be to “finally screw up the courage to admit its failures and dramatically change course.” Good advice that we will never see acted on: it’s simply not in Bush’s nature (just now he’s emphatically saying that Rumsfeld will stay). There is no example in Bush’s life or career of “admitting failures and dramatically changing course.” (Yes, he kicked drinking, but as friends who have experience with alcoholism have pointed out to me, he has never taken the key step of acknowledging and naming his condition.)

That means that the only real way to achieve the goal Friedman identifies would be for Bush himself to resign — like the stand-up, take-responsiblity “CEO president” he’s supposed to be. It’ll never happen — we’re going to have show Bush the door instead. But we can dream.

Times Magazine failure of intelligence?

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The New York Times Magazine had to have closed out its cover story for yesterday well before the stories about torture in Abu Ghraib prison broke. So chalk one up to its editors’ prescience for running Michael Ignatieff’s “Lesser Evils,” which all but predicts the scandal:

  Torture, our founding fathers said, was the vice of tyrannies and its absolute exclusion the mark of free government. At the same time, keeping torture, or at least what used to be called “the third degree,” from creeping back into our police squad rooms at home has required constant vigilance by D.A.’s and honest cops. Now it may be creeping into our war on terror. There is some evidence that the United States has handed key suspects over to Middle Eastern governments for torture. In the metal containers stacked up behind rings of razor wire on Bagram air base in Afghanistan, beatings are reportedly routine, and at least two suspects have died during secret interrogations. It is possible that similar physical methods have been used against detainees from the Hussein regime at Baghdad airport.

It’s a smart piece, overall, but I do have one bone to pick: In his discussion of intelligence, Ignatieff writes, “The United States appears, for example, to have had almost no one on the ground in Iraq after 1998, hence the catastrophic misjudgment by U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, he’s obviously right that U.S. intelligence could have used some agents “on the ground” in Iraq after 1998. But surely everything we’ve learned about the interplay between the Bush administration and its intelligence operation in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq — from the creation of the Wolfowitz/Perle skunkworks to the stovepiping of unvetted reports — has demonstrated that the U.S. intelligence rank-and-file basically got it right before the war: They told the Bush administration that there really was no conclusive evidence supporting either the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the much-hunted link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

The problem wasn’t with the intelligence. The problem was with the Bush administration. It didn’t like the intelligence it got. (Maybe it didn’t believe the intelligence it got, since it was listening to “friends” like Ahmed Chalabi.) So it ordered up some new intelligence.

Let’s not allow the Bush administration’s rewriting of this important bit of history to stand. The fiasco of the missing WMDs was not primarily a failure of intelligence; it was a failure of presidential management and leadership. Such failures are all too common in an administration that stubbornly — even “catastrophically” — refuses to recalibrate its preconceptions when they get bruised by reality.

Gene genie

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There was considerable sense and occasional nonsense on tap last night at a panel discussion at UC/Berkeley inspired by a new essay collection titled “Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery.” (One of the book’s editors, Christina Desser, moderated.) The premise, as presented by panel introducer Michael Pollan, is that “we are on the threshold of vast technological changes” — in areas such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and advanced computing — that will alter “what it means to be alive and to be human.”

Our reactions to the prospect of these changes tend to fall into two categories, Pollan said: Either “it’s never gonna happen” or “it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of time and the market.” Both reactions foster a passive stance; instead of the “ossified debate between techno-utopians and neoluddites,” can we “take the dialectic someplace new?”

Pollan’s challenge was a useful one. Howard Rheingold took it up by reminding us that the Internet as an open platform isn’t something we can or should take for granted: it needs to be actively defended, as digital rights management schemes and “trusted computing” checks begin to be baked into the hardware that we rely on to access the network.

Investigative reporter (and longtime Salon friend and contributor) Mark Schapiro suggested that as genetic manipulation becomes more widespread, it is outstripping our existing legal and political institutions — for instance, a maritime system that evolved to deal with 18th-century needs leaves us today in the position where no one bears responsibility when a ship full of deadly cargo founders.

Denise Caruso, who has spent recent years building the Hybrid Vigor Institute, said that as we “increase the complexity of our environment exponentially,” “innovation at any cost” is no longer defensible. She called for a new focus on active risk assessment. The appalling status quo is that most biotech innovations are released into the natural world with little care or forethought: Caruso cited the example of bioengineered, Monsanto-produced Bt Corn, which received government approval without any studies considering its impact on “non-target species” (like Monarch butterflies).

“This is not just hysterical Luddism,” she said. But it’s an uphill battle, because “government and industry like things the way they are right now.”

I found Caruso’s rigor and Rheingold’s speculative imagination provocative and helpful — particularly in contrast to the Panglossian presence of inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the final panelist. Kurzweil was actually videoconferenced in from his Massachusetts home, and his larger-than-life image hung peculiarly over the proceedings, disembodied and disengaged. (Christian Crumlish has blogged a photo so you can see what I mean.)

Kurzweil’s speech was laden with statements like “Human knowledge in general is doubling every year” and “The rate of progress itself is doubling every decade.” Like some blinkered throwback to high-Victorian cockiness, Kurzweil blithely assured us that “continued progress is inevitable.” I understood he was referring to empirical measurements of processor speed, storage, telecommunications bandwidth and the like. (You can read a detailed exposition of Kurzweil’s notions of the coming “singularity,” in which artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain, here.)

But there’s a deep chasm between the notion of precisely-measured technical advancement and the subjective concept of qualitative “progress.” Evidently, Kurzweil — like some Bugs Bunny character who’s charged off the edge of a cliff but hasn’t yet realized there’s air under his feet — has failed to notice this divide. That leaves his vision of the future as disconnected from the messy, intractable realities of human behavior as the speaker himself was from the ebb and flow of last night’s conversation, by virtue of his own virtuality.

When someone coming from such a rhetorical perspective starts talking about “expanding our knowledge” through “intimate merger with our technology,” you want to run to the wash room and toss water on your face. In such company, the clarity of skeptical optimists like Caruso and Rheingold helps keep us sane.