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Bill McKibben talk

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Tomorrow night (April 30) I’ll be attending a talk here in San Francisco, sponsored by a group called the Center for Genetics and Society, by my old friend Bill McKibben, who has a new book out titled “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.” (We reviewed the book in Salon here, and interviewed the author here.)

Bill is a great writer and speaker — if anything, his droll sense of humor comes through in a more full-spectrum way in person. Whether you find yourself sharing or questioning his critique of a future in which genetic engineering transforms our species, I think it should be a fascinating evening.

Notes from the world of ETCon

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My column about the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference — a musing on the future of Web services, as the wave of idealistic technological innovation hits the breakers of proprietaty business thinking and legal constraint — is now up on Salon, here. (It’s a Salon Premium-only piece, but anyone can read it if you watch an ad and get a “daypass.”)

For those interested in more session-by-session reports from this conference, there’s a list of those bloggers who provided notes here.

This was beyond a doubt the most heavily blogged, WiFi-hotspotted, wiki-fied, IM-ed, chat-enabled event I’ve ever attended. There was even some cool, Rendezvous-enabled group-note-taking employing some software called Hydra.

At one point at the start of a talk I saw Cory Doctorow and Glenn Fleishman wandering the hall, laptops held open at waist level, moving intently, deliberately, up aisles and down rows. I understood on an intellectual level that their orbit somehow involved a hunt for good 802.11b reception; but what my eyes took in seemed more seance-like, a wireless ritual. It was as though they were scouting for the geek music of the spheres. I hope they found it.

Grokster decision: on to the appeals court

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The Grokster decision — a ruling in Federal District Court on Friday that peer-to-peer file-trading services Grokster and Streamcast/Morpheus are not illegal — is being hailed as a victory for the computer user over the forces of copyright uber alles. And of course it is. In recognizing that, thanks to the precedent of the Betamax decision of the 1980s, the government should not outlaw a technology that has legitimate and legal uses even if some users employ it toward illegal ends, the court made a critically important distinction — one that every sophisticated user and software developer understands, but one that the so-called “intellectual property lobby” is determined to blur as it fights its own customers to preserve a dying business model. The court also seems to have accepted the essential difference between Napster’s central-server model of file-trading, which put the service in a middleman position that made it vulnerable to legal attack, and the new file-trading networks, whose true “peer-to-peer” architecture means that the software’s providers are not in a position to regulate what sorts of files users exchange. (Lawrence Lessig credits the Electronic Frontier Foundation for much of the hard lifting in the case.)

Still, it’s hardly time to cheer yet. Thanks to decades of Republican appointments, the federal courts of appeals tend to be extremely friendly to corporate interests. In theory the conservative judges are supposed to be believers in limiting the power of government — at least that’s the libertarian basis of much of conservative legal thought. So you’d think that they’d resist the music lobby’s infringements on individual freedom. In practice, however, it seems that many of these judges are actually believers in not limiting the powers of business — and they sway back and forth between laissez-faire logic and deference to government prerogatives depending on which favors the corporate side in any particular case.

It’s for analysts more legally trained than I am to guess at how soundly entrenched in the law the district court decision was, and how far a potentially hostile appellate court would have to dig in order to overturn it. Something tells me the appellate court may prove tough on the file-sharers. On the other hand, since the case was in Los Angeles, it will go before the Ninth Circuit, which has the reputation for making maverick moves — and for being regularly overturned by the Supreme Court, where I imagine all of this will end up.

Oh, right, the Supreme Court is even more dominated by conservatives than the appeals level.

Henry Norr and the time card

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Though we work in the same town, I don’t think I’ve ever met Henry Norr; I only know him by his long-respected byline as a tech journalist. But I’ve been following the story of his suspension — and now firing — with some interest.

Norr, you may recall, was suspended from his job as a tech reporter for the S.F. Chronicle about a month ago. He’d taken a day off from work because he’d participated in an antiwar protest and been arrested. According to Norr’s own account, he’d followed Chronicle policy in alerting his supervisor to his activities. (The Chronicle has since changed its policy on reporters and political activity, but that’s another story.)

Now Norr’s been fired, and the ostensible issue is that he falsified his time card by marking his day off as a “sick day.”

Now, this may have been a tactical misstep — I suppose he’d be in a stronger position, bureaucratically, had he taken the day as vacation time.

But I can also report from personal experience of ten years’ employment at the San Francisco Examiner — whose then parent company, the Hearst Corporation, now owns the Chronicle; whose old staff, my former colleagues, now work for the Chronicle; and which always shared the same union representation as the Chronicle — that time cards for writers are a joke. (They no doubt have more relevance for copy editors and other folks who work at more shift-oriented tasks.)

I worked most of that time as a theater critic. My work spilled into all hours — I’d be reading a play and doing research in the morning, then maybe take a break for a few hours, then go into the office and check my mail and make my phone calls, then have dinner, then see a show, then return to the newsroom (or later, once I had a PC and a modem, home) to write my review and file it. Sometimes my workday ran in patches from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. Sometimes I’d write the next morning instead. I typically covered three to five shows a week, and my work cycle was shaped by the timing of opening nights.

Trying to fit this particular workflow into the management-mandated and union-approved time card template was impossible. If I’d followed the rules as the union had defined them via collective bargaining, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job well. If I filled out the time card accurately, I would have invoked the wrath of management, because overtime would have kicked in, and they didn’t want to pay overtime.

I figured my first responsibility was to my readers, to the theaters I covered and to my own standards. So I did my job the way I needed to, and for nearly a decade I dutifully filled out a time card that claimed that I worked a steady five day a week, eight hours a day routine.

I’m not reporting this because I’m unhappy with the result — I got to do the work that I loved, and I think I served my readership well. (Time cards do not really work when the people involved are creative professionals who love their work.) I’m reporting it because everyone involved knew that this was happening. And not just with me.

So when you hear that Henry Norr has been fired because he falsified his time card, be assured that this is not the real issue. The Chronicle is getting him on a technicality because it wants to fire him for some other reason.

Could it be that the paper wants to cow its staff from participating in political demonstrations that have nothing to do with their beats? Or could it be that it just sees an opportunity to trim someone from its payroll at a time when its financial woes are well-known? Maybe the editors don’t like Norr’s work, or maybe they think they’re over-staffed in tech coverage now that there’s no tech boom to cover. Maybe they’re mad at him because he went public with his dispute.

I don’t know. I do know that the time card is a pretty transparent excuse.

O’Reilly-a-rama

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Here at Salon, we’re used to having our arguments ripped out of context and turned into fodder for the right-wing media machine, but the feeding frenzy of distortion and lies surrounding the selective quotation from Gary Kamiya’s “Liberation Day” op-ed over the past few days set a new standard for disingenuousness.

You can read more about it in this Salon editorial.

Cavalcade of spam

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Good piece in today’s N.Y. Times on the continuing explosion of spam: “America Online says the amount of spam aimed at its 35 million customers has doubled since the beginning of this year and now approaches two billion messages a day, more than 70 percent of the total its users receive.”

Anti-spam tools emerge, the spammers figure out a way around them, better tools come along, the spammers adapt — it’s a perfect example of what my friend and colleague, Andrew Leonard, described as “the technodialectic” in his fine book, “Bots.”

Me, I’m getting upwards of several hundred spams a day now. It’s the curse of having had public e-mail addresses on the Web now for eight years or so. I like my e-mail addresses; I refuse to give them up. SpamAssassin is doing a pretty good job of filtering out 99 percent of the crap right now.

What’s notable in Saul Hansell’s piece are the absurd self-justifications and defenses proffered by the spammers. Here’s what one says:

“These antispammers should get a life… Do their fingers hurt too much from pressing the delete key? How much time does that really take from their day?”

Last weekend I received nearly 1000 spam messages. No, my fingers don’t hurt. SpamAssassin is my friend, and I know how to hit “select all,” then “delete” in my filtered-spam mailbox.

But at this pace of spam growth the burden on the Net’s infrastructure will at some point become insupportable. Spammers are “free riders”; their defenses are ludicrous, and their abuse is a classic instance of the “tragedy of the commons.” The Internet is our commons. We need to keep working on better ways to keep it from getting choked by spam.

Digital Storytelling Festival returns

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Eight years ago I attended the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colo., at which a group of three dozen or so invited guests assembled to talk about the collision of narrative art and digital technology. It remains one of the high moments of my conference-going career — and not only because Crested Butte is about 9000 feet above sea level.

In the three successive years that I attended, the conference grew in size, and it acquired a more specific focus on how individuals — professional artists and everyday people alike — can use digital tools to tell their own stories and break through the logjam of “old” media. Yet that first event set a pattern of intelligence and camaraderie that held up through the years.

I was unable to go to conference number five, in fall 1999, and since then the event has been on hiatus — its founder and guiding spirit, Dana Atchley, passed away in Dec. 2000. But Dana’s wife Denise — working with Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen of the Center for Digital Storytelling, and with the core of people that have formed the Digital Storytellers Association — has revived and revitalized the festival this year. It happens June 12-15, and I’m going to be talking there, along with a bunch of great people (including, as of now, Brenda Laurel, Harry Marks, Jonathan Delacour, Derek Powazek, Kit Laybourne, and many others).

One big thing that’s changed is the location: The festival has moved to Sedona, Arizona. Arizona in June may sound like a recipe for frying, but Sedona’s up high (though not as high as Crested Butte) — I’ve been there in June, and it’s delightful. There’s lots more info here.

For a war that wasn’t about oil…

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I imagine the planners in Washington consider the looting that has wrecked Iraqi cultural edifices, including the legendary National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad, in the wake of the U.S. “liberation” to be so much minor “collateral damage” — eggs that have to be broken to make the omelette, that sort of thing. “Regrettable,” you know. “Can we move on to the next question?”

But I can’t help thinking about this: While U.S. forces were unable to protect museums in Baghdad (or Mosul, as Salon’s Phillip Robertson reported) from looting crowds destroying millennia-old artifacts, it seemed to have plenty of troops available to protect the Iraqi oil ministry in Baghdad. (See this picture.) And of course seizing and protecting the oil fields in both southern and northern Iraq was not beyond the capacity of our forces. Priorities are priorities!

The Washington Post had a good piece Sunday on all this.