Billions seconds
Not everyone is happy about the upcoming billion seconds of Unix.
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I put together a web bug demo Tuesday. It's fun to work somewhere where using web bugs is part of your job and yet your employer isn't evil.
You can see me in some of the most recent protest pictures now linked from sf.freesklyarov.org: Hintz, Labalme, Manoochehri. (I was wearing a grey t-shirt with a collar that day; it was a LinuxWorld t-shirt. The two signs which I'm shown carrying are the "Svobodu Dime" sign -- which looks like it starts with the Roman letters "CBObO" -- and the "FREE Dmitry" sign.) You can also see Duncan, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/I_Thought_We_Knew_That.mp3 (or, better yet, http://harvard.pawlo.com/lessig.ogg).
You know, I can imagine a whole entire party with music entirely based on remixes and musical settings of geeky things -- for example, the techno remix of the Free Software Song, and then of course Descramble (This Function Is Void), and much more.
This Kuro5hin story is of interest to me. (The SVLUG mailing list just had a recent round of arguments about whether there is such a thing as a stupid question, which is a tangentially related issue.)
I guess the biggest problem is that I want people to learn about general rules and concepts (the body of knowledge which is true for all systems) -- but so much of what I know about computers is highly specific to particular systems. Why do I know these details?
There is a sense in which people shouldn't have to know the way a particular system does things, if that choice was arbitrary and cosmetic -- on the other hand, how could people use any system without some specific knowledge about it?
The concept of "computer literacy" is so amorphous! So we have arguments in both directions based on metaphors:
(Nick's version of the latter argument involves comparing graphical UI to cartoons: "So, all business communication should be done by way of cartoons?" That might be kind of neat, actually...)
I hear these parallel arguments fairly often. Now, there are other arguments (such as: "computer interfaces should be improved" -- independent of whether people should learn more about computers -- and then "improved" can mean significantly different things, such as "should be made more intuitive", "should be simplified/optimized for common cases", "should be made more abstract/conceal more detail", "should be made more ergonomic/employ better information design"). And the other arguments don't necessarily have a clear connection to the education issue.
One might be tempted to distill the education issue as follows: "The computer is broken [i.e., incompete, badly designed, inadequate]; it should conform to the person's expectations" vs. "The person is broken [i.e., limited, inadequate, ignorant, inadequate]; he or she should be prepared to use the computer".
Perhaps the reason this debate can sometimes become so acrimonious is the moral overtones that easily creep in. If we take a body of knowledge which is not partly of human design -- such as higher mathematics -- we can already have moralistic and aesthetic controversies. Some people learn some part of higher mathematics and consider it good; other people haven't learned yet. Now many people think it's better to know higher mathematics than not to (although it might be interesting to find people who disagree), but given that there is a learning process involved, there may be a question of values or priorities or opportunity costs -- "I don't want to study math, I want to play Frisbee, or free Dmitry, or learn to sew, or plant rutabagas, or hang out with my girlfriend". So now we run into a question of how to appraise people's choices about what they learn, or how to argue about the value of some kind of knowledge or experience relative to other kinds. (A lot of marketing is based on playing off of consumers' presumed disdain for things. "Tiempo -- para cosas mas importantes", said a Bank of America billboard I saw Monday evening. Which is to say: you have your real life, and then you have this thing, outside of your real life, beneath it.)
Computers are a recent field of knowledge with somewhat imperialist, or moralist or activist, tendencies. I suppose that the idea that "knowledge about computers is good, and is something that should be shared, and something that should be acquired" has various motivating factors:
I doubt anybody reading this would have to look far to find some somewhat strident promotion or opposition to information technology. The promotion of technology as having something for everyone has had huge effects on schools and libraries in the U.S. in the past five or ten years. Was this just a marketing campaign by major IT vendors?
Getting back to the specific argument: some people are painting computer "literacy" as a specialized skill, like needlepoint or being able to fix supercolliders (so let's say that by these people it's dismissed as either a specific vocational skill or a specific hobby, which not everybody needs to share), and others are viewing it as a common-heritage-of-humanity kind of thing, like literacy and (in a traditional view) the liberal arts.
I've spent most of my 21.936 years firmly in the liberal arts camp (although I'm now aware that much of humanity doesn't necessarily believe in traditions that there is anything in particular that everybody ought to know or experience). And I've been enthusiastic about technical education, to the point of thinking that it would likely be the focus of my career for most of my life.
So what do we say to people whose lack of computer knowledge is due to, or attributed to, a choice? "I don't want to know", "I don't need to know", say skeptics. How can we tell whether the skeptics are like a child who doesn't want to learn to read, or like ourselves when we say "I have better things to do", and decline to follow a particular path to its conclusion?
Then again, how can we argue that children who don't want to learn to read are wrong? There must be someone left in the world who's keeping up an argument against literacy, or at least an argument against compulsory literacy. Yes, you need to read to get a job; yes, you need people who can read if you want high tech, and modern medicine; yes, you need to read to have the Great Conversation (if you want it to last more than a century, and to reach and be reached by people in other places and times). You need to read if you want to communicate with people on other continents (or you need to live among readers who can create the technology to drive undersea cables, or track satellites). Can't we imagine a person who doesn't want these things, or who knows about some of the accomplishments of preliterate cultures and is content with them?
I have felt that informatics is qualitatively different from "ordinary" technology. Have I thought too narrowly? Have I been reading too much Wired, and too many advertisements by microchip vendors?
Some people saw the famous AT&T "You Will" advertisements and felt a sense of connection (the way some people have read science fiction and felt a sense of connection to future space colonists, or something); other people felt alienated, or threatened, or attacked.
One skeptical solution would be that there isn't a particular resolution to the problem -- it's just that people are conditioned in different ways by their cultures and life experiences, so that some people feel that a particular technology or experience has a great resonance and meaning, and other people feel repelled by it, or see it as shallow and mainly uninteresting. But if that experience is strictly aesthetic or cultural, there might not be a general solution, any more than there has been a general solution to what color ought to be your favorite color, or what color is most preferable.
When I was in high school, I engaged lots of people in debate about whether there was such a thing as objectively "better" and "worse" in music, so that it was meaningful to say "This piece is really better than the other", not just "I think this one is better", or "I like it more". So I kept repeating the argument that our inability to articulate the standards for these judgments, or even our inability to make them, was no evidence that the judgments were impossible. And the fact that we disagreed about particular cases was also no evidence that the cases in principle couldn't be resolved. Everyone, but everyone, makes mistakes and has inadequate knowledge; that doesn't mean that the knowledge doesn't exist, or that people will be permanently debarred from finding it.
I remembered the bit in Corinthians about presently having imperfect knowledge but (by divine grace, as Corinthians would have it, or by our efforts and the passage of time) acquiring fuller and more real knowledge later on. So we might not know at the moment whether your music is better than mine (we might disagree), but some day we would know, or someone would know, or at least someone could know some day.
Since then, I've seen more and experienced more about human cultural gaps (and many people would insist that I'm still very ignorant, because I've never been to a non-Western country, or even lived in a rural area or among anybody other than college-educated middle class professionals) and how genuine they are. One might expect that this wouldn't have so much effect on my belief that real knowledge exists and that almost all questions of value are also questions of fact. But I've become much more skeptical, or at least much more afraid. The largest thing that shook my confidence in the ultimate resolution of moral and aesthetic questions was dating -- "romance and failure", as my essay put it. There are other things, too.
So now I wonder not just what answer we will reach about the significance of computing in society and in history, but whether we will reach any answer at all. Many people will remember the story about Mao Tse-tung, who, asked about the historical significance of the French Revolution, supposedly replied that it was too early to tell. We've had computers for about 50 years, and there are vast cultural divisions and cultural conflicts surrounding them. (I even feel a culture shock when I venture among Windows users -- there, the question when someone buys a new computer is not "What distribution are you going to install?".)
We've had reading and writing for much longer, and I suppose the divisions surrounding literacy are also not yet healed. I don't have a television at home, following my father's example, and (although I don't talk about it often) I feel somewhat defensive and polemical about that decision. I think -- as many bookdealers do, and many publishers and librarians and teachers -- of the television as somewhat anti-literate. I think that people who watch TV often read and write less than those who don't. I think that, if you're reading this at all, you're probably not someone who watches TV every day.
And I feel an attachment to the literate tradition; I try to cry when I read about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and (as one writer once said) it would be easier for me to imagine myself weeping for the fall of the Library than for the fall of the Temple.
But someone could still say that it's too early to tell about the significance of literacy, and too early to say whether it's a good thing.
Two worthwhile pieces in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker: Gary Greenberg, "As Good As Dead: Is brain death just a noble lie?"; Connie Bruck, "The Personal Touch: Jack Valenti knew how to make Washington listen to Hollywood. Can he still do it?". Have a look, if you can.
The Bruck article ends with an account of Valenti debating Lessig at Harvard -- even Valenti's critics admired his performance. And such is the tone of the whole article: even Valenti's critics admired his performance.
I broke a simple substitution cipher. Sumana speculated that I could break it in three minutes; it actually took two. Also, the cipher's permutation of the alphabet was based on a pangram.
Contact: Seth David Schoen