I was quoted at some length in
a Wired
News article about the technology formerly known as Palladium. I
worry that I was too long-winded because I was interviewed by e-mail
instead of on the telephone. I was also a bit formal.
Here are two superstitions you have to deal with in order to make an
informed criticism of this technology:
- People can't be harmed by being given a new choice or ability, or
benefitted by having a choice or ability taken away from them.
- Harms are done to people on purpose, or as a result of some
individual's nefarious intent.
As to the latter, I think of the phrase "damnum absque iniuria".
(I heard about it in
a very old court case last fall,
when I went to hear the Pavlovich argument; then I went to hear the
Eldred argument, and soon I'm going to hear the Bunner argument.)
Maybe these aren't even the right superstitions to be worried about.
I'm pretty confident that the first one is important; I have a list
of about a dozen metaphors to try to make this point (from time-lock
safes to St. Basil's Cathedral to collective bargaining to the
game of Chicken on out), but I doubt any of them are immediately
intuitive, and I think I'm going to need something much more intuitive.
I missed Dar Williams (alas! the first time in over two years, I
think), but I saw the total lunar eclipse from Bernal Hill. If I
were looking for a literary device, I would pass back in time to
the solar eclipse of May 10, 1994, and the lunar eclipse of
January 20, 2000, and describe all the things which happened to
me as a result of each eclipse.
On top of Bernal Hill, over a hundred people
gathered, and little children ran back and forth.
Boy: I want to look at the town!
Boy 2: It's a country, not a city. We're so high up we
can see the whole country.
Boy: We live in a city, not in a country.
Boy 2: We live in a country too, and we can see the
country from here.
Girl: Do you even know how big a country is?
The skeptical girl was the first person on the whole hilltop to
spot the moon, quite some time after it had risen. (The fog
and the sunlight made it hard to make out at first.)
I wonder if people in D.C. went out to the Ellipse to watch
the eclipse.
I'm going to Germany in August for the
CCC's (blocked by N2H2 as "Illegal"!)
biennial
Chaos Communication Camp.
I've never been to Europe at all. One of my priorities, I hope, will
be to visit my grandmother's home town,
Herborn. (I didn't know
that J. A.
Comenius, the human rights and peace advocate, studied there,
but I did know about "annihilation of the Jewish Community (1942)".)
I have a recent postcard of Herborn on my wall; the main street looks
practically unchanged from the 1920s. I'll have to go see if that's
still true.
