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The Network Observer Vol 02 No 12
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T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 12 DECEMBER 1995
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"You have to organize, organize, organize, and build and
build, and train and train, so that there is a permanent,
vibrant structure of which people can be part."
-- Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition
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This month: Neurotic game-playing on the net
Virtual house-hunting
Things I do not recommend
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Welcome to TNO 2(12).
This issue includes an article about aggression on the net. I
was inspired to write this article by a rather unpleasant recent
experience, but the issues are obviously of broad concern. My
focus is not on the badness of bad guys, though, but on practical
responsibility: the ways, beyond the right and wrong of the case,
in which we permit ourselves to be abused by others, including
our tendency to accept the self-serving logic of the aggressor.
Neurotic game-playing can flourish on the net to the extent
that its community structures are weak, and it provides us with
an opportunity to reflect on our own complicity in that weakness.
My "recommendations" this month are much longer than normal, and
just this once, after two years of happy recommendations, they
are things I think poorly of. My point is not to beat anybody up
but to encourage thinking about the precise nature of the vacuum
that these regrettable entities fill.
I wrote this month's "wish list" in my head while driving around
and around San Diego looking for a place to live.
A footnote. At least once a day I run into someone whose first
words are "did you get my last e-mail?". What these folks don't
seem to realize is that this question often has no determinate
answer. If I have gotten no recent e-mail from the person then I
can say no. But otherwise I have no way of knowing. Very often
I've seen a message from them and have replied to it. Now one
possibility is that my reply is still waiting in their mailbox,
so that my answer should be "yes". But another possibility
is that they have seen my reply and have sent a reply to *it*
that I have not seen, so that my answer should be "no". This
is way too much to explain while passing someone in the hallway,
so my standard response is to say "I don't know; what did it
say?". Often they cannot actually recall what it said, or
did not intend to tell me, given that I will be able to read it
perfectly well once I get back to my office. What they're doing
instead, I think, is responding to a sense that our relationship
is ill-defined at that moment -- we do not have enough shared
context to feel connected or hold a proper conversation. In
other words, asking me whether I've seen the most recent message
is a symbolic way of reestablishing the coherence of shared
background upon which the relationship is based. Such are the
faultlines between synchronous and asynchronous media, and I hope
they don't develop into faultlines in the relationships between
people as well.
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Net games.
I want to talk about the Internet as a venue for certain kinds of
abusive game-playing. But first I want to discuss the concept of
personal responsibility. People who find such matters distasteful
may wish to skip ahead.
I have been mugged twice. The second time it happened I wasn't
paying attention late at night, so that I stepped off a curb and
found that a shotgun was aimed in my face. After I handed the
guy my cash, he threatened to come back and blow my head off if
I called the cops, whereupon he fishtailed down the street in a
red muscle-car with the lights out.
The first time I was mugged, though, was more instructive, and
I'm almost glad it happened. It was many years ago, and I was
living in a loft in Chinatown in Boston. To get home from the
subway I had to walk through the Combat Zone, and it was there
one night that I looked over my shoulder and saw two suspicious
characters closing on me. Part of me said to run, but then
another part of me said that running away from them would
hurt their feelings, whereupon one of them executed this very
professional choke-hold while the other one stood by, preparing
to stab me if I did not pass out. My last thought before losing
consciousness was that I was going to be raped; my first thought
after waking up with fewer material goods and a badly bitten
tongue was that I should call up and cancel my credit cards.
If you've never been assaulted then you might find the thoughts
I reported having, particularly the solicitude I felt for these
guys' feelings, to be odd. In fact they are common. Many
women have reported being unable to defend themselves against
assaults because they feel obliged to take care of others before
themselves, and I think that many more men would admit the same
thing if they were more aware of their feelings and had social
permission not to be "tough". The most common interpretation
of this phenomenon is in terms of gender socialization, and
that is surely part of it. But another interpretation, which
emerges from the recovery movement and fits more closely with my
own experience, is that it is about self-esteem: giving others'
feelings priority over your own, even in extreme situations,
is an expression of the value you place on your own life and
well-being. I think today I would probably be able to run away
in such a situation. But I'm a different person now than I was
when I was first mugged.
Many people in the recovery movement also believe in a much more
difficult concept, which is that I bear some responsibility for
having been mugged. Many other people resist such ideas, given
that the muggers themselves certainly bear full responsibility
for their own actions. Permitting them to mug me is not the same
as giving them permission to mug me. I find that it helps to
distinguish three equally legitimate but quite different concepts
of responsibility, which I will call legal, moral, and practical:
legal responsibility is whatever the law says it is, moral
responsibility apportions moral right and wrong when something
bad happens between people, and practical responsibility pertains
to issues of *why* things happened and a posteriori of how
they can be prevented from happening again. Legal ideas about
responsibility tend to reflect complex and historically shifting
accommodations between moral and practical ideas, and I won't
consider them any further here. In the case of the muggings I
described above, the muggers were 100% morally responsible for
the muggings that took place and I was 0% morally responsible.
But practical responsibility is a whole different matter.
Much havoc occurs when the moral and practical conceptions of
responsibility are confused with one another, or when one of
them is emphasized to the exclusion of the other. Let us briefly
consider three examples:
* Many survivors of abuse and assault find it very difficult
to explore the ways in which they have permitted themselves to be
victimized because this sounds to them as though it detracts from
the moral responsibility of their victimizers, who usually claim
with great and practiced casuistry that they are themselves the
innocent victims in the situation. The batterer might argue that
the victim provoked the battering, or seduced and rejected the
batterer, or whatever. These claims may actually be true in some
cases, but they are complete non sequiturs. Batterers and other
abusively controlling people are generally in massive denial:
driven by an underlying terror of abandonment, they experience
themselves as powerless and their actions as fully controlled
by the other party. And the battered party may come to believe
this as well. As a result, people who work with survivors of
battering relationships were long reticent to admit that these
survivors often return to a batterer even without a strong
financial reason to do so; they did not want to provide support
for (utterly false) claims that the battered party had thereby
excused the past battering, consented to further battering,
or else "wanted" to be abused in any sense that would reduce
the batterer's moral culpability. The most abusive lines of the
batterer's ally are precisely the innuendoes that confuse the
practical and moral varieties of responsibility: "You did have
some part in it, now didn't you?" For this reason and others,
everybody needs to be the judge of practical responsibility for
their own lives without submitting to the judgements of anybody
else.
* Some large and successful organizations offer workshops which
teach people to view the world entirely in terms of practical
responsibility. Lifespring, for instance, actually teaches
people that they are 100% responsible for everything that happens
to them, that every ill that befalls them is evidence of a hidden
motive, that this stance reflects "empowerment", and that any
other stance is just part of the disingenuous rationalization for
one's perverse desire to be victimized.
* A rising political trend in the United States has laid claim
to the phrase "personal responsibility" and has constructed an
elaborate system of ideas about the "victimology" of certain
social movements that have sought to identify and redress social
ills. People who employ these ideas generally speak as though it
is always clear and obvious who bears responsibility in a given
situation, and they will engage in harsh lectures about "taking
personal responsibility" when they perceive someone as adopting
the social identity of a "whining victim". In practice, though,
these ideas are empty, and serve as an excuse to apply the burden
of "personal responsibility" in an arbitrary fashion depending
on who the parties are. It is as though American English has now
differentiated two versions of the word "victim". When given its
normal pronunciation, with a major stress on the first syllable,
it refers to the victims of violent criminals, liberals, and
government regulators. But when given its newer pronunciation,
with an extra-heavy stress on the first syllable, it refers to
those people who have chosen to construct themselves as victims
of racist white people, sexist men, private businesses, abusive
parents, or the police. To be sure, some people really *are*
whiners. But to raise "whining" to a broadly but selectively
applied stereotype is the very antithesis of moral reasoning.
Some clarity about the nature of personal responsibility is a
prerequisite for any serious understanding of the dynamics of
unhealthy interactions between people. In a series of books
that were both highly popular and thoroughly lampooned in their
day (e.g., "Games People Play" and "I'm Okay, You're Okay"), Eric
Berne described these phenomena in terms of "games". An example
of a game is Uproar. Everybody knows pairs of people, especially
parents and teenaged children, who repeatedly get themselves into
a situation in which both parties are mad and one of them storms
out slamming a door. Each of them will be deeply involved in
assigning responsibility for the event to the other, and this
will be one way that they effectively conspire to enact the
same scenario over and over and over. Now it could be that,
in a moral sense, one of them really is primarily in the wrong.
But that does not explain, in a practical sense, why both of
them consent to participate in the endless cycle without either
repairing it, doing something different, or leaving. Everyone
who plays a game has a practical responsibility for their own
participation, and discovering such a game in one's life provides
an opportunity to grow by exploring what's behind it and how it
might be healed.
It is important to keep clear that Berne is asking a practical
question, not a moral one. His point is definitely not that all
assaults that occur, for example, are instances of a game; he is
referring to people who do something to make physical coercion a
pattern in their lives. People who assault others are just about
the lowest form of life and are morally responsible for their
actions absolutely regardless of what their victims did or didn't
do or could have done differently. And many assault survivors
most certainly found themselves with absolutely no options in
situations that they could not possibly have been expected to
foresee. But the practical question still remains of why people
who see trouble coming and have viable options to ameliorate it
nonetheless sometimes fail to do so, and fail to do so repeatedly.
The answer to this question is mysterious and depressing but
not all that surprising. Berne claims that all of us, or at
least those who have not healed their game-playing tendencies,
transact tacit negotiations with everyone we meet. We go around
effectively broadcasting queries such as "I like to be the one
who storms out slamming the door in a game of Uproar; do you
want to be the one who gets to complain about having the door
slammed in their face?". When our interlocutor doesn't want to
play the other role in any of our games, we just say nice-to-
meet-you and move along to someone else, until we find someone
who wants to play. Then perhaps we fall in love, go into
business together, discuss politics, or whatever on the surface
we claim we are doing.
I have had many occasions to think about Berne's theory as I have
run a large mailing list on the Internet. Among the many social
functions that e-mail makes more efficient, it seems, is the
social trolling through which game-players find their partners.
I have identified a couple of such games. One of them is called
Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas. It has two major
roles, Professor (P) and Questioner (Q), and goes like this:
P: forwards material out to a large Internet mailing list that
has any sort of political content
Q: sends professor a message in response that presents itself
as an innocent inquiry full of high-minded language but
in fact is utterly snide and often laced with innuendo
P: takes offense and mails back a reply that reacts to the bait
in any way
Q: declares victory by adopting a tone of wounded innocence and
professing shock and/or rueful disappointment that ("just as
I thought") a Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas
The cycle may repeat, with P continuing to take the bait and Q
escalating the rhetoric of wounded innocence, grave injustice,
unconscionable rudeness, abuse of authority, and so on. It takes
very little indeed for Q to portray himself (in my experience
it is always a man, or at least someone employing a man's name)
as the victim of rude closed-mindedness. For example, I find
that even referring to Q's argument as "conservative", even in
the context of a perfectly level-headed response, is enough to
produce howls about stereotyping and labeling and party lines
and thought police. One guy called me a fascist because I used
the word hegemony -- never mind that the guy who gave the word
hegemony its modern meaning did so while rotting in a fascist
jail. The twisted logic is of course part of the game -- an
invitation to play another round, double or nothing.
As in most games that involve accusation, the protagonist in
Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas proceeds by
creating and exploiting ambiguity, or at least pretending that
ambiguity exists, about issues of moral responsibility. I am
attacked through an accusation of having conducted an attack
myself. Like most abusive behavior in real life, the attack
works precisely by creating confusion and conflict about reality
within the person being attacked.
Was he really being snide?
Am I imagining things?
Am I overreacting?
Am I just looking for an excuse to snap at someone?
Maybe it's a cultural difference?
Don't I have a responsibility anyway?
And above all...
Am I hurting his feelings?
This very common pattern deserves fuller treatment on another
occasion, as do the larger political project and form of
self-fashioning in which Q is engaged. My topic here, though,
concerns practical responsibility. Briefly put, why do I fall
for this game? Let us cut me some slack and forget the first
half dozen occasions that this scenario occurred, before the
pattern ought to have become clear. The hard question is why
I continue to play this game the twentieth time around.
For one thing, I find it very hard *not* to reply to e-mail. I
can rationalize this by saying that it's moral, it's responsible,
it's polite, and it's a norm of Internet etiquette to reply to
everybody. But if I am really paying attention, and am not in
denial, I really can tell the difference between people who are
offering me a game of Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New
Ideas and people who, while perhaps not sharing the political
views that were expressed in the item I happen to have forwarded
to a mailing list, and while perhaps employing some arguments
that I find mistaken, nonetheless are interested in commencing
a grown-up professional relationship. Messages reflecting these
two intentions really are as different as night and day, even if
I could not provide a formal grammar to distinguish between them.
So why *do* I keep choosing to play this game? No doubt the
answer has a number of layers to it, but one part of the answer
is that I have a big red button on me that relates to unjust
accusations. You don't need to know where this button comes
from, but you can probably imagine what it is like. In any
case the upshot, it seems, is that when someone offers me a game
of Liberal Professor Closes His Mind To New Ideas, I frequently
go right ahead. I am better now at declining such offers than
I used to be, and I expect to be even better in the future.
My thing about unjust accusations is probably also one reason
why I am prone to accepting invitations to another game, which
might be called Censorship. Like all games, this one comes in
first-, second-, and third-degree forms. (Berne's definitions of
these degrees don't work very well, so I'll modify them to make
them fit the case at hand.) Fortunately it is hard to engage in
third-degree games over the Internet, since these involve actual
physical violence (but see Kali Tal's article in TNO 1(6)). But
first- and second-degree versions of Censorship have both become
common on the net. The game involves two players, a Moderator
(M) and a Contributor (C), and it goes like this:
C: joins a mailing list and submits items to the list that
don't really belong there, repeating if necessary with less
and less suitable material until...
M: rejects those items
C: asks why the items have been rejected, usually while
affecting a tone of bewilderment and wounded innocence
M: offers just about any explanation at all
[at this point C might attempt to escalate the game by
baiting M into saying something s/he'll later regret,
and M might accept the implicit offer by taking the bait]
C: declares victory by registering protests about having been
censored, usually with high-toned language about freedom and
hypocrisy and so on
Once again let's ask about practical responsibility. It may
be objected that M is entirely innocent in a practical sense,
inasmuch as precisely two options are available: publishing
the unsuitable submissions or not publishing them. But other
options actually are available, such as negotiation, suggesting
more suitable lists, offering to call C on the telephone,
preparing a boilerplate text explaining the nature of moderated
mailing lists and the policies of this particular list, offering
different sorts of explanations or offering no explanation at
all. Of course, I do not mean to say that every list moderator
is playing a game whenever someone complains about a posting
not being published on his or her list. In fact, I think that
e-mail affords situations in which game-players can enroll others
in their games, such as the two games I have mentioned here,
with only a very minimal level of agreement from those others.
Nonetheless, these considerations should not distract us from
the perfectly real possibility that M actually does bear some
practical responsibility for a particular episode. I know that
this has been the case in a few instances with my own mailing
list. In a first-degree version of the game, someone might send
me a note, in that disingenuous tone that healthy people do not
put up with, challenging me as to why I don't post certain kinds
of materials on my list, or else insisting that I post particular
items. I might respond by explaining that the list consists
simply of whatever I find interesting, whereupon my interlocutor
will declare victory by saying something like "oh, so the list
just exists to push your own views". Any attempt to respond
to this sort of nonsense is obviously further game-playing on
my part, and I sometimes manage to abstain and sometimes do not.
Let me tell you what a second-degree game of Censorship is like.
Recently I received a series of long messages from this guy I've
never heard of, written in exaggeratedly high-toned language,
which vilified a mailing list moderator for declining to publish
something he wrote. I found these messages totally confusing and
replied briefly saying so. I then received an equally confusing
and obviously disingenuous explanation from this person, followed
by an even more confusing message reporting some kind of problem
with my own mailing list. I replied to the problem report with
a simple "what are you trying to do?", and I got an even *more*
confusing message back that, I realized, meant that he was trying
to post something to my list. This is impossible, however, since
the list is only for my use. He had received a message from
the server explaining this in perfectly clear terms and giving
instructions for subscribing, but he had bizarrely ignored the
explanation and treated the rest of the message as an unsolicited
personal invitation from me to join my list. So I explained
that my list is not a discussion group -- and got back even more
high-toned complaining, together with incoherent accusations of
double standards, singling out, and so on. By now I had had it
with this guy. If I were a rational person I would have realized
that "having had it" is simply what it feels like to decide to
accept an invitation to certain kinds of games, in this case
a game of second-degree Censorship. Yet I plunged right in,
explaining that moderators can do whatever they like with their
mailing lists and advising the guy to get a life. I don't feel
particularly bad about this as a moral matter; it was certainly
proportionate to the situation. But proportions may have little
to do with cause and effect in practical reality.
Before I knew it, high-toned tracts accusing me of censorship
*and* unprovoked rudeness were making their way to the faculty
and staff of my department, some people in the hierarchy of
my university, a CPSR mailing list, and heaven knows who else.
These messages (some of them entitled "Language of an Assistant
Professor") included numerous false and misleading statements and
generally verged on libel. Probably the most offensive falsehood
is his claim that I told him that I would not publish his tract
because I disagree with it. In fact I have never read his
tract and have never exchanged the first word with him about its
contents.
In any event, at this point I began to snap out of my denial and
ask around. It would seem that the guy has been practicing this
technique serially: trying to post a meandering tract on various
mailing lists where it doesn't belong, getting rejected, and then
vilifying the mailing list moderator to every address that can
be connected with the moderator in any way and to several other
mailing lists besides, until finally someone refuses to publish
his messages and the cycle begins over again. His principal
tool in assembling and distributing his messages seems to be the
Web: he searches the text in the list owner's Web pages looking
for material that can be quoted in constructing a charge of
hypocrisy, and then he searches for potentially relevant e-mail
addresses that can be used to deliver the resulting message.
In my case, he evidently went through the Web-based archives
of my list that Kee Hinckley and Al Whaley so kindly maintain and
sent his message to a large number of the people whose messages I
*have* sent out. (He does not use a Web browser to send the mail
but Windows Eudora, suppressing his recipient lists with a blind
cc.) I am also told on good authority that he sent his tract to
vice-president@whitehouse.gov along with a note explaining that
my mailing list, among others, had refused to publish it.
It is hard to know what to do about this. Would I have been just
as victimized even if I had not played my part in this fellow's
game? I could certainly have supplied him with less ammo by
retreating into euphemism and high-toned language, the better
to resist quotation out of context. But if his past practice
is any guide, he would probably then have kept escalating his
provocations until I took the bait, or else satisfied himself
with the basic charge of censorship if I did not. It is also
hard to imagine what redress I could have. I would simply be
signing up for a more strenuous game of second-degree Censorship
if I approached his service provider, posted a public query
asking for others' experiences with him, or placed a phone call
to his mother. Besides, I don't even know what country he's in.
Will such behavior become more widespread? As the net grows,
it will include more people looking for fellow players of their
games, and it will also include more potential places where such
games can be played. Perhaps a list moderators' union would
help, by analogy to the extensive network of system maintainers
who share notes about viruses, security holes, system hackers
and their attacks, and so on. It might also help to put names
on these games, or at least to tell stories about them, so
that fewer people fall for them unnecessarily. Or perhaps this
kind of behavior will simply become part of the price we pay
for our enjoyment of the net. Most people who have gotten this
guy's messages have just blown them off as the work of a crank.
(When I walked into my department's office the next morning, the
entire staff asked me in unison, "who *is* this guy?". Actually,
they didn't use the word "guy".) And I got an opportunity to
learn something about myself. The Buddhists say that we should
be grateful to everybody, no matter how awful they are, since
they provide us with another occasion to deepen our appreciation
for the illusory and transient nature of all things. By that
measure this guy is a true hero of the net, and all thirty
million of us should send him individual messages of appreciation
for his tireless work. (That's just a joke. Leave him alone.)
The net has a way of making old things new again, and obviously
this includes issues of aggression and abuse, right and wrong,
injury and responsibility, and the rest. And just as in the
corporeal world, our actions on the net either contribute to
a healthy atmosphere of integrity and pluralism or they do not.
This applies in a straightforward way to the people who wreak
havoc on the net, but it also applies to the people (most of us)
who abet havoc, who permit havoc to be wreaked upon us, and who
comfortably play out the role of isolated social atoms judging
things at a distance. We know what we think about a game-playing
troller, a builder of viruses, an author of hoaxes, a broadcaster
of advertising to mailing lists, a forger of message headers,
or a propagator of libel. These people are aggressors against
the whole community of the net. But what about the rest of us
-- the ones who took the troller's bait, who didn't virus-check
that disk before sending it out, who didn't read that alarming
message closely enough before passing it along to a mailing list,
or who went ahead and believed something that didn't quite add up?
The Buddhists are right: these people are here to teach us
something, and we're lazy if we don't figure out it what it is.
Sentencing wrongdoers to a zillion years at hard labor sometimes
feels good, and sometimes no doubt it's even morally called
for, but it does little to change how much wrong gets done. And
banishing perpetrators only shifts them to another neighborhood,
where they will immediately start playing their usual games on
someone else. Pests flourish to the extent that communities
are atomized, demoralized, and disunited. Once we get off our
butts and start building the institutions and customs and skills
of community, they will no longer be able to feed on us, and
they may even start seeking out the help they need to heal their
own wounds. I have no control over these people, and the more
I stop trying to control them the less nutrition I will provide
to their defenses and their delusions. What I *can* do, though,
is describe the reality of the situation -- put a name on it as
best I can -- and hope that others will do the same, extending
or deepening my own analysis and bringing in their own ways of
thinking about the problem. This kind of consciousness-raising
is a prerequisite of both individual and community healing; the
will to be of service to the community comes next; and the formal
skills of listening, organizing, and building come after that.
These skills can and must be taught, but they presuppose that
everyone is looking to their own health, taking responsibility
for the things they have control over and refusing as much as
practically possible to be assaulted by the things they do not.
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Wish list.
Having returned to San Diego from a few months abroad, I spent
much of late November looking for a new place to live. This is
an appalling waste of time. Fortunately I knew the city well and
could narrow down the blocks I wanted to live on, first through
my general knowledge of various neighborhoods and then by driving
around and observing the remarkable block-by-block demographics
in each area. I spent some time responding to ads in the
paper, but this was way too hard. Many of the ads don't list
an address, thus requiring me to leave a phone message that may
or may not ever get returned in a useful form. Even when an
address is present, I still have to drive over there and look
at the place from the outside before deciding whether to suffer
the even greater hassle of trying to make an appointment to
look at it from the inside. Many apartment building managers,
I'm convinced, really don't care whether their vacant units are
rented out anyway.
In consequence of all this, I ended up spending a great deal of
time designing networked computer systems to support apartment-
hunting. As always in the wish list, "design" here isn't just
about technology. It's also about creating the architectures and
institutions that structure incentives in the interest of doing
the right thing rather than the wrong thing. So far, it seems,
developments in this area are primarily driven by the corporate
owners of huge apartment complexes. These include videotapes of
apartments that you can borrow from Blockbuster, free "magazines"
of apartment complex advertising, and (I'm told) a few Web pages.
These projects are oriented to marketing a particular company's
products, or those of an alliance of large companies, and not to
the creation of standards to let everyone market their property.
Now the obvious thing is to create a Web form that asks for the
same information as the person on the phone when you purchase a
want ad in the newspaper. Then a prospective renter calls up and
browses the resulting ads in any of a dozen forms. This scheme
should be extremely cheap, since nobody has to buy any newsprint
or lug anything around town in a truck. It also lends itself to
arbitrarily elaborate extensions, and one can imagine categories
of ads like in the yellow pages: two-line text listings might
even be free, with display ads formatted in PDF, possibly even
hyperlinking to further information in glorious multimedia back
on the seller's home machine. Clicking on the phone number might
automatically dial the phone, and so on.
But this scheme only solves a few problems. It's the obvious way
to start, by implementing familiar mechanisms in digital form,
but we can do a lot better. Let's crank up the technology a few
years and imagine an online version of the "Aspen Project" of
the Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor of the Media Lab
at MIT). What they did was drive around Aspen, Colorado while
pulling a wheeled cart with a running video camera on it. They
did this three times for each segment of each street, with the
camera looking forward, to the left, and to the right. Then they
put all of the resulting video clips on a videodisk and built an
interface that lets someone "drive" virtually around Aspen. When
the person "turns" the corner, for example, the system directs
videodisk player to cue up the clip corresponding to the street
that one is "turning" onto. Mike Naimark, now at Interval, was
involved in the original Aspen Project and has done a variety
of subsequent-generation versions of it, including a system you
might have seen at the Exploratorium that lets you "fly" around
San Francisco with a joystick.
Now imagine someone building a version of this for the whole
of San Diego. If you figure that San Diego has something on
the order of 2000 km of streets and the car moves at 50km/h and
shoots 3 sets of video (forward, left, and right) at 2 degrees of
zoom (a few buildings with yards and landscape versus close in to
the buildings themselves) then the result is 240 hours of video,
the equivalent of perhaps 150 movies and thus easily within the
range of video servers that will soon become available. Someone
shoots all of this, sets it up on a Web-accessible server, and
offers several different sorts of services, each interlinked with
a different database. So I could "drive" down the streets of the
area east of Balboa Park, and some of the houses might have "for
rent" signs on them; when I click on these signs I get a page
with the full details. Or else I could start with a map of the
city, draw circles around areas that interest me, call up the
want ads that fall within one of those areas, call up a street
map of that area with the available properties marked on it, and
then take a "drive" past all of them.
Depending on how the architecture works (particularly how
many different video "trips" can be running at once), it would
be beneficial for everyone to get free access to the driving
mechanism without necessarily using the enhanced services. That
way more people would be aware of the system and have a hotlist
link to it. Then individual services build on top of the system
would each have their own fee structure. Advertisers would pay
for the want ads and for other annotations on their property
(such as the clickable menu on the window of a restaurant),
but browsers might pay for other services such as architectural
information and other commentary on the buildings. (Think of
the "Access Guides" that I recommended in TNO 2(6); they are
organized block-by-block rather than by topics.)
Unfortunately, such a system could have a variety of less happy
uses. Imagine if the video database were linked to a phone book,
or a mailing list, or a customer database enriched with detailed
demographic information. A less serious concern is that the
video system might accidentally pick up people or situations
that shouldn't be immortalized on video. But the folks who are
shooting the video would presumably post some warnings and send
someone ahead of the car to alert people that it's coming and
give then a chance to retreat inside. Of course, the people
might react in a less cooperative fashion, and it would be a
fascinating scene to observe at a safe distance in any case.
Another issue is what happens when the video goes out of date:
Is the video going to be dated? Who pays for it to be reshot
when the appearance of the buildings or the street changes?
Would such a system invade everyone's privacy? The question
has already arisen in the case of overhead representations in
"GIS" digital mapmaking. (See excellent work on this subject
of Michael Curry <curry@geog.sscnet.ucla.edu> in the journal
Cartography and Geographic Information Systems and elsewhere.)
The basic problem recurs in a variety of emerging privacy issues:
nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to
what someone might see when driving past their house in a car,
but that's not the same as their house being "observed" in a
context that is enriched with data from other sources. Suppose,
for example, that burglars could call up geodemographic files
and browse for houses that look easy to break into...
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This month's recommendations -- not.
In the spirit of the season, this month I am going to get off
my chest a bunch of antirecommendations -- some holiday turkeys
that I regard as musts-to-avoid. Those wishing to accentuate
the positive may wish to move along to the "follow-up" section.
Terence K. McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original
Tree of Knowledge: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human
Evolution, New York: Bantam, 1992. Also, The Archaic Revival:
Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual
Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess,
and the End of History, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.
Terence McKenna has achieved a certain amount of fame in the
cyberculture for drawing an analogy between shamanism and virtual
reality. My quarrel is not with this analogy -- both of them,
after all, involve a sort of controlled hallucination. My
quarrel, rather, is with his ideas about shamanism. McKenna is
an ethnobotanist, which in practice means that he goes down to
the Amazon, hangs out with people in traditional cultures, and
trips out on gnarly mushrooms. His books are basically arguments
for the legalization of hallucinogens based on the great virtues
of shamanism. The problem is that he very misleadingly tends
to conflate shamanism with drug-taking, so that his readers
end up with little sense of the personal discipline involved in
real shamanism or of the simple fact that drugs are not needed
in order to practice shamanism at a high level of sophistication.
A vastly better introduction to shamanism is Sandra Ingerman's
"Soul Retrieval".
The Red Herring. This is an extraordinarily expensive magazine,
with a self-indulgently meaningless title, from the subculture of
venture capitalists and people dedicating their lives to cleaning
up one day on an IPO. I gather that its principal attraction for
this audience is copious data on high technology companies that
are raising funds. The actual copy, though, is unimpressive.
The people in this world are accustomed to hearing entrepreneurs
pitching their companies by means of thoroughly self-serving
presentations with no pretense of critical perspective or
analytical detachment, and that, unfortunately, is precisely
what the "articles" in TRH are. To each their own, I suppose.
The Weekly Standard. The son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude
Himmelfarb and the protege of Bill Bennett, Bill Kristol made
his name in 1993 as the author of a series of bone-crushing
faxes that crystallized conservative resistance to the Clinton
Administration. Having grown up steeped in the critique of
liberalism, Kristol accurately saw its deep vulnerabilities at
a time when most of his fellow conservatives were disoriented by
George Bush's loss at the polls. Although I only read the faxes
in bits and pieces through others' quotations, I was impressed
by the clarity of his vision in this regard. Which makes it all
the more surprising that his new project, a weekly conservative
political magazine published by Rupert Murdoch, is so totally
lame. John Judis argues that this is simply one reflection
of the bankruptcy of American conservatism as an intellectual
movement (despite all of its talk about "ideas"), and it's true
that nothing being written today holds a candle to the National
Review in its early days. But part of the problem is simply that
Kristol is no longer a marginal hell-raiser with nothing to lose.
He believes that the task for conservatives, now that they have
decisively taken over the Republican party, is to soften their
message enough to build a working electoral coalition. In my
opinion this approach is misguided, given the many structural
trends working against the Democrats in the long run. But
Kristol opened his magazine with a heavily publicized quasi-
endorsement of Colin Powell, and that tactical orientation has
continued. Very little of this stuff will be worth reading next
month, must less in the next century.
The concept of "memes". The term "meme" was introduced by
Richard Dawkins in his popular biology book "The Selfish Gene".
The argument of the book is that evolution can be viewed as a
process by which individual genes use organisms as vehicles for
their own propagation rather than the other way round. This is
an amusing turnabout, but it is also a simplistic substitute for
biology's crying need for theories that straddle multiple levels
of analysis. The concept of a "meme" was introduced by analogy
to this. A meme is simply an idea, and the rhetorical trick is
to portray ideas as agents trying to spread themselves around
in society, mutating and recombining through a process of natural
selection in which our minds (brains, I suppose) are so many grey
meat machines. Now, Nietzsche said something like this a hundred
years ago in reference to the "will to power" of metaphors. The
idea didn't make much more sense then, but at least Nietzsche had
larger and more disturbing things in mind. The word "meme" has
gotten a boost lately from its frequent use in Wired magazine,
from which it has been taken up into the shifting jargon of
the subculture of cyberspace. The concept does have attractions.
It is one way -- better than nothing, I suppose -- of talking
about a crucial phenomenon: people's incomplete awareness of
the contents, origins, and logics of the ideas that they have
acquired from others through the language they speak, the
symbolism of their machinery, the seeming platitudes that they
pass along from the evening news, and much else. But it is
nonetheless a poor theory of these things. One basic problem
is the biological metaphor: memes are to genes as people's minds
are to creatures. I suppose it would be churlish of me to point
out that biological metaphors have been a staple of authoritarian
thinking for a long time; at least these particular biological
metaphors appeal in a misleading way to whole ecosystems and
not to single organisms with authoritarian "heads". The deeper
problem is that these metaphors are moving in an antihumanist
direction. Do the people who talk about memes really think of
themselves as passive cultural dopes, or as inert media through
which great swarms of ideas pass? Such a notion flies in the
face of the massive work in which many organizations engage to
encourage the proliferation of certain ideas and discourage the
proliferation of others. It also greatly underestimates the
large amount of collective cognition that is part-and-parcel of
group identity among people with shared interests in society --
not least the cyberculture, with its shared "bet" on benefitting
from the outcome of technology-driven social upheavals. At the
end of the day, treating ideas as "memes" is an abdication of
personal responsibility. *You* choose what ideas you think and
say and write, and *you* should take responsibility for them.
Those Dewar's ads. You've seen them, in Wired for example: the
ones that are aimed at men in their early 20's who are figuring
out what's involved in being a man. What's involved, it would
seem, is drinking this crummy blended scotch. The ads are based
on ridicule and the fear of ridicule, and reveal the extent to
which the cultural construction of masculinity, with its foolish
poses and burdensome roles, depends on the threat of ridicule.
Let's just all just move along -- to a world in which people's
self-esteem cannot be manipulated by corporate drug pushers.
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Follow-up.
In response to my article about those computer ads in TNO 2(10),
one reader told me that Microsoft Windows was responsible for a
great deal of togetherness in his family, inasmuch as his kids'
game software is often so difficult to install that he must spend
endless hours helping them with it.
And in response to my wish in TNO 2(10) for voice annotation to
web documents, Michael Chui <mchui@cs.indiana.edu> kindly pointed
out (as I knew and should have remarked) that, as he put it,
"annotation has been part of the conceptual cloud of hypermedia
almost as long as it has been raining links". He directed my
attention to discussion of annotation in the original WWW design
documentation at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/DesignIssues/
and to "current work relating to collaboration using the Web,
including a pointer to the web page of the W3C Annotation Working
Group", at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Collaboration/
My point in wishing for voice annotations was not to claim any
originality for the idea but to contextualize it and explore some
of its consequences.
Web picks.
The telecommunications technology that has had the greatest
impact on political processes in the United States since TV is
still not the Internet but the fax machine: several organizations
have set up weekly fax broadcasts to their membership, and the
practice is spreading. Republican theorist Bill Kristol, for
example, is famous for his 80's faxes, mentioned above, against
Bill Clinton's health care proposals. Jesse Jackson has a fax
broadcast as well, the texts of which can be found on the web
pages for the Rainbow Coalition at http://www.cais.com/rainbow/
The Political Participation Project can be found on the Web at
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ppp/home.html
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Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucla.edu
Department of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles +1 (310) 825-7154
Los Angeles, California 90095-1520 FAX 206-4460
USA
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Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The
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