More importantly, the categorizations in this guy's blogroll are the coolest ever. Update: No longer true. When I get time, I'm ripping off his idea.
19 July 2004
Say hello to the new boss
Just like the old boss:
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.The story isn't getting picked up by much US media, natch, but Holden at Atrios is on the case.
...
A former CIA officer, Vincent Cannisatraro, recently told The New Yorker: "If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London, the answer is yes, he does. He was a paid Mukhabarat [intelligence] agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff."Sydney Morning Hearald 17 July 2004
Update: more on the story:
[Morning Hearald journalist Paul] McGeough cites the opinion of former CIA case officer, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who told the New Yorker: "He [Allawi] was a very effective operator and a true believer. Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug."So I was wrong: our press isn't ignoring the story.In the first three weeks of the interim government, Allawi's unelected and despised administration has assumed the power to impose martial law, ban demonstrations and monitor citizens' phones and email. He has declared his intention to recruit the military and intelligence operatives of Hussein's regime and this week announced the formation of a secret police agency to "annihilate" opposition. He is already being contemptuously referred to in Baghdad as "Saddam without the moustache" or "America's Saddam".
Far from denouncing the Bush administration for establishing a US-protected police-state in Iraq, commentary over the past week in the New York Times and the Washington Post has lauded Allawi for his reputation for sadism and ruthlessness ....
Magick smackdown: The motion picture
Via my extensive contacts in the world of the occult, I learn that there's a film in the works, Revolt of the Magicians, telling a fictionalized version of the young Aleister Crowley's break from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
If you think about it, it's pretty astonishing that Uncle Al has apparently never been portrayed on film, with the possible exception of turning up in a movie of sketch comedy with his name misspelled in the credits, or in the form of the character "Oliver Haddo" in a nearly-forgotten silent film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Magician.
Even if you don't believe in magic, Crowley's biography boggles the mind. He was one of these larger-than-life Brits like Sir Richard Francis Burton or Lord Byron. He was a childhood chess prodigy. He was one of the great mountaineers of his time. He wrote poetry. He traveled the world. He had lovers of both genders --- during the Victorian era. He was in an occult secret society together with heavy hitters like William Butler Yeats. And then there's the actual occult stuff: even if you stick to the historically verifiable events, you have all this great secret society / mysterious manuscript / declaration of a New Aeon stuff. We now have two good biographies on the shelves: Kaczynski's and Sutin's. How could you not make a movie?
One wonders if Revolt will be the treatment that one would hope for. There's a fly-by-night scent in the air. The film has an impressively lame website. I'm talking 1994 lame. It's not bad in the "I hired an incompetent graphic designer with delusions of grandeur" way, or the "I hired a teenager who put in a lot of gratuitous spinning icons" way --- it's bad in the "I just built my first website typing HTML into Notepad, but I was in a hurry" kind of way. And the producers apparently make reality TV shows. Or try to: everything they list on their website is in pre-production. A web search reveals only that they have published a direct-to-video Corey Haim slasher movie. Not inspiring.
On the other hand, and this is a big other hand, Lon Milo Duquette is credited as one of the two screenwriters. Duquette is a good writer and a serious occultist. His The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed ben Clifford is the best (and funniest) concise introduction to qabalah I have read, his My Life with the Spirits is likewise a wry autobiography of occult practice, and he's written a bushel basket of very serious occult books. He's heavily involved in the OTO, Crowley's initiatory organization, so knows about as much about Crowley as anyone and understands that the man was an egocentric shmuck but hardly the sinister figure of legend. So who knows?
18 July 2004
Communists
A funny little Platonic dialogue.
Snoop: I know what its mascot should be .... The Carrboro Communists.If you're laughing --- and again I know who you are out there --- follow the link: there's a bit more.
Lex: Oooooh. I like it.
Snoop: The Fightin' Commies.
Lex: The marketing possibilities alone are almost limitless.
Snoop: Yeah, I figure the football team could be called the Red Menace. They'd, you know, wear red uniforms.
Lex: Sure. With a hammer and sickle and a star on the helmets.
Snoop: And instead of having their last names on the backs of the jerseys, all the jerseys would just say "labor."
17 July 2004
Breaking of the vessels
Bob Dylan, perhaps in kabbalist mystic mode, teaches us that everything is broken.
Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds.
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken.
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts.
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones.
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin',
Everything is broken.
Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken.
In that spirit, I offer you a heartwarming little parable passed on by the aptly-pseudonymed Heartsdesire. Ordinarily, "heartwarming" is not territory I enjoy &msash; I hear you laughing out there! — but this one has a little allusion to good design, and is worth a peek if you at all enjoy parables or heartwarmingness.
16 July 2004
Every man and every woman
Warren Ellis has another dark poetic situationist rant about the conflict between our humanity and what Bucky Fuller called grunch.
Society is not your friend. It doesn't care about you.I'm not quite in a foul enough mood today to entirely believe this sentiment. But after a week wandering the office parks and minimalls of America, I'm close.We're logs for the steam engine of society.
Shove us in and burn us up to keep the wheels turning.
So throw the machine into reverse.
See, there is no massive world conspiracy to keep things crappy.
There's a business plan. There's a million business plans.
And they're based into coercing you into buying their products.
And cheating the other people who have products to sell you.
There are no secret chiefs. There are no space aliens or supernatural entities running things.
Just governments. And governments are essentially incompetent.
In Britain, there are government cameras on the roads. Big Brother, right?
But most of them don't have any film in.
That's not a competent Scary Government.
But an incompetent with a gun can still kill you. That's why they're dangerous.
Running a war badly still gets people killed.
So you know what we need to do?
We need to become the Secret Chiefs, and the space aliens, and the supernatural entities.
Antistars.
15 July 2004
Correction
This understated comment ran in the Lexington, Kentucky Herald-Leader on Independence Day.
It has come to the editor's attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission.Via Athenae at Atrios, who muses about what contemporary stories will merit similar corrections in a few decades.
14 July 2004
Great Wall of China
Via Collision Detection I learn that you can check out a current satellite picture of the site for Black Rock City. At the moment I write this, the road network is already visible, there's a fair bit of of stuff in place in and around Center Camp, significant stuff in place at the Man himself and in a couple of places on the far side of the Man's Land, plus a handful of scattered specks in the otherwise empty City.
I'm not going this year, and strangely, more than almost anything else this makes me wish I were going.
Today's quote
Via Aoibhill:
The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.If you don't know who Emma Goldman was, spend a minute with her WikiPedia entry and improve your life. Although of course my witty, sophisticated regular readers know all about her, I'm sure.Emma Goldman
13 July 2004
Dance!
You know I try to take it easy on the silly little animations, but this one addresses a very important problem.
Lego
The lovely Waterbones points out a terrific Lego diorama of a Greenpeace protest. Not to be outdone, I offer you Bible stories, mobius strips and other mathematical forms, Escher's Relativity and Ascending and Descending, a globe, and a strange museum of horrors.
But most amazing of all is a dark, brilliant Lego sculpture by a Polish artist. I won't tell you what it is: you'll recognize it immediately. There are more pictures in the series, reminding us that everything in our world is reproduced in pixelated form in Legoland.
12 July 2004
Insert Jerry Lewis joke here
From Bérubé, who also has some wry observations about soccer.
French popular music sucks. It actually sucks in so many ways, in so many genres, that I could not keep proper track of its promiscuous modalities of inadequacy. A friend suggested to me that the French never made the categorical distinction between "rock" and "show tunes" that is fundamental to Anglo-American popular music, so that French pop sounds more or less like Barry Manilow. But that doesn't explain the travesty that is French hip-hop. Nor does it explain the curious fact that although experimental French art and literature have in fact rocked almost continuously for the past 175 years, no French music of any kind has really mattered to the rest of the world since the mid-thirteenth century, when the hot new musical form known as the "motet" took Europe by storm. I welcome your theories about this. (Before anybody gets all weird with me about Berlioz and Satie, all I have to say is, two exceptions in 750 years prove the rule. And the incomparable Django Reinhardt wasn't French, he was Manouche.)But hey: what about MC Solaar, who raps in French? If that's not a mutant superpower, what is?
11 July 2004
Power-ups
Clive "Collision Detection" Thomson is fond of asserting that computer games are an art form well-suited to political propaganda.
A political game hits with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but that's the point; like a political cartoon, its simplicity tries to clarify the issues.He's on to something. A couple of weeks ago, I spent a good chunk of time playing an epic game in which you take on George W. Bush. The game plays with the conventions of computer games, as well as lots of pop culture references, and is often very funny: You can fight as an '80s hero, for instance --- Mr. T or Hulk Hogan. In between the action scenes, there are some great infographics and animations of pure political stuff, like how the Bush administration has rigged the tax system for the benefit of the rich.
10 July 2004
On the road again
FYI: I'm going to be on the road for work again this week, which means my posting may or may not be as regular as usual, depending upon the amount of internet that have out in St. Louis. All you addicts may have to hang tough.
Today's quote
Pointed out to me by MKB: What Larry Flynt said in an interview with Salon, about Rep. Bob Livingston calling him a "bottom feeder" for threatening to reveal Republican congressmens' extramarital affairs during the Clinton impeachment hearings.
Yeah, that's right. I'm a bottom feeder. But look what I found when I got down there.He's the defender of Jessica Lynch's honor and he's called for a national day of prayer. Larry Flynt is a great American.
09 July 2004
Naming convention
My way of Mr. Conner, I offer you a website listing bad baby names. Lots of bad baby names. With commentary.
Part I: Brought to You By the Letter YIn a hurry? Check out the Worst Of page!
Part II: God Wants You to Name the Baby After Him
Part III: Easy to be Scarred
Part IV: Babies or Blotter Acid?
Part V: Big Chief Mucous Stink
Part VI: When You're in Love, the Whole World is Welsh
Part VII: Jesus' Mom is No Saint
Part VIII: Of Thee I Scream
Part IX: Bad Baby Names From You!
Part 10.1: More Bad Baby Names From You! (revised)
Part XI: Even More Bad Baby Names From You (confirmed sightings edition)!
Part XII: Baby's Got a Bad Bad Combo
Part XIII: Fellow Collectors
Part XIV: Voyage to the Bottom of the BBS
Part XV: Flights of Fantasy
08 July 2004
The Chairman's open house
A parable of electronic media intersecting with culture, from Bruce Sterling. Looking again years later, the only version I could find is nearly illegible, so I'm reproducing the whole thing here.
Microsoft Campus, 1:30 PM, May 21, 2004Hi. Well, it's nice to be back with you weird crungie (?) characters once again.
Yeah, you know this book has a lot to say to people in your industry. It got blurbed...I almost said it got “blogged”...but it got blurbed by Howard Schmidt, your former chief security officer and Bill Gates is a minor character in the book. At one point, he offers my hero a job. And it is a book about computer security among other things. It's basically about a...it's a Mr. Smith goes to Washington story about a techie that decides to join federal service after 9/11 because his family has a long history of technical service to the United States government and complications ensue.
It's got a villain and a superweapon. It's a technothriller and technothrillers kind of require villains and superweapons because otherwise there is no reason to keep turning pages. But although it is a great superweapon and I stole it from the best guys in the business, I really put some intellectual effort into it and I thought it was a nifty keen kind of weapon o' mass destruction style nifty technothriller superweapon, absolutely nobody is interested in it.
Nobody is patting me on the head about my ingenious superweapon, the labor of love that I invested in this because nobody believes in WMD anymore, frankly. It is just a sci-fi vaporware notion.
What people are interested in is the book's take on Federal computer security and it is a mess. I think anybody who's got e-mail has to know that Federal computer security is a mess but I never expected in my life to see it as bad as it is now. It's just a debacle and it didn't help that the capo of cyber security for the Bush Administration was Richard Clarke, but he was. And the guy blew up like thermite right in front of the congress and every camera in the business and it's just a crying shame.
So I have some rather harsh things to say about the state of law and order in cyberspace in this book. People ask me about it. Is it really this bad and the answer is “yeah, it is pretty much this bad.” My story is a parable. It is the exaggerated, anime kind of cartoon version but it is all about real issues that people are facing online, out on the net every day.
I could go on and on about it. In fact, I am going on and on it because I've got to go to Gartner. They're doing one of their gigs, consulting gigs in Washington and I'm supposed to go down there and talk to all these people about how screwed up it is and get this off of my chest, a kind of hammer and tongs style version and it is an unpleasant task but they already paid me so I'm going to have to go.
Maybe I'll learn something. I mean, I commonly do when I go to Washington. I just went to Washington. This is the last day of a very extensive book tour to support this book. And guys are sidling up to me at these signings and saying:
“Yeah, it's worse than what you say. I've read it and you're right. It's terrible.”
“So what agency are you from?”
“I'm from under the hill...”
“You mean to say you're from the NSA, sir? You're from under Fort Meade?”
He just sort of sidles away, leaves diagonally...
Be that as it may, I want to try to get a little closer to the fire here. I don't want to spend my entire time pontificating about public affairs because I have to do that in Wired every month. I want to try to get a little more hands on with the subject and I've tried to do this with a few audiences on my way here but you guys are the absolute target demographic for this personal crisis I'm facing. You e-mail me, send me e-mail, bruces@well.com. I've actively soliciting ingenious responses to this really sort of personal crisis that I'm facing.
So now I'm going to background the problem for you here, ok? Now, in Austin, which is where I live, we have this social event every year which is called “South by Southwest.” South by Southwest has three wings. It's a cultural conference. It's a festival, I guess you would call it. There is South by Southwest Music where garage bands show up from all over America and all over the planet, really, looking for an A&R guy and a record deal. You get a wristband and you wander around in a drunken haze down sixth street listening to bands.
There is South by Southwest Film, which is kind of the coming thing in Austin lately because we have got real film directors in town. Richard Linklater lives in Autin and he's making a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Richard Rodriguez spends a lot of time in Austin. He's mister Spy Kids and he's doing all of this stuff. Sandra Bullock lives there and Quentin Tarantino shows up with his posse. It's a very odd thing, like having your town infested with Sumatran fungus. There really didn't used to be any movie people in Austin but now there is there is a little movie scene in my hometown and it's kind of adorable and fun to watch.
Then there is the third part, which is my people here, which would be South by Southwest Interactive which is the geek set in my town, right? It used to be South by Southwest Multimedia and it's not like an industry gig. These people are cyberculturati. These are weblog guys, meetup guys, vaguely political online organization characters, Electronic Frontier Foundation fellow travellers, EPIC guys, computer game designers, SIGGRAPH habitues, washed-up former virtual reality visionaries, dazed sort of half-conscious linux programmer loonie free-software characters, and science fiction writers.
So I've gone to this every year since they started it because I knew the organizers and these are just people out of my milieu. So every year I have a party here at South by Southwest. It's my Open House Party. It's a very “Information Wants to be Free” kind of party. I just go there. I'm always booked to do something: I'm on a panel. I give a speech or something and traditionally I end my speech by just inviting the whole audience over to my house for free beer. “Aw boys, we're all going over to my house for free beer!” They show up. It's not difficult to give away free beer. I don't know why people think that this is expensive. If you just price it out, a keg of beer, you can get someone really drunk for seventy-five cents. Plus people bring their own beer. They bring lots of liquor.
My organizational principle for this party, which has been going on for just donkey's years now, is that you can bring anything you can carry and anyone that you trust. Right? Strangers show up and that's kind of the point. It's not like I hand out little laminated cards and say “Yes, you can go by the novelist's house.” It's just that we literally throw the doors open and people just show up.
There's never been an incident. People have a really good time. You can't predict who's going to be there. I really enjoy talking to people that don't know that I'm the host. They are like “God, this guy's taste in art, what's with this?” I like to attend my own party and that's kind of a thrill for me.
It's just a little social thing that I do. It's fun and it's sort of our big social outreach for my wife and I. It's what we do to kind of pitch in and give back a little bit. It's pleasant and it costs us just a few hundred bucks. It's nothing like a budget breaker. It's not the cost that's any kind of trouble. You can make two or three hundred people really happy for the cost of...I don't know...a laser printer or something. Why not? Right? It's not a big problem.
Well, this year, I did have a big problem.
This year I had a problem because there were 200 people in my audience and I say “Ok, everybody is going over to my house for beer!” and they say “Yay!” and 600 people show up at my party. They weren't the people in the audience. Half the people in the audience normally attend because it's on the last day and a lot of people leave anyway. They showed up and some kind of flash mob thing occurred.
There was some kind of electronically assisted gathering happening at my house. Because people were showing up and they were showing up in buddy lists. It wasn't just the usual foot traffic of one and two people. There would be at half-past one...there were sudden clusters or armadas of taxis coming in from two or three directions and people would get out of the taxis and are name-checking each other and sort of clustering together and coming into the party in a mass.
Guys are phone-camming the party. It's like “He's not kidding, look there's a keg here!” and off they come. Actresses are showing up, which is sort of interesting because there is never much cross-over into the film thing. Guys are coming up and saying “Bruce! Your party's full of hot chicks!” There are girls in lingerie tops with stiletto heels. They aren't actually partying. They're not eating. They're there to display themselves so they kind of swan anorexically through this crowd of unix sysadmins and they're, like... They're awe-struck. Somebody had told them that it was sort of necessary to go make the scene at the novelist's house and they sort of arrived in a bloc, united by phones, I assume, and then departed.
So it was lively and they were a very well behaved group. There was no...they were very sweet, kindly people except more and more of them started showing up. So around 1:45, the cops show up and I'm in there pontificating as is my wont. Someone says “Gee Bruce, the police are out on the porch and I think you'd better come see this.”
So I go out there and it's one cop. He's an Austin cop. He's a very nice guy but he wants to see some I.D. so I'm handing this over. He says, “So Mr. Sterling, is this your home?” “Yes, officer.” “Well, Mr. Sterling, we are receiving noise complaints from your neighbors and let me just tell you the drill here. I'm giving you a verbal warning and if I have to return, I'm going to have to write you up a citation. If I have to return a third time, I'm going to have to take you downtown.” I'm talking to this guy and I say, “Well, that's very interesting officer but what if you take me downtown and people continue to arrive at the party? Because they aren't being issued invitations. They are just sort of arriving spontaneously. What are you going to tell these 600 people when there is no host and you've arrested him?”
He didn't like that question. I didn't like the question either because it was kind of loud. “Gee, Officer,” I told him, “We're not playing loud music. It's a very well behaved crowd. This is South by Southwest.” Well, it was half past one and he said, “You're not playing music but you're talking and people can hear you talking two blocks away.” They could here us talking two blocks away. There was uproar. These people had a lot on their minds. They were talking about politics and current affairs. They weren't talking about business because there isn't any in their line of work but they had a lot to confess to one another. They were crying on each other's shoulders, whatever.
So I hustled them all inside the house, got them off of the porch, it was beautiful weather. Packed them into the house, shut the doors. That was when the spontaneous self-organization happened. This was a little weird. I've never witnessed...I've had big parties. This party was 50% bigger than last year's party. Last year was maybe 350 people. This year was 600 easy. So it's half past one and I'm down to, maybe, 175 people but they're all inside the house and our house is on an open plan. There is a kitchen, a big room, a bathroom and so forth. Well, normally, people just wander from room to room with their drinks and beer or whatever. This time, they are moving en masse.
There is this outbreak of herd behavior. It's packed. It's packed like it is in here and people just start moving along the room. There is this spontaneous emergent order. They're actually... ...swirling around the house and you don't get to get out of the way. They are coming in all these groups and the people in front of them see them coming and they're moving and the whole thing begins jostling in this spontaneous crowd flow, which is hairy because if someone yells “Fire” in a situation like that, there is going to be real injuries. I'd never seen that happen in my house before.
So, this is my problem, right? I have reached some kind of critical limit in these parties. You keep adding quantity and eventually there is a qualitative phase change here. They were nice about it and finally I got them to leave. I just announced that all of the liquor had been drunk and they left. There were no casualties and it was fine.
But that's not what concerns me. What concerns me is next year's party. Because I don't have any way to define the proportions of this party nor do I have any security mechanisms in place, nor do the police. Which is kind of interesting.
So, I'm now going to read to you, some of the suggested technical solutions......for what is really a microcosm of the organizational problems with the global internet, ok? Because this is my personal incarnation of what is really a much larger problem, a problem that scales up.
What is the problem here? The benefit is that I'm bringing in strangers. It's like I'm reaching out and touching someone but the downside is that I'm bringing in strangers and they can reach out and touch me. The benefit is that I'm breaking the boundaries of my narrow circle of acquaintances but the downside is that I'm breaking the boundaries of my narrow circle of acquaintances. The plus side is: this is a really popular party but the downside is that this is a really popular party! I'm now hovering at the edge of a potential dystopian development where I can get one guy that shows up in order to wreak mischief and can hurt a lot of people in some sort of cascading effect. I don't have any...Well, let's just talk about possible solutions. I think I've defined the problem sufficiently. It's a problem that you ought to recognize. So, what do I do?
Here's one solution: Go Professional.
I'm a very popular guy. Why don't I just start a bar? It will be “Bruce's Cyberpunk Bar.” This is what you do and there are hundreds of these things in Austin. People come in and they get the beer and they pay you for the beer. You get an insurance license and you rent a building. You hire employees and you establish some kind of formal relationship with the police. You card people when they show up to make sure it is legally possible for them to drink. Maybe I could hire bands! This is like the AOL/Time-Warner version of what was formally this kind of freeware, open, loosy goosy, kind of...you know? Why don't I just do that because it's certainly been done? This is the standard way of handling the subject. Well, yeah, ok, but then I'm a bartender. I'm a guy that owns a club and I don't really want to own a club because it is a lot of hassle and most of them go broke. I don't mind doing it once a year but, Jesus, every day? Five times a day? Weekends? I've got no weekends and I'm a bar guy suddenly? I'd never get to go out in daylight because I'm down there managing all of these drunks. I don't think so. That's not really it.
Solution number two: The Party Emergency Response Team.
Well, I've got pals who basically show up for these parties. There is a hardcore set of dudes who really get it about Sterling's parties. These are sort of the core recruiters. They are the sysadmins of the Sterling scene. Maybe I could deputize these guys. They are my closest buddies. Maybe they aren't at the party but I can make an emergency response team for guys that get it about my parties. I can brief them about it and maybe I'll give them a semi-uniform style thing. I'll get a buddy list of my own and it will be like “It's getting out of control, call the PERT!” and they'll rush in. Maybe they'll just start phoning people, I don't know. They don't have the downside of being actual cops. They don't have to wear a badge or be, sort of, really accountable in any way. They're just like a private militia...there sort of like Blackwater or something. A private military company.
Basically, it's the CERT except its the PERT and they're there to react immediately when a party goes out of bounds. Well, I kind of like that idea actually because it kind of suits my organizational style but the downside is: I'd have to join it. Then I'd have to worry about their parties. Do I really want to get up out bed at 2:00 AM when I could be watching Bollywood movies and pile into my car and drive over to Sixth Street. “How did you let your friggin' party get out of control?!” Do I want to go put out the fires and other people's parties? I'm not going to able to just do it by myself. The CERT is a cooperative group. What kind of dues am I going to have to pay to belong to this org? I don't go to that many parties. I mean, I only have one. I don't want to go to parties all of the time, especially parties that are no damn good.
Ok, well, now I've got a more subtle solution. This is the Rand solution here. A sort of Arquilla and Ronfeldt groovy, Advent of Netwar, solution.
If you've ever read these Rand guys, Advent of Netwar, rockin' book! September 12, 2001, I called these guys up. “Man! You are futurists of the first water! You were predicting states would be attacking non-state actors and that all hell would be breaking loose. You guys are something else!” Well, they got a lot of credit for that: Arquilla and Ronfeldt.
So, anyway, what Arquilla and Ronfeldt say in their Rand futurist analysis of how to deal with an out of control network is we can't have a war on a network because states are hierarchical and networks are distributed. What you need is a counter network. A counter network. Just like Advent of Netwar.
So here's my plan. I have plants at the party. Who are there secretly and sort of organized with one another. And they aren't really made clear to the party members that they are there at all. They are covertly there. They are covertly organized. They have secret handshakes and recognition symbols.
What is their job? Their job is to monitor the party and see if enthusiasm is moving into an area of untoward radicalism. So they don't do anything blatant. What they do is stage small but effective party spoiling scenes. Women would be especially good for this, I think, because no one ever thinks women are capable of political organization. You get a woman from your counter-network to just sort of burst into tears spontaneously at the party and just sort of start muttering to herself something along the lines of “That bastard! I can't believe he would dump me right in the middle of Bruce Sterling's party! Call my mother!” A little cluster comes around and they are patting her, trying to bring her down and people say “Aw man, this is a bad scene here. What's with the chick over there, man?”
Or you might have a guy that gets kind of boisterous at the party and have someone who gets really boisterous at the party who joins them but feigns he's on PCP or something. So if one guy starts misbehaving, this guy's like an agent provocateur. He's just stumbling......he's taking the edge off the growing enthusiasm, sort of like the carbon rod in the nuclear pile.
Well, I'm giving serious attention to that one actually.
Ok, now there's the architectural solution.
Maybe it's a technical problem, ok? I can engineer the kegs because the kegs are the locus of the party organization. So let's just say, maybe my kegs are too low-tech and what I need is a keg firewall. It's measuring the amount of fluid that is coming out of the kegs and is the party is getting too boisterous, they just start busting out air. “Hey man, the keg's not working! The keg's not working at Sterling's house. Aw man, the keg's are dry.” and then they leave and then the kegs just spring back up. They're just sitting there, watching network traffic, and if it gets too heavy, the kegs kick out. Or you could have keg mirror sites at someone else's party and it just pops up on the keg that says “Hey, you're being slashdotted here! Why don't you go to Fourth Street? There are lots of kegs there!” Have appealing little pictures of the kegs moving around on them. Maybe webcam photos. “Oh, this party is so much fun over here! Why don't you go to that party?”
Ok, that's sort of a techy solution but then I'd have to wire up the kegs. The guys that I rented the kegs from might not like my new interface on the keg and people might accuse me of making darkness the standard. The keg tap might not interop quite right with other kegs. The guy might have badly formulated his kegs and I get sudden bursts of people from other parties and I don't really want the guys from their party to use my site as a mirror site. What if I had to debug the kegs? What if flaws are discovered and the patches have patches? I don't know.
Then there is the Transparency International solution.
This is a kind of NGO solution, the democratic solution. When I go next year and invite all of the people to my party, I could make a clean breast of it. I could say, “Look, I'd love you to come to my house and have a really nice time but I have to make it clear to you that we're facing a potential political crisis at my house. It's time for me to level with you, the party people. I'm just going to have to appeal to your personal sense of responsibility as citizens to come to my party and not screw it up for anyone else. I want you to watch one another, police one another. I trust you. I don't want to enforce anything on you. I want to devolve the party down to the grassroots level. It's up to you, you, you. This is your party, not merely my party. You are the community to whom I'm trying to appeal. You need to assemble as a community. Hold hands with one another, support one another. If you're too tired to chew, pass it on.”
Maybe, maybe.
Now there is one other possibility, and we're getting a little hairy now, this is kind of pushing the limit of parties.
If there is a bad incident at a party, I'm worried about future parties because I think it may be necessary to have a War on Parties. I might put magnetometers into the doors, check people's bags, make them take off their shoes. We'll just get some terror theatre installed around the party. We'll have orange netting, I.D. badges which have your legal name on them rather than the name by which you are known at parties. I may have to make it clear, as the host, that I carry a gun. I am allowed to carry a gun in my own home in Texas. We have an open weapons law. I could just wear a uniform and carry a gun. I don't think they'd get too out of bounds if the host had a gun. If one gun wasn't enough, I could carry two guns. That's a possibility.
Another possibility, Total Party Awareness.
I think it would be possible to install video cameras and monitoring equipment throughout the home. I think it would be good to have people sign a disclaimer when they arrive at my party consenting to be video taped and to have their remarks at the party recorded. Now, I think that this would have a very calming effect on the party. In fact, I'm not sure that that gathering would even be classifiable as a party but I could probably pack a lot of people into an area like that.
Another possibility, legal disclaimers.
I'm thinking party shrinkwrap. You just don't get a beer unless you break the shrinkwrap. There is something written on the beer that is really long and kind of inexplicable but you are required to take some small moral action before you drink the beer. Put your name on it, I don't know.
There is a literary solution. Sharecropping the party.
I did have some guys show up. “This party's great! Why don't you have our corporation sponsor your party, Mr. Sterling? We've got this really cool building downtown and there is lots of empty space. We'd love to have you put your name on our corporate party.” Bruce Sterling (C) (TM) (R) presents Intel's Blast 2005!!! I'd just be renting out my celebrity like the billboard for somebody else's organization. They'd pick up all of the tab and presumably hire thugs, give people free shit, you get mouse pads or whatever. The upside is that they'd handle all of the hassle for me and they'd probably put on a better feed than me but the downside is that all of my friends would accuse me of becoming a corporate sellout. I would be sheltering under their profit driven organization. And who knows?
The last solution, which is probably an underestimated possibility, I could ask a charity for help.
I could make my party a fund-raising event for somebody that is morally unimpeachable. Red Cross. Greenpeace. I could have my choice. There are lists of charities. Right wing charities. Left wing charities. Hip charities. Dodgy charities. Sobbing-into-your-handkerchief March of Dimes crippled kids charities. Children dying of obscure illnesses. Anti-AIDS. Whatever. Whatever demographic that you want to hit, there is some kind of NGO and you ask for money. It is a community leader thing. “Well, I have this resource among my friends and it is time for us to go out and see to it that this particular intractable social problem is somehow dealt with.” I don't know but I'm sure that it would mellow the scene out considerably. Because, (a) most people just want the free beer. They don't want to get hit up for ten bucks by some nitwit with a clipboard and (b) also it lends it a kind of moral gravity. “Oh look how mature the party host is here, he's angling for a seat on the city council. He's moving from party animal to community leader. He's going to build us a music museum or some god-forsaken thing.” Well, it works!!!
Now those are all that I've managed to think of but I'm sure that's not the entire possible gamut of methods by which I could deal with this. My situation is quite serious. It really is a conundrum. It's a security problem. It's a societal problem. It's a social, cultural, literary problem. It's a personal problem of my own. My credibility is at stake here. Although I've written a book about computer security which goes into agonizing detail of the intractability of some of these difficulties, I can't solve the problem within my own damn home. I have no solution. And who's got it?
Who has got it?
If you tell me, I will publicize it. If you will think about it, I will be happy. If you will send me e-mail, I will take you with utter seriousnesses. It's a funny problem but a real problem.
Thanks for your attention.
I don't know what solution he finally came to.
07 July 2004
Googlebomb!
You may or may not know about the googlebomb technique, which has reminded the world about which candidate is unelectable, which candidate is a miserable failure.
Athenae at Atrios suggests that, in response to the growing Republican mutterings about how John Kerry is a rich elitist we also remind America that our current Presdent is himself very wealthy. Join the fun!
Today's quote
Mighty Matthew Yglesias tells us what he didn't say on TV about about Fahrenheit 9-11.
While Moore has done us all a great service by bringing to light the footage of the president not reacting to the second WTC attack, he fails to make what I think is the most important point here: The President's own aides have such a low opinion of Bush's leadership capabilities that they didn't think it was immediately necessary -- or, perhaps, desirable -- for him to take charge of the situation right away.That's certainly not what would have happened in the Bartlett White House.
06 July 2004
Product endorsement
I think I may need a Katherine Hepburn memorial candle.
There isn't much I can say about Katharine Hepburn that hasn't already been said, except this: She is why when I was a little girl I dreamed of being a smart businesswoman with a clever boyfriend and my own apartment instead of some fairytale princess in a frou-frou dress who needed rescuing all the time.Or at least, I admire the pitch for it on the catalogue page.Guess whose dreams came true.
05 July 2004
More Independence
For those of you who didn't get enough Declaration of Independence action yesterday, Xnoubis points out a cool video of Hollywood actors reading the Declaration of Independence from the Declare Yourself "hip celebrities 4 democracy" website.
Morgan Freeman delivers the goods in the introduction, proving once again that the presidency is his for the taking if he ever decides he wants it. “Scholars believe Jefferson intended for the Declaration to be performed, and not just read. ... It's a safe bet the Continental Congress never had in mind a performer like me.”
And forgive me using this opportunity to rant, but this reminds me of something that really bugs me. There's a wingnut meme that the left is uncomfortable with patriotism. It's just not true. What bothers lefties like me is “patriotism” of the creepy “my tribe can beat up your tribe” variety. But when it comes to the iconography, legends, and ideas of America, the left's patriotism is strong. Check out that video: you want to make a little movie about the Declaration, and Whoopi Goldberg shows up.
My personal example is The West Wing on TV, a romantic lefty fantasy of working in government. First there's all of the God Bless America stuff in the show itself: the parade of Immigrants With A Dream, of Ordinary Americans whose Heroism Shines Through, of Public Servants who take their Obligations to the American People Very Seriously. But more symbolically, there's the opening credits to the show. Okay, a third of it is the usual hero shots of the cast adorably looking into the middle distance. But the other two thirds? There's black and white pictures of presidential iconography: the oval office, motorcades, and the Presidential helicopter Marine One. And there's American flags waving in the background, and plenty of 'em.
I have them on DVD now, and I watch the credits every time because I love that stuff. I'm not proud of it—it's silly and shmaltzy and I feel a little silly doing it—but I'm not ashamed, either.
AWOL
Dedicated readers of my blog may recall that I've praised Orcinus for keeping a weather eye on the Bush AWOL story. He has a new summary handy with the story so far.
The centerpiece of that summary is a quote from the beginning of a detailed analysis by Paul Lukasiak. I'll give you the key sentence.
An examination of the Bush military files within the context of US Statutory Law, Department of Defense regulations, and Air Force policies and procedures of that era lead to a single conclusion: George W. Bush was considered a deserter by the United States Air Force.In brief: Bush skipped out, and pulled strings to avoid the consequences. Since then, there's been extensive tampering with records to cover it up.
Update! Brad DeLong offers the helpful long summary that I didn't have time to prepare.
04 July 2004
Independence Day
I consider this essay largely supplanted by my later, hopefully more astringent, version, but you may still find it interesting.
Today is Independence Day in the United States.
Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite as an occasional lefty activist) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.
But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper.
I've posted before about how the American veneration of documents in our political culture reflects our Enlightenment conception of the nation as a human creation, composed of ideas, rather than any essential volkish link from country to nation. Nowhere do we see this more strongly than in our choice of the Fourth of July, the day men signed the Declaration of Independence.
It's easy to forget what an achievement the Declaration really is. But 1776 was a world of kings, and finding a way to think and talk about a political order without kings was very, very hard.
A look at Jefferson's intellectual sources shows how just hard the problem was at that time. Here's David Hume trying to find a moral theory for equality in world that only knew the divine right of kings:
Whatever actually happens is comprehended in the general plan or intention of Providence; nor has the greatest and most lawful prince any more reason, upon that account, to plead a peculiar sacredness or inviolable authority, than an inferior magistrate, or even an usurper, or even a robber and a pirate.Here's John Locke trying to talk about individual human rights.
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.Now here's Jefferson summing it up perfectly in the Declaration.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness --- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.Those are the principles, in two hundred and three words.
I'd like to say that you couldn't improve it by changing a single one of those words. It's very, very close. But those two uses of the word "Men" really stick out. I'm prepared to forgive Jefferson that one. He was a man of his time. He knew that the principles he describes meant that America was engaged in a terrible evil in the form of slavery. (Check out his rough draft of the Declaration: it's right there.) And so also, deep in the Declaration is the principle that all people are equal, and I suspect that Jefferson knew it without knowing it, but didn't know how to fit it into the language. Maybe not, but I prefer to believe in the Declaration as it should have read.
I gave you the best part, but hey, you really ought to take a few minutes in honor of the day and read the whole thing --- it's really good stuff.
Bonus followup post: Hollywood movie stars and me ranting about liberal patriotism!
03 July 2004
Brando
Marlon Brando
1924-2004
Greatest actor in American film
For a man who hated the job, Brando was a hell of an actor. He had all of the ingredients of talent as a film actor in vast measure. The most important, and inexplicable, was his screen presence.
I will grant that actorly craft can help to create screen presence. Consider all of those well-trained British actors who turn up in American films — Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and so on — who are able to command the screen with their mastery of the craft. It's something you can learn.
But it's also a talent, a weird and inexplicable talent. It's a thing that can make actors with mediocre skills into great movie stars. Think of Katherine Hepburn or Keanu Reeves. They can't act all that well, but they have that thing. Brando was a great actor and he had that thing. He had as much of it as anyone else who ever worked in the medium. Probably more than anyone else who ever worked in the medium.
There's a scene in Last Tango in Paris where Brando is idly drumming his hands against the wall. That's all that's happening, and it lasts a couple of minutes. It's a scene of a man standing drumming his hands. It should be duller than a Jarmuch film and put you to sleep. But the scene is utterly hypnotic — more movie than you get from most entire feature films.
Talent. Magic.
When I first told my folks about discovering Brando, about seeing this scene, they both became angry. He cheated us, they said. He should have made more films. Maybe so.
But could he ever have made enough films?
Salon has a dazzling feature with pages and pages of quotes about him by everyone cool who ever met him. Check it out.
Microsoft and security
Bruce Scheneier argues that Microsoft is unwilling to do what's necessary to meet their alleged goal of enhanced security with their products.
The security of your computer and network depends on two things: what you do to secure your computer and network, and what everyone else does to secure their computers and networks. It's not enough for you to maintain a secure network. If other people don't maintain their security, we're all more vulnerable to attack. When many unsecure computers are connected to the Internet, worms spread faster and more extensively, distributed denial-of-service attacks are easier to launch, and spammers have more platforms from which to send e-mail. The more unsecure the average computer on the Internet is, the more unsecure your computer is.Not surprising to me. Microsoft makes their money by selling you software that creates problems for you, then selling you software which solves those problems ... but then gives you new problems, so they can sell you software which solves those problems ... but then gives you new problems ... and so on.
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Initial news stories reported that Microsoft would make this [security-oriented] upgrade available to all XP users, both licensed and unlicensed. To me, this was a smart move on Microsoft's part. Think about all the ways the company would benefit. Licensed users would be more secure and happier. Worms that attack Microsoft products would be less virulent, so Microsoft wouldn't look as bad in the press. Microsoft would win, its customers would win and the Internet would win. It's the kind of marketing move about which best-selling books are written.Then Microsoft said the initial comments were wrong; SP2 would not run on pirated copies of XP. Only legal copies of the software could be secured. This is the wrong decision.
Now that Windows is fairly reliable, they need to get us into some serious pain over security so that they can ride in on a white horse and fix that problem. We're just not in enough pain yet.
02 July 2004
Heroic art
So I stumble across this online art gallery, which describes itself as providing "The Finest in Contemporary Romantic Realism."
Which turns out to mean lots of Heroic Figures. I have a soft spot for this kind of stuff. I know it's kitchy, and I don't really want to have any of it in my home, but I do think it's often the right sort of thing for public spaces: think of all that great 1930s WPA art.
But looking at the gallery, the relentlessly Exultant Figures of Human Aspiration start to get faintly creepy, and the descriptive text doesn't help.
My goal is to portray the heroic and romantic in human nature and human achievement in a realistic style and a modern setting.I start to think about Leni Riefenstahl, but that's not quite it. Then one of the pieces makes it click --- these are like the paintings and sculpures that Ayn Rand described Howard Roark admiring. And sure enough, you can buy prints of cover art for Ayn Rand's books!
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Art that points a way forward to the limitless aspirational possibilities of life-affirming and mind-affirming conscious existence.
01 July 2004
Pants on fire
Just in case you needed one handy, the Poor Man reminds us in specific detail about how the President of the United States has lied on a host of issues, and why it's important to say "liar" in so many words.
These are all lies, told by the President himself. This doesn't include any distortions, half-truths, or exaggerations, or any lies told by senior figures in the administration. These lies are big and small.But hey, he hasn't lied under oath about his sex life, and isn't that the important thing?
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