Blog: July 2007

A tornado has transported you to a magical land, where a jubilant throng of midgets greets you as liberator. They direct you toward a road paved with yellow bricks. We'll start with you, Mayor Giuliani. Would you consider capturing one of these exotic creatures and subjecting him or her to enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding and electric shock, if it means extracting vital information that will determine whether the yellow route leads home—or into a trap?

More at Slate.

The Daily Show, in its thoughtful and mature coverage last night of the CNN/YouTube debate, interviewed several members of Drinking Liberally at their debate watching party.

We've all sat in a hot, stuffy room, uncomfortable, and know the amazing feeling of a brief gust of wind blowing fresh air into the room, cutting through the muggy feel just briefly before subsiding, leaving us craving more. Last night's Democratic debate felt that way. CNN opened a window - brief, limited, controlled - but they opened it, and the refreshing feel of the outside air tasted so delicious.

I had the opportunity to attend last night's South Carolina Democratic debate in person. The room looked and felt like any other produced, managed television event. The candidates started out rehearsed, giving their prepared sound bites in response to each question. But the questions were real, as were the questioners, and as the debate went on, the candidates changed. Not radically, but they began to respond more directly to the questions. They started talking to the questioners. They resisted when Anderson Cooper tried to force them to discuss trivialities like whether they have chartered campaign planes instead of the real issues of global warming. While of the campaign videos followed tired old campaign commercial patterns, a few were funny and felt genuine.

Television still dominates politics and candidates still speak in a way that will play on TV. Last night was one debate, but cable news continues to fill tens of thousands of hours with content controlled by a small group of journalists. Still, last night, we could see a glimmer of a better way where candidates speak to citizens. Briefly, a gust of fresh air was swirling through that large auditorium. The Internet is blowing this fresh air through the rooms of our politics, our economy, and our culture. Anyone can blog, or sell their own t-shirts, or release their own music.

To some, however, this open economy is scary and dangerous. How can we know which books are good without Barnes and Noble to select them? How can we avoid buying shoddy jewelry or fake silver without the controls retailers have in place? And what will happen to a civilized centrist political consensus when just anyone gets to speak their opinions? To some, the gust of air is chilly and brings in the salty smell of the sea and a whiff of garbage. Maybe conditioned air is best. Maybe we should leave it to the professional HVAC technicians to manage our air.

In the early days of the Internet, you could sign up for access through a service like AOL, Prodigy, or CompuServe, which resembled shopping malls. Each piece of content was carefully selected by editors. Or, you could get direct Internet access, which had enormously more content to read, communities to join, and products to buy, but it also carried spam and other dangers, fooling people into buying worthless penny stocks or giving their bank account numbers to Nigerian scammers. More content and community, because nobody had to ask AOL for permission to be on the Internet. Spam, because even the spammers didn't have to ask permission.

Most of our communications networks work more like AOL than the Internet. Television and cable professionals decide what you see on TV. The cable companies decide what channels to offer. Radio managers choose shows for their stations. And Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile determine which phones to offer and in many cases what applications you are allowed to install on those phones. They want to keep the air clean (according to their standards). You can choose between AT&T and Sprint, between NBC and CBS, and they do compete vigorously, but within a professionally selected range of offerings. Nothing unpredictable, but little participation from citizens and limited innovation from entrepreneurs.

Without the openness of the Internet, we wouldn't be experiencing the tremendous growth of citizen involvement in politics. Without it, we couldn't learn about nearly any subject instantly from Wikipedia – even if the information hasn’t been vetted by gatekeeping Britannica editors. Without it, we couldn't buy all the many hard-to-find products on eBay from around the world – even if they don’t come with corporate guarantees of quality. Without it, millions of people wouldn't be finding love on dating sites – though they occasionally meet sketchy people as well. The market chose the freewheeling Internet model over AOL's controlled "walled garden". Internet access boomed while the managed online services went out of business. Clearly, citizens are willing to be unpredictable and take advantage of open systems. And I believe citizens are able and willing to be their own gatekeepers, which has worked on sites like Craigslist and Digg.

Many of the former gatekeepers are opening up to the idea of opening up, even if begrudgingly. Newspapers are blogging to remain relevant as subscriptions decline. Candidates are competing for supporters on Facebook and MySpace. And CNN is letting citizens write the debate questions. Meanwhile, others are fighting the trend. Many pundits and commentators attack bloggers. Books about the Internet "killing our culture" get widespread attention and praising reviews in the New York Times. The RIAA, according to Rolling Stone, is facing obsolescence because it refused to try to work with the Internet constructively.

So far, the telephone and cable companies are choosing to hold on to old, closed business models. An upcoming auction of new wireless spectrum could follow "open access" principles to create a new wireless network more like the Internet, but Verizon and AT&T so far oppose this. We should give consumers this choice between the current networks and an open one. Net Neutrality is about preserving the ability to choose an open network as new fiber-optic networks replace today's DSL and dial-up modems.

The fresh air of creative citizen participation is starting to blow into Presidential politics through the window CNN opened. And this week, we have an opportunity to open the window in telecommunications as well. Senator Dick Durbin is conducting a series of discussions on OpenLeft.com to make policy by talking to citizens.

The question we ask ourselves when choosing a President is what kind of America we want. The question we must ask ourselves and Senator Durbin is the same - what kind of network do we want? Should we leave it to the professionals to decide what applications we use and what content we see? Or do we want the Internet to keep being open, so anyone can blog or sell products or create the next Amazon or Facebook without permission? Do we want to expand that openness to mobile technology? Or do we want to return to the tight control of the AOL era, or Presidential questions being written by a small panel of Washington elites? I hope Senator Durbin will open the windows. It's awfully stuffy in here.

In fifth grade, we did a unit on advertising. During that unit, the class learned to sing classic advertising jingles in chorus, like "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener." One I remember most clearly is the Ajax tune, which Wikipedia claims is television's oldest ad jingle dating from 1948:

Use Ajax (ba dum ba)
The foaming cleanser (ba dum ba dum bum bum)
Floats the dirt right down the drain
You'll stop paying the elbow tax
When you start cleaning with Ajax

These days, Ajax is more well known as the "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" combination of technologies that lets a Web application talk to the Web server behind the scenes without requiring the user to go to a new page after every action - a technology popularized after Paul Buchheit and his team doggedly insisted on building a Javascript interface for Gmail, ignoring many objections from superiors until he proved that you can indeed build a kick-ass interface in Javascript.

I knew all the fundamentals of Ajax but never got around to actually writing an app in it, until today. I needed to do some annotating of my images as part of a project to link them to Facebook, and I wanted to be able to flip through many images quickly. After about half a day of coding, I now have a simple application that loads images behind the scenes, captures clicks appropriately, sends them back to the server, and keeps loading more images as needed.

I actually ended up having to figure through a few less simple pieces of Ajax, like how to keep a set of separate concurrent asynchronous XMLHTTPRequests going at the same time without them bumping into each other. But once you get the hang of the basics, it's quite simple to stop paying the elbow tax and start programming with Ajax.

Originally posted at IPac.

Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner poses a thought-provoking question on the Freakonomics Blog: If public libraries didn't exist, could you start one today?

The law protects public libraries, and their right to lend books to people. But the publishing industry doesn't like that it can't control what happens to books after they are bought. Dubner analyzes the pros and cons of libraries from the point of view of the publishing industry: on the one hand, many people can read a book but the author and publisher only sell one copy. On the other hand, libraries foster literacy, expose people to new authors, make reading accessible to the poor, etc.

Dubner writes, "Perhaps they'd come up with a licensing agreement: the book costs $20 to own, with an additional $2 per year for every year beyond Year 1 it's in circulation. I'm sure there would be a lot of other potential arrangements. And I am just as sure that, like a lot of systems that evolve over time, the library system is one that, if it were being built from scratch today, would have a very different set of dynamics and economics."

Or, perhaps libraries wouldn't exist at all. We know from experience that content industries often don't act in their own long-term best interest. The RIAA shot itself in the foot with its unwillingness to find a profitable way to allow filesharing; authors and book publishers are suing Google for making it easy for people to find their books, even though the users can't read more than a few lines of copyrighted books without permission. So let's assume public libraries are good (and I believe they are) - unfortunately, we couldn't count on the publishing industry to make it possible for them to exist.

The publishers might insist on too much revenue, in an attempt to protect their margins on existing books, even at the cost of the public good and their own long-term success. This is similar to the way the recording industry is trying to kill Internet radio with royalty fees so high almost no stations could continue operating, or the way Verizon squelches wireless innovation because they won't allow applications on their phones unless they make significant profit.

The movie industry would have stopped the VCR if it could have, afraid that home video would cut into theater profits. It did, but they ultimately more than offset the loss with video rentals and sales. We have every reason to think that publishers would do the same to libraries if the first libraries were forming today.

IP laws give one participant in a market - the content rightsholder - complete monopoly power over that market. Sometimes that's the only way to make a market work so creators get compensation. But often, it just means that the market fails entirely. If we don't give the monopoly holders everything they want, sometimes that's best for them in the long run. Or maybe it's just good enough for them, while the public greatly benefits.