Recently in Technology Category

(Felix Salmon - The Bitcoin Bubble)

Such people, including Satoshi Nakamoto, are far from unique in their mistrust of all existing financial institutions. What sets Nakamoto apart is that he turned that mistrust into a philosophy, the most important driving force behind the bitcoin project. When he introduced bitcoin to the world in February 2009, Nakamoto boasted that his new currency was "completely decentralized, with no trusted parties". And he explained in some detail what he saw as the problem in need of a solution:

The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.

There are all kinds of amusing ways in which you can poke fun at Bitcoin and the subculture that has grown up around it. But, taken seriously, this is yet another big bet by the privileged techno-libertarian class that those of us who believe in society and a commonwealth and democracy and all that rot are the dumb money in the room. 

You don't fix problems of trust by eliminating trust from the equation. You fix them socially, democratically, empathically. The answer to a failure of trust isn't further atomization (neatly disguised as techno-utopian transcendence). It's justice.

(Which, easier said than done, yeah. People mistrust our institutions because our institutions are profoundly broken. And there has been precious little justice or reckoning with the events of the past decade and more. But the answer sure as hell isn't to run away and hide in the Singularity. Social problems have social solutions. Broken institutions have to be mended, and absent justice has to be created. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Start doing what the online community used to do best: inventing new systems of trust and new ways to connect.)

And that's the thing: Flickr feels like a permanent home. While sharing is great, it turns out that as we progress in our digital lives, as we take more and more photos and share them more and more places, we eventually want to go back and see them again. (Which explains the popularity of services like TimeHop.) We want to revisit them. We want to relive them.

And I think that gets at why the web was so adamant about Yahoo saving Flickr. It wasn't just that we wanted yet another app update. It's that we didn't want to give up on what we already had. In short, we wanted to go home again.

(Wired | The Return of Flickr)

I really want to see Flickr come back and do well, but I don't think I buy this impulse on any sort of mass level. The lack of a desire for a permanent home, and an accumulated and (inter)linkable public history of our online and offline lives seems to me to be one of the major ways in which the new web has passed us old-timers by.

That desire was a product both of our privilege, and of the unique conditions of the time, and I don't think it's coming back anytime soon. I'm not even sure I want it anymore, because I've seen how dangerous and depressing the new conditions of a corporatized, spammer/troll/abuser infested, government and employer surveilled, and mass-social web make it.

I might still be privileged enough that I could get away with most of what we used to in the early days, but few others are, and until those negative forces are neutralized, we won't have a neighborhood where enough people want to set down permanent roots and make a home to make such undertakings worthwhile.

Ebooks are not subject to sale-or-return accounting; every sale is final. Ebooks never go out of print, so contract reversion terms are different. The retail price is typically lower but the sales channel has fewer middle-men so the royalty rate is higher. Production costs are, surprisingly to most people, nearly as high as for dead-tree books (ebooks still need editing and proofreading and marketing).

Mass market paperback sales are down around 50-70% in the USA. (In the UK the mass market channel disappeared in the early 1990s; all paperbacks are sold as trade books.) Ebooks are now up to 60% of gross sales, from 6% in 2008-09 and 0.6% in 2005.

Hardcover or trade paperback sales are, mostly, unaffected by ebook sales. These are premium products sold to people who like buying lumps of dead tree. They may dwindle over the coming decades but the hardcover market is still okay.

So ebooks are the new mass market paperbacks; easily distributed, cheap, disposable reading matter.

This is an excellent antidote to the ebooks-are-changing-everything-books-are-dead panic that's abroad in the land. Yes, there a changes afoot, but this stuff is always a lot more contingent and complicated than it looks at first glance.

What ultimately has made the criticism of the Chicago strike so odd and irritating is that the critics are so dismissive and arrogant about the chief sticking points in the negotiations, which aren't really about money. There's a seeming inability to understand why poorly designed evaluation systems, particularly those that are tied to test results, threaten the very best and most inspiring teachers as much as anyone. What they threaten is not the loss of job security, but the professional discretion and skill of good teachers. You can't be in favor of clumsy or cookie-cutter evaluations and still claim to be primarily concerned about the quality of teaching in public schools.

What might be happening here is less the rage of privileged elites against anyone they deem to be beneath them, and more the rage of upper middle-class professionals who have found their own lives increasingly hemmed in by forms of deprofessionalizing oversight and dumb operant-conditioning gimmickry sold to organizations by snake-oil consultancies.

The trick in the next decade is going to be: can we get the river to flow the other direction? Rather than give in to every person who insists that whatever outrages and inefficiencies of 21st Century Taylorism have been inflicted on them must be inflicted on everyone else, we should be trying to claw back generative, productive forms of dignity and autonomy to the working lives of every person.

Do Liberals and Elites Hate Teachers? | Easily Distracted

I took a super-interesting Information History class with Dan Schiller my last semester at GSLIS, and one of the main themes of the course was how IT allows capital and management to deprofessionalize and regiment work. This starts at least from the invention of the modern clock, and goes up through the early management techniques of the industrial revolution, to office technology like the typewriter and the adding machine which replaced a whole middling professional class of clerks with pooled labor. Then you get the full monty with Taylorism and all the dehumanizing results that followed from that, which was thankfully somewhat offset by the rise of organized labor by midcentury.

So, then modern computer IT comes along, which of course was initially clearly centralized and controlling (think mainframes and men in gray flannel suits.) But, since I didn't know my history or recognize my privilege I'd always thought of the emergence of the networked personal computer as different somehow, liberatory instead of controlling. And, of course, it can be, for those with the power to control it rather than be controlled. 

What we're seeing now is the rapid shrinking of the proportion of people and professions who have that power. It's happening to teachers, lawyers, writers (think of the methods of HuffPo and Nick Denton and the rise of pageviews as the measure of cultural worth if you don't think that cultural work can be regimented and automated) and lots of other previously autonomous professional occupations.

That call center worker whose every second and every move is monitored and timed and dictated? Well, that may be your future too, unless we fight tooth and nail for power over our working conditions. That's what teachers in Chicago are doing now. It's time for professional classes to realize that they have a lot more in common with those below them on the economic ladder than with the people running things. We're in a place now where solidarity isn't just sentiment, it's survival.

The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology. And what's more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It's a bad business model," said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

"I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change.

"Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball.

"But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

(The Telegraph | Jonathan Franzen: e-books are damaging society)

What absolute piffle. He starts out heading in a fruitful direction when he talks about the economics of ebooks. They're definitely a threat to the commons and especially to libraries, because they're a remote-controllable and license-able medium. When you buy a paper book, you own it free and clear and the law is clear on your rights for lending, reselling and reuse. Not so with e-books, and if we don't get it in hand, public libraries will be renting their whole collection on onerous and restrictive terms, the same way academic libraries have to now with journals.

So, that's a big advantage to paper, but that's not really what he's on about, because he's not really worried about democracy or civil society or the commons. Just like with Stanley Fish awhile back, what he's really concerned about is authorial identity and authority. Funny how the "radical contingency" of electronic media tends to freak out privileged white dudes sitting at the top of their fields more than anyone else.

This ain't about democracy. Democracy will be just fine, except for the whole rapacious global capitalism issue, but more authority and stability for the current crop of elites sure won't help us on that front either.

Radical contingency, mutability, fluid and collaborative notions of authorship, and an interactive and fiercely contested intellectual and public sphere were all hallmarks of the print culture that spawned and nurtured early democratic polities. Electronic media are bringing back those conditions, albeit with the complicating issues of surveillance, control at a distance, and I.P. What he's really lamenting is the loss of broadcast culture, which privileges a few fortunate voices and denies the rest a chance to talk back or participate in culture creation.

Which, if this is the best those voices can come up with, good riddance.

I have come to appreciate more and more that technology itself is one way to propagate the many injustices in our society because it tends to reflect the society. I work to help students understand this so that as they go out to the communities they are more able to construct technology applications that begin to bring about justice," Wolske argues. "Technology by itself will never bring about justice, but it can set up a framework in which people can work toward issues of justice. The key is to carefully construct it so it doesn't reinforce injustice, but actually becomes a platform for building justice.

My favorite prof. here won an ALA teaching award. Man, it's great when people who actually deserve it get recognition. Here he pretty much encapsulates why I'm doing what I'm doing, and how I want to do it.

wockerjabby:

I don't know who those people are, but a large number of my almost-adult students don't know how to attach documents to email, use the basic tools of a word processing program, or insert an image into a document. it's because, while they grew up with smart phones (and they all have twitter), they DIDN'T grow up with computers and most of them still never use a computer anywhere other than at school. 

so that's one place computer illiterate kids might come from. poverty & underprivilege, and just a different set of societal priorities & expectations.

These are definitely the sorts of issues we're getting into in my LIS program in re: the digital divide, computer and tech literacy, community and economic development and empowerment, etc. It's a really complicated picture with lots aspects you wouldn't expect, and our desktop-based computing skills (and even moreso, our handcoding, self-hosting, DIY web skills) and our notions about culture around these tools and literacies now look very time, place, and class bound to me.

They also happen to be dominant in the more stable and white-collar parts of the professional world, which is pretty crappy for a lot of people who have really rich technological and cultural literacies and skills, but who either missed or skipped the desktop computing moment and went straight to mobile access and social media.

Lots of kids (some from underprivileged backgrounds, some not, though it's easier on the more privileged kids and they have less of an excuse) are definitely having to seriously adjust their approaches to media and technology once they hit college and the professional world, and educational systems and adults aren't giving them much practical guidance at all when it comes to that.

The whole thing is a mess and sad in general, but this bit in particular leaped out at me.

"It is ironic," he said, "because I like these things -- freedom, openness, egalitarian ideas -- but I think to some extent they are compounding and hiding problems you might find in the real world."

Adopting openness means being "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists," he said, "so you have to have a huge argument about whether there is the problem." Mr. Reagle is also the author of "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia."

Generously, this is the Geek Social Fallacy at its worst. Less generously, it gives away the game on any nominal lip service we give to gender equality in online culture, and has little to distinguish it from pathetic wingnut tu quoque "arguments" that oh-so-cleverly point out that our precious tolerance doesn't extend to the very sort of intolerant and antisocial behavior that negates it, so of course it's no tolerance at all.

That Wikipedia could get this far along without examining those sorts of undergrad maladroit geekboy assumptions is troubling to say the least.

jackflaps:

I'm just not in the room where they do that. So in ten years, I'd like to be in the room where they do that. Ideally I could make that happen without having to get a Ph.D. in information science or a master's in urban planning, because those things are expensive and I'm already $25,000 in the red from Carleton, but I think if it was brutally necessary I'd find a way to deal with that. Jobs like this don't exist, though, and also I live in a forest where nobody cares about urban planning.

This is way after the fact (Tumblr outage plus end-of-semester craziness interfered) but I just wanted to say that one semester into library school, I already feel like I'm in the same boat, and I'll be interested to see what kind of path you take.

I'm interested in broadband / community technology / community development policy, and I'm getting tons of hands-on experience in the Community Informatics track here at GSLIS, but I'm not seeing many practitioner-level jobs where you can make even close to an acceptable or stable living, and I sort of need health insurance to stay alive and stuff. I'd prefer to build a reputation through practice and work my way up to the policy level that way, but I'm not seeing much of a path there. Even with policy, I'm not seeing the kind of career track that justifies going way in debt and getting a Ph.D when I'm not particularly interested in the tenured faculty rat race or in doing hyper-focused and rigorous research (that's likely of dubious practical value to anyone) in areas where I could learn a lot more and be a better policy maker through practice.

It looks like the best path is probably entrepreneurial, whether starting an organization or a business or what have you, but I'm not really interested in or skilled at that either. I kind of need someone else with business, marketing, management, and begging skills to do that for me, but I don't see anyone lining up to do that. I'm really not sure how to get from here to there, though hopefully the next year or so of school will give me a more of a sense. Right now the fallback plan is to work at a public or community college library, and try to do cool community outreach and tech/info literacy stuff in that context, but I'm afraid that could always be doomed to be a sidelight in most such settings, especially with the resource constraints we'll be under and the stage of my career I'll be in.