AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Corporate Hearts

Dave Rogers adds some useful comments in our conversation about corporate entities and their attributes. I see his point about ways that corporate entities differ from human individuals (though I wonder how individual we look to our mitochondria?). I don’t by any means want to assimilate corporate groups to the model of a single (rational) individual, and we individuals must resist corporate behavior that contravenes our sense of what’s coherent and liveable. Frank is headed in this direction too (in the same comments); he specifies corporate business entities, and I share his suspicion of businesses. When I talk about corporate groups, I’m thinking about any time people get together to pool their capacities (thus including unions, peace movements, and churches). It’s easy to think of examples in which people live less admirably under the influence of a lowest-common denominator group mind. I don’t want to make any blanket assumptions about group thinking or balance-sheet thinking, though; I want to observe carefully various ways in which groups reflect characteristics distinguishable from their constituent individuals. To that end, I will sometimes speak of the corporate entity as a person; that trope has signficant limitations, so I’ll need to deploy it more carefully than I have in the past.

And as Dave and Pem and Steve (does it seem to anyone else that now that hes a student, he blogs a lot more?) that “authority” isn’t a simple notion. There’s authority, and then there’s authority. This is a major interst of Margaret’s, and I want to consult her before I say much about it—but that’ll mean waiting till tomorrow.

Perils of Asynchronous Communication

Oh, dear! Last night I was blogging from Margaret’s iBook, so I didn’t check my mail. I casually dismissed Dave’s suggestion of “honor” for “hallow,” but then it turned out that my Mom mailed me the same suggestion by email (Sorry, Mom!).

My main hesitancy regarding “honor” involves the specially religious flavor of “hallow”—but I’ll give it more careful consideration since it’s not just Dave Rogers (whichever) suggesting it.

I was surprised by the number of people who wanted to talk about translations of the Lord’s Prayer. I hadn’t assumed it to be a topic of general interest. Just goes to show, I guess.

Principles and Social Life

Not only is the elusive Dave Rogers of Connect & Empower blogging again, but the persistent Dave Rogers of Time's Shadow has been blogging all along, and has some provocative reflections on authority, society, and principles.

He's very much onto something, but I want to disagree at a couple of points. I'm getting sleepy, though (bet you didn't guess), and I'll make my interventions short and, well, who knows how sour or sweet they'll turn out to be?

First, I do think that corporate entities amount to more than the sum of their parts, and that it's not (therefore) a bad practice to allow that a social group might have a heart, or a principle, even if wiser observers like Dave Rogers and Chris Locke insist that they don't (I didn't find quickly a link to Chris's claim that corporations don't have hearts, but he says it, and I'll link when I find it). And I'm comfortable using personal pronouns for them, even if Frank Paynter says I shouldn't.

Second, there's no getting away from "authority," though when authority is benign we tend not to think of it as "authority." When my dentist (that's her in the first picture from August 2001) strongly urges me to floss twice a day, I don't perceive her as authoritarian--I perceive her as concerned and helpful (that's as opposed to previous dentists I've had, who could seem authoritarian about suggesting that you not leave behind your wallet when you leave the office). Dave's caution about listening to authorities merits our attention, but then we also need to work harder on discerning to whom we should pay attention, and whom we should treat with extra suspicion.

There's probably a third thing, too, but I'm too sleepy. I don't suppose Dave disagrees with me here--just want to add my two cents. G'night.

Hollowed

Well, it took some provoking, but (Connect-&-Empower) Dave Rogers rose to the bait of an archaism in the conventional translations of the Lord's Prayer. Dave thinks that "hallowed" doesn't belong in a contemporary translation of the passage, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

It's actually beenbothering me for a while. The Greek word agiasthetw is one of those third-person imerative forms of a verb that means "to saanctify, to make holy." So Dave's right (in his comments) when he observes that substituting "honored" misses some of the force of the Greek verb. We honorWorld Series champions, but we don't hallow them, sanctify them, or otherwise render them the opposite of profane.

One of the problems the translator faces involves a modern Western cultural reticence about "holiness" in general. A whole variety of useful words related to worship and sanctity (words like "pious," "devout," "sanctity") have been siphoned into unsavory discourses that make them less suitable for colloquial use. "Pious" and "devout" can sound smug and prissy; "sanctity" has been so abused by unctuous politicians that one might be excused for wishing that nothing be sanctified again for a long, long time--especially not The American Family, the Flag, Tax Cuts for the Super-Wealthy, so on.

So while I agree with Dave that "hallowed" ought to go, I'm just not moresatisified with any particular alternative.

But while we're on the topic of translating from the Greek, today Dave Hedges asked what's with the difference between the conventional contemporary Lord's Prayer's "Save us from the time of trial" and the archaic "Lead us not into temptation." That's a tricky one, too. The main verb is a plain word for "to lead in," so that the older version captures that bit quite adequately. The contemporary version substitutes "Save," which seems unduly confusing to me; Jesus isn't talking about "saving" here in the sense of "saving lives" or "saving souls" as he does elsewhere; he's saying "Don't lead us into. . .". But what's with "time of trial" and "testing"?

The Greek word involved has historically been used for "testing," usually in a fairly neutral sense. At some point either because of New Testament usage or in close proximity to New Testament usage, it begins to show overtones of "testing" in a hostile sense (hence, "temptation"). The scene in the wilderness after Jesus' baptism can quite plausibly be rendered as the "testing" in the wilderness (rather than "temptation" in the wilderness), and doing so brings out nicely the echoes of Israel's experiences in the forty years of wilderness wandering. Eventually the Greek word has pretty clearly accommodated a hostile sense for "testing" as part of its range, though it still workss well for just plain testing (and I acknowledge that some poeple will look on any kind of testing as hostile). So contemporary translators judged it most likely that in the Lord's Prayer, the word refers to The Ultimate Test, the Day of Judgment, from which disciples asked to be rescued (not implausibly, since elsewhere Jesus instructs disciples to beware the presumably unpleasant manifestations of the Day of the Lord). Back in James I's day, though, the predominant opinion held that this petition simply went, "don't lure us into spiritual danger," something of an odd request to make of a God one is supposed to love and trust.

My friend Jeffrey Gibson has written a strong article about "testing" and how it turned into "tempting." He's pretty well convinced me, and I'm ready to begin saying "Do not lead us into testing." (Why can't we use contractions in church? Of all possible colloquial usages, contractions seem minimally improper, and they form a standard part of daily discourse. Who would ask a friend, "Do not lead me into the chocolate store" rather than "Don't lead me into the chocolate store"?)

I'm still working on "hallowed," though.

Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about the "Son of Man."

Five Words, First Word Sounds Like. . . .

Translation is the topic du jour, with Jonathon bringing it up (implicitly) relative to the Lord’s Prayer, and Naomi pointing out Davezilla’s Five-Word Bible Project (and kvetching about translations of liturgical texts).

Relative to Jonathon’s post, I noted that the Lord’s Prayer begins with three parallel Greek constructions that the usual English trannslations break into a one-plus-two pattern:

Hallowed be thy name;
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done. . . .

One might represent the Greek [woodenly] by rendering these as:

Thy name be hallowed
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done. . . —or,

Be-hallowed your name
[Be-]Come your kingdom
Be done your will.

Of course, no one’s going to mess with the structure of the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer. Talk about a third rail!

These constructions, by the way, are third-person imperatives (in the passive voice). Third-person imperatives make intro students’ eyes roll back in their heads. “How are we supposed to translate that?” (Well, maybe you don’t worry about translating it; you just read it in Greek and enjoy it.) “That doesn’t mean anything! There’s no way to say that!” (Perhaps not directly, in English. . . .)

We then move into the creative phase of the class, where students try out their hypothetical translations. The official approach to translating third-person imperatives goes, “Let them plow. . .” or “Let her run. . . ” (or whatever), but that’s problematic both because few English-speakers actually talk that way and because it sounds permissive rather than imperative. A wonderful student of mine suggested, ’They better. . .” or “He (she, it) better. . .” as an effective colloquial rendering of third-person imperatives. “he better rake the yard,” or “They better not sponge off the church” do more ably catch the force of the imperative than “Let him rake,” or “Let them not sponge.” But do anticipate congregations willingly adopting the version that reads,

Your name better be hallowed
Your kingdom better come
Your will better be done. . . .

I don’t, either—but it would be a blast, and a better translation.

As for Davezilla’s Five-Word Bible project, I found the funny versions intensely funny, but a number of the summaries entirely missed the point (or contents) of the book itself. The OT actually fares much better than the NT (there must be a better take on Deuteronomy than, “Damn. Itís like ... Africa hot!”). The gospels, though, are way off kilter. Davezilla gives “Christ was one cute baby!” for John’s Gospel, when John doesn’t so much as mention Jesus’ childhood (that line would do better for Luke, I’d say). And Matthew, Mark and Luke might be more aptly assimilated to one another and differentiated from one another. Really, the Pauline epistles work moderately well, and the rest flounder (well, apart from James: ìShut up and do it!î).

Speaking of James, did anyone else hear Paula Poundstone this week on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me? When asked about the recent discovery of an ossuary that seems to have contained the bones of a James, the brother of Jesus, son of Joseph, she not only couldn’t identify whose bones had occupied the ossuary, but she expressed utter astonishment that Jesus might have had a brother. Since the NT refers to Jesus’ brothers at a number of places, I take it that Poundstone (whom I think is one of the funnier people on earth) just hadn’t read the NT much, or that she had simply accepted the Epiphanian view that the word that normally means “rothers” is here used to mean “cousins,” or the Hieronymian view that these are Joseph’s sons by an earlier marriage—though the note of amazement in her voice suggested that she really hadn’t ever heard that Jesus might have had sibs.

Sunday Miscellanea

Where’s Daypop? How will I know which uninteresting personality test memes I’m ignoring, wihtout Daypop to list them for me?

Margaret’s on her way home after a good visit with Nate. Last heard from around Erie, she’s comfortable and getting productive study time in while riding the train.

I stayed up most of last night working on a sermon that I knew to be unsuitable. (Okay, I took time out to play computer games, too, but that falls into the category of “trying to jar my brain out of a wrong-headed rut”). Woke up early this morning to put in more time on the sermon. Preached it three times at St. Luke’s and, after a satori moment about the intrinsic problem with the way I was casting the thematic structure of the thing, the preaching of it seems to have worked out okay.

I’ve been mostly brain dead all afternoon, but haven’t slept.

Heather took pity on the kids and me, and invited us over for a pasta party at ther place. Tripp and several others were there also, and the children stayed very late plaing a game while I sat like a vegetable at home.

Now, the vegetable goes to sleep, looking forward to seeing Margaret tomorrow.

Change of Address

Dear Readers,

The time has come, and I hope I won’t have to ask again in the near future. Would you please change your bookmarks,blogrolls, etc., to reflect my snazzy new domain name?

I’ll be posting from The Disseminary, an adventure in online resources for theological education. The main page isn’t ready yet, but I don’t know when it will be; we’ll have a more handsome placeholder page, at least, before Thanksgiving.

But my blog will be accessible at akma.disseminary.org. It’s still hosted at Seabury, for now, but this way we won’t need to change the address when I find a different host. Thanks for helping with the transition!

Best Fishes

A Happy b!rthday to b!x; I finally got Denise Howell onto my blogroll this week; I added Juliet Dodds to the University of Blogaria faculty list (I still want to scratch together a UBlog diploma, someday); and I corrected Alex Golub’s address to his new domain name. Good night!

Politics, Damned Politics, and War

Paul Wellstone was the kind of elected official who tempted Margaret and me to wish we believed that the electoiral-politics system actually had the potential to effect change in the USA. We know a staff member of his, though it seems that our friend must have been based in DC. We were anxious for a few hours, waiting to see who else was on Wellstone’s plane, but our friend was not.

Was Wellstone an “idiotarian”? Or more like this. . . ?

And Anil Dash has been targetted for hate mail since he dared question the tenor of discourse over at Little Green Footballs. We instant-messaged for a few minutes, and he manifestly welcomed positive wishes, even from someone who had never addressed him before.

It looks, however, as though the US will be driven into war on the basis of a collection of non sequiturs and untruths. Pippa willing (and that’s a big proviso), I’ll look for you all at Federal Plaza in downtown Chicago tomorrow at noon.

Dental, Medical, and Transit News

My day has been fractured into a dozen or so task-defined particles. First, I took the kids to the dentist. They did well, considering how long it’s been since they last went. Pippa has two small cavities, Si none.

Midday mass, with laying on of hands and anointing for healing.

I went to Evanston-Northwestern Hospital to give blood this afternoon. I’m quite anxious about giving blood; I’ve fainted several times under other circumstances, but the ENH staff know this and talk me through it beautifully. One phlebotomist asked what I did for a living and, when she heard I taught Greek, asked about my other languages. “Well, my French is pretty good, German just barely adequate, and I had to learn Hebrew and Aramaic for grad school.” It turns out that one of the other phlebotomists knows Aramaic, is from the Middle East.

I’m using the big word “phlebotomists,” Frank, not to show off but because I don’t know which smaller word fits these personnel best. They aren’t nurses, I don’t think, nor are they doctors. They are technicians, I suppose, but that doesn’t sound just right for “someone who pokes a needle into my arm so blood can ooze out of it in a more-or-less controlled manner.” The more important part of their job is swathing me in ice bags, keeping me talking, pumping me full of cranberry juice, and distracting me from anything that’s happening near where my arm meets tubing.

So the Mid-eastern blood-drawer shows me some glyphs on a yellow pad. I’m thinking, “I squeaked through Aramaic more than a dozen years ago, and this afternoon I get a pop quiz while having blood drawn? That’s just not fair.” But I gathered my consciousness, looked at the pad, and saw nothing I could recognize.

She frowned. “Those are the first three letters: aleph, beth, gimel. . . .”

“Aaah,” I interjected, “I learned from typeset letters, not handwriting.”

“Well, how would you make the letters?” I drew an
א, ב, ג
for her, and she frowned again. “That’s not Aramaic, that’s Hebrew.”

“Oh, I see; the books I learned from wrote the Aramaic words with Hebrew characters.” (This is, by the way, the truth. My grasp of Aramaic vanished with the closing minutes of Prof. Orval Wintermute’s Dead Sea Scrolls class, but the whole time we were reading from a text printed with Hebrew characters.) By now, though, she’s frowning noticeably; I seem like a fake, even though noone asked me, “How would you do if I modern Aramaic-speaker wrote some stuff down in handwritten exemplars of a script you never learned?” I’d have been able to tell them that I’d flunk that particular exam. Instead, they ambushed me, and I looked even more foolish than usual.

Then in the evening, Margaret defies terror by taking Amtrak to Rochester, to visit Nate on Family Weekend. Nate’s just been through midterms week, a rude trial for a home-schooled kid who had never experienced anything like it before.

Cheese, Olives, Virgins, and Mice

In Early Church History class today, we covered Hippolytus of Rome’s Apostolic Tradition. This always piques the interests of Anglican students, who can readily recognize the influence that work had on the liturgical renewal movement of the 70’s and 80’s.

Much as the Apostolic Tradition’s influence has lasted, some of the most riveting features of the text involve matters no longer practiced in the church. For instance (and this always gets ’em, every year) the Tradition reads

[I]f someone makes an offering of cheese and olives, the bishop shall say, “Sanctify this coagulated milk, just as you also coagulate us in your love. Let this fruit not leave your sweetness, this olive which is a symbol of your abundance, which you made to flow from the tree, for life to those who hope in you.”

Students can't wait to get at that one. “Why are people offering cheese and olives? Was this hors d’oeuvres, finger food before the Mass?”

Likewise, they notice the instructions on professions (I'm mostly copying and pasting from the translation at Kevin P. Edgecomb’s website, to save typing):

If someone is a pimp who supports prostitutes, he shall cease or shall be rejected. If someone is a sculptor or a painter, let them be taught not to make idols. Either let them cease or let them be rejected. If someone is an actor or does shows in the theater, either he shall cease or he shall be rejected. If someone teaches children (worldly knowledge), it is good that he cease. But if he has no (other) trade, let him be permitted. charioteer, likewise, or one who takes part in the games, or one who goes to the games, he shall cease or he shall be rejected. If someone is a gladiator, or one who teaches those among the gladiators how to fight, or a hunter who is in the wild beast shows in the arena, or a public official who is concerned with gladiator shows, either he shall cease, or he shall be rejected. If someone is a priest of idols, or an attendant of idols, he shall cease or he shall be rejected. military man in authority must not execute men. If he is ordered, he must not carry it out. Nor must he take military oath. If he refuses, he shall be rejected. If someone is a military governor, or the ruler of a city who wears the purple, he shall cease or he shall be rejected. The catechumen or faithful who wants to become a soldier is to be rejected, for he has despised God. The prostitute, the wanton man, the one who castrates himself, or one who does that which may not be mentioned, are to be rejected, for they are impure. A magus shall not even be brought forward for consideration. An enchanter, or astrologer, or diviner, or interpreter of dreams, or a charlatan, or one who makes amulets, either they shall cease or they shall be rejected. If someone's concubine is a slave, as long as she has raised her children and has clung only to him, let her hear. Otherwise, she shall be rejected. The man who has a concubine must cease and take a wife according to the law. If he will not, he shall be rejected.

Gotta watch those characters who do what may not be mentioned.
Then students call attention to the rule about the ordination of virgins: “Hands are not laid on a virgin, for a decision alone makes her a virgin.” This associates virgins with confessors, those who have been tortured for their faith, and thus have earned priest-like honors: “If a confessor has been placed in chains for the Name of the Lord, hands are not laid upon him for the office of deacon or elder. He has the honor of the office of an elder through his confession.” Both virgins and confessors created problems for the early church, as they attained their status not by the church’s decision, but by some outside agency (the virgin’s resolve, the confessor’s arrest and torture).

And don’t you hate it when this happens? “All shall be careful so that no unbeliever tastes of the eucharist, nor a mouse or other animal, nor that any of it falls and is lost.” It’s getting late; we will not speculate concerning what other animals were getting at the consecrated elements.

Getting Sleepy

Must blog. . . .

The Dean told a joke during tonight’s sermon, a joke on a familiar theme in which a husband and wife are conversing. It occurred to me as I sat in the congregation with any number of gay/bi/ lesbian colleagues, students, and guests, that the “joke”—one of our most rigid literary genres, in certain ways—makes it necessary that the couple in the joke be straight, not gay. If one were to stipulate that the couple were gay, even indirectly, the way that a joke forces one to use an economy of information would require that the gayness of the couple be part of what’s supposed to be funny. A listener would be inclined to wonder why you told them the couple was gay, if you weren’t going to make that part of the joke.

So I was wondering how long it would be before you could tell a “couple” joke without tacitly reinforcing the perceived normality of heterosexual couples, the marginality of homosexual couples, and it occurred to me that this may be one of the reasons I don’t tell jokes much: the genre constraints make it harder to say what I want, on my terms. So although I incorporate humor in preaching, writing, teaching, and most every other aspect of life, I rarely tell jokes, more often narrating events or inflecting words to highlight peculiarities in the world.

That’s a lot to think about during a sermon, and by the time I noticed I’d been pondering instead of paying attention, the Dean was almost over. Sorry, Very Reverend Sir; I’ll pay closer attention next time.

Silence and Furious Joy

It’s been a hard year in Blogaria, and one of the hardest blows has been the news that Chris’s dear friend Rick Gleason died this afternoon, after having survived the twelve days since the Bali bombing.

When the world twists suddenly on us, when our hearts lurch and stammer, people often propose a moment of silence. That’s right; as I tried to say to Chris, it’s too easy to blather when you try to say anything meaningful about this deepest juncture.

I hope there will be due respectful silence for Rick (and Chris, and for Rick’s family). I hope that awe and grief stop trivial clichés, and allow silence to tell the truth about what’s going on.

But I also hope that the spirit of companionship that Chris’s loving commitment to Rick bespeaks will engender some furious memorial rejoicing, some thanksgiving for good things Rick meant to his friends, some conviviality that perpetuates the generosity of spirit of which Chris reminds the rest of us in blog after blog. I hope that the loyalty that Chris has been demonstrating for the last two weeks cuts loose now with some of the joy that keeps death’s power at bay. I hope that though friends move on, that friendship endures and thrives and through a web of one-or-two-degrees-of-separation wraps us together in a loyalty and friendship that beats cruelty and violence.

I hope that gentleness and affection win in our response to maddening loss, and that vicious brutality loses, it withers away and leaves kind souls to celebrate their friendship—in peace.

Peace be with you, Rick; peace be with you, Chris.

Another Busy Day

The Movable Type demo this morning went well; I wasn’t assuming that the ten-minute time slot I had allotted to me would suffice for the prupose, and was even more skeptical when the presenter before me ate up five of my minutes. But I had prepared illustrated handouts, screenshots and arrows and all, and I was lucky that the act before me had used PowerPoint. I plugged the laptop into our network, asked the operator to fire up Explorer, and walked the class through customizing the interface, posting, and commenting, all in about seven minutes—and I think it went fairly well (having hard copy in front of them, to take away, helped measurably). On the other hand, only one of the class has tried MT yet, so it’s hard to gauge how effective the demo was; I was below the anticipated glazed-eyes quotient, though.

Then I survived a small meeting on how to allot the funds left over from a large technology grant. There was less money than Id hoped (that’s the bad news) but the other committee members unconditionally backed my plan to bring in some snazzy spokespeople to kindle enthusiasm for technology (and to help Seabury assess the possible pitfalls of technology for leaders in parish ministry). Arranging that’ll be fun, even though part of it will wash over into my sabbatical leave.

Add in morning prayer, midday mass, evening prayer, rigging up Movable Type for the class that’s using it, my two-hour Biblical Theology seminar, time spent photocopying handouts for the MT demo and more handouts for Biblical Theology, some pastoral conversations, and a couple student appointments. Stagger home, have some frozen pizza with Pippa as Margaret goes to a meeting in the evening, and I’m pretty well worn out.

Introducing. . . Movable Type!

Spent the evening devising a tutorial for the students who now are tackling Movable Type for the first time. I can’t use more than a few milliseconds of class time, so I made a handout for ’em with screen shots and play-by-play. Now I have to go to sleep, print it out tomorrow morning, and explain it in class.

As I said when we first installed MT here at Seabury, a certain amount of the work comes in concealing the power of the system so as not to intimidate users. We’ve already had a few frightened users here, so I have to work extra hard to keep the beginners on board.

All I Survey

Well, it was going to happen sooner or later, but what a blast, to have a domain of my own in which to commit hyperlinked mayhem! It’s already effective, but I haven’t yet made sensible plans for the domain as a whole—so I won’t announce my new address for a bit. But you can imagine me bouncing up and down, typing my address into the location bar and watching my stuff come into view. Whoopee!

I’m Valid!

I followed Mark Pilgrim’s directions, edited my RSS templates as he suggested, and lo and behold! my feed validates. I have a long way to go before my online work is all accessible and valid, but it’s good to know that one thing works as it should. It’s not that long a journey, but it still begins with a single step.

[Update: the results are in, and here’s the button to prove my validity. . . ]

Why We Love Blogaria

It’s so easy to learn when we make mistakes.

We might, on the other hand, launch a scurrilous rebuttal, arguing that we shouldn’t be held accountable for what we said, only for what we meant. We might call names and fume and pout. We might enlist our allies (such affiliations don’t ascend to the plateau of “friendship”) to spill oil on the troubled waters.

Or, we can say, “Thanks for the clarification, Tutor. I’ll try to be get it right next time.”

Flashback

I was listening to some old-timey music (British rock from the 70’s and 80’s) when it occurred to me that the wheels have turned so that the music of the left’ outrage from Thatcherite Britain has become especially timely today:

They smiled so much and waved their flags
As she saluted to the military band
Most of the people failed to see
She had a broken bottle in the other hand
And she took them by surprise
When she took them by the throat
And said "My friend you're not allowed to vote"
But they shook it all off
With a nervous laugh and cough
"Next time," she said "I'll let those people choke"

The people who grinned themselves to death
Smiled so much they failed to take a breath
And even when their kids were starving
They all thought the queen was charming
-- The Housemartins, “the People Who Grinned Themselves to Death”

"Today, institutions fundamental to the British system of Government are under attack: the public schools, the house of Lords, the Church of England, the holy institution of Marriage, even our magnificent police force are no longer safe from those who would undermine our society, and it's about time we said 'enough is enough' and saw a return to the traditional British values of discipline, obedience, morality and freedom.
What we want is:

Freedom from the reds and the blacks and the criminals
Prostitutes, pansies and punks
Football hooligans, juvenile delinquents
Lesbians and left wing scum
Freedom from the niggers and the Pakis and the unions
Freedom from the Gipsies and the Jews
Freedom from leftwing layabouts and students
Freedom from the likes of you..."
-- Tom Robinson, “Power In The Darkness”

I'm speaking to the Justice League of America.
The U S of A,
Hey you, yes you in particular!
When it comes to the judgement day and you're standing at the gates with your weaponry,
You dead go down on one knee,
Clasp your hands in prayer and start quoting me,
'Cos we say...
Our father we've managed to contain the epidemic in one place, now,
Let's hope they shoot themselves instead of others,
Help to civilize the race now.
We've trapped the cause of the plague,
In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If we listen quietly we can hear them shooting from grave to grave.
You ought to,

Melt the guns, melt the guns,
Melt the guns, and never more to fire them.

Melt the guns, melt the guns,
Melt the guns, and never more desire them.
-- XTC, “melt the Guns”

Help save the youth of America
Help save them from themselves
Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys
And the Californian girls. . . .

Listen to the voice of the soldier
Down in the killing zone
Talking about the cost of living
And the price of bringing him home

They're already shipping the body bags
Down by the Rio Grande
But you can fight for democracy at home
And not in some foreign land

And the fate of the great United States
Is entwined in the fate of us all
And the incident at Tschernobyl proves
The world we live in is very small

And the cities of Europe have burned before
And they may yet burn again
And if they do I hope you understand
That Washington will burn with them
Omaha will burn with them
Los Alamos will burn with them
-- Billy Bragg, “help Save the Youth of America”

The oldies still are goodies, even if these aren’t getting played on the ClearChannel nostalgia factory stations.

Last Word, I Hope

Here’s what I hope will be my last pontification about blogging and bribery.

I have read numerous times about the ways that corporations send complimentary products to big, fancy influence-peddlers. Was it the Grammys, or the Oscars, or both, when Apple gave iPods to all the nominees (as though Denzel Washington can’t afford an iPod)?

My persistent interest here is that we not romanticize and infantilize “smallness,” so that low-profile bloggers fall under a moral imperative to not accept any goodies from Microsoft or whomever, while such benefices remain an obvious perquisite of notoriety.

If Microsoft brightened some regular schmoes’ lives by flying them to Redmond, schmoozing them as though they were Big Stars, and giving them some freebies, then bless the regular folks who extracted more out of Microsoft than Blue Screens of Death and overpriced bloatware. And I repeat, dear Tutor: if Microsoft, or Apple, or Userland, or Perseus Press, or some other corporate entity or individual benefactor condescends to bestow on me a freebie, then I reserve the prerogative to accept it. (Explain to me the difference in principle between David Weinberger giving me a copy of his book, which I then reviewed favorably, and the Möbius bloggers noting exuberantly how kewl their new toys are.) (And I’m not apologizing for or giving away my copy of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.) If you-all trust me less as a result, thats your prerogative, too.

The proof of the integrity is in the blogging.

We do no one favors by protecting the moral purity of the poor by denying them the wealth that brings with it the chance of corruption. We don’t uphold integrity when we deny bloggers the opportunity to demonstrate their probity by biting hands that have fed them.

More Money, More Blogging

In all my blogging about money and blogging, I neglected to note that it’s Halley who started the whole topic. She opened the possibility of product placements in blogs (she was mentioning Coke, but imagine what Jonathon Delacour ought to be able to get from Dishmatique). The problem with this for me is that although I defend bloggers’ prerogative to make money, I’m too scrupulous to accept money from any institution other than, say, Harvard University Press, publishers of fine works in many academic fields, especially the Loeb Classical Library, the finest series of classical publications since the Library of Alexandria. Harvard University Press, for all your academic-publication needs.

She mentioned in an email that Andrew Sullivan blogs about this (the feeling I get when linking to Andrew Sullivan: sullied).

Bribe-Blogging

I didn’t bother reading Mitch Ratcliffe’s interview with Netzeitung, because I doubted that Mitch and his interviewer used much of the vocabulary with which I’m most familiar: words like “covenant,” “form criticism,” “ “justification.” Mitch has posted the interview in English, now, and it clarifies the brouhaha helpfully.

St. Luke

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist, patron saint of healers (doctors, surgeons), and I served at two masses. At the first, at midday here at Seabury, I participated in sacramental healing: anointing with holy oil and laying-on of hands. At the second (in the evening at our home parish, St. Luke’s Church), I celebrated the mass.

Healing ministry exhausts me in any circumstances, but at the end of a long week so distinctly marked by stress and medical concerns, I was utterly wiped out.

Then I wobbled down to St. Luke’s where I offered the mass with special intentions for Rick Gleason, for Fiona and for Turner Junior, for Misako and Margaret, and for all our friends in the care of physicians.

Distinctions, Inc.

Sheila Lennon and Tom Matrullo have both prodded me relative to blogarian ethics. I’m still manically busy working at the job that does pay me, but by way of quick summary and response.

Sheila says

I am typing in the newsroom of a mainstream major metro daily where no payola is allowed. None. I sometimes leave at night with giant bouquets sent to the society writer or the restaurant reviewer, reporters who are not allowed to keep them under our stringent rules.

Reviewers may keep the books, cds and software they review. They may not sell the overflow; these are offered in monthly "book grabs" open to the entire building. We are monkish about preserving not only our objectivity but avoiding the appearance of impropriety. It's why you can't get rich in journalism.

Tom says,

When I wrote a column about gadgets for a paper, co's like IBM used to send me pretty valuable items - without even an initial call from a PR person. Just flood the mail with stuff. The system seems to presume that bribery works.

I believe heartily that bribery works, and in my line of work I see constant examples of human frailty and corruptibility. These do not surprise me. (And I take Sheila’s allusion to reportorial “monkish” behavior in the very best sense.)

But there’s a significant difference between expecting paid reporters to decline gifts that would engender a confllict of interests, and expecting unpaid bloggers to decline gifts that actually cohere with their interests. (The Happy Tutor asked, the other day, if this isn’t what Gonzo Marketing is about?)

“Was it a millionaire who said ‘Imagine no possessions’?” I doubt that I’m writing to any millionaires—certainly not the reporters among us—but the Tutor’s relentless flogging of every pretension to purity and high-mindedness ought not anesthetize us to the truth behind the rod: that we’re scrambling around, trying to make ends meet, doing what we can with limited resources. If when I preached, I recommended Windows XP because Microsoft was sponsoring the sermon, I’d have a conflict of interests and would be justly reviled. If I blog favorably about Communications Inc. because they gave me a squeeze ball, a pen, and a can of mints, there’s no conflict of interests, only cheap commercialization of what readers will have thought a disinterested voice at the coffee table. That’s disappointing, but not venal—and one could certainly draw comparisons to those who curry favor and trade links in order to look bigger in the Blogging Ecosystem, or who parlay Google buzzwords into high hit counts.

To work. . . .

Ouch-snore. . . .

Its217;s been a long day. Sheila Lennon, Tom, Trevor, and probably several other people contributed to the blogging-ethics conversation. I’m to respond tonight, but it’s important (so far as I can tell) to note that the heart of the issue isn’t, “Would you pay Halley to blog?” but rather is closer to, “Is there something intrinsically problematic in anyone giving a blogger cash or goodies?” I chipped in for Mark Wood’s computer; if he ever links to me, should he add a disclaimer?

If Mike Golby wants to blog, and his friend in the Nigerian banking system wants to pay him to blog, so be it. I may like his blog more, or less, or about the same. And if he starts waxing euphoric about the Nigerian stock market, I’ll just tune him out.

I can’t see what separates blogging from other fields of human endeavor, in which payment is not only permitted, but expected. But maybe I’d see the point better if my eyes weren't three-quarters closed.

Power, Corruption, and Blogs

The denizens of Blogaria are in an uproar about whether the blogger deserves her wages. Doc surveys the goings-on and approves the sudden widespread interest in the ethics of blogging. Dorothea and Mark speak in defense of principled amateurism; Shelley speaks as a consummate professional; Steve happily pursues commercial non-viability, David takes a solemn oath of unprofessional conduct, Mitch added several insightful retrospections, and mountains of us in many different communities are struggling to parse the dos and don’ts in some ethically-intelligible way.

It’s easy to say there’s something dubious about a gazillionaire corporation buying off bloggers for a weekend’s mess of pottage. That, most of us can denoucnce comfortably. But some puzzles persist in the more general discussion of blogging and bucks.

For instance: I preach the gospel week after week, arguably (at least within my particular ideological/theological community) a more important function than blogging—but I unashamedly accept money for preaching. And, again granting the premises of the whole operation, the people who pay me to preach have a tremendous stake in my capacity to compose a sermon uninfluenced by the temptation to curry favor with my employers (or “patrons,” if you prefer). I put a lot of effort into preaching, and I’m pretty good at it. Should I decline payment on principle?

If I’m about as good a blogger as I am a preacher, should I decline payment for the hours I put into composing blogs?

Here’s another conundrum for you: I teach to feed my family and, more importantly, to pay the broadband bill. But teaching (as the Epistle of James notes) carries a tremendous responsibility, since a teacher stands accountable both for her own follies and for the follies she transmits to her students. Is my pedagogical compass thrown off by my being paid? If so, does anyone know where I can submit my pedagogical compass to more effective distortion? I have a college tuition bill to pay.

Doc is an Official Journalist, as is Tom. David must be pretty nearly official, if not as unimpeachably official as others; certainly he appears in the Globe and in Darwin. Should professional journalists not blog (because they’re professionals), leaving the field clear for the unpaid bloggers? Doc gets paid to give talks; David and Chris get paid to give talks. Is David more enthusiastic about IBM because they sent him to China? Not so far as I’ve been able to tell.

Here’s another riddle: I happen to be nuts about Apple computers; have been for years. I’m probably more likely to say foolish, biased things in favor of Apple—without their having laid a cent on the table in front of me—than I would be to flatter someone who wanted me to shill for his new digital identity enterprise solution (I’m; not sure what an “enterprise solution” is, but it sounds like the kind of thing a Software Corp. would try to sell).

I do not agree with Dr. Johnson that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Extraordinary writers pour their brilliant gifts into words for our delight and instruction all the time, without receiving a cent for their ardor. (Academic writing can be a lot like that, much of the time—sigh.)

Okay: I should take stock.

• Pay for writing doesn’t necessarily make you corrupt
• Not being paid for writing doesn’t necessarily make you reliable
• Passion for a topic or product doesn’t make you more reliable or less reliable

Dorothea and Mark worry about the tendency for sponsorship to corrupt, and only a fool would argue that they have no basis for concern. But lack of sponsorship doesn’t constitute a warrant for greater credibility. We’re thrown back on the uncomfortable challenge of discerning on whom we can rely in any case. Personal interest—whether it be sponsorship, or employment, or stock interest, or ownership (should Dave Winer not blog about Radio?)—enters into our assay of how reliable a blog might be, but it’s not, can’t be, a binary criterion.

In this context, Mitch makes a nice point about the relative importance of trust and brands. He suggests that the nineties’ emphasis on brand-building misses the point that the vital quality is trust. But isn’t it still more complicated? May I not trust the Subaru brand, precisely because their autos show evidence of being highly reliable?

But Mitch’s point holds insofar as he means that a recognizable brand isn’t worth much if it’s synonymous with “untrustworthy.” I will not throw a stone at any particular brand, nor kick one while it’s under indictment for fraudulent business practices, but at that point a recognizable brand might be the last thing you want.

I trust Doc. I try to live and write in ways that make it sensible for you to trust me. I don’t apologize for being paid, nor do I expect others to do without in order to preserve a problematic dispassion from their topics. But—to get us back round to the presenting symptom—if a manufacturer came round to me with a goodie bag and invited me to their hardware pleasure dome, I would (a) almost certainly accept, and (b) write about the trip, and (c) make clear as can be that readers knew what was going on.

That’s no foolproof insulation against bias (I’m a great enough fool to defeat any such insulation you install), but it helps you build the context for knowing how much you trust what I write. And it doesn’t set an arbitrary limit on how I pay for my next change of clothes.

[The whole discussion is good, but the best moment comes when David Weinberger writes, “Blogging about opera is still jazz. ”]

Truth, Integrity, Money, Blogs

Well, now the cat’s among the chickens (is that the idiom? It doesn’t sound quite right).

Mitch Ratcliffe alerted readers to the dubious propriety of bloggers being granted special favors, and Dave suggested that Doc’s disavowal of complicity was misguided (Dave put matters more vividly). Then Doc agreed, and offered us a full account of his journalistic interests and his possible beholden-ness to Microsoft. Now David is explaining why we can and can’t count on him ever to tell the truth about Big Redmond, and Tom is keeping it all linked up, and Jeneane and even the Happy Tutor are putting their oars in (perhaps in the Tutor’s case, I should say “paddle”). What’s a moralist to do, when everyone’s already staked out the terrain? [Now Nick Denton has clairifed Gizmodo’s participation in the Redmond junket, with helpful context from the worlds of professional journalism and puffery.]

Well, for one thing, I can go back over what everyone’s already said, and metablog it (or meta-metablog it, in some cases).

First, I appreciate Mitch’s putting us onto a circumstance we might not have suspected. I don’t frequent the sites he cited, but if I had stopped in at one or another I might well have taken the enthusiastic prose at face value (I’m a pretty trusting guy). It hadn’t occurred to me to think that anyone would hand someone a plane ticket and hotel room to generate positive buzz about new products. (I should’ve bargained harder with Eric about DIDW) (more about that below, actually).

Now that Mitch has blown the whistle, what of Doc’s disavowal and subsequent full disclosure? I have to say that I fully supported Doc’s initial response. While (as Doc notes) he hadn’t explicitly stated, “MS is paying me to come out and talk to them,” I never for a minute supposed that he was flying out to Washington on his own dime. The senior editor of Linux Journal? I don’t think so. So when he shrugged off the possible imputation that his presence at Redmond was tainted, I shrugged it off too.

My confidence in Doc’s integrity comes largely from the online persona he has written into existence. Crass toadying doesn’t fit the picture. Now, he (or Microsoft) could be taking advantage of that circumstance, but it would be both highly unethical and a grossly misguided short-term strategy; once Doc’s [purely hypothetical] effusive endorsement of parental controls built into the OS cast doubt onhis credibility, MS would have to find another trusted blogger to snare. And Doc’s name would be Mud.

Doc’s too smart for that, and MS is too smart for that, so I harbored no qualms about Doc’s integrity. And although I applaud his willingness to lay out his travel fees, expenses, and editorial perspectives, all that’s unnecessary to me. Doc doesn’t have anything to prove, and he has a lot of credibility to lose.

Lesser bloggers, who might the more easily fall for the seductive allure of corporate benefaction, probably ought to make utterly clear their relation to any patrons. In that spirit, I’ll stipulate that I paid for my own hotel room in Denver, and burned all my frequent flyer miles to get to the conference (my son Si kept offering to share some of his miles from his trip to Sri Lanka with me, but I didn’t need them). I paid for my registration, too, and if you read my accounts of DIDW you’ll be hard-pressed to see any bias in favor of any of the corporate interests present. Oh: ePresence gave me a t-shirt (as they did for Phil Windley), and Communicator, Inc. gave me a flourescent green squeeze ball, a tin of mints and a pen. Notice how much good that did them: I hadn’t mentioned them at all till this came up, and even now I’m not saying anything about their product (friendly, generous booth staff, though).

Moreover, I entirely understand corporations’ offering alert attention to journalists and bloggers. People like Doc (and possibly the Redmond bloggers, I don’t know) have a valuable perspective on the tech business, and a closer relationship with Doc would be nothing but advantageous for anyone in this line of work.

So I’m just flat-out not worried about Doc—but thanks for showing us how un-worried we can afford to be.

Those of us whose reputations don’t run as deep as Doc’s, whose livelihoods don’t depend on our maintaining a balanced perspective and our offering the world an unvarnished view of the industrial scene: we’re the dangerous ones. At the same time, “full disclosure” itself can mask a closetful of secrets, pulling the old sleight of hand whereby one admits to X and Y so as not to mention Z. What of us? (Quickly, now; it’s past my bedtime.)

(a) No guarantees. You’ll have to size us up and make a reasoned, critical discernment.

(b) Public pressure within the community—such as Mitch and Dave have generated—helps keep the lights on and the windows open. Good for them.

(c) Some of us just don’t want to go through life suspecting everyone who treats them kindly of ulterior motives. (That’d be me, for one.) That sets us up as easy marks, in a certain way, but may also indicate that we’re more likely to speak our minds no matter how kindly we’re treated.

(d) When we’ve been most effectively seduced, we’re not aware of it ourselves. So asseverations of our own innocence probably miss the point (even alleged Presidents of the United States and duly-elected Presidents, too, protest the purity of their motives).

(e) If we keep in touch with one another, if we cultivate trust among disinterested correspondents, we may just buld the resources to resist, if never finally to escape, the risks of which Mitch warns us. I trust Doc, and there’s an end on it. Like Jeneane said.

Good night.

Take A Bite. . . .

Or at least, Chris, I’ll be glad you did. . . .

(P.S. I look better in vestments than that guy any day. And do you notice that those pictures show him wearing a black collar? He’s only showing an inch or so of white, up front.)

Converteroo

While Denise and I were in Denver, we fell into a three-handed chat (sixhanded, unless Kevin throws the total off in an unexpected way) with Kevin Marks about the preponderance of TiBooks among the bloggers. (Actually, “preponderance” is too strong a word; “prominence” would be better.) She and I were swapping my ’Book back and forth as we chatted with Kevin. I think that once, Chris Locke grabbed the keyboard (did you notice that he typed with a different accent, Kevin?).

Anyway, Denise and I mused that we might be suitable candidates for Apple “Switcher” ads. Denise had been using a PC until earlier this year; and I used a Kaypro CP/M machine until about 1987.

Now, of course, the great foofaraw surrounds the revelation that Microsoft’s marketing department had a highly original idea and put together an ad suggesting that Mac users had good reasons to convert to MS XP. Unfortunately, the Microsoft example was fiction-based-on-fact (“Trust us,” they say, “the copywriter really was describing her own experience”), while the Apple ads were facts-used-for-marketing (a different kind of fiction). Apple gets the Ellen Feiss fan club, and Microsoft pulls its ad and apologizes.

Maybe I can offer to write an ad for Microsoft, describing what it would be like if I did switch—I mean, “convert.” “:I wouldn’t have thought Hell would be so chilly. Look, a snowball!”

“Once they showed me the flying pigs, I realized I just had to get Microsoft XP.”

“George Bush’s statesmanlike peroration in explanation of his decision to demobilize US forces in the Mideast and devote the war savings to building hospitals and universities around the globe convinced me that Microsoft really was where it’s at.”

It’s odd that the two modes of puffery seem to make such a sharp contrast when both Apple and Microsoft are simply plain trying to sell you a new operating system. Microsoft’s was clearly a bungled move, Apple’s a fairly conventional advertising ploy (I remember when Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch), but they’re still just advertising.

Identity After DIDW

I traded some iChat with Euan Semple this afternoon, learning how to pronounce his name and explaining mine. More importantly, we checked in about some aspects of identity in general and digital identity in particular.

Euan and I talked about DIDW, about hanging out in person with people whom we had come to know first online (Euan wasn’t in Denver, but he had met several Cluetrainers at various other points). We agreed (and check me on this if I misstate things, Euan) that it’s a mistake to make a hard distinction between supposedly virtual relationships (on one hand) and face-to-face relationships (on the other). Online relationships are very real, though they’re different. They don’t obviate the satisfaction of meeting people in physical space; but they aren’t pallid substitutes either.

Jon Udell observes that

Most of us [from the Denver DIDW conference] have weblogs into which we project a lot of ourselves. As a result, face-time is different than it otherwise would be. Our digital identities precede us, and create a rich context for live discourse.

He notes that online people have a stake in DigID to the extent that it helps preserve reputation awareness; that’s very right, but I still think Doc is closer when he reaches out for the digital identity killer-app (not “identity-killer app”). We will appreciate reputation-security, but we’ll jump on board and promote the DigID app that fires our imaginations the way Napster did. (See what Phil Wolff says about the DigID Napster. . .).

I knew about Phil and Jon before I met them at DIDW, but now I have to look out for them online more vigilantly. Thank heavens they’re aggregatable.

Special thanks, also, to Elliot Noss of Tucows—partly for his restlessly persistent interest in talking through our theological differences and similarities, and partly for representing that under-appreciated online constituency group: Readers. Elliot refuses to blog for several reasons, buit one of them is that he has to contribute to keeping the ratio of readers to bloggers somewhere near a manageable proportion. This has two side effects: I have one less blog to read (phew!), but I miss out on reading what’s on Elliot’s mind from day to day, and I’ll miss that.

DRMA: "The Funky Western Civilization" by Tonio K.; "Shoot Out the Lights" by Richard and Linda Thompson; "Power to the People" by the Chi-Lites; "You Were There" by Ron Sexsmith; "The Old Gold Shoe" by Lambchop; "Kite" by U2; "Jesus Met the Woman at the Well" by the Pilgrim Travellers; "Three Marlenas" by the Wallflowers.

Oh, no!

I entirely blanked out on a speaking engagement tonight. The priest who arranged the gig called up and asked Margaret, Wasn’t AKMA supposed to be here? And Margaret asked me, “Were you supposed to be there?” And I said, “No, I had this morning clear. . . Oh, no!” The presentation was scheduled for this evening.

I just never wrote it into my calendar, so a couple dozen people assembled in St. Charles Illinois to hear me spout off about “Rumors of Peace: Christians, Hope, and Trouble,” and I didn’t show them the respect even of turning up. This makes me feel sick and grossly irresponsible, so I will hunker down and berate myself for a few hours. . . .

Congratulations, Eric!

I’d; like to be the first one to blog that Eric Norlin seems to have finished the Chicago Marathon in 4:43:33—though I may be reading the results page incorrectly, because it looks as though Alie Norlin finished with exactly the same time, and although I’m last in line to dispute extreme spousal togetherness, this seems somewhat improbable. Alie was ahead of Eric by eight minutes at the 30K mark (Eric seems not to show up at the 15K and halfway points). The “chip time” for Alie shows her at a faster 4:35:37.

Here are some other dimensions of the conundrum. In this summer’s “2002 KBCO Kinetic” 5K race, Alie finished in 27:49, where Eric finished in 30:21. In the “14th Runnin' of the Green Lucky 7K,” Alie finished in 39:12, and Eric in 44:45.

Margaret has decided that Alie twisted her ankle, and Eric caught up and they hobbled to the end together. Or she waited for him so they could cross the line together. Hmmm.

Decompression

(a) I’m home, safe and sound. And I ran into Eric Norlin at the baggage claim; he and his wife and friend (brother?) caught the same flight as I. Eric’s running in the Marathon here tomorrow morning.

(b) Margaret, Pippa, and Josiah are doing wonderfully, though Margaret’s stuck on the medication regime that’s wearing the dickens out of her, and has a cold to boot.

(c) The meeting on Outreach and Evangelism to which Margaret took me direct from O’Hare went just fine.

(d) Everyone else seems to have gotten away from DIDW safely.

(e) Response from the outside world seems to confirm the point that Doc and I were trying to make from on-site: digitial identity has dimensions that extend far beyond technical complications, security, and interoperability. DigID won’t go anywhere unless people want what DigID brings them.

The BigCo.s at DIDW heard from fairly gentle voices in Denver. If you want to hear intense, highly-literate resistance, ask Tom. If you want to gauge the potential resistance to any large-scale DigID implementation, check out the Slashdot thread. (Peevish complaint: “Several people from the weblog community are in attendance and have reports available: Denise Howell, David Weinberger, Doc Searls.” Ahem.) The Slashdotters weigh in firmly against the kinds of DigID approaches that the BigCo.s were promoting—and Slashdotters have the savvy to know how to crack what they want to resist (collectively, if not individually). Again, it confirms Doc’s point that DigID will have to come to us as something we want, not something a megacorp thinks is good for us.

Again, I’m not faulting the DIDW organizers, who explicitly indicated to me their hope that next year they can weave a stronger user’s-side perspective into the conference. They tried to do that this year, and will try even harder next year, and I absolutely want to encourage them, not trash them. [Edit: Bryan Field-Elliott makes some of the same points in his post-conference blog.]

Now, I owe some correspondents a few more words about secrecy. Justin, if you take me off the DIDW aggregator, you probably won't miss anything essential.

Doc’s ID

Doc Searls has come to the stage and is doing just what I asked for a few minutes ago: he’s asking the question, “Why would anyone want a ‘digital identity’?” What makes any of us think that we can manage or control any of this?

He’s sketching the history and dimensions of his (and Chris Locke’s) identities. These are all so convoluted, they intersect in such unpredictable ways (I typed “unproductable,” which I like more) that managing is out of the question. If you’ve been reading Doc over the past eight months or so, you’ll be acquainted with the narrative that undergirds his point (including intersecting identities, end-runs around big corporations, gonzo marketing and so on).

What DigID needs is something that catches fire. The Big Co.s aren’t going to do it; one of us will have to make DigID desirable, necessary.

He quotes Craig Burton as saying, “The Net is a hollow sphere made entirely of the people and resources it connects. It’s the firs tworld made by people, for people. We’ve only beguin to terraform it.”

Commercial interests want to control infrastructure, whereas the technologists who make infrastructure, who carry the burden of supporting commerce, want to do their work without commerce to “control” them. They’re willing to support commerce, they like that, but they don’t want commerce to govern. Commerce doesn’t understand infrastructure. Rob Glazer points out the now, infrastructure is changing faster than fashion and commerce.

Doc suggests a conflict of metaphor between commerce (which views the Net as a pipeline) and technologists (who view the Net as a space). The software industry is like the construction industry; it belongs to project-oriented builers, designers, architects.

We need to get past the conflicting metaphors. Commerce doesn’t recognize the elements of infrastructure, and the free-software and technologists don’t see the creative power of commerce [on this I’d want to push Doc further.]

Web services are the result oif infrastructural chaos. In the chaos, no pre-existing rule governs behavior. A chaos-adopting something will drive a standard to ubiquity. How do you crate ubiquitous infratstructure and make money at the same time? By causing chaos, then taking advantage of it.

Infrastructure supports commerce; commerce contributes to infrastructure.

But Hollywood’s efforts will fail; we are the Web, and we will not conform to that model. DigID will be built around fully sovereign individual IDs (so that we become customers rather than consumers [I’d rather be “AKMA” than a customer, too]). Doc wants DigID to be part of relationships. Markets are relationships.

When Doc or AKMA can come to businesses as participants in relationships rather than as generic consumers [and Margaret and I are shopping for a used car now, so we are especially attuned to the perils of being just generic consumers], then DigID will catch fire.

David Weinberger comes to the mike and points out how great it could have been if Doc had spoken on the first day and thus conditioned the rest of the conversation. Doc says, “I’m not trying to say, ‘Can’t we all just get along,’ I’m trying to make a world in which dependencies are better understood.”

By the way, Doc is a first-class PowerPoint artist—and I hate PowerPoint. I could watch Doc do his stuff for hours.

How It Stands

The morning of the last day of DigIDW dawns, and it’s a good time to take stock. I think the conferenence has succeeded admirably in several ways. Predictably, it has usefully brought together the official Major Players in the DigID industry—which itself will catalyze a bunch of processes and energies. The conference also brought together a cadre of minor players, helping construct networks and grapevines which compass and penetrate the interests of the Major Players (which will catalyze a bunch of processes that may spur or impede the progress of DigID).

I’m disappointed in several ways, too, and I think this doesn’t reflect negatively on the amazing work that the DigIDW people have accomplished in bringing this conference together and making it fly. The heavy emphasis on technological and business solutions, though, has overshadowed on-the-ground users.

But users count. Users are people, they are subjects, they’re the center of all the interests that converge at this conference, and they are not simply nodes where information converges. People will respond to DigID initiatives not on the basis of disinterested reason or of a fascination with groovy things technology can do. People have been trained by years of popular culture to harbor a deep suspicion of DigID—and probably for good reasons. When gargantuan corporate concerns work out DigID solutions without deep engagement with civilians’ attitudes, they only amplify the likelihood that their deep investment in particular devices will encounter resistance whose scale they haven’t begun to estimate.

Users, people, count most fundamentally because the impulses that generate any interest whatever in DigID derive from the needs and concerns of users; without users, the topic is moot. Users (especially naive users) will make or break proposed DigID mechanisms, and a conference on DigID ought to keep the technologists’ feet close to the fire of popular sentiment.

My second disappointment involves the ways that the big corporations present here have addressed the radical changes at work in the spheres of digital reproduction and distribution. The leaden inheritance of copyright law has dominated the presentations and panels, where spokespeople for more flexible, adaptive responses to digital distribution have mostly had to raise their questions from the floor. (The interactive politics of the conference thus reproduce the distributive politics of technology: corporations on the spotlit stage, pirates harrying them from the margins.)

This is not about “piracy”; it’s about dealing with the digital transition on digital technologies’ own terms, rather than trying to constrict digital technologies to the capacities of analog technologies. The entrenched interests and their apologists try to limit the discussion to terms and legal concepts that derive their cogency from industrial conditions that no longer obtain, rather than trying to respond to the transformative effects of digital distribution by transforming their missions and business models.

That strikes me as a short-term, dysfunctional tactic. Digital distribution will transform (not simply “change”) businesses that have depended on analog reproduction and distribution for their revenue. As Doc says this morning,

It's only natural for the industry to protect itself. But there also needs to be some introspection about the changed market conditions that invite the piracy in the first place. The Net and the CD-R are facts of market life now. What the industry is trying to protect is an obsolete and overpriced distribution system.

I wish that this conference and the businesses that have gathered here demonstrated a willingness to cooperate with that transformation, rather than gazing fixedly at the hypnotic swinging pendulum of “intellectual property.”

Doc’s Fan Club

That’s Doc surrounded by (left to right) Mike Bauer, Nikolaj Nyholm, Phil Wolff, Adam Theo, and Mike Hern. I’m the one on the other side of the table, holding the camera.

Trusting and Worthiness

Sara Wedeman notes, in response to my quotation of Brett Glass asking why the companies that vociferously demand that we trust them are themselves the least trustworthy, observes

[B]ecause they are the only ones stupid enough (in the world of ‘emotional intelligence’) to believe that trust is a commodity that can be bought and sold; that trustworthiness is a pose to strike in the service of competitive advantage rather than a stance in life. In this construction, trust is a ‘product feature’ that encourages customers to do what you want them to do in spite of their better judgement or economic self-interest. Paradoxically, in urging us to trust them, they reveal an utter of understanding of the concept. This, in turn, lets us know they are entirely untrustworthy. Quite perfect in its symmetry, if you think about it.

I couldn’t agree more.

What He Said

David, being an honorable chair at the DRM session, didn’t manipulate the panel into treating the topic in the ways he would most have wanted. But he vented his pent-up thoughts on his site, and it’s a shame he couldn’t have challenged the panel (and audience) with them.

These are where-it’s-at questions. Go, David!

I try hard to extend my understanding into the fissures and technicalities of all the questions I engage, but on this topic I’m content to push a partisan case that runs something like this: the notion of copyright depends for its cogency on an obsolescent industrial model. We need the next idea, not complicated ways of perpetuating the old idea—especially when the ways of perpetuating the old idea end up forcing constraints onto the tremendous capacities of emerging technologies.

DNS and DigID

A panel of DNS biggies (Esther Dyson as chair, then Mark Foster of Neustar; Bret Fausett, a lawyer/iCANN guy; Paul Mockapetris of Nominum, Inc.; Richard sdfasdfm (not "Richard Forman," as advertised) of Register.com, and Elliott Noss of Tucows.

Nikolaj started the ball rolling by giving Mark Foster a hard time over a Forbes magazine article relative to Neustar CEO Jeffrey Ganek’s plan to mine the database of all North American phone numbers and phone calls.

Brett Glass pushes on the use of whois as a spammer’s source for email addresses. At this, Esther scolds the panel and the audience that “spam is not the problem—privacy is the problem” (Elliott says that Esther likes spam).

Ken Klingenstein comes back and asks the panel about federation (that’s one of the big words at the conference). The panelists seem positive about the prospects of federation.

Good, but not hypnotically fascinating panel. Elliott was especially helpful.

Makes You Think

One of the remarks that Craig Bundie made in his talk this morning was something to the effect that “computers aren’t the problem; connectivity makes computers a problem.”

Did you get that, Gary?

What It Looks Like

Images from DIDW: Doc and I are clearing email (taken by Frank Paynter)

and David and Doc were recursively photographing one another and me.

David’s Right, Mainly

David Weinberger is chairing the DRM panel, which includes Brad, the Microsoft guy; Ken, the open-source Internet2 guy; Bala, the anti-piracy guy, and Denise, the litigator.

Denise is starting the discussion by summarizing the state of the question.

Now, Bala is explaining his company’s approach at Smarte Solutions. Now Brad is presenting Microsoft’s angle.

Ken suggests that we have DRM, and we’re losing it. We’re conceiving digital rights too narrowly.

Microsoft (both Brad and Craig Mundie) refer to having a 360° perspective on DRM. Denise and David keep pointing out that the technological transition to digital media is being limited by habits and conventions that derive from analog media. David insists that DRM allow leeway for uses that don’t adhere strictly to a producer’s dictates.

Brad wants his auditors not to vilify either Microsoft or the studios & record producers.

Ken speaks up on behalf of authorization & attributes as parts of the solution (these work well in Shibboleth).

Clued Presentation

Martha Rogers’s presentation was generally quite convincing; she invited us to think about the issues involved in digitial ID, privacy, and security as an exercise in building relationships with customers. I’m not going to say more (the DRM panel is beginning), but Doc has a lot of great material.

MS - I’ll Pass

Microsoft’s Craig Mundie is talking about Passport and trustworthy computing now. He’s presenting a pretty vanilla prespective on all these topics. His presentation of DRM focuses not on “protecting copyright” but on “ensuring that people can have access to

He’s talking about keeping kids away from inappropriate material now; it sounds good, but I get suspicious about their moving toward the emotionally-charged, hard-to-argue terrain of child protection. They’re demo-ing an approach to parental controls that steers children to “age-appropriate” materials, that sets up barriers against “age-inappropriate” material, and (get this) emails the parent when Junior wants to look at a page that isn’t specifically permitted.

Imagine, for a second, getting an in-box full of messages saying that Junior wants to go to sites X, Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J. Now you go to all these sites, decide whether Junior can cope with them, pass along okays—how long does that take?

How soon before Junior has a strong incentive to learn to outflank the barriers? (And the notion that they won’t be able to depends on parents’ naïve assumption that their children find computers as incomprehensible as the parents do.) This looks like a very superficial scheme to me.

Mundie treats MS’s Palladium project as though it were a necessary response to security and DRM questions; he completely bypasses the question of the hardware’s relation to other OS platforms. Linux? Mac OS?

0wnz You

The first session at DIDW this morning concerns the ownership of information about our identities; who does own information, who should own it, what can be done, what should be done. Some of the discussion surrounds privacy differences between North America and Europe (and between the US and Canada); to what extent is a US model dominate the discussion (Nikolaj observes that the US legislation and debate tends to be very binary). Esther observes that American marketers are impervious to scandal; she’s alluding to Safeway re-selling information about individuals’ buying habits.

Michael notes that there’s a deep problem with the outlook that says, “If it’s not illegal, it’s okay.” He laments the lack of a sense of responsibility.

Esther keeps hammering away on the necessity of transparency; she’s right, she’s right. The way to short-circuit fears about privacy involves living in ways that don’t suffer from public exposure. That’s a message that many of my seminary students resist—I expect it’s even more unwelcome in secular circles. Still, it’s not just a matter of morality or constitutional law—it’s a pragmatic necessity.

Busman’s Holiday

Honest, I wasn’t planning on this; indeed, it was the last thing I expected. But after I got off the phone saying good-night to Margaret and the children, David Weinberger and Elliott Noss and Phil Wolff started up discussing postmodernity, biblical interpretation, Christianity and Judaism, hermeneutics, moral and ethical absolutes, and the nature of faith. I had been ready to go to sleep, maybe catch some of the Giants game (since we don’t watch TV at home), but instead we talked for two hours.

That Weinberger—you can’t get him off his pet topics.

Dinner with Phil and Jon

I didn’t recognize anyone who was already sitting down at dinner last night, so I took a shot in the dark and sat in the middle of a big empty space at an underpopulated table. After but a few moments, Phil Windley (the legendary Phil Windley, whose name is quickly acquiring the extension “the blogging CIO of the State of Utah”) sat down next to me. We got into a good conversation about his presentation, and then after a few more moments Jon Udell sat down.

We had an exciting, wide-ranging conversation about everything from digitial ID to Byte magazine to working in government to preaching. I knew of these gentlemen, and respected their stuff, and was not surprised when they turned out to be terrific conversationalists.

Neologism Registry

As I observed Doc prowling the atrium of the DIDW hotel, lookiong for a place to plug in (for power, not access), I asked whether there was an acronymic neologism for the activity of looking for plugs. He suggests “earwalking,” for Electrical Access Reconnaisance walking, or “oarwalking,” for Outlet Access Reconnaisance walking.

Now, someone tell Gary to get the chalk.

Doc also suggested that Dubya “sounds like Ross Perot played at 33 RPM, with the needle skipping.”

All that is on top of an intriguing, illuminating conference.

Good Question

Brett Glass just stopped by and asked, “Why is it that the least trustworthy companies in this industry are the ones asking for our trust?”

Trust - Verisign?

I spent the second session this morning at a presentation by Mahi De Silva of Verisign; he adjured the audience that “trust is key” as he promoted “the value of trust.”

Some will recognize my discomfort at listening to Verisign in this connection. De Silva probably did not approve the policies that pull domain names from duly-subscribed customers, and he (I am sure) would explain that this happens only rarely, and that Verisign would remedy the harm caused by such lapses.

At the same time, public lapses damage “trust” much more than a rosy corporate pitch can acknowledge. For the corporation, “trust” comes down to verifiability; it’s almost mathematical. That’s good as far as it goes; David Weinberger reminds me that he wants that kind of trust in his hosting service and other agencies, and he’s got a fair point there.

At the same time, trust extends beyond “what you could check up on if you needed to.” Trust involves not simply a referential function, but also a speculative function. If I left the room for a few minutes to phone Margaret, I would have to trust the people among whom I’m sitting—at least one of whom looks pretty seedy—not to make off with my computer. There&8#8217;s no mathematical angle on this dimension of trust; at most, one can articulate a probability function. That still differs from the discernment that impels me to think that I’ll leave the computer unguarded, or take it with me.

That prospective aspect of trust matters a lot more than Mahi De Silva seemed to allow, more (I think) than he can allow, granted Verisign’s allegedly spotty track record. (Consumer Safety Warning: David Weinberger told me about a wonderful experience he had as a Verisign customer, so they’re not only Bad Hats.) So long as Verisign has a dubious reputation that’s grounded in as few as one or two undisputed examples, they can’t presume on our prospective trust. Still less can such a corporation afford to make “trust” the theme of their promotional campaign, lest they immediately invoke a negative response.

DIDW 1, GM 0

I missed Phil Beckerís opening speech, but from what Denise says it looks like Phil did a great job (and setting the developments in tech and DigID in the context of the succession of movies was a nice touch).

Tony Scott from GM is going now, and although his talk does involve DigID, itís not permeated by DigID issues. Iím learning about the auto business, though.

Good Morning!

The alarm went off at a few minutes after 4 AM (auspiciously, Nina Totenberg was summarizing the stakes in Eldred v. Ashcroft). (At least, I think I heard Nina Totenberg summarizing the case; it was, after all, 4 AM, and I had sepnt several hours last night talking son Nate through a battery problem with his iBook.)

Margaret, heroic soul, voluntarily got up to drive me to O’Hare; we got there in plenty of time.

Landed in Denver a shade ahead of schedule, smoking that slow-poke Weinberger, whose plane landed just on schedule (not having made up any time between Boston and Denver; I’ll collect on your wagers later).

Roll into the Hyatt Tech Center, Eric Norlin greets us at the registration table, we skulk in the back of the opening session and some guy hails me (me?)—it’s Doc. Hey, there’s Denise. (Eric said, “We’ve got a lawyer and a priest. We’re ready to go.”) Now, where’s Frank?

Everyone Into the Pool

David Weinberger is racing me to Denver tomorrow morning. He’s spotting me hundreds of miles and a couple of hours, but the schedule-makers give me a fifteen-minute advantage in landing.

On the other hand, I’m flying out of O’Hare.

So what odds do you give on the dark horse from Boston versus the fleet flyer from the Windy City?

Preparing, Packing, Anticipating

The last two days have been nonstop flurries of pedagogical/administrative activity, as I sat through a four-hour faculty meeting yesterday morning, two-hour classes both yesterday afternoon and this afternoon, prepared papers and handouts for those classes and the classes I’ll be missing while I’m in Denver (thanks, Trevor!) for DIDW, packing for the trip, and last of all installing an AirPort card in my laptop.

I had been using a third-party wireless card that the laptop inherited from my previous machine (which could’nt use an AirPort card); it was functional, but had some kinks (though its open-source driver was in almost every respect amazingly good) that AirPort itself finesses.

The only problem was that the card installs differently on my PowerBook than on my wife’s iBook. On hers, it just pops into a friendly little slot under the keyboard; on mine, one has to unscrew the bottom plate. Unscrew, that is, with a Torx T-8 screwdriver. I used to have one of those till I absent-mindedly tried to take it through a security checkpoint. (Idle fantasy thought: “If you don’t yield control of the plane to me, I’ll install 512 megs of RAM into the nearest laptop.” Okay, I’m sure that a Torx driver could be used as a lethal weapon in a pinch, but mercy, it dosen’t even have an edge to speak of.)

Does anyone I know have a Torx driver that they can lend me tonight? Three Mac geeks at Seabury; three no’s. Dashing to the office, I printed off handouts for tomorrow’s class. I casually glance into my desk drawer (translation: “I rummage furiously through my desk drawer in desperation”) when—surprise!—there’s my trusty Torx. It was some other screwdriver that security nabbed.

AirPort installed, Torx coming with me to Denver just in case (in checked baggage), time to pack my bags and go to sleep.

More Secrecy. . . .

Iím opening this space to respond to some of what people have said regarding secrecy and confidentialityóreally quite helpful provocations, especially since Iím working against a heavy cultural investment in ìconfidentialityî being a given, necessary thing. Tomorrow morning, when my battery is recharged (literally, I mean), thisíll just be the first paragraph of a response. Thanks David, Mike, Paul, Tutor, and others who contributed both publicly and anonymously. (Iíll add links, too, but I'm almost flatlining the battery.)

Today: Not quite. Iím furiously preparing for DIDW, fulfilling responsibilities, arranging for others to cover responsibilities for me, and blogging has fallen off my list. I havent even read any blogs today. Did you say anything interesting? Iíll rejoin Blogaria as soon as I possibly can.

Hmmmm. . . .

If I insert the same Sitemeter Javascript into my MT template as resides in my Blogger template, will it record referrals and hits at each page cumulatively? I have the sense that MT constructs the page differently, and this might not work; or Sitemeter might not accept pings from two different pages to one account.

Perspective

Copying and pasting one’s old archive links from Blogger to my MT template makes me think I’ve been blogging a long time.

Not that I’m claiming to rival anyone—many of you have been at it much longer than I—but its still a long-ish job.

Whoops!

Spent the night on Daypop, and I didn’t know it. (Rough sleeping.)

Saturday in the Library with Paul

We were blessed with so lovely an afternoon that only the elite came to hide from the glorious sunlight in the assembly hall of the Sulzer Branch of the Chicago Public Library. Paul McCann opened our symposium with a very thorough PowerPoint presentation on weblogs, their histories, varying definitions, and the different categories in which he groups them. He then introduced us to Dan Hartung (whom Iíd read at Lake Effect, but hadnít associated with the dhartung of metafilter), Naz (whose work was entirely new to me), Jim McGee (whom I knew from Christ Church and from crossing paths online a long time ago), and me.

The turnout was modest but sterling; Jason from somnolent.org (metafilter user number 117!), and Kurt Heintz, from e-poets.net, and Andrew from me3dia.com [whose name escaped me before] and Cinnamon, and more. One kind visitor already sent an appreciative noteóthanks, Earl!

Grace Where You Didn’t Look

I was out preaching at a distant parish this morning—our family joke is that everyplace is an hour away from Evanston—and after I got a little lost on the way out, things settled in and the early service went pretty well. Between the services, I talked with the chalice bearer for the 7:45 service and with his wife. It turned out that her dad had gone to Seabury, so we reminisced about the seminary, its faculty, and parish life in general.

After a while, she asked what I taught, and I answered that I teach New Testament and Early Church History, with a little Greek thrown in. She said, “You know, my dad left a lot of his books to us, and I know there are a few Greek books downstairs. You’d be welcome to have them, if they’re not too old.”

I observed that Hellenistic Greek hadn’t changed much since the sixties, and that I was hesitant to diminish her store of memories from her dad, but that I was always delighted to find an appreciative home for books. “Well, we have a ton of them; you should take any that you like.” Again, I demurred, by she noted that her husband would be thrilled to clear the space in the basement. “All right,” I conceded, and her husband gave me directions to their home; I could stop by after the second service.

“Do you need any vestments?” she asked. Well, I have only the ones I was wearing,plus one alb and a cassock. “Because I have some of his old stoles and chasubles, and you should look those over, too.”

I drove home with three boxes of books, some quite delicious, and a lovely purple chasuble, two red stoles, a somewhat worn cincture, a red cope(!) (when will I wear that?), and—amazingly—a lovely cappa nigra, a liturgical cloak often worn at funerals, but useful on any number of outdoor occasions. Mercy sakes! What a kind, generous soul—and she wasn’t even a blogger!

Authenticity, Identity, and Secrets

Once upon a time, I used to write a lot about “authenticity” and “identity.” When I’d said most of what I wanted to, when the discussions clarified the ways other folks thought differently from me, we let the conversations wind down.

At the time, I tried to underline the case that the notion of ìauthenticityî entailed a problematic duplicity that guaranteed the cogency of the discussion. In plain English, once we decide that thereís something inauthentic about ourselves and feel the urgency of trying to fix it, we generate the kind of over-against-self consciousness that weíre trying to remedy. (Thanks to wood s lot for returning to us and for pointing out this article in which Vincent Lloyd makes a complementary case.)

And I tried to suggest that pseudonymity did not liberate us to speak freely, but constrained us to subdivide our selves into partial identities, shackling ourselves to our partitioned personae.

All this becomes relevant again in my life partly because Iím practicing saying the word ìidentityî a lot, since Iím getting prepared for Digital Identity Worldóthe Conference, and partly because Iíve been drawn into several recent nightmares in which ìconfidentialityî plays a significant role. The heart of my attitude toward ìconfidentialityî connects directly to my approach to identity and authenticity. We can be whole persons, whole characters; but our investments in self-diminution render wholeness unattainable. One source that funds a tremendous proportion of these self-diminishing investments is the notion that people should be secret-keepers.

Quickly, now, I do not advocate instantly divulging all oneís friendsí most embarrassing, most incriminating, most vulnerable confessions. My point concerns the complications that arise through the conflicts of accountability that inevitably arise when keeping secrets, along with the tremendous amplification of the power differentials among people who ought to be able to converse and trust freely and fearlessly.

I propose that confidentiality erodes the very social obligations that it pretends to sustain (just as searching for authenticity alienates one from the self whom one always already is, and the practice of pseudonymity buys the prerogative to say whatever one wants at the cost of acceding to oneís unfreedom to speak in oneís own name).

In the past, Iíve been misconstrued as arguing the opposite of what I want to recuperate from: that thereís no such thing as artificiality, or that no one should ever deploy a pseudonym, or (today) perhaps that no one should have any secrets. So permit me to grant that we will have secrets, and then follow up with some reservations.

We will have secrets, because even if you, dear reader, exemplify everything pure and noble and admirable in life, youíll end up dealing with at least one person who falls short of your unblemished integrity. In our social connectedness, we canít avoid secrecy of some sorts.

We can, however, resist the prevalent glib assumption that any time anyone says, ìThis is confidential,î we have no alternative but to accept a binding contract not to discuss the topic again. I myself need to say more often, ìNo, this is discretionary; if you trust me enough to talk with me about your next-door neighbor, I need you to trust me to discern soundly with whom I might share what you say. If youíre unwilling to take that chance, please donít talk to me about your neighbor.î Spreading ìconfidentialî information around almost ensures that the secret will get out, and that it wonít be the secret-giverís fault: ìI told you that in confidence!î But if we shift the preponderance of our confidential discourse to the category of ìdiscretion,î we who make secrets share in the accountability for the secretís dissemination, for we determined that our listener might fairly be trusted wisely to reckpoon who might receive the secret and who not. If we choose a blabber-mouthed recipient of information, we canít hide behind the immunity-claim, ìBut it was confidential!î

Then, if we clear our plate of the countless inanities that pass for confidencesóoften enough, simple gossip that we ought not to circulate anywayówe make room for rare, genuine confidences. We should accept the terms of these imperative confidences (Iím deliberately avoiding the use of ìnecessaryî or ìessentialî) only in extraordinary circumstances, and some of us shouldnít accept them at all. By my vocation, I canít refuse some kinds of confidential information; but I have recently witnessed more than one occasion where confidentiality has been used in ways that do significant harm, and circumstances that call into question the ideological reflex by which I grow accustomed to accepting confidentiality as an inevitable general ingredient in social and professional relationships.

Weíll more readily trust one another if we ask for the utmost exercise of trust less casually. Weíll be better able to grant that ultimate trust if we hold fewer conflicting confidences. More often than we might think, the simplicity and freedom that derive from saying openly who you are and what you think far (or in opting not to speak at all) outweigh the dangers that arise from sowing mines of secrecy along the avenues of our social traffic.

I have some links and nuances to add in a later post, but itís time to put the computer (and me) to sleep.

DRMA: Itís three in the morning; Margaretís sleeping in bed next to me. Iím not listening to anything but the sound of her breathing. And itís beautiful, and Iím tired and fretful and restless.

New Digs

I’m trying out a Movable Type blog for a while, partly so that I can more effectively syndicate the site, partly so because I can’t wait till my long-imagined site coalesces. But I’ll keep the usual place open as my main base of operations for the time being. I can’t ask people to change my address twice in a short span, so this’ll remain a temporary expansion measure, like the mobile-home classrooms that elementary schools buy when they can’t afford to build new school buildings.