AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Typeface Pointer

At the risk of involving myself publicly in yet another set of discourses, I mention that I scour the ’Net eagerly for new freeware typefaces. Since these aren’t regularly mentioned anywhere that I usually viist, I thought I’d mention that Nick Curtis just added two faces to his generous collection of designs—and, for the time being, I’ll try to remember to cite other typefaces I uncover that warrant publicity.

AKMA the Grey

Rex Masterson (whom you may know as Alex Golub) brings the epic cycle of danger, heroism, space, anthropology, unspeakable horror, hermeneutics, halakhah, emacs vs. vi, and dishwashing to its completion in Episode V of My Weekend with Leuschke (if you missed the preceding episodes—one can scarcely suppose you did—you may refresh your acquaintance with them at Episode I, IIa, (intermission), IIb, III, and IV).

At a moment such as this, one naturally begins thinking about the movie deal to follow. Rex, of course, gets one of the big-name stars such as Ben Affleck. For the role of AKMA, one would need a middle-aged, mid-level actor who’s not reluctant to leave top billing to the money players. Michael Caine and Sean Connery are rather older than I; Gabriel Byrne has done the ponderous theological roles to death; Viggo Mortensen would command too much money and attention these days (plus, he’s way better-looking than I). I wonder if Kevin Spacey is available?

Analyze This

Last night, I dreamt that I had been invited to give a talk to a continuing-education seminar of church leaders. That’s not so strange in itself, but the topic of the seminar was Church Growth (which makes it a little stranger, since that’s a topic about which I typically keep chary). But what made it really strange was that the headline speaker was Chris Locke. Yes, I just typed “Chris Locke.”

And since it was a dream that I’d only started having a few seconds before, I was totally unprepared. I figured, “Hey, Chris’ll set the tone, it’ll be highly improvisational, provocative, irreverent, and I can come in after and clean up some of the loose ends.” But it became clear as I started claiming the space for my presentation that Chris had been prepared to the teeth—this was not “faster horses.” I don’t have a chance to talk with Chris, but from a distance he looks entirely composed, engaged, pleased with how the morning session went. From what I can tell, Chris had these church leaders role-playing a trial from 18th-century France. And there are courtroom sketches, there’s newsprint all over the place, no one seems to have wigged out from profanity or incoherence—and I’m up next.

What makes it even tougher is that I know some of the people in my follow-up session. One is my old grad-school friend Greg Jones, now the Dean of Duke Divinity School (who looks skeptical about my being there: “I didn’t expect to see you giving a talk on this topic,” he says, and he has good reason since I’m not a church-growth-movement kinda guy). I see some other faces, and I begin the cold panic that accompanies pre-conference unprepared presentations. “Let’s see; Chris couldn’t have used the ‘faster horses’ routine; maybe it’ll work for me. . . .” I began to cobble together what seemed like a plausible outline for my hour of exposition, and as I stepped up to the front of the room with all the confidence I could muster—I woke up.

DigID, Commodities, Ascription, and Identity

I had a great idea earlier today, one that connected an earlier conversation about commodification with the ongoing conversation (or, thanks to Mitch now, converzisation) about digital identity and reputation, and the relation of the two. I doubt I remember the good parts, but hear’s what I do remember.

The key reason to resist commodification in general is that the market tends to define everything it encounters in its own terms. In the end, everything reduces to some kind of exchangeable good. People who describe the market—we can dignify them with the title “economists”—likewise define the ways that people behave as “market forces.”

But I’m not accurately defined as the sum of a variety of market behaviors and forces. There’s more to being A K M Adam than buying Apple computers, choosing second-hand suits, flying on United Airlines, avoiding purchases of leather when practicable, buying Shell gasoline at the station on Chicago Ave, haunting used book stores, and so on. Indeed, though these are all things the market wants to know about me (Andre’s T3 identity, if I understand the article correctly), but they miss a great deal of what I would say is important.

Now Andre talks about T1 identity and T2 identity also. He uses T1 identity to indicate the aspects of identity that we own, that are ours through and through, and T2 to indicate ascribed prerogatives. (Mitch thinks that we should own T2 identity also, but I lose the train of his thought at this point.) Andre points to credit cards (ascribed creditworthiness), job perqs (ascribed authority), server software (ascribing the bounds of permissible participation in the server’s network), and so on as examples of this mediated identity. I follow up to point out that this also captures very little of what it means to be A K M Adam. If Andre is right, and the T3 and T2 strata of identity information “constitute the bulk of today's identity marketplace,” then very little about my identity is actually in play at this point.

(To get back to Mitch for a second, I admire what he’s saying about building chaordic institutions, and about laying claim to our authority over what institutions say about us. At the same time, those institutions need, in order to function, to be able to ascribe categories and prerogatives to me that I do not myself dictate. I have an ascribed credit limit; I suppose I could go in and argue about it, but I don't want to spend that much money anyway. I f have certain limited prerogatives as a professor; I try arguing for more, but it doesn’t get me anywhere. Even my prerogatives as a priest, deriving from the Ultimate authorization, aren’t mine to own. I can perhaps go with Mitch as far as extending the bounds of what we think of as “personal” information, but we can’t take ascription out of other people’s; hands.)

Now, I’ve just proposed that T2 and T3 information doesn’t; get at my identity; persumably, that’s all T1 identity information. But here again, (a) my identity isn’t subject to reduction to information (contra the exciting and popular visions of Dr. Kurzweil (love the keyboards, hate the theory) ), and (b) much of that “missing” material isn’t mine to own, either (Who loves him? Whom does he love?), and (c) none of the important stuff has any interest in immediate bearing on market behavior. But the commodification of identity tends first to treat my truest identity as bounded by those dimensions that are in fact of interest ot market agents; second, to define those characteristics in ways amenable to market assimilation (I’m defined quantitatively, or aggregated to a category of people who are just like me); third, the market impinges on me to try to make me behave as though my market-ascribed characteristics were my most important features; fourth, all of these operate imperiously, without my having an open place in which to say, “I’m a homely, deliberate, trusting, tries-to-be-generous kinda guy. I love reading (not just “buying books”) and writing (not just for pay). I put all my resources at the service of my family, my church, and the seminary at which I work.” That stuff is noise; the market is looking for the signal onto which it can latch, to determine my credit limit, my brand allegiances, my spending patterns, and the market segment that predicts, in the aggregate, how I will behave.

I’m running low on battery power again. My main concern here is that when so powerful a public arena as the market has the capacity to identify me in ways alien to my self-knowledge, and only partially mediated by characteristics ascribed to me by those who know me well, then we perpetuate models of social power that drive a wedge between the public commercial market-defined man and the private, socially-irrelevant, self- and human-defined man. The threat, the shadow, of such an imposed dichotomy will have more far-reaching effects, and will generate more far-reaching resistance, than I hear anyone in the industrial part of the DigID discussion suggesting. (Four minutes of power left--good night!)

Winer’s Law, Searls’s Corollary, and AKMA’s Suggestion

According to Doc Searls a few days ago, this is Winer’s Law:

“It’s even worse than it appears.”

To which Doc appends the Corollary:

“It’s more complicated than it appears.”

This appeals to me intensely; my students will attest, as with one voice, that I say this all the time. Now I have back-up from the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, which is worth a lot more than their hoary old professor’s word. (I don’t have a stand when it comes to the historical specifics to which Doc is pointing, save to observe what a sorry mess we humans get into when we start deciding whom it’s necessary to kill.)

Last week, I submitted for verification the proposal that “The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of disruptors to disrupt,” an entropic law of hacking/cracking. Since no one has pointed out that someone else said this first, I hereby lay claim to it as “AKMA’s way of saying something that a bunch of smart people knew all along, but none bothered to say it that way,” which will be my memetic ticket to information immortality. Whee!

DigID Re-re-visited

Well, I’m all chuffed, since Eric likes what I’ve been saying. Or, more to the point, because it sounds as though we’re tuning in to a common wavelength.

As Eric notes in an aside, though, the deep problem won’t be the “digital” end of “digital ID”—it’ll be the part about proving that you are the person to whom the DigID applies. Amplify that by the factors of people who may not be fully cpapable of taking care of something as important as a digital identity plan will be, and we’re facing some big-time problems about what it means fully to participate in the digital dimension of life. Bryan points to this also, at the bottom of David Weinberger’s mega-meta-blog (scroll down to the bottom of the page for Bryan’s spot-on conundrum for the practical deployment of DigID).

This begins to get at what I bent people’s ears about at DIDW. When the world treats our identities as constituted, in non-trivial ways, by numbers or passwords or fingerprints or DNA sequences, that inevitably affects the ways we perceive our own humanity.

Some of my digital friends will scoff, but it was twenty-four long years ago that Bob Seger made a lot of money with “Feel Like a Number”—and if he felt like a number in 1978, how much more so would he feel like a number in DigID times? And what about the people who sympathize with him strongly enough to buy the record? And the people who don’t especially like rock’n’roll, but who themselves mistrust the numerization (?) of identity? The scenes from Minority Report that illustrate the lengths Tom Cruise will go to in order (effectively) to beat the eyescan ID problem, illustrate both the tyranny of strong ID security, and the certainty that people will devise ways around any system we dream up. (The fact that the work-around is fictional doesn’t detract from my point; the screenwriter knew the spirit of resistance enough to know the lengths to which the next generation of hackers, in this case literally “hackers,” would be willing to go to defeat strong security.)

So Eric’s and my agreement about a graduated-security hypermedia environment may not be as encouraging as it felt at the beginning of this blog.

How does one cultivate the decentralized ID system on which Bryan, Eric, and others are working helpfully, without relocating the human particularity of our identities from our appearance, our memories, the sound of our voices, even our fingerprints, to something extrinsic (a massive privacy code, perhaps carriedon a card? but then, what happens when I lose my card?) or something hypothetically unique (DNA sequence) of which I have no awareness? My spouse and friends may know me as “AKMA”, but I’ll know that the electronic dimension of the world knows I’m really a garbled code of digits and letters. “I feel like a DNA code ID. . . ”

Takes a lot to sell that one in Nebraska and Peoria, Eric—but if anyone can, you can.

Reputation

The DigID discussion has been continuing via email, and I’m not sure how much I ought to quote—which makes my job harder, since I have been helped by some of today’s mailings.

So I’ll say just a couple of things, and hope that other people’s good ideas show up in their blogs, so I can bounce off them tomorrow or Monday.

I mostly want to signal my approval of Eric’s “protected net” and “dark net” proposal: a digitally-secure protocol-protected net, where high-stakes commerce and medical records and government functions can hide out, as insulated as they imagine they can be from crackers outside, as opposed to a looser, security-free zone where Other commerce and bloggers and no-need-of-security web functions can connect. This makes a good deal of sense to me, especially since I suspect that most customers will end up gravitating toward enterprises that respect their reticence about hard security. Eric’s; plan allows people to find online connections where they want to be, and that’s about right by me.

Probably because he was “.just spitballin over here,” Eric leaves his notion separate into just two congeries of links: the secure zone and the wild zone. I expect that fairly rapidly, many people would be attracted to an alternative that doesn’t pretend to be Absolutely Secure (a pretense subject to disconfirmation the first time a cracker puts a little effort into invading an inviting target) but also doesn’t suggest that everyone involved is an Mysterious Stranger. I think that’s what Doc and David are talking about: a Web which cultivates a distributed index of the people with whom you’re dealing, so that one person’s bad experience won’t blacklist you, so that many people’s bad experience will, so that who you know does matter, and how well they know you, and that these are not housed at/determined by/owned by a central Identity Agency, but are—in some sense—brokered.

In other words, a form of digital reputation, whereby my willingness to say, “Si’s my son, he’s a good kid, but he doesn’t have two hundred dollars to his name” means that Si would have a positive reputation for his sterling character, but would have a low reputation relative to financial transactions. Once he earns a little money, begins dealing with commercial entities and online friends more fully, his financial reputation might creep upward, and his character reputation would increase not in quality (everyone thinks Si’s a good guy) but in depth (now, more people would be saying so). Moreover, the endorsement of someone with a deep, positive reputation (say, Doc Searls) would weigh more heavily than an endorsement from, say, some guy in Illinois: me. A financial endorsement from Boone Pickens would mean a lot; a financial endorsement from me might help you finance a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s (no, not that much).

The point is that this cumulative reputation would reside not in my hands, as the person under assessment, but in the hands of other people who had an interest in giving a true sense of me (since my actions then reflect on their status as endorsers).

Distributed, not foolproof (as David points out, this is a strength of a system, not a weakness), and optional (as Kevin notes, if you put cash in the clerk’s hand, she doesn’t care who vouches for you).

Past my bedtime. Eric, Doc, Bryan (my AIM client still can’t see you), David, blog more tomorrow, so other folks can benefit from what y’all are saying.

[Sunday AM, before church: I know, this is fundamentally like a credit rating (though less centralized. And my suggestion doesn’t incorporate strong security that guarantees that the person claiming my credibility/credit is actually me—I’m counting on PingID to develop that!). But part of what David’s saying is that credit ratings and credit cards generally work pretty well, and I suspect it’s worth building out from there.

Andy on DigID

“If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
  Andy Warhol, as quoted on the sheet of postage stamps we bought to mail out our tardy holiday greetings

Starring Margaret

Regular readers may recall that everything clever and pertinent that appears here derives from the inspiration, suggestion, or flat-out dictation of Margaret. She influences whatever I write, but up to now has been caught online only obliquely (for instance, David Weinberger awarded her an arbitrary winner certificate in some long-forgotten JOHO contest, and though the contest itself ebbed from memory, Margaret has cherished the knowledge that somehow, somewhere, someone recognized her as a winner).

All that has changed, now that the hi monkey website has immortalized Margaret’s affection for its eponymous terrycloth primate. Now, millions (if not billions) of web viewers will see Margaret (and Si, in one photo) promenading the monkey around Nantucket Island in pictures from last summer. (Margaret disclaims responsibility for typographical errors.) Can movie offers be far behind?

Moving Toward Identity

Despite Mitch Ratcliffe’s kind invitation to stay in the discussion of exchange value and other topics over my head, I’m going to stick with the premise that impresses me most forcefully: that digital identity (and the commercial dimensions of the ’Net that will depend on some sort of online identity, in the face of the ’Net’s tendency to drive all things to the public domain). That is, why would an ordinary citizen want something roughly like a digital identity?

I can think of at least four reasons:

• Jane Public doesn’t have access to her everyday computer; perhaps she’s on the road, or away from work (or home), or perhaps she doesn’t even have a computer pf her own. In a world where we depend on identity that resides in cookies on a core computer, we have to reconstruct the traces of our identity every time we want to work from a different CPU; if we could walk up to a public terminal and log in as Jane Public, with the various identity-markers that adhere to Jane, life would be considerably simpler. Webmail illustrates this argument; I use my email client for daily purposes, but it’s very helpful to be able to access my email via the webmail interface if need be.
• John’s hard drive crashes. Sure, he ought to have backed up regularly, but even if he did, he may not be sure how to recapture his identity data.
• When Joan Public finds it advantageous (to her) to permit limited access to her identity data for marketing purposes, she’ll willingly participate in DigID (think Amazon’s book recommendations on a larger scale).
• Eric Norlin (who is dead right about the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring) points me to a fourth reason, that of identity theft. Of course, the DigID answer would have to be more significantly secure than the dispersed usernames and passwords of our present I>ad hoc arrangements (lest a cracker immediately gain access to all a user’s digitial prerogatives), but especially given the public’s fears about identity theft in the digital realm, this could constitute a persuasive selling-point in efforts toward a standard DigID system. In Eric’s vivid words, “for the most part, the average everyday person will accept it because they will be told how much more secure their transactions will be; how identity theft and fraud is being fought; how parental controls are now easier—stuff that, in Nebraska and Peoria, plays really damn well.”

I’ll say more about this when I blog about reputation, which I hope to do this evening or tomorrow morning, but the cardinal point in all this is that the impetus for widespread acceptance of DigID will come when it feels like using a credit card. That is, no matter how porously insecure physical-world credit card transactions are (and there’s no mistaking their comically insecure character), a credit card feels safe to most users. A credit card resides in my pocket; I can choose to use it or pay with anonymously cash (sometimes—but the ideology of security tends of conceal the exceptions); my credit card has whoop-de-doo security features like a magnetic strip and a laser-etched hologram, a confirmation code printed on the opposite side, and my own signature right on it. These contribute to a sense that somehow physical-world credit cards are secure, but digital identity isn’t. Give Jack Public the feeling that DigID works like a credit card, and you’ll be most of the way home.

On the other hand, if Verisign (“the value of suspicion”), for instance, uses its position as a DigID broker to determine who’s allowed to have a digital identity and who isn’t, to adjudicate which users may have access to whose web pages, and so on—they could rapidly poison the well of DigID goodwill with vivid enactments of every citizen’s fear of Big Brother.

Keep DigID as close to the edges as possible, give the user more control over DigID than she has over her credit card, and watch the ’Net flourish.

Me, a Hippie?

Well, now we’re getting down and dirty in the N E A/Digital-ID controversy. It looks like the core issue is, “Who is a hippie?” Eric obviously isn’t; David issues a partial disclaimer; the world waits for Doc to make an explicit statement on his hippie status. For my part, I’m willing to say it loud, I’m a hippie and proud.

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love, and understanding?

I think that hereafter, I’ll try to keep my mouth shut about business models, frictionlessness, exchange value, and other stuff about which I know next to nothing, and concentrate on “reputation.” But we’ll see what I actually do.

Digital Friction

Eric’s; point two seems unexceptionable: “2. The Access/Connectivity of the Net leads to a pooling of fragmented interests (nod to Ross Mayfield). This pooling reduces the friction of transactions and thus accelerates the natural curve of commoditization.” The closest I have to a dissent actually crosses me with Kevin Marks, who doesn’t see why “commoditizing something is deemed to a be a bad thing.” One might answer Kevin’s question several ways, but this impresses itself on me most forcefully: everything signifies more than its economic value—but once it becomes defined as a commodity, its social characteristics tend to reduce to its exchange value. That’s; not good, especially with regard to phenomena whose eschange value and whose social significance diverge markedly. If our frame for assess human endeavors relies primarily (or exclusively) on what they’re worth on the open market, we face hard times for poets.

Now I’m sympathetic to Kevin’s; point in the rest of that blog, so I don’t want to be starting a fight over commoditization. The ’Net makes it easier for people who want to break up their collections of Philip K. Dick novels to find eager buyers—thus making the world a happier place for both parties. Eric’s; point, though—that the more a particular sort of exchange has been affected by digital media (and written, aural, and visual recordings head the list), the less that sort of exchange can derive a premium from scarcity. In the familiar economy, the musician gets a premium from the recording company for [scarce] recordings, the record company gets a premium from buyers for copies of these [scarce] recordings, and a host of mediators receive premiums because they can get the [scarce] copies to potential buyers. The digital sledge hammer rearranges that whole model: there's no immediate reason a musician can’t distribute recordings of her own performances; the scarcities at the levels of access, copying, and even (to some extent) recorded performance have diminished and in some cases virtually vanished.

But this returns me to my perpetual refrain that we need a new business model, not a new way of enforcing the old. RIAA and Hollywood might like to use DigID to ensure that one and only one person has the right to listen to my copy of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot—but if DigID is going to function as a weapon for enforcing the perpetuation of an obsolescent business model, than we’re much better off without it. Kevin knows this, and is touting Mediagora; others may propose alternative solutions to the breakdown of the familiar model. But again, many, many of us want nothing to do with a systematic implementation of DigID if it’s going to be deployed to shore up a clueless enterprise.

I’ll be honest and say I don’t understand Eric’s point three (except the summary, “the net moves all things toward the public domain”). I could try to work it out, but itRs17 ;getting late, I’m tired, and I’ve already talked too much.

Point four applies the first point to the level of the economic ewxchange itself. Okay, I reckon.

Point five—“5. IF the transaction/exchange that occurs in the Net world is to be made as efficient as it can be made to be (something that economics assumes will happen over time), then the problems of high degree of anonymity and inefficient reputation mechanism MUST be solved.”—begins to push the case from general reasoning about circumstances, problems, and possible solutions, toward the necessity of resolving the matters Eric regards as problems. Remember, though, that not everyone agrees that anonymity should be regarded as a problem, nor does everyone agree that the tenets of market capitalism should determine how we build out the Web’s infrastructure (especially when that building-out seems to favor some participants in economic exchange over others).

Too many solutions to the DigID situation risk privileging one party over another (the buyer, the vendor, the producer) or one participant over another (AOL/Time Warner, Microsoft, whomever), or to assign reponsibility for the systems’ security to an unreliable agent. I’m not speaking here as an adversary to any of the systems or institutions that Eric supports (though I’d be willing so to do at a different moment)—I’m arguing that it’s in the best interests of those institutions to make sure that DigID be done correctly, to feel comfortable to the user (as just another extension of the user’s own identity), and to avoid as far as possible even the faintest temptation to bias the DigID functioning to favor any cause but the user’s. When DigID begins functioning on that basis, commercial and civic interests will have ample widgets to play with, to make a nearly-voluntary DigID system work for all concerned.

Till then, as David points out, our current situation works pretty well. Why trade in an adequate compromise for an uncertain, overbuilt, unwieldy “solution”?

PS: A late note to Phil Windley—they can’t know what they’re losing.

No Parking?

Margaret pointed me to this story, especially pertinent in light of last week’s discovery of Jesus’ face on a street sign. . . .

Special Request

Does anyone with 1337 Photoshopping skills feel like making a montage of the three Blogsprogs? I’m editing my Norlin-blog from last night, or I’d hack away at it. . . .

Norlin’s Instrumental

Eric has surfaced a lively discussion, a lively renewal of the discussion on digital identity (current participants include Doc and David, and the blogthread goes backward from these most recent posts). Earlier, Doc was concerned that we were getting “testy” (thatnks for reminding me about that word, Doc—it’s a good one), but I don’t think Eric or I is (am?) feeling any but energized and provoked by an invigorating discussion on a topic we both care about. I trust Eric to let us know when he’s testy.

One wild card in the discussion so far may involve the different interests each participant has in the topic. Eric’s all about digital identity and, specificially, its engagement with commerce; Doc wants to gird up the N E A character of the ’Net; I’m particularly exercised about the ways that crossing over more fully into digitially-mediated reality changes what we think about ourselves as “human”; and Dr. Weinberger is so smart he thinks about all these things at once, plus twelve others, and sounds funny and self-deprecating at the same time. When you put those differences into a discussion, we can get side-tracked, testy, harmonious, and confused all in a matter of moments depending on who has the conversational ball and toward which goal the ball is moving.

So, in response to all this wisdom, I’ll blogback at Eric, point by point, with animadversions involving Doc and David where it suits me.

Eric’s Point One (edited): “1. The Internet brings (in essence) ubiquitous Access and Connectivity, but it does so with a high degree of anonymity and an inefficient implementation of reputation.”

Eric clarifies this to note that the Web is a nearly frictionless environment for economic transactions, but that anonymity engenders a twofold drag on transactions: first, in that “anonymity” makes for awkward transactions. We know that some vendors, given the opportunity to act anonymously, will defraud customers—and vice versa. That sort of anonymity will kill most, if not all, deals.

Eric cites “inefficient implementation of reputation” as a second problem, but that’s really just the other side of anonymity, isn’t it? If we had efficient means of establishing someone’s reputation, their anonymity would be shot, whereas anonymity entails a certain lack-of-reputation.

I agree with Eric that we can’t have both anonymity/lack-of-reputation and frictionless commerce at the same time. But David points out that we have them now, only in divergent loci. I’m not anonymous to Amazon (except when i’m in a hurry, in which case their cookie has always just disappeared), but I can be very anonymous when I visit Umbrella R Us, because I have never bought an umbrella, never plan to, and have no cookie from them in my browser.

One of the catches, though, at this point is that Umbrellas R Us can pop a cookie onto my browaser uninvited (unless I scrupulously monitor all such attempts, which I and most other folks are too indolent to do). That invokes the demon of Big Brother, observing your every click, watching you over your shoulder, and ready to siphon all your identity markers into the central database of Information Acquisition. I’m not fretful about DigID, but John Poindexter (working for George Bush) gives me the creeps; this kind of situation makes me want a way of manipulating my digital profile without putting in hours playing Cookie Detective.

So, relative to point one, my answer to Eric is, “Yes, the two-pronged feature/problem of anonymity and reputation introduces drag into the economic function of the ’Net. But. . . ,”
and I’ll say more tomorrow.

Manana

I was going to blog tonight about Eric and Doc and David’s latest contributions to the DigID blogthread—but I’m about to go to sleep, and I just didn’t get a round to it. Tomorrow.

Meantime, Wendy and Tom are working on Blogsprog 3. . . .

Voice of Sanity

Mitch Ratcliffe says the words that the public needs to hear about the Bush administration's heavy-handed bureaucracy to protect us from “digital doomsday.”

Let’s talk directly:

• “Monitoring” will only protect us from something we know we’re looking for, and the more energy we put into barbed-wire barricades to protect us from what we anticipate, the more vulnerable we’ll be to what we didn’t expect. Did anyone in Washington learn anything from 2001’s disasters?
• The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of idsruptors to disrupt (this must be “Somebody’s Law” already, but if it isn’t, this may be my big chance to go down in history). It’s the hackers’ manifestation of entropy: order costs more energy than chaos.
• The economic costs of illusory “protection” and the convulsions that will result if the illusion fails us amount to very much more than the cost of amplifying the Net’s capacity to route around disruptions. And back-up and redundancy don’t undermine the civil liberties of millions of citizens, or artificially constrain the growth of the single strongest economic engine that the United States presently can rely on.

On the other hand, outflanking problems doesn’t get the positive vibes and the tough-guy persona that wasting money with head-on confrontations generates. So we can expect the present administration to keep fear-mongering, wasting money, and reaping the benefits of high popularity and immunity from criticism.

Et In Arcadia, ID

David Weinberger wonders whether there need be a connection between on online reputation-identities (on one hand) and commerical identities (on the other), and in the comments Cory Doctorow muses that he’s not sure why we need anything other than client-side browser-based identity.

In hasty, spuerficial response, I would reckon that although David may want to keep “reputation” and “commerce” separate, that it’ll be a hard job to pry commercial entities’ tentacles away from conflating the two. I admire David for thinking it’s possible, though, and I support that vision—even if it subjects me to Eric’s aspersions of hippie-osity (hey, in this cultural climate, we could do with a lot more hippies).

As to Cory’s proposal, it sounds good to me, sounds like a set of protocols rather than an odious mediation. All we need is someone to write it and someone to implement it. . . .

Doc, Eric, Mitch, David, Kevin and Me

I’ve been watching closely the on-going brouhaha involving Doc Searls, Eric Norlin, Mitch Ratcliffe, David Weinberger, and Kevin Marks (and most of these principals have blogged more than once on the Big Topic in this recent exchange; it’ll take some clicking backward and forward to make sure you get the whole picture). They all know mountains about technology, about business, about plenty of things, more than I ever will. A wise man would therefore keep his mouth closed and just listen appreciatively.

Since I lack all pretense of wisdom, though, I venture to observe that I think Eric pushes his case too hard in these exchanges. I respect Eric’s position, inasmuch as he’s keeping a hard eye to where the money’s; coming from and going to, and the Net isn’t going to just keep on shooting electrons without someone paying bills somewhere. That much, we can agree on.

Eric also wants to puruse his work on digital identity as an aspect of his concerns about commerce and scarcity. Here’s one of the places I dissent. Identity—whether digital or physical—subsists not as a prop to commercial interests, but as a fundamental part of the way humans communicate with one another (Eric knows this, it’s taking his argument slantways, but bear with me a minute here).

It may look as though “identity” only justifies its continued existence by underwriting commerical exchanges. Plenty of people came back from their “identity-finding” expeditions in Tibet to devote sustained attention to the question of just which bottled tap water best fits their lifestyles. But that appearance to the contrary notwithstanding, “identities” attract such deep and persistent attention in public discussion partly because the debaters sense that the outcome of this debate will shape who we may be in the future. Once the notion of “identity” takes a single, transmittable, reliable pattern online, we’ll begin to think of ourselves as instantiations of that pattern, in the same way we think of ourselves as our job descriptions (“I’m a freelance consultant,” “I’m a writer,” “I’m a software engineer”). When Eric prods us to get comfortable with digital identity—“DigID”—to accept the inevitable commercial interest in DigID, to abandon our communal dwellings on Mars and get down to Earth where people know that “the true beauty of the internet is in the pornography, the capitalism, the conflict and dark corners of the human soul,” I can’t simply appreciate the verve of his presentation and nod politely.

The Internet is not (agreed) a tool for human self-betterment, and even if someone sometime intended it so to be, that particular intention was defeated long ago. It is a locus for human attention and interest that may help us better ourselves or degrade ourselves, to help one another or exploit one another—and here, I think, Eric’s position takes too easily for granted the commercial status quo of early 21st-century entrepreneurship.

Permit me to propose a different way of looking at things. Even if commercial interests (in which I include my own commercial interest in ordering a pair of Land’s End footie pajamas for my Dad, and a diverting book of comic verse for my Mom) require some manifestation of accountable identity online, we err catastrophically if we hand over to them the prerogative to determine how that accountable identity should work.

The cardinal reason for people acclimating themselves to DigID will involve the impulse to deal with people (or something like people) whom we can know through their observable behavior. We will want agents to be accountable for what they do, and we will want the friends and strangers with whom we converse online to offer some earnest stake in candor and trust. So the version of DigID that will succeed won’t succeed because it has the coolest interface, the highest security, the greatest degree of user-manipulation (most users don’t want any more settings on their technology than the bare minimum). The successful version of DigID will offer users primarily a way to know one another, to feel as though the “Snowbunny” with whom one had an, err, intimate discussion yesterday will be recognizable in some way when one encounters her or him today. That’s a desirable end for a mass audience: accountable, persistent, reliable online identity. That’s not what some privacy advocates want, but I’d bet that the preponderance of users would trade in their prerogative to generate multiple “anonymized” personae to preserve the capacity to have a (good) reputation, or to be distinguishable from a maleficent identity-hijacker.

If the people demand identity at this level, the privacy advocates should be sure to put their oar in the process of designing the protocols, because having an accountable, persistent, reliable online persona will appeal intensely to people who have no desire to be other than accountable and reliable, who want indeed to protect themselves from people who crave absolute anonymity. If Privacy won’t collaborate, they may lose their whole stake.

Then let someone figure out how these personae can do business online, and few people will mind. But if you say, “Hi, I’m MegaCorp—trust me, this application that you don’t understand, by which we keep track of your finances and commercial activity online, will make your life simpler and happier,” you will encounter incalculable resistance from people who’ve seen too many science fiction movies on this theme, who’ve read Revelation 13:16f (“[The Beast] causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name”), or who’ve survived enough Blue Screens of Death and security patches to doubt the capacity of any system to withstand the varying demands that a DigID protocol will face.

If DigID is designed for users first, and only subsequently for commercial interests, then users won’t mind (much) sharing DigID with commerce. If DigID is designed for commerce first and thrust upon users, users will resist and evade.

Around Blogaria

Margaret forbade me to report the comment she made about the relative size of Cameron’s; head and Gary’s nose, so I won’t.

Chris Locke got an honest job, writing about business and Blogaria and gonzo marketing for Corante (home of Donna Wentworth’s Copyfight and Hylton Joliffe’s column on blogging, so they’re obviously serious about this)—a sweet gig, and a good combination of his gifts and their venue.

Euan “Obvious” Semple and I were iChatting this afternoon about learning, desire, institutionalization, resistance, and Chris Locke. We regretted ways in which the world shapes children to fit its institutions, celebrated the extent to which no system of political or cultural domination can be so completely effective as not to leave room for resistance, wondered whether the cost of resistance is always worth the gesture, decided that it’s better to burn with resistance than to be quenched by acquiescence, and wished each other well. I’ve never met Euan in the flesh; I love Blogaria.

Finally, it looks as though I’ll be in New York City the evening of January tenth and the morning of the eleventh. I might ought to make only soft plans for the evening—and heaven knows everyone else has more interesting things to do on a Friday evening than quaff coffee with me—but Saturday morning should be clear. Any offers or advice gladly entertained.

End-of-Term

I handed grades in today, on time. I still have to finish commenting on all the papers around my office, but I'm experiencing that all-over-body letdown response. All term, my body says, “Can’t feel fatigue; can’t get sick. Gotta keep functioning.” At the end of term, the body says, “I’m outta here. See you in a couple a weeks. Good luck!”

Which would be all right, I suppose, except that this is a season in which people expect one to accomplish a ridiculous amount of shopping, mailing, party-going, snow-shoveling (some years), church-attending (and for some of us, rehearsing). I’m crumpling up in a heap just thinking about it.

Can You See It?

From the profound to the ludicrous: I can’t decline the opportunity to call to our attention this sign of the times (as it were). Jesus appears at No Parking zone. As Pippa would say in her best Dr. Evil imitation, “Riiight. . . .”

I’m much more ready to believe things than your average Joe Skeptic, but I have to admit that it’s tough for me to credit seriousness to anyone involved in this fiasco. What it looks like from here is a sponge blot grafitto, and the straight-faced claim by Father Mike that “(The Church) can only (make a statement) after a thorough investigation of an event or the assuming appearance on a ‘No Parking’ sign” stretches my patience to the breaking point. That was really Don Novello dressed up as Father Mike, right?

Oh well, at least it’s a moment’s break from Cardinal Law stories. Plus, grades are due tomorrow, which reminds me to urge every reader to dash over to this post on Naomi Chana’s blog. (This afternoon, in my office: Tripp says, “Is grading really supposed to make you nauseuous?”) So after that all I have to do is. . . oh, right, Christmas is coming.

Non-Curricular Learning

Kevin and Doc and I seem to be a in a three-way email thread, which propriety forbids me to quote without permissions I don't have time to seek. But Kevin started things off with what was going to be a comment on my previous post, so I’ll venture to start with that. Kevins says:

I'm not surprised that Doc’s son taught himself to read; the danger is that he may have done it in an inefficient way. Whole word memorisation seems great until you top out at 1500 words or so, and then it breaks down, and he falls into guessing. Andrew [Kevin’s well-named son] largely taught himself to read, but a little extra explanation and help with phoneme-letter mapping (especially with schwa) helped him a lot.

Good materials present words in a sequence that lead the child to a useful abstraction. The Reading Reflex materials are great for this, and the Singapore Maths workbooks are an equivalent for maths.

It is certainly possible to learn basic arithmetic spontaneously, but expecting children to re-derive the rest of mathematics themselves is a little hard on them.

Doc responded with a description of the way that a child might learn new words, or even math skills in dialogue with a Socratic teacher.

Kevin, at last report, was still concerned that children not learn idiosyncratically, but learn an efficient way—and I re-enter the conversation here after a most-all-day faculty meeting, a search committee meeting, and a late-afternoon dean's-house holiday get-together (sorry, I hit a sale on hyphens). Kevin, I saw Nate and Si learn to read on their own steam, very early, and then saw them diverge sharply on how they acquired math skills (or didn’t). Pippa was actually doing some surprising math problems at a very early age, but then it seems to have drifted away from her. She has, though, begun reading at a staggering pace (after having really learned to read only thirteen months ago, or so).

So I respond that I’ve seen such variety in the ways children learn what they want to know, and such agony when a child was made to learn something “the right way,” that I’m still very much inclined to let people (now moving away from just children) learn things the ways that suit them best, to the extent possible. That’s not much of an extent in an institutional classroom; I have enough headaches just herding a class along through 600 years of church history, much less permitting each student to learn as best fits her or him. My effort to allow leeway involves assigning work of varied sorts, so that some part of the course should work for some person some time.

But learning at home, my children don’t have that all-at-once impediment. Pip became a voracious reader at 8, but Nate and Si were reading much more, much earlier. Pip is a spectacular designer; not so much Nate and Si. Nate rapidly became a music whiz when we let him start piano lessons. Si’s more a computer guy, into films and writing (and blogging, sometimes). But they all learned, their own ways, when they were ready. We’re excited for them, proud of them, and if they aren’t as efficient as they might be, neither have they been balked by trying to learn according to a schema that can be proved effective, but just doesn’t suit—them.

Ninth Anniversary

Part of Margaret’s and my joy at welcoming Cameron Fiona Turner into the world this week comes from our pride and delight at our marvelous daughter Pippa, who came home to us nine years ago today (at seventeen (long) days old). Watch out world: she’s got markers, watercolors, books, stamp pads, movies, Legos©, and a fabulously expressive face—and she’s not afraid to use them.

Learning and Desire

Doc and I have been emailing back and forth about our mutual admiration for John Gatto, about the Disseminary, and about Margaret’s and my homeschooling Nate (he’s a music theory major at Eastman School of Music, honest, though you might not guess it from the only online evidence of his existence), Si, and Pippa.

We had begun homeschooling the kids years before we knew John Gatto existed. At first, we considered buying a packaged curriculum; we were petrified at the prospect of flopping miserably at raising well-educated children. Eventually we wound up trying a home-brew, free-form approach to teaching Nate, and in the course of figuring out what was happening Margaret became acquainted with the work of John Holt. That settled things. From then on, we were unschooling the children, following their lead to help them learn as they felt ready, felt the need.

The years have had educational ups and downs, but we have seen before our eyes that children can learn as though they had cartoon vacuum cleaners in their brains, sucking book after book in. Our main educational strategies became (1) frequent trips to the librar