Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel’s book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.
Siegel’s book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen’s leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture (2007). I posted a two-part review of Keen’s book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here’s a quick taste of Keen’s take on things. He argues “the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0” and that “our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake. Gravest of all,” Keen continues, “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well.”
As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.
Continue reading →
There’s a new poll out this week from some group called Break Media that is getting some attention because it finds that 69% of online males say they can’t live without the Internet, versus just 31% for television. That’s more (unsurprising) proof of the substitution effect at work in the media marketplace today, with many people moving their media consumption online and abandoning old, appointment-based, couch-potato media. (Shhh… don’t tell the boneheads in Washington who are still busily regulating TV and radio as if “Leave it To Beaver” was still on the air. They might shift their attention to regulating the Net instead.)
Anyway, what I found more interesting about the poll was the finding that 74% of men would rather have sex than surf the Web. Perhaps more importantly, 79% of men “would rather meet a woman out on the town than online.” And they say traditional values are dead!
I’ve been trying to catch up after a week-long cruise with my kids down in the Caribbean and as I was doing my best to sort through thousands of e-mails and articles in my RSS reader, I stopped and did a double-take when I saw some headlines from last week about how the Federal Communications Commission is spending $350,000 taxpayer dollars to sponsor a NASCAR team. For that money, NASCAR driver David Gilliland “has agreed to use his No. 38 car as a high-speed billboard promoting the February 2009 national transition to digital television,” according to Multichannel News.
In the annuls of idiotic government spending initiatives this one has to be a potential hall of fame entry. Over on the PFF Blog, my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin has a humorous piece explaining why:
what signal does FCC sponsorship of a stock car racer send to the beleaguered American public in this autumn of our discontent? The FCC Chairman claims that this sponsorship is an “extremely effective way for the FCC to raise DTV awareness among people of all ages and income levels across the United States who loyally follow one of the most popular sports in America.” Well, those loyal sports fans will have to be following No. 38 at the three sponsored races with some pretty high-speed binoculars to catch the DTV message. Although the $350,000 does get the government posting of its informational website URL, www.dtv.gov, along the track — doubtless not the only advertisement to lure spectator eyeballs — it is primarily receiving posting on the car’s sides and on the driver’s helmet and suit. Let’s just hope No. 38 has a large fan base, does exceeding well in the three races, and, more importantly, avoids accidents, injuries, and fleeting expletives.
Maybe this is just another federal government bailout. On the same day that the FCC announced its investment in NASCAR, the Raleigh News & Observer ran an article entitled, “Global crisis threatens NASCAR.” It seems that “motor sport” team sponsorship has been down this year, “with sinking auto showroom sales, declining attendance and rising operating costs.” And let’s not even talk about the carbon footprint of stock car racing.
Of course, what’s even more pathetic about this move is that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s likely motivation for doing this is probably political: He probably thinks this is a good way to win blue collar votes with all the NASCAR fans down in North Carolina for a future run for office. [It’s widely rumored that he will seek some office down in his home state after his tenure at the FCC is up.] After all, NASCAR is hugely popular in that state. I don’t know about you, but I’m none too happy subsidizing a get-out-the-NASCAR-vote effort for one of the most regulatory-minded FCC Chairmen in history.
Yesterday at an event on Capitol Hill, I had the opportunity to formally release a paper I co-wrote with my colleague Steve DelBianco called “Hardening the Security Stack.” The “stack” is a common sense concept, but one that seems to get lost in the rhetoric about Internet security.
The idea is that there is no monolithic thing called “Internet security,” nor any monolithic entity that can single-handedly provide it. Internet security relies an interdependent network of tools, technologies and behaviors; and succeeds or fails based on the efforts of a wide range of stakeholders, from infrastructure providers at the core of the Internet, to end users at the edge. Those stakeholders make up the security “stack.”
There is no silver bullet. It sounds simple enough, but when policymakers and members of the high-tech community get it in their heads that one tool — or one stakeholder group — has the silver bullet to solve all of our Internet security woes, it can lead to some unfortunate outcomes. The latest example of this has been the recent furor over DNS Security Extensions or “DNSSEC.” Continue reading →
I thought that Thierer was frank when it came to pointing out the self interest of net neutrality proponents, check out Valleywag on the same topic today:
What’s “net neutrality”? As far as we can tell, it’s a bunch of rhetoric that amounts to regulations that affirm Google’s God-given right to avoid giving Internet service providers a cut of advertising revenues.
This comment was inspired by Google VP Vint Cerf’s recent endorsement of Barack Obama for president. Obama has stated that he favors net neutrality regulation and would enshrine into law the likely illegal action of the FCC to stretch their net neutrality “principles” into hard and fast rules.
Continue reading →
Friend of TLF and chief political correspondent for CNET Declan McCullagh has a new column on CBSNews.com called “Other People’s Money.”
Nice name, but we’ll have to see whether his status as a fully decorated part of the mainstream media draws him from principled writing to constant applause for self-appointed experts who want to spend our taxed-away dollars for us.
His freshman effort looks pretty good. “Will U.S. Taxpayers Need a Bailout?” points out the perils of politically directed investments in the banking sector.
Funny stuff:
Precocious Youngster Sells Cookies To Buy Attack Ad
This is, of course, a wildly implausible story. Here in the real world, McCain-Feingold doesn’t allow little girls—or other private citizens—to run television ads criticizing federal candidates in the month before an election. Which, come to think of it, isn’t funny at all.
Slashdot linked to this post purporting to demonstrate that it’s ridiculous to consider the next version of Windows Windows 7. They offer several lists of past releases, all of which have at least 7 elements.
Obviously, the evolution of Windows has been sufficiently tortured that reasonable people can disagree about exactly how many generations there have been. In particular, the parallel development of the 3.1/95/98/ME and NT/2000 lines makes things unusually messy. But I think it’s entirely plausible to say that there have been the following 6 generations of Windows operating systems:
1. Windows
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3/3.1 (NT 3)
4. Windows 95/98/ME (NT4)
5. Windows XP (Windows 2000)
6. Windows Vista
Windows 98/ME were clearly incremental upgrades of Windows 95. NT3, NT4, and Win2k were business/server operating systems that were released in parallel with the consumer products. It seems pretty reasonable to say that there have been 6 major releases of Windows, and that the one they’re working on now will be the seventh.
Over at Ars Technica I have an article I’m particularly excited about: the second installment of my series on self-driving car technology. In the first installment, I surveyed the current state of technology and addressed some of the technical challenges that stood between us and fully self-driving cars. Today I assume that those technical hurdles can be overcome and speculate about what the world will look like when we get there. Some benefits of self-driving cars are obvious—less time spent behind the wheel and fewer accidents—but the consequences are likely to be much broader than that. Among the most intriguing are much greater use of taxis, more widespread use of smaller, more energy-efficient cars, the virtual elimination of parking lots, and a dramatic transformation of the retail sector. Please check it out.
Meanwhile, over at BloggingHeads, my friend Will Wilkinson interviews my advisor Ed Felten about his work. I haven’t had a chance to watch the whole thing yet, but Will and Ed are two of the smartest and most interesting people I know, so it’s bound to be a great conversation.
Like a lot of people, I was surprised by the choice of Paul Krugman for the Nobel Prize in economics, but upon further reflections I agree with Tyler Cowen and Will Wilkinson that the award is well-deserved even if the timing is unfortunate. Krugman’s now-decade-old column in defense of free trade is my all-time favorite Krugman writing and among my favorite examples of popular writing on economics by any author. Recently Krugman’s columns have gotten a little too partisan and strident for my taste, but contra my esteemed co-blogger, Krugman is indisputably a first-rate economist who has done important theoretical work. There’s just no comparison to generic left-wing pundits.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.