I’ve decided to resurrect my dear old blog, now a rambunctious and neglected eight-year old–today! On May 6th in 2003, I decided to start a blog instead of sending my friends links to stuff via Instant Messenger.

Back, then, I had to carry these posts uphill both ways; I built my own blog software and CMS, and lovingly tended to it for years, writing my own features, plugins, editors, themes, search engines, and so on. Then, at some point not long after I switched hosting servers, I broke the software and lost the ability to post through my precious software I’d spent years making. And honestly, I didn’t feel like fixing it.

I had started to submit work (largely unsuccessfully) to magazines and so forth, and eventually stopped writing for a bit. Then I worked on massive exposes of shadow conspiracies bent on world domination, but struggled to a) find the right news hook and b) trim down my fantastic account of killer robots feasting on the flesh of terrified hordes to less than 3500 words.

So, this blog will be filled with shorter posts from now on. I’ve got a custom WordPress install and I’m nearly done cleaning out the archives of nasty bits of leftover formatting (if you find an incomplete or funny-looking post, leave a comment). I’ll be adding cool new features by the by.

Lots more to come!

Usually I talk about politics here, with slight detours into science or arts or things like that, but on the sixth anniversary of Casual Asides, I’ve decided to turn to the foundational element of this blog: technology—specifically, the World Wide Web. Six years is a long time on the Internet, and even longer in the blogosphere. Allow me to quote my first blog post:

I’ve had a homepage since 1995. When I was in high school and the Internet was so new and all, I spent a lot of time on my web page. Eventually, the Internet became my trade, and I stopped updating my web pages in favor of paid work.

But lately, I’ve been clicking around the blogosphere, which has become the most interesting web phenomenon in recent years. It reminds me of the old Internet, which was about interacting with people and greater access to information, rather than the new Internet, which is about figuring out new ways to send you advertisements for toner cartridges and porn.

So, what have I learned in the past 6 years? Lots of things, usually in the extremely laborious researching of almost 290-odd posts. I can’t tell you how many spreadsheets I’ve made or hours spent researching a point which I ultimately had to edit out of the piece because my assertions ended up being unfounded (which is just fancy talk for me almost saying something which was dead wrong). I also have pages and pages of stuff left unfinished, some of it years old. But today’s topic is not me: it’s the Internet.

The phrase “Web 2.0″ was coined in 2004, according to Tim O’Reilly:

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

So, in the wake of the collapse of the Web 2.0 economy (which was suspiciously like the Web 1.0 economy with slightly less money), I present to you:

Rules for Web 2.1

Information wants to be free. Charging for content is so 2004.

You can’t patent a business model. This is merely a legal reality, but an important point, considering…

Too much venture capital is killing revenues. As a corollary to the above point, the problem is that at the point where you want to monetize a free service and/or the lack of available funding for R & D becomes an issue, there will inevitably arise a competing site on the upside of a financing curve. This is particularly a problem because…

Customers are not generally loyal in the long term. The Web 2.0 model is that you come up with a great idea, turn it into a free site, create a huge following, and then drive your user base away by screwing up the site. The exact way you screw up a site may vary, but it always comes down to asserting ownership of the space you’ve created in a way that lessens the value of the product. Sometimes it’s your users themselves who destroy the service by trying to monetize it by spamming everyone else who uses the site. Which brings up another important point…

Advertising is bullshit. Truly a victim of its own success, the more successful advertising has become, the less successful it is. Continuing the theme of information technology being too powerful for its own commercial good, the web came with revolutionary metrics; the problem is that it exposed exactly how ineffective advertising can be. I watched click-through rates fall from 5% the year the first banner was introduced to 2.5% the next and so forth, arithmetically. In the old days (of the brown-shoes), a company paid an advertising firm to sell the company’s product to the consumer and the advertising campaign to the contracting firm; you could never accurately gauge how effective an ad campaign was. That inefficiency in data gathering meant that it might have been the ad campaign that boosted or cratered sales, but you couldn’t tell with any certainty. Now you know exactly how few people make the full trip from advertisement to virtual cash register.

You don’t make money on data, you make money on relationships. Information may want to be free, but trust can be earned—or bought. It can also be betrayed (see above).

Data is portable, presentation isn’t. Data is becoming platform independent. Many people apparently read this blog via bloglines or rss. All that CSS and graphic design for naught! I shed a tear, I really do, but that’s the trend away from the problems of ownership described above. People want the steak, not the parsley.

Brace yourself for perfecting competition. Have you noticed a theme here? It’s that information technology is perfecting marketplaces too fast for firms to adjust while maintaining their profits. In prefect competition, profits are always driven to near- or at-zero. Profit requires monopolization.

Keep it simple, stupid. That’s why this post is so (relatively) short.

Next time I’ll be talking about Web 2.2; after that, Web 3.0. Stay tuned.

There are a few topics I try to avoid on this blog; Israel, monetary policy, cats. But I suppose the most glaring omissions are feminist concerns (closely followed by Darfur, a topic about which I have long struggled to write without much success). I’m not going to offer some lame excuse like “I just don’t understand women,” even though I don’t—ha!

An ex-girlfriend once accused me of being if not exactly a misogynist, something less than a feminist. I’ll come right out and state my two major problems with feminism: first of all, as a old-fashioned lefty, identity politics of any stripe evoke a visceral reaction because they screw with working-class solidarity. Second, I’ve received a lot of contradictory testimony over the last decade over whether or not men can in fact be feminists at all.

My ex informed me, and rightly so, that these exceptions I was taking were bullshit. I write about gay and black issues, even though I’m neither. Somehow these identity-related concerns are more accessible to me than feminist issues. I will not make any apologies for finding the idea of gender inequality abhorrent—and that cuts both ways. Women aren’t ‘better’ than men and men aren’t ‘better’ than women. (Sidebar: the “feminist theory of international relations,” which held that everything would be better if women were in charge and we would have world peace doesn’t hold much water, e.g. Ghandi, Meir, Elizabeth, Boudicca.)

So here’s the question—are gender disparities the same as gender inequalities? And we must always bear in mind what Martin Luther King said about equal treatment:

The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.

…and note the use of “a man.” By which I mean to say that people may face systematic societal barriers no matter how equally I as an individual treat them.

I mention this in reference to my previous post about the idiotic ‘new age of civility’ proposal. I did notice, although I didn’t say anything about it, that women were at the forefront of this issue—the travails of blogger Kathy Sierra were an impetus, and the guidelines were based on those compiled for the BlogHer network. In the two days since I wrote that piece, a little left-wing internecine skirmish has begun between ‘Kos’ of Daily Kos and several feminist blogs, such as Feministing, Bitch PhD, Ampersand, and other blogs which I read and generally enjoy. Notably, almost everyone involved thinks the ‘civility’ project is a bad idea; that’s not what got them all riled up.

What ignited this firestorm was Kos’ post where he echoed my call for those who cannot stand the heat to get out of the kitchen:

Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you’ll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said “death threats” don’t even exist — evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said “death threats”.

Now, I’m a guy and I’m reading this and I don’t see anything gender specific about that statement in and of itself, other than the fact that he made it right after mentioning Sierra, who, became the target of various threats on a site called MeanKids (the sites where these things happened have all been taken down weeks ago).

Kos wrote,

I’m in and out of commission, so I hadn’t heard of this so-called “death threat” thing. So I looked it up.

Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online. It follows a series of death threats which have forced her to cancel a public appearance and suspend her blog.

Ms Sierra described on her blog how she had been subject to a campaign of threats, including a post that featured a picture of her next to a noose.

Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial shit, you’ll get idiotic emails.

If you think Kos is talking about Sierra here specifically (and not “you”), you have to wonder whether that was the last article he looked up about the ordeal, because all the sources he links to in the article are rather vague about the threats. The most specific the BBC gets is that “The police are investigating while the blogosphere has launched its own enquiry,” and “a post that featured a picture of her next to a noose,” although it certainly discusses the gender issues of her harasssment.

Majikthise and I, for example, are in complete agreement on the proper way to deal with these things:

As Markos says, a lot of bloggers get abusive email. I know I do. Several times a year, I emails from people who say they hope I die, or express other similarly vague pro-attitudes towards my demise. Legally, those are threats. I forward those to the FBI and the ISP of the sender. I’m not the least bit scared, but man, do those threats make me angry. These shmucks are trying to intimidate me. It doesn’t work, and I take great satisfaction in creating a paper trail.

It’s just as illegal to threaten someone by email as it is to call them or send them snail mail. If we chide people for taking email threats seriously, we’re coddling their abusers. Threats should have consequences, regardless of the medium used to deliver them.

I can safely say that I have been receiving death threats over the Internet much longer than any of the bloggers who have commented on this issue, beginning with my Bill Gates Is Satan website (1995-2002, R.I.P). I’ve been getting e-threats before there was such a thing as a blog (and don’t even get me started on Usenet again). So, when I think about this stuff, I think about the assholes who told me they were going to grind my Communist ass into fertilizer for Bill Gates’ giant lawn. Certainly, with women, the threats are often sexualized (as were some of those against me), but the issue at hand (I thought) was about threats of any violent nature.

Then in university, as a joke/proof-of-concept, I created a page that would crash any windows 95/98 computer just by accessing it. (I’m an asshole, I know.) Someone forwarded this page to what I will politely refer to as a forum for “gun-toting redneck psychos.” What ensued was a two-week long death threat fest.

I was vaguely scared, but I wasn’t annoyed as much as I relished these threats as a badge of honor, and I didn’t follow the above advice and call the cops, either. So, I got to thinking, is that a typically male reaction? Are we conditioned to react differently to threats of violence? I might think I’m pretty street-smart, but the fact is no man has balls big enough or upper-body strength sufficient to stop a shotgun blast. I should recognize that the way men and women have been socialized to react to these things is different, and not based on physical differences between sexes.

Then there’s this response by Echidne of the Snakes:

To many misogynists a woman saying anything at all is controversial shit. Women, like Kathy Sierra, who blog on tech topics are not actually saying that much that should be controversial.

Most of the time, said “death threats” don’t even exist…

Perhaps not. But there is a whole slew of crime statistics on misogynistic harassment, rape and worse in the real world. There is very little that can be compared with that in terms of real-world attacks against controversial male bloggers. Women may be justified in taking threats of harm more seriously than men, just because of this.

If they can’t handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work.

What if it is a lot of heat, like the kitchen on fire, but this heat only burns the female bloggers and commenters, because they have to work against the kind of harassment Markos mentions AND the kind of harassment their gender creates?

It seems like someone’s straying a bit here (not to mention pushing the metaphor), but I was curious about the statistics. So I looked it up:

Homicide by gender, 1976-2004

I invite you to (anonymously) post your conclusions. From what I can tell, sex-related homicide rates pretty much mirror argument- and workplace related homicides except that there are slightly more female offenders for argument-based murders, which is presumably how an actual comment-related murder would be classified ceteris paribus.

The upshot to all this, by the way, is that the logic expressed above only underlines my point about the importance of preserving anonymity on the web, because it cuts both ways. Should people have to deal with harrassment? Of course not. Now, does not acting surprised when something happens excuse it? No.

Let me state at the outset that I am a huge, huge fan of both Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales. I own several O’Reilly books, and obviously I use wikipedia all the time. I respect them immensely, and we should all bow before their superior technological wisdom.

Except in this case: A widely forwarded New York Times article about O’Reilly, Wales, and a group of others who are calling for some kind of new age of “civility” on the World Wide Web, namely in the blogosphere:

The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

I know what you’re all wondering—in the name of civil public discourse, ARE THESE PEOPLE FUCKING STUPID?!? No, really, are these whore-mongering, baby-eating, paint-huffing, shit-stained, baboon-faced, coke-addled RETARDS serious?

Part of the fun of the Internet is that it’s practically made of free speech and built on a certain degree of anonymity. Not only does nobody know you’re a dog, but everyone can tell you’re an asshole, too. And that’s the way it ought to be. Sorry, ye shrinking violets and withering wallflowers, but if you can’t stand the heat, get the hell off the Internet. Go xerox a zine or write poetry in your journal. Don’t put things up for public consumption and act surprised when the public consumes them with varying degrees of receptiveness. The best thing about the Internet is that it gives everyone freedom of the press, but that freedom comes with various strings attached.

It seems as though these bloggers want their fifteen minutes (or fifteen people) but not any of the consequences thereof.

None of these solutions solve anything, and not just because these codes of conduct are voluntary. Let’s start with the issue the policy is designed to address, anonymous comments.

It seems like these people are investing an awful lot of effort into something we all know is destined to fail—but it’s even worse if it succeeds. Regular readers familiar with my M.O. can see where I’m going with this—let’s look at the premise expressed above, namely that there is not a single human being “able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.” Sorry, when your initial premises start with A = not A, you’ve pooched it from the get-go, my friends.

If you think someone is making a credible death threat against you, call the cops. Disallowing anonymous comments isn’t going to stop it. If someone is libeling or slandering you, file a civil lawsuit. But nothing you do will be able to stop people from posting derogatory things about you, whether it’s on your blog or their blog or a another person’s anonymous comments allowing blog or a bathroom wall.

Let’s continue with the article:

“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines [the O'Reilly-Wales proposal is based upon] and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.

A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors.

Talk about opening up a can of worms… trust me, there’s no blogger worth their salt who wants to have to verify every comment made on their blog for legal indemnification. What if someone lies about something and you don’t catch it right away? or if they’re posing as someone you trust?

Right now, the solution is simple: it’s your damn blog and you can delete comments at will, anonymous, non-anonoymous, whatever. If you’ll notice, my own problem with comments was that I received literally 15,000 spam messages from evil robots in the past six months. Did I feel any compunction about deleting them? No! Did I institute a keyword-based filter? No! I want people to be able to make Bob Dole/Viagra jokes without my interference. I just don’t want them to be able to sell Viagra on my site. So what did I do? I implemented a simple technological solution—an arithmetic question. But I am fully aware that as soon as robots figure out what the sum of 2 and 3 is, I’ll need to shift tactics slightly. It’s just how it works—I’d rather deal with that problem than verify every claim my commenters make.

One of the thornier problems with this proposal is the lack of enforcement, which is fatal to any regime. In the arms race between the great unwashed and the blogging elite, who’s going to pay for the mechanism of enforcement or dispute arbitration? if you feel your comment was unjustly deleted, are you going to have an avenue of appeals? will other people involved in the guideline program be able to kick you out for violating standards—and how?

Now we get to self-contradicting statement number two from the article:

Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

Heavens to Murgatroyd! It looks like I’m doomed to continue to make that mistake. Free speech might conceivably be “enhanced by civility”, for a short time, but it certainly isn’t engendered by it. You’re free to call black as white as you please, but it’s still oxymoronic. There is no speech ‘freer’ than free speech. It’s also hardly “civil” to hamper the basis of civil rights—free expression.

There’s a larger problem, though. what these people are trying to do is effect a caste system, where people who pay to be credentialed are privileged over those who wish to remain anonymous—like dissidents and whistleblowers.

Look, I’ve been using computers to talk to people I’ve never met in person since I was 11. Before there were blogs, before there was even a world wide web, there were BBSes and FidoNet. Most importantly, there was, and will always be UseNet.

UseNet (you may also know it as ‘newsgroups’ if you have an accomodating ISP) was the first global conversation that used the Internet to connect strangers with common interests. You would subscribe to a newsfeed, which was basically just a list of threaded messages within a hierarchically named topical group. I used to hang out in groups like talk.atheism, alt.politics.socialism, and alt.sysadmin.recovery, for example.

UseNet has been dealing with “incivility” for over twenty-five years. Wales would do well to look up his own site’s explanation of the Internet term “eternal September”:

Eternal September (also September that never ended, perpetual September, or endless September) is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993. The use of these expressions implies the belief that standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet have declined since 1993 due to an unending influx of new users.

Usenet originated among universities. Every year, in September, a large number of new university students got access to Usenet, and took some time to acclimate themselves to the network’s standards of conduct and netiquette. After a month or so, the new users would (it is supposed) learn to comport themselves as normal Usenet users. September, thus, represented the network’s largest regular influx of newbies.

“Right now it’s summer, and most schools are on vacation, and a sizable percentage of other people are in the same state. So the net is quieter. Yet it’s still growing. Will the return of all these people, plus the usual growth, be the final straw for the net?”

— Brad Templeton, posting to net.news, July 12, 1984[1]

And did the net end in 1984? Usenet wasn’t even getting started, folks.

According to UTC, the Eternal September date as of the time this page was loaded was September 4969, 1993.

…

In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, later millions, of users. To many old-timers, these “AOLers” were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university freshmen.

…

Whereas the regular September freshman influx would soon settle down, the sheer number of newbies now threatened to overwhelm the existing Usenet culture’s capacity to inculcate its social norms.

It boils down to this: creating these voluntary methods of social control will never work, and it only engenders that inevitable evolutionary arms race between malefactors and ‘upstanding citizens.’ Not only that, but trying to privilege ‘credentialed’ communications over anonymous ones will only result in extending the exact social controls the Internet is so good at defying.

Furthermore, credentialed systems all suffer from the same flaw, which is that the more they rely on credentials, the easier it is to fool them once you can fake those credentials.

The whole effort is fundamentally misguided. The only sensible solution I’ve heard was from some technologist whose name I cannot remember or find on the Internet; he was talking about this issue a few years ago, and said that the solution to this is simple: blogs should not allow comments at all, only trackbacks. If you want to make your voice heard on the internet, get your own damn blog and link to the people you want to insult.

A while ago, I mentioned that there was a new Charles Manson website, www.4a4r.com, which replaced the old www.atwa.com. Well, an alert reader informs me that 4a4r is down, but www.atwa.info is still up! I deeply apologize to those misled readers desperately seeking information from and about Charles Manson. Oh, before I forget, you can read about Manson here.

From: D. J. Waletzky
To: The Internet Oracle
Subject: Re: Answer #QYGaari, the Oracle requires an
answer to this question.
Date: 18 Jun 2003 05:46:32 -0400
On Wed, 2003-06-18 at 04:33, The Internet Oracle wrote:
{ The Internet Oracle requires an answer to this question!
{
{ O Oracle most wise in the ways of Bit Torrent,
{
{ Where can I find a good and reliable source for Uchuu no Stellvia? The
{ [R-B] encodes, that is?

The answer is so simple, you'll kick yourself you didn't think of it. Here, let's solve it together! "Uchuu no Stellvia" has to be an anagram, right? So, we carefully rearrange the letters until we find our first clue.

LOU, VIA CLUES HUNT.

So, his name is Lou, or Louis, or Louie, or Luis... aha!

A EUNUCH, LUIS VOLT.

Well, that was simple enough. He's got to be the reliable source. But wait, I hear you cry, doesn't UCHUU NO STELLVIA also rearrange into

LUIS--A CUT LOVE HUN!

That sounds somewhat difficult, Luis being a eunuch, but after all,

TINA, LULU VOUCHES

I guess they would know. But, maybe Lulu's not experienced enough to know what she's talking about:

THUS LULU, A NOVICE

Well it looks like we'll get a chance to see what Luis can do:

LO, EUNUCH! A SLUT--VI!

Hel-lo, Vi! She's looking very alluring, but seems somewhat unapproachable. Oh, just a second--looks like she has a "Nouveau Screech" pin on her shoulder bag! You remember Nouveau Screech, that 80's band, you know, the one with the keyboard player with the crazy hair. If Luis could only remember one of their hits, he'd have something to talk to Vi about...

CULL NOUVEAU HITS

Didn't they do one called,

I LUV ONA, CUTE LUSH

or something like that? Luis walks up to Vi...and she slaps him! Apparently, that wasn't the title of a song at all. Well, it's looks like Luis is no Don Juan, but maybe he can direct you to someone who does. "Hey, Luis! Do you know where we can pick up some high grade Uchuu no Stellvia? You know, the [R-B] encodes, not that cheap stuff you find on the street."

UNCLE VITO'S U-HAUL

Aha!

You owe the Oracle a copy.

After the mysterious demise of www.atwa.com, a new Charlie Manson site has popped up–www.4a4r.com! Yes, the only semi-official source for information about wacko murderous cult leader Charles Manson, from the pro-Manson perspective. You’ll find hours of amusement reading Manson’s letters from prison. It’s even more fun to make your friends do dramatic readings from them!

I’ve had a homepage since 1995. When I was in high school and the Internet was so new and all, I spent a lot of time on my web page. Eventually, the Internet became my trade, and I stopped updating my web pages in favor of paid work.

But lately, I’ve been clicking around the blogosphere, which has become the most interesting web phenomenon in recent years. It reminds me of the old Internet, which was about interacting with people and greater access to information, rather than the new Internet, which is about figuring out new ways to send you advertisements for toner cartridges and porn.

So, since freedom of the press applies only to those who own one, and because I’ve been doing some freelance writing, I figured… you know the rest.

If you have any interest, previous stuff I’ve written is in the archives.