Via BBC News
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Doug
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Doug
The world is a sadder place now.
Douglas Adams - 1952-2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk/newsid_1326000/1326657.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/U42
My deepest sympathies to his wife Jane, and most particularly to his young daughter, Jane.
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Doug
I’ve been on an unexpected hiatus the last week or so. This has been due to a combination of my new computer being delvered and a nasty summer head cold I managed to acquire from somewhere. The computer is great; the cold considerably less so. Between the two of them, I ended up being unable to post much for a few days.
Unfortunately, I’m not having a particularly good night tonight, either. Thursday evening appears to be a banner night for telemarketers for some reason. Even more frustrating was tonight’s interaction with the Science Fiction Book CLub, where I’ve been a member for twelve years. What’s the deal with companies these days? We’re deluged with more and more advertising and marketing every day, companies go to extreme efforts to milk every last conceivable penny of profit out of us, but the quality of service we receive just keeps going down. It may be quixotic on my part, but I just refuse to stand for it. Here’s the text of the e-mail I sent tonight to the editors at SFBC:
“Dear SFBC staff:
I have been a member of the SFBC for about a dozen years now. I fulfilled my book comittment years ago, and have stayed with the Club because of the quality hardcover books you’ve always offered at great prices, and the excellent customer service. There have been many times when I’ve seen a newly release book that I want in a bookstore, but passed it by in order to buy it through SFBC.
Unfortunately, today’s SFBC is not the SFBC I joined many years ago. Things seem to have changed, and not for the better. At the end of last year, I suddenly started receiving e-mail inexplicably inviting me back to the Club, claim that “things have not been the same since you’ve been gone!” Since I’d never left, I found this to be a bit odd. After a couple of months had passed, I noticed I hadn’t received any mailing from SFBC in quite some time. I logged on to the Club web site, only to discover that somehow I was no longer a member!
After repeated attempts to actually reach a live person at the in-aptly named Member Service Center resulted in endless chains of phone menus but no person I could speak to about my membership, I e-mailed Member Services. After a couple of days, my account was reactivated, and I began receiving mailings again.
As frustrating as your phone system was, I could accept one error in 12 years. Mistakes happen, it did get cleared up, and I was ready to forget it. Then the e-mailing started. Twice a week or so I began to get notices of “Special Offers” in my Inbox. Since I didn’t recall ever giving SFBC permission to dump SPAM in my e-mail, I was a little annoyed at this. After a few weeks of receiving SPAM, you sent me an e-mail survey asking my opinion about the e-mail marketing. “Ah hah!” I thought, “Here’s my chance to tell them to stop!” Imagine my surprise when the question about how often I wanted to receive e-mail advertisments from you didn’t include the choice “Never!”
Nonetheless, I was resigned to continue getting your SPAM, since I did have a business relationship with you and it’s no more than every other company is doing these days. I still enjoyed the books and the great prices, so I’d just grin and bear it.
A couple of weeks ago, I received you latest mailing. After looking through it, I decided not to purchase any of the Featured Selections, but did have an interest in the latest Linda Nagata book, “Limits of Vision.” As I’ve done the past couple of years, I jumped on the web site and clicked on the Members Area link to respond to the mailings. The site timed out; I couldn’t view the page. I tried again, and again. Still no luck. I could access other sites, but not the Members Area of SFBC.com. I waited a couple of days. I’m a technology professional, so I know sites and servers can occasionally be down. Still no luck. After several more tries, I finally managed to access the site and log in. Unfortunately, now that I was in, I was told there were no Featured Selections for this account! There was no way I could complete my order.
Since I’d already thrown away my return envelope (I haven’t needed one for two years), I now had no choice but to try and navigate the maze of the Member Service Center phone system. I called the number on the back of the order form. Instead of ringing, I hear a phone company recording telling me the number has been changed. As you might imagine, my frustration was increasing by the minute. I read for relaxation and pleasure, and dealing with SFBC was turning into an exercise in neither.
I called the new number, and immediately entered the IVR system. I pressed the options that should have allowed me to speak to a human, but was told no people were available - I should call back during the hours that I normally am at work. Incredibly, rather than returning me to the menu to make another choice, the IVR system hung up the phone. I called back, navigated the system to refuse the Featured Selections, but decided to definitely NOT order the Linda Nagata book. After all, Dealing with SFBC to place a simple order had already consumed at least an hour of my time and cost me two long-distance phone calls. That’s too high a price to pay for a book I can order from Amazon with a single mouse click.
I apologize for the length of this note, but I wanted you to understand what my experience has been like as one of your customers in the last few months. Rather than treating me with the respect and attention a long-term customer should expect, you’re choosing to deluge me in marketing material I don’t want and making it more and more difficult to do business with you. I can’t imagine my experience is unique, either. I’ve been in business long enough to know that for every customer who tells you they’re upset, there’s ten who don’t say anything and just take their business elsewhere. Fool that I am, I’m hoping that this letter will provoke positive action that allows me to remain a member, rather than a lot of platitudes about how moving the Member Services Center has resulted in confusion, etc.
From the Member newsletters, I’ve always had the impression that SFBC editors were genuine SF fans, with a real interest in and concern for the members. I’ll eagerly await your response to see if I’m right about this. You’ve lost a sale, I hope you don’t have to lose a member.
Sincerely,
Doug Miller”
I should add that while I was on the phone for the first call to Member services tonight, trying to madly scamble for something to write their new number down, Ameritech chose to break in with an advertisement for Caller ID, making it totally impossible to actually hear the new number from the recording. Has every company in the country gone insane?
I’m getting very, very tired of all these marketing droids being constantly in my face, constantly clamoring for my intention, constantly interrupting me and pulling me away from things I think are more important than whaatever message of the moment they’re spewing. I’m tired of all the money being spent on these hollow marketing campaigns while functions like customer service and quality are starved for resources, cash, and qualified people. It’s insane that I should have take extreme steps, and buy extra products and services (like Caller-Id and Privacy Guard) to keep the people from invading my home, my time, and my peace of mind. It’s certainly a joke that our elected representatives, when faced with a choice between legislation that protects consumer privacy and legislation that allows even more invasion of our lives by the leeches, they will unerringly chose to support the leeches.
So, I’m declaring war. From here on out, every opportunity I have to make a stink about this I’m going to. I’m going to pass out copies of The Cluetrain Manifesto and ask telemarketers how much they’re willing to pay me to hear their pitch. I’m going to write letter, both to companies and to my representative. I’m going to do my damnedest to be a crotchety old man towards all these idiots. And the next time I meet someone with a Marketing MBA, I think I’ll knee him in the groin.
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Doug
Via the Mt. Fuji Internet Server
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Doug
I had some ideas about some writing I wanted to do this evening, and Microsoft’s antics today prompt me to write a thousand words or so refuting today’s apparent declaration of war on free software. Unfortunately, it was a looooong day at work today, capped of by the big kindergarten musical at my son’s school tonight. I’m beat, and I’d be a bit of a hypocrite trying to make myself write tonight after ranting on about my need for simplicity, so I’m just going to relax, instead. Sleep well and dream deep, and we’ll see you tomorrow.
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Doug
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Doug
Via Witches Web
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Doug
It’s May Day, and I’m mad.
May 1st, May Day, is a day of some particular historical significance, though most Americans probably aren’t that aware of it. Hal over at blivet has a whole bushel basket full of links to pages talking about the significance of this day, from ancient to modern times, so I won’t delve too deeply into the history. Briefly, May Day, also known as Beltane, was an ancient holiday celebrating the end of Winter and the beginning of summer. It was a time to celebrate the full return of the sun, the liberation from the cold and privation of winter. In more modern times, May Day became International Workers Day, likewise a celebration of freedom - but replaced in the U.S. by Labor Day, due to the communist connections of May Day.
I’m mad this May Day because on this day that has been a celebration of freedom for literally thousands of years, a pretty complete picture of what the mega-corporations have in mind for us in terms of future information access has become pretty clear. It isn’t a pretty picture, and it isn’t something to celebrate.
The first indication I saw about this came this morning in an article on ZDNet concerning Windows XP. It seems that Microsoft announced to a group of PC makers that there’s a good possibility that Windows XP won’t launch now until 2002. On the surface, this might seem an excuse for some chuckling at Microsoft’s expense, as they once again miss a launch date for a “flagship” product. What provoked my unease, however, was the reason Microsoft gave for the delay. It turns out that XP has a very narrow ship window. If, as seems likely, the new OS isn’t ready to go by early August, then the launch of XP will tread on the heels of the launch of the X-Box - Microsoft’s new souped-up gaming console. The X-Box needs to launch this fall to be ready for the holidays, and Microsoft is ready to spend an absolutely unprecedented amount of money on this product launch.
Now, think about this a second - Microsoft, the company that makes the most widely used operating system and office suite package on the planet, is apparently more than willing to delay the launch of it’s newest OS, and therefore presumably the latest incarnation of Office (which has always been the real money-maker for Redmond) in support of a gaming console. Corporate server upgrades, site license upgrades for both the OS and Office, the whole works are going to have to wait on a consumer electronics device, specifically a device that MS has admitted they’re going to lose huge amounts of money on the hardware sale with, in an area the company has never, ever really participated in before. Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?
Consider this though, as you read on: the X-Box is a full-fledged computer, even though it’s being packaged as a game console. Well, maybe not a full-fledged computer, but it certainly is a computing device that’s far more powerful than any game console that’s been shipped before. Moreover, the X-Box will have web browsing capabilities, no doubt with all the latest whiz-bang (read Hailstorm) Microsoft technology inside. It connects to MSN. I’ve heard rumors of eventual broad-band capabilities. It doesn’t have much in the way of local storage, of course.
Next, I ran across this article from Wired News concerning a new technology from Microsoft for digital watermarks in music files. Further, Microsoft Research has apparently also worked up a watermarking technology to be used in software licenses that could be used to enforce license expiration dates and prohibit users from running “expired software.” Of particular interest is the following quote:
“Kirovski, who demonstrated the technique on Friday, said Microsoft hoped to ally itself with record labels and spur e-commerce in music. He said of current online practice, where MP3 files are frequently traded: ‘All this is super convenient for the user, but is super inconvenient for the record labels, which are losing $5 billion to piracy every year.’”
Catch that? A) Microsoft hopes to ally itself with the record label. B) Trading files is convenient for users, but is inconvenient for the record labels. Excuse me, but do the artists come into this anywhere? C) The labels claim to be losing $5 billion a year to piracy. From users trading MP3’s? That sounds like some pretty interesting math.
To me, these two articles, combined with recent announcements like Hailstorm, paint a pretty interesting picture of where the thinking is headed in Redmond regarding the future of personal computing. Microsoft has long had an interest in set-top box computing, and it’s evident that the direction they’re moving in is rented applications, services provided through MSN (and MSN only), and as much control as possible over user’s storage and usage of data. The X-Box is Microsoft’s latest, greatest attempt to place a device in the home that will be readily embraced by consumers (due to the gaming capabilities), that will be the perfect platform for implementing their consumer Internet strategy. This is so critical to them that they’re willing to delay the launch of Windows XP to be sure that the X-Box is a success.
Now, to computing purists and rabid anti-Microsoft zealots, this strategy alone is enough to send them baying at the moon. It certainly isn’t the computing choice I’d make, but I’m realist enough to acknowledge that millions of people use AOL despite the crappy quality of service and straight-jacket feeling of the service, and that a lot of these same people will find Microsoft’s approach attractive. To some extent, I’m even in favor of it; there’s a group of users (most of which will probably disappear over the next twenty years) who lack the computer literacy to use another sort of device, and a set-top solution is probably right for them. They don’t want to learn how to use a computer, they just want to play games and get online. The appliance computer is coming, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
What bothers me, however, is that the appliance computer is being used as a Trojan horse to introduce technologies into personal computing that are freedom-limiting. It seems to me that Microsoft intends to support the efforts of the media cartels to destroy fair-use and move as much media consumption as possible over to a fee-for-use model.
The icing on the cake today was the news that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals was decidedly unfriendly in today’s hearing in the DeCSS case toward arguments that the DMCA is unconstitutional and that this case represents a free-speech issue. The court most definitely appeared to support the MPAA’s position, though we won’t know for sure for a few weeks yet. It’s a reasonable guess, however, that the government is going to back the media conglomerates to the hilt. From the hearing:
“Newman said that fair use still was possible if a lower-quality analog copy was made, instead of a high-quality digital copy. ‘Have we ever said you not only get to make fair use, but you get to make fair use in the most technologically modern way?’ Newman said. ‘You haven’t told me one fair use that’s been eliminated.’”
What if the computing device you’re using is technologically incapable of making any sort of copy at all, by design? If you then procured software that allowed you to make a copy, even a reduced-quality analog copy, wouldn’t that then constitute a circumvention device under the terms of the DMCA? If a copy of the DeCSS source code printed on a t-shirt constitutes such a device, I can’t imagine this wouldn’t. And this is exactly the situation that’s quite likely to happen given the events I’ve outlined above. The end result is an environment where information consumption and production by individuals could be very tightly controlled by corporations, with the willing consent of the U.S. government.
The concept of copyright is a good one, and creators deserve to be compensated and protected. Unfortunately, via legislation and Orwellian application of technology, copyright is becoming a bludgeon in the hands of large corporations to exhort ever more money from consumers, rather than a means of protecting creators and encouraging innovation. This is particularly true in the motion picture and music industries, and it seems like Microsoft wants to see a similar situation in the software industry.
The reality is that the early years of the explosion of the web scared the hell out of both the media conglomerates and a lot of politicians, who were neither intellectually nor technologically equipped to deal with what happened. Interestingly, the advent of these new technologies also created a situation where the corporations could grow to unprecedented power, and they’ve bought and paid for the politicians they need to support their quest for even more money and power. What I see on this May Day is that there’s a fundamental conflict going on to determine the future of the Internet - and this conflict is only part of the a similar conflict being played out on the world stage as we all try and determine if this Pandora’s box of technology we’ve opened is going to act to liberate us, or become the agent of increased control and limits on our personal freedom.
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Doug
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Doug
I’ve just finished an eight-week or so binge of reading about World War II. I’ve always been a history buff, and having grown up in a family that had several notable members who served in those wars, I’ve been generally familiar with this specific bit of history from a very young age. I grew up near the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, and I spent more than a few hours there as a kid, learning about the airplanes, and by extension, the history they took part in. A considerable amount of this related to the Second World War, and I’d always felt rather confident that I knew a lot about that conflict. In times past, I’d avoided reading much more, mostly, I think, out of a sense of complacency about what I knew.
A few weeks ago, though, the history bug bit me and I picked up a copy of Battle: The Story of the Bulge by John Toland, and I was off. For nearly the next two months, I didn’t read much that wasn’t related to WWII. The more I read, the more I realized how much I didn’t know, and how much my perceptions were colored by the history we’re taught in school, and what we see in the media. I read accounts written by Germans, British, and Russians, as well as Americans. It was an eye-opening experience, particularly as I began to see how each of the accounts slanted the same events from their own, generally self-serving, point of view. I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative way, by the way - telling these stories from ones own perspective is certainly to be expected, even desired, and doing so provides a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of the people who were involved. Observing people trying to make sense out of the events of this time period, sometimes a couple or three decades after the events, was nearly as fascinating as reading about the events themselves.
Aside from learning a great deal about the war itself, and how people other than Americans were impacted by it, this orgy of historical reading started me thinking on a few other tracks. For one, it started me thinking about the term globalization. From the perspective of WWII, one would think this referred to something positive. One of the proximate causes of the Second World War was an upsurge of rampant nationalism. Further, it’s conceivable that the scale of the conflict could have been substantially lessened if nations, both their people and their leaders, had possessed better communication with and understanding of their counterparts in other countries. Further, one wonders if the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which set the stage for much of what was to come, would have been as harsh if there had been a better sense among people of how they fit into a global, rather than merely national or regional scheme of things. On the face of it, that’s what globalization would seem to mean to me - a sense of being part of an entire planet of peoples, each with differences and varying needs, but still, at the end of it, all in it together. Further, it seems to me that this sense of globalization, by its very nature, has to recognize these differences and divergent opinions, and seek to reconcile them through increased understanding.
Unfortunately, globalization seems to mean something quite different. Rather than promoting understanding, it seems to promote homogenization. Rather than seeking to embrace and reconcile differences, globalization on the modern stage seems dedicated to suppression and elimination of differences. It isn’t about recognizing our commonality, but rather, selecting an arbitrary set of beliefs and practices, held by those with the biggest stick, calling those “common,” and then forcing those on everyone else through economic coercion. Ironically, this seems to be called “Free Trade,” which of course has its own contradictory implications.
Combining all of this with my WWII reading, particularly those works written by German authors, started me thinking on the subject of control. Earlier today, I was reading some of the essays of John Taylor Gatto concerning education in the United States. In his essay on The Public School Nightmare, Gatto describes how compulsory education in the United States actually had its origin in Prussia. The Prussian education system had been developed in response to two stimuli - the defeat of the Prussians by Napoleon, and their desire to unite the separate German principalities into a single nation. The system they conceived was specifically designed to do one thing - enable control of mass populations by turning the mass of people into unquestioning order takers. In the essay, Gatto quotes Erich Maria Ramarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front who blamed the First World War on the “tricks of the schoolmasters,” and Dutch theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who felt that the Second World War was the “inevitable product of good schooling.” Reading this resonated with me, because it was so totally in keeping with the accounts of Germans about WWII. What was clear to me was that here was a people raised to obedience - raised to follow orders, and prepared to be used by whoever was prepared to come along and use them. Can it be coincidence that Japanese society of that time held much the same values, and engaged in similar educational practices? As incredible as it may seem to so many of us, it seems evident to me that the excuse offered at many of the War Crimes trials - “We were only following orders” is exactly what was going in many cases. Not in every case, to be sure; there were clearly evil men at work here, true psychopaths - but the important question is how they managed to get an entire nation to follow them, to die for them, to commit mass-murder for them. Frankly, it seems to me that they were conditioned to do so, in a frighteningly low-tech but Orwellian manner. Before it was over, something on the order of 20 million people were dead.
What frightens me is that I see many of these same forces at work today. I’ve frequently heard smart, thinking people express the opinion that the American school system is designed primarily with the objective of teaching children not how to think, but rather how to “fit in” to society - primarily by respecting the established systems, controls and hierarchy (this is in fact Gatto’s point, as well as the subject of an interesting discussion at Hack the Planet Prime last month). Even if you don’t agree with Gatto, or believe the system is set up with the same intention as the Prussian system was, a trip to your local McDonald’s should be enough to convince you that we seem to be failing at teaching critical thinking skills and judgment. Further, whether this is deliberate or not, there certainly seem to be people prepared to take advantage of the situation…only we’re far better at it than the Prussians, because we can couple it with television and marketing and lots and lots of mostly pointless consumer goods, and then wrap the entire thing up in “politically correct” speech and double talk like “Free Trade” so no one is the least offended and they don’t have to be distracted from further pursuit of acquiring more pointless stuff.
And, truth to tell, for most Americans it’s been a pretty good deal. For the price of a chunk of personal freedom and a mostly useless education, the vast majority of Americans are pretty well off, at least materially. So well off, in fact, that we’re pretty much out of cheap labor. Most of the industrialized world is this way, in fact. That seems to be where globalization and free trade come in to the picture, one of the missions of which seems to be to export the values, systems, and control of the industrialized nations to the rest of the planet. It gets us cheap goods, and by recreating much of the same process our Western economies went through, the end result in a hundred years or so may be more or less equivalent to where our economies are. At least that’s what the globalization and free trade advocates seem to be saying, and it certainly seems as though they believe it.
That’s where I have a problem, though. You see, there’s no doubt the Prussians created an impressive, efficient, modern state from nearly nothing, and did it in an amazingly short time. The Meiji Restoration accomplished pretty much the same thing for Japan. In Prussia, however, they created a state where a lot of people didn’t want to live, and in both nations, this path eventually led to the incredible cataclysms of the last century. We seem to be hell-bent on following a similar path on a global scale, for similar reasons, namely power and treasure. There’s some question, though, as to whether or not the rest of the world wants to play along. Worse, even if we manage to pull it off, are we really certain this is what we want?
