Small Pieces: The Gang Blog

2003-03-06T17:50:00.000Z

Ceci n'est pas une vache

This not a link to the Raging Cow blog.

2003-01-05T17:36:00.000Z

Dialectics is an amusing machine that leads us (in banal fashion) to the opinions which we would have held in any case.

End of cross blog citation in honor of Fishrush. (Go here to begin this thought)

2002-08-13T02:57:00.000Z

Um, where is the post I posted here earlier today? Anyway, I thought I had psoted an advance notice, taken from Scott Rosenberg's weblog, of a Salon dual-review of two books, one of which is Small Pieces. But that post doesn't seem to be here. Maybe I fucked it up. But the article is up now, lead story on salon.com -- an excerpt:

But the same people who got the Internet business so wrong got the Internet story wrong, too. IPOs and e-commerce and "network effect" growth rates were dazzling ephemera. But while magazine editors' eyes were transfixed by the business's convulsions, big things were happening under their noses: E-mail was transforming the workplace and the social landscape. Personal Web sites became "advertisements for myself" for the masses. "Communities of interest" -- devotees of certain obscure handicrafts; critics of certain large companies; followers of certain public policy debates -- formed and splintered and reformed in numbers too great to compile. New galaxies of communication coalesced, far off the familiar big-media grid.

It's this story that's addressed by "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" -- an odd but wonderful series of essays by David Weinberger about how profoundly the Net is changing our lives. "Bamboozled at the Revolution" is trade-magazine reporting; "Small Pieces" is armchair philosophy. Still, you can learn far more about why and how the media lost their way online from Weinberger's musings on the nature of Web reality than from Motavalli's chronicles of boardroom chaos.

2002-07-14T04:49:00.000Z

That metaphor seems strangely apt. If you put a million monkeys without diapers in a room filled with word processors, surely it wouldn't belong before they produced a book better than this one.

I don't know about that. The book has been out for awhile now. And it seems to have taken the above solitary monkey a rather long time to start flinging his shit around.

2002-07-10T08:04:00.000Z

Judging by the stuff a google search for his byline uncovers, Mr Futrelle specialises in whinging his way from one fluffy dotcom mag to another without ever saying anything worth remembering.

You can get away with writing sniping pieces , but only if you are witty and the target deserves it.

Brush off this gnat and move on to those who appreciate you- apart from AKMA, I said nice things about you here for example...

2002-07-09T15:50:00.000Z

Mr. Futrelle writes, if that is what this fact-free riffology may be called, for Money. I see AKMA has offered a far more constructive comment over on his blog.

2002-07-09T13:49:00.000Z

Yikes, that's not baiting, it's snagging.

2002-07-07T20:25:00.000Z

You want some David-baiting? There's a savage review in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26278-2002Jul4.html Now that's David-baiting!

2002-06-25T14:38:00.000Z

SHAMELESS MEMIC PROPAGATION...
The Andrea James Interview is available today for your reading enjoyment. Check it out, and link-it-if-ya-like-it! Thanks
-fp-

2002-06-18T21:47:00.000Z

An article today shows how Bush invented the hyperlink.

(Dave baiting? Moi?)

2002-06-18T12:21:00.000Z

Sorry if I've blurred a couple of different senses of links that should be kept distinct. On one level, we posit links as connections between people - as Kevin and David and I had in mind in speaking of connotation, affinity, etc. These occur via voice, interpretive inferences from collections of links, etc.. I think Alex Golub zoomed in on this in his piece about SPLJ. What struck me then, and comes into play here now, is that this all lies in the area of interpreting links - the hermeneutics of links.

There is also the rudimentary functionality of links - what Ward calls the grammar - having to do with the the simple on/off way they work and how we use them. On the level of the current state of the code, we either 1) link or 2) do not link. If there is a link, we either 1. click, or 2. do not click. (More accurately, we have a few other "options" - we can run the mouse over and get an idea of where we would go if we clicked, and we can click and open a new screen (addition), rather than replace what is on the screen with a completely different screenful'o'content (substitution). I do both of these quite a bit.)

Does it help to try to keep these two senses of links distinct? If not, then I'm more confused than I thought. At the moment,I know of no quantum link thing - e.g., no way to mouse over and have the the new text/image/whatever superpose itself without replacing or displacing the linking site. Nor is there a way right now for a link to intelligently update. Suppose Alex had updated his thoughts on David and linking, and that I have not seen the update. My link from back when I wrote about his original piece does not have the intelligence to look for updates in Alex's stuff. It is static. If Shelly's blog thread thing gets going, it might offer a new alternative here.

I love the Borges piece - much Monty Python there. But doesn't the humor reside in its playing off of the notion that taxonomies have general and shared status among users? If everyone "promulgated" his/her own taxonomy, would it still be taxonomy?

2002-06-18T09:14:00.000Z

Dave, I was referring to Tom's use of 'links' in the sense of connections or correlations, perceptions of affinity (at least, that is what I think he meant). Tom, in response to your earlier point about literary critics anticipating the virtualisation of real place, I can see what you are getting at, but Brad's point was that while the deconstructers were inventing ever wordier and more reflexive jargon to describe the putative social construction of reality, a different reality was indubitably being socially constructed online. Another quote from late 1995:
Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much - if at all.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that. But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.

The Web is going to be very important. Is it going to be a life-changing event for millions of people? No. I mean, maybe. But it's not an assured Yes at this point. And it'll probably creep up on people.

Steve Jobs in late 1995

2002-06-17T15:05:00.000Z

I'm getting lost and I don't want to be because you're talking about something really important. Allow me to recapitulate so you can tell me where I'm going wrong:

We take the dumb-ass tests because we are looking for others like us? Ok, got it, although aren't they a postmodern exercise in irony because of the implicit contradiction between the supposed richness of the result and the tawdry, multiple choice technique they use? Anyway, so we're looking for links to others. (Nice birdsong trope, by the way.) But Tom objects that links on the Web tend to be binary. Say wha'? E.g., the links within a blog entry tend to be richer than that. For example, Kevin's link to the Borges piece occurs within a provocative, voice-ful piece about links and collections. Further, the linked page provides more context for understanding Kevin and his blog entry. No binary-ness here. Even the blogrolodex, typically consisting of nothing but names, is contextualized by the blog page and in turn contextualizes that page. But, Kevin, when you say "The kind of links you are talking about are more likely to...", what kind of links do you think Tom is talking about? I think this is where I'm getting lost. Contextualize me, please!

(Considering I hate the term "contextualize," I'm certainly using it a lot today. Shoot me before I say "prioritize.")

2002-06-14T00:13:00.000Z

The point is that the links on the web are created by people, so they can be as allusive or nuanced as you like. Connotative connections are harder to represent,a s they need more description, but as we can all create and promulgate our own taxonomies now, the chances of something subtler being found is higher. The kinds of links you are talking about are more likely to show up as an essay describing the links between two hard-linked works. What woudl show up as a classical allusion for the literary elite can now be directly connected to a telling of the tale, whether by an explict link or through the emergent intrasubjective indexes of Google.

What we need is a good way to express collections rather than links.

2002-06-13T16:18:00.000Z

I fear I have to agree about these taxonomical games. They are calls, and much more rudimentary ones than those transpiring among actual birds, bees, etc. But yes, "looking for links among ourselves" is one of the big things going on here, and I will try not to listen to that wretched song in my head as I add, there might be a bit of a conundrum here. The links that I suspect turn out to matter, over time, are those created via intersubjective relationships - i.e., wit, tone, style, the connotative stuff of expression. Whereas, links on the Web tend to be binary, on/off, hot-or-not kinds of binary data links, i.e., denotative.

Is there a sense in which the geekly Web in its current form works ''against'' (or at least does not work "for") complex connotative connections?

2002-06-13T15:17:00.000Z

Identity: DIY only
I read Burningbird's item about categorizing her blogroll for a day, and can concur with the sense of wrongness she felt. I considered it briefly once, but I'm even slightly uncomfortable with the "Tech" category in mine, given that Dave Winer isn't always tech-oriented, and Doc Searls often is, for example. The problem is that blogroll categories made for our own utility will be construed by others as labels.

On the other hand, many of us are drawn to self-quizzes that categorize us. I took the beliefnet test and the political quadrant test too. The difference is that they're self-initiated. When we post the results -- usually without taking them too seriously -- maybe we're looking for commonality. They're another identifying birdcall to send out as we look for links among ourselves.

2002-06-12T19:34:00.000Z

Dave, I could probably come up with something, but would it be authentic? I'd hate to pollute this discourse with Dave-baiting asides.

AKMA, Dorothea & Burningbird have been writing a lot about identity and categorising people.

One of Bloggers lapses a few days back lost a post I wrote on this kind of thing, referring to Richard Bartle's Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds . Bartle wrote the Essex MUD - which was my introduction to network-mediated communication in 1985 (GROGGS and Bolo came shortly afterwards). Available only between 2am and 7am, it probably helped associate staying up late with enjoying computers for me).

Bartle divides the kinds of players into:

Achievers (Diamonds) who try to score the most points in the game
Explorers (Spades) who dig for obsure features and details
Socialisers (Hearts) who play to meet people and chat
Killers (Clubs) who use the game to impose on others

He goes on to decribe how to construct your games to attract a sustainable and stable mix.

Mapping these categories into weblogs, email and so on is worth a try...

2002-06-12T13:59:00.000Z

Will you bastards please say something I can disagree with?

2002-06-12T02:49:00.000Z

I think extended deep conversations are simply a rarity, regardless of the medium. Could that have to do with some kind of power-law distribution too? But I still want to say "oh yeah!" to your notion, Tom, that these web conversations are getting us off our butts... er, I mean getting our butts off the couch and to the writing desk. I celebrate the fact that the Internet now enables these discussions to occur globally and asynchronously in groups, often semi-spontaneously, i.e. without the formal hosting that The Atlantic Monthly provided to James Fallows and Todd Gitlin recently, for example, or between readers and authors in magazines' Letters sections. This is unprecedented.

Regarding the jittery search for a lingua franca, though, it's common for me to receive a frivolous interjection in a budding serious face-to-face conversation, most often in casual group conversation, where heavy topics aren't so welcome, and maybe moreso among smart people. (Or maybe it's just because I buttoned my shirt wrong.) People want to show their wit and lighten things up, particularly in groups larger than two. Hmm, but it seems the thinkers we gravitate around manage to be thoughtful and deep and witty, sometimes in the same breath. David's conference presentations are fantastically pointed and funny at the same time, for example. There's also a fine balance that distinguishes the masters of the medium, between respectful replies to serious inquiries and humor. But yes, some people may raise the videocamera or funhouse mirror in defense. And down with detached irony! Irony is OK, but detached irony is definitely out. We're in this to be attached.

2002-06-11T19:29:00.000Z

I find the piece Kevin cites quite compelling, even as it nears its 7th anniversary of publication. The author, Brad DeLong, goes on to say:

There have long been speculations about how the electronic shadows made possible by the computer and telecommunications revolutions will acquire the intensity of effect, the immediacy, the complexity and the depth to become--in a certain sense--real. That afternoon in the Valley Life Sciences Building was the first time in my life that I had compared a place in the real world, the UCMP, to its virtual electronic image in cyberspace--and found the real world lacking, found that the real world experience lacked, compared to its virtual electronic image, the intensity of effect, the immediacy, the complexity, and the depth necessary for reality.

(A bit further on, he pooh-poohs a literary fellow for failing to register this, when a case might be made that literary theory registered this before it occurred.)

I believe this has something to do with Steve's struggle, but it's not easy to map a clear path between them. I suppose one way of looking at it is, yes, you can view the space of a blog as a theater in which we present vivid anecdotes or scenes from our lives. But if blogs, or other web modes, are simply slightly faster tableau vivantes of hallowed 18th century pedigree, then so exactly what is the big deal? What is more interesting is when the events, rather than being reported on a blog or web site, instead seem to occur there. My feeling is there is a way in which we are coming out of a long dumb silence in which we largely played the role of inflatable couch potatoes with ATM cards. There is a wooly, but uneasy, exuberance about the conversations being held across blogs etc. Right now, many of the exchanges exhibit a sort of maladjusted stutter between enthusiasm and passion on the one side, and detached irony and stuided irrelevance on the other. My suspicion, and it's only a guess, is that this happens when a bunch of very smart people attempt to arrive at a lingua franca in which they can communicate richly, or fatly, as David might say. An effort to find a way to speak. So many really interesting exchanges seem to get truncated - I think in part because people are still uncomfortable giving up the role of videocamera-wielder for that of conversant.

2002-06-11T08:20:00.000Z

The Shock of the Virtual
I stood in the stairwell. I looked at the few-very impressive-fossils. I thought to myself, "Let's get back to my office computer, so that we can link to http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/expo/dinoexpo.html and see the real University of California Museum of Paleontology."

"The real museum," I thought, "has audio narration by the discoverers of dinosaurs. The real museum has many more bones--a Diplodocus skeleton, for one thing. The real museum has detailed exhibits on dinosaur evolution and geology..."

"No-wait."

"This is the real museum. The Internet Web site http://ucmp1.berkeley.edu/expo/dinoexpo.html is just the 'virtual' image--an electronic reflection--of this place."

And that was when I felt I needed a consulting philosopher. I needed a consulting philospher real bad...

Well, it took 7 years, but David is here...

2002-06-10T13:08:00.000Z

Tom, your reiterated post in your blog today makes me want to comment that I entirely agree with that third point (I think it's David that you barred from agreeing, if I understand correctly). I want to respond to your statement "... I don't necessarily think this need occur in the form of a re- or pre-hearsal with an audience in mind" with a clarification: My struggle is to keep this simultaneous how-can-I-blog-about-this thought (like seeing a vacation through a videocamera) from happening, particularly when the subject is just a captivating life occurence. When the subject is, instead, a long or deep-running thought, then we're entirely in agreement, and your point about the gathering of the thought from other blogs, like some slime mold in the pre-migration stage, is particularly apt. (To AKMA, regarding a much earler entry in your blog about Wolfram's book: slime mold behavior is fascinating. They're just in bad need of rebranding under another name. Right, Kevin?)

2002-06-10T08:20:00.000Z

Well, I finished Wolfram's book today (the front of it anyway- the back is the same thing with exhaustive footnotes, as befits 10 years work that aims to overthrow scientific thought).

If you take his closing claim at face value, the rule 110 1-d cellular automaton is equivalent in complexity to human thought (and the rule 30 one could do your trick instead of pi too).

However, you can't use them as a shortcut,as they would take as long to run as thinking it up in the first place...

2002-06-10T00:44:00.000Z

Tom, my Kabbalistic approach actually started with an anagram. Since you (reading between the lines) asked, I'll reveal my most secret method: Knowing that David has a penchant for anagrams, I searched through "muse of cliches" and quickly found "come fish clues", so I knew I was onto something. Searching further I found "self sum choice" -- clearly what I was really looking for -- and this launched the vast mathematical excursion that finally led me to the pi-related discovery that we might call "four and twenty blackbirds", or "small pieces, neatly sliced". [OK, I promise to stop this nonsense. Kevin, I think pensieve is cool too, and it reminds me a little bit of Dave Rogers' post about the dreaming metaphor.]

2002-06-09T20:56:00.000Z

Kevin, I like what Cory says, but it sort of limits blogging to moving bits around, where I seem to see transformation at work. The pensieve is cool.

Steve, then David could not have been channeled by the Muse of Cliches, since it must have been Algorhythmia, vatic inspirator of syncopated pi-throwing exhibitionists. Who happens to be the sister of Algorhymnia, the cliche who invented the internet. Glad to have gotten that worked out.

2002-06-09T15:30:00.000Z

Picking up on David's veiled hint about an alternate to the hermeneutical method, I tried another approach and discovered this (David, you sly dog): if you take the sum of the ASCII values for the phrase "We're writing ourselves into existence on the Web." and multiply by pi taken to the 301000th decimal place (sans decimal point), you get the entire SPLJ book in ASCII.

I've also found that there always exists a sub-sequence of the digits of pi for which, using a formula similar to that above, David's phrase can be used to generate the entire contents of any weblog in the daypop top 40. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this, but blogger.com won't stay up long enough for me to type it here.

2002-06-08T06:38:00.000Z

Tom, Cory describes his blog as his 'outboard brain'.

Personally, I like the Harry Potter idea of the pensieve - a pool of memories that others can dip into.

Of course, what Harry really needs is Google - 'The Goblet of Fire' would be half the length if he had a usable search engine instead of having to sneak into the restricted section of the library in the middle of the night wearing an invisibility cloak....

2002-06-08T04:21:00.000Z

A few quick points in catching up:

1. David, if you're going to keep on agreeing with everyone at the first sign of controversy, how are we ever going to stage the Agon of Agons, the war of words, the battle of wits, the agreeable disagreements that solve world hunger, or help pass the time?

2. What's more, I disagree with your claim that the Muse of Cliches (Klipsaccherie) authored your statement. I think Steve was more correct in saying that you meant something by it that not only is not cliched, but must be taken in the context of SPLJ (and perhaps SPLJ jr.) if it is to be taken at all. Resonant phrases aren't bad, just dangerously liable to be hijacked by those in search of anthems or slogans.

3. I will disagree with both you and Steve on the matter of blogging as an incitement to organize experiences that otherwise may have escaped recording. Actually, I do not disagree with that. I think blogging is inciting people to capture epiphanies, images, memories that might otherwise have gotten away. But I don't necessarily think this need occur in the form of a re- or pre-hearsal with an audience in mind. One of the best things to come out of it for me, anyway, is the experience of reading across a bunch of blogs and gradually forming a perception or observation which is partly based on that reading, and partly on ideas or insights that might have formed years ago, but only now seem to find a venue for delivery. That's sort of what blogging does - deliver one of thoughts, memories, etc. that otherwise might have languished for want of venue and impetus. Don't you dare agree with this!

2002-06-08T00:31:00.000Z

[saving early and often...]
What a tough job it must be for the Muse of Cliches: inspiring brand new commonplaces.

Though the framing in narrative reinforces what might be forgotten, internal narrative can get in the way of the groove, you know? My richest memories are of whole sensory/emotional experiences. If I'd been trying to be a back-seat journalist at the same time, I would've missed something. Maybe it's just me. I'm terrible at multi-tasking. But is the lack of intervening auto-narrative why childhood memories are so strong? Maybe, but it's probably also the replaying of the memories to ourselves and others that keeps them strong over the years. The narrative needs to come later. Separation of blurts and state.

2002-06-07T21:57:00.000Z

[What I posted an hour ago apparently didn't make it through Blogger.com's Random Frustration Synthesizer. Damn. Here's sort of what I think I said:]

I hereby renounce any special standing presumptively accorded me as the author of "We are writing ourselves, etc." It was merely the Muse of Cliches speaking through me. The various hermeneutical exegeses offered in this gang blog outweight whatever I might have had in mind.

As for Steve Y's drive time experience: Isn't this what we all do? We rehearse our day to see how it will sound in the telling? Except now we are all writers and we're telling our stories not to our weary spouses but to friends and strangers. And they're writing back. Isn't what's old about the Web at least as important as what's new?

[And then I said something else. I can't remember what it was, but I do recall thinking that it was staggeringly clever and ineffably profound. Oh well.]

2002-06-07T14:53:00.000Z

There's a sort of Heisenbergian problem to blogging that I noted awhile back. I came across it this morning as I was driving, just enjoying the rain and the music -- "hmm, how would I write about this?" I've also felt a tug to blog, even when uninspired, just to keep my small audience from going away. How did that happen? I started out just blogging as a way to organize my own thoughts and interests, with the self-imposed vetting of considering potential readers. Having people respond and interact has made my blogging a community thing-in-itself, not simply me-on-the-web. Blogging does help me reflect carefully on what's important to me (but for me only certain things, and not even the deepest personal things -- I'm probably more private than most), and in that sense, something of me comes more fully into existence. But it also has its own separate motivations that are inextricably part of the fabric.

We can look at all the arts -- writing, music composition, music performance, painting, etc. and ask to what extent the act is influenced by the relationship to an audience. Of course within each, there's large variation from person to person, just as there of course is in blogging. But that begs the question (uh-oh, rue this, baby) "is blogging art?".

So, while I think "writing ourselves into existence on the Web" is a great resonant phrase (just a little too long for a bumper sticker) it's not quite on the mark when you get down to the details. Not that David intended it to be -- it's we who picked it up just because it did grab us.

2002-06-07T00:12:00.000Z

You may rue the day, Kevin. I'd welcome some discussion of: "We're writing ourselves into existence on the Web." On its face, does it not seem a bit blandly unproblematical to adequately address the representation of the self in a networked environment? Too...conflict-free? Of course, a worry-wort could easily fix that, saying, "It might be an expression of satisfaction, but might it not be a too great a stretch to experience it as setting off alarms? What if we change writing to painting? -- 'We're painting ourselves...into a corner...on the Web...' ''

It seems fair to ask, is this self-writing always an affirmative proposition? Is there some reason writing should be allowed off the hook of being examined in all its effects and implications, just like any other human act?

I've got a bunch of even dumber questions, like: what's the difference between "we" and "ourselves"? And, is that "ourselves," or "our selves"? But in the absence of any evidence of conflict, I'll sleep on them.

2002-06-06T07:16:00.000Z

This is slowly turning into a monologue here - wake up!

2002-05-29T13:38:00.000Z

The EFF parody 'The Mickey Mouse Club' to fight the CBDTPA.
Cory explains what parody is.

The phrases 'Mickey Mouse Copy Protection' and 'Mickey Mouse Computer' need to enter the language in this context - as in 'Do you want a Mickey Mouse computer that stops you making music?'

2002-05-28T06:44:00.000Z

From my referrals log (among all the links from Andrew's more successful one) I see that someone is compiling a list of weblogs that mention SPLJ but missed this one. Odd.

2002-05-28T06:32:00.000Z

Steve, I have friends,family and co-workers I meet and socialize with live too, but they don't always want to talk about Nietzsche and Heidegger's influence on the web, or Connectivity as a commodity though Andrew's jokes go down well in both places.
Hearing about Andrew's website today, our guests asked what I write about on my blog and I found it hard to say exactly - hard to map this stuff into that conversational space, without the ability to reflect and crosslink.

I obviously got the wrong end of the stick about 'living well' - I thought you meant it in the sense of living virtuously. That's one of Stoppards from Professional Foul - 'John eats well, but he's a lousy eater'.

Glad to see from the AKMA exchange that you read Nonzero - I'd love you to help me resuscitate my moribund Nonzero blog - and encourage this lot to read it too. And talking of projective geometry and religious thoughts, I'm about a quarter of the way through "A New Kind of Science" and it is interesting from a scientific point of view so far. I'll let you know when he gets into theology.

2002-05-28T00:19:00.000Z

Thanks for the invitation.

When I wrote that seeming heresy
We're trying to substitute for what we really need socially. "Writing ourselves into existence" is a poor substitute for just living well.
it was the end of a week of pecking away at the corporate keyboard waiting for that paycheck kernel to fall through the chute. After a refreshing weekend of live human socialization (no cover charge! step right up!) and being outdoors (the heck with your just-posted inland version of Sea Dirge, David :-), and the cheap sagacity of a little distance, I want to modify what I said.

It should've been entirely first person singular. But the basic statement stands. "Writing myself into existence" is for me a poor *substitute* for face-to-face socializing and other good solid corporeal doings -- i.e. what I too-narrowly called "living well". I've found weblogging really rewarding in its own right*. It can even be richly social -- rich in that we usually take time to be thoughtful, and social when a blogthread gets going. But if it's really social contact I need, it'd be better to pick up the phone and arrange a lunch with a friend than to fire up Movable Type. Don't you think?
Hey, anyone in the Boston area want to have lunch?

*I wrote the following to AKMA earlier (part of a longer conversation): "But when we examine a phenomenon like blogging (or this email exchange), it's an amazingly wonderful thing that lets us be even more ourselves and as David W. put it so well 'write ourselves into existence'."

2002-05-25T14:20:00.000Z

Telecomm More...

Vergil Iliescu has inaugurated his blog with a reflection on the telecommunications story. Vergil once was a telecom guy and recalls being told explicitly: "We in Telecom must not be reduced to just carrying the bits - that will make us just a commodity!". (He also has some provocative thoughts about the nature of consciousness.)

Meanwhile, Kevin Marks has posted further comments. He has some great stuff there, although I insist that we're not disagreeing very much. The major point of disagreement is that he thinks that there's a good, solid business selling commoditized connectivity (a "stupid network") whereas NetParadox (Isenberg and my site) says that it's a more attractive business to sell services over a tuned network. We don't agree that there's a business selling commoditized connectivity.

Last but not least, I liked Andrius Kulikauskas's report on what his group came up with during my session at Connectivity 2002. I'd asked the audience to break into groups and come up with a story that would explain why we need to keep the Net open. Here's what his group came up with:

1) What is the technology?

All you need to know is that Transport and Content are two very different things.

2) How does it work?

Any assumptions that Transport makes about Content will limit the market opportunities.

3) How could we cripple it?

They're placing a ceiling on our imagination.

4) What could we do with it?

We want infinite growth of imagination, making for an infinite variety of opportunity.

2002-05-25T13:31:00.000Z

Steve Yost is a friend of mine ... the sort of friend you actually meet for lunch now and then in the real world we've all heard so much about.

Nevertheless, let me complete the quotation Steve pings: "We're writing ourselves into existence on the Web." If that's not what I actually said, it's what I actually meant. No either/or is required.

2002-05-24T18:53:00.000Z

Blur Circle: Tribe or universe
We're at a discontinuity in history. We've suddenly (by historical standards) become connected globally, yet are often isolated. The social entities we form are dispersed and often transient. Our attentions are so drawn by our jobs that we have little community in our communties.

That's part of the appeal of this mostly-broadcast medium of weblogging. We're trying to substitute for what we really need socially. "Writing ourselves into existence" is a poor substitute for just living well.

B!x, can you invite him to join in here? I think that writing ourselves into existence can help teach us to live well.

2002-05-23T16:54:00.000Z

If you can't brag to friends, then who can you brag to? Library Journal's review of SPLJ (5/15) apparently is really good. All I have are a couple of blurb-worthy quotes: it's an "insightful social commentary on the profound meaning of the Web" and "This is a solid, penetrating philosophical analysis of the Web whose ideas will heat up the chat rooms and news groups. Highly recommended." Woohoo!

You may now carry on with what you were doing...

2002-05-20T16:41:00.000Z

On Sunday, May 19, 2002, at 09:26 AM, Christine Hall wrote:
Hi

I visited SMALLPIECES.BLOGSPOT.COM, and noticed that you're not listed on some search engines! I think we can offer you a service which can help you increase traffic and the number of visitors to your website.

I would like to introduce you to TxxxxxxMxxxxx.net. We offer a unique technology that will submit your website to over 300,000 search engines and directories every month.

Dear Christine,

I don't give a fig about 300,000 search engines. There is one search engine that matters, and it is called Google, and it ranks smallpieces.blogspot.com very highly. Note this search

That is us at number 4 out of 2,400,000. I tried searching for your company, and it didn't show up very highly, except for complaints about spam.

Google crawls us daily, and even being linked here can do wonders with your Google ranking (Andrew is now number 3 on a search for 'funniest stories' - thanks Tom) which is why I have not included your URL in the entry, because your tactics are the complete antithesis of the ideas about authentic voice and emergent online community that we discuss here.

Please read the book we're discussing, then read the Cluetrain Manifesto and Gonzo Marketing before bothering us again.

2002-05-20T00:27:00.000Z

Dave wants a tool to organise hyperlinks. I'm using one at the moment that fulfils all his requirements - Blogger:

Create a blog (or a blog per category - folders in your parlance)
*Within the browser (tool bar or whatever) invoke the app and store an URL and a comment in folder
Use the BlogThis tool to do this.
* Arbitrarily create and nest folders
OK, nesting doesn't work, but you can use keywords or multiple blogs. Nesting sucks anyway because you have to remember which folder its in, and I find most things belong in many folders at once. If you have used iTunes or OS X mail, you'll recognise this technique - tag everything, then filter on the tags. (If you haven't used iTunes, you owe it to yourself to try it out - it's like Google for your record collection).
* Be able to browse and search the archive
Have a look at that search box on the bottom right of the blogger page. Or use google
* Doesn't lock the info away in a way that makes me totally dependent on the app provider
Well, its in a database, but mirrored in HTML on a server of your choice, and cached by Google.

I'm sure Radio Userland would be just as good for this too, and does have hierachies, as it's all built around outlines.

2002-05-18T08:01:00.000Z

Jeanene did it, Dave did it, Akma did it. Encouraging a second generation of bloggers is the coming trend, and they catch on very quickly.

My son Andrew (7) is the latest to sign up. He wants you to tell your friends to link to him to increase his Google PageRank....

2002-05-16T16:30:00.000Z

[I'm cross-posting from my blog, thus violating all rules of netiquette]

Denise Howell gives Small Pieces an excellent write-up in her law-centered blog, Bag and Baggage. Thanks, Denise!

It's going to take a bit longer to thank Alex Golub for his review since it's not a review so much as a critical piece. In the best sense. In fact, it is a superb response to the ideas in the book. He kicks at the spots in my "argument" that most need kicking and, most important, he laughs at my jokes.

Alex is an anthropology grad student at the Univ. of Chicago who maintains an excellent site about Hans Georg Gadamer. And although he engages with my book as if it were a moderately serious intellectual effort, he writes passionately, personally and with a ragged edge I enjoy:

The book starts small and you don't get the theory 'til the end: He spends most of the book shaking the big can of whup-ass he holds in his hand and giving you an I-dare-you, 'don't make me open this big can of whup-ass' look. And when he finally does open it in the last two chapters, you realize Why You've Been Fearing The Whup-Ass All Along.

He takes me to task most systematically on the question of knowledge. Alex thinks I approach this too much from the philosopher's viewpoint according to which knowledge is the defining human experience: "I think he places too much emphasis on 'truth' and not enough on 'body'. We do not just laugh - we cum." (I told my publisher I didn't have enough "fuck"s in the book!) Furthermore, he says I get stuck on "knowing" rather than seeing that underneath the change in knowledge is a more important change in the nature of convincing, i.e., rhetoric. To this I reply with an emphatic and enflamed: Yeah, that's right! So, take that! That chapter was trying to do something fairly specific: kick the pins out from the traditional view of knowledge that leads us to absurd, anti-human, anti-body ideas about what it means to be a human. On the other side of the Dam of Knowledge there's all of life, including jokes, porn, mysticism, mindless entertainment and RageBoy. I didn't mean to imply that on the other side of the Dam is only a different type of knowledge. At least, I don't remember meaning to imply that. In truth, I believe Alex has smoked out a genuine prejudice and consequent blinkering in the chapter.

Alex uses this to help make his larger case: "I guess what I'm saying is that philosophy can only advocate for lived experience for so long before it's out of its league." What else does Alex the anthropology graduate student think is needed? Hmm. Wait for it ... Anthropology!

David has taken us 90% of the way, but to get over the finish line he needs [not] only anthropologists to help him along, he needs artists and artisans - the people who weld, sing, dance, fuck - as well.

To which I reply, vehemently, that little vein in my forehead throbbing: Absolutely correct! I didn't intend this to be the last book written about the Web. We need poetry, science, religion, and every other way we humans have devised to understand ourselves and our world.

So, let me be clear: I love Alex's review. What a gift.

(Here's an amusing picture of Alex.)

2002-05-16T02:35:00.000Z

Miscellany:

1. Antonio, in my comment to you I was actually thinking of the "post-Kehre" Heidegger's anti-technology writings, especially on "The Framework" or however we translate it these days. There may be nothing wrong with being anti-technological, but his deep-seated distrust of modern technology, it seems to me, would have led him *not* to exempt the Web from his critique. There may also be nothing wrong with being an elitist but it does work against one's ability to jump into the Web.

FWIW, I agree with what you say about Heidegger's understanding of technology. The focus of his later writings on recovering the play of the fourfold, however, leads me to think that Heidegger didn't think the rescue could come from anything indoors. But, we'll never know.

2. Rick Levine has a title something like "Corporate Visionary" at a small-ish software company in Boulder. Tom Petzinger, as of a few months ago, was still working on his company supplying funds to biotech companies. Jeez, I hate to see Tom not writing.

3. SPLJ just got an outstanding review by Alex Golub. He attacks my "arguments" at the places they need to be pushed and he laughs at my jokes. It's more of a critical engagement than a review. Great stuff.

2002-05-14T16:25:00.000Z

Three quick things:

1. As long as we're talking "Where are they now," has anyone a clue what has become of Tom Petzinger, who wrote the intro to Cluetrain, and gave the book a major boost in his WSJ column?

2. Today's "Will Blogging displace Journalism" story is on MSNBC. A snip:

What makes blogs attractive—their immediacy, their personality and, these days, their hipness—just about ensures that Old Media, instead of being toppled by them, will successfully co-opt them.

Wouldn't it have been cost effective to simply buy and run a copy of one of the previous 39 versions of this story?

3. For a somewhat rhetorical argument that U.S. journalism and government are now siamese twins. see this piece by Richard Mynick. I don't know Mr. Mynick, but he certainly throws down the gauntlet. If he is correct, we can bet the farm that not a single media entity will pick it up. Therefore I suggest you do.

2002-05-14T07:50:00.000Z

Akma - Rick Levine is the silent partner... anyone heard from him since?

2002-05-13T23:16:00.000Z

Dave, let me insist about my (old) #2 (Heidegger and the question of the technology).
You say:
> Antonio, I agree with #1, but #2 seems to me to give the old Nazi too much credit.

My #2 is mainly about the 2nd Heidegger, the after WW2 Heidegger, the no more called neither to teach in a college Heidegger... And the old Nazi was the "Sein und Zeit" (1927) Heidegger, the one you state as "right" and you "use". He was more a "young" Nazi than an old one.

> I somehow think that the "rescue" he had in mind wasn't itself technological. As you know, he lived in a ski chalet in a medieval town in the Black Forest and seems to have considered technology as alienating.

And what's wrong with it? Technology has been alienating, and is still alienating, web excepted. And the web is the kind of technology you could easily accept to live in a ski chalet in a medievale town in the Black Forest, isn't it? You know very well how many writings he was able to create this way... and I wonder he would have been a great gangblogger from there...

> He was also not enamored of the "wisdom of the common man" and thought that the great turnings in how the world shows itself to us occur on the pivot point of poetry, not the rantings of the rabble.

mmmhh... feel like Chris Locke wouldn't be happy with that...;-) Poetry, yes, why not. The poetry re-emerging in our lives thanks to the "extreme technology" of the web too. In Heidegger technology's not a rescue in itself. Technology is the way in which truth is re-vealing itself in our age. As such a thing, technology could be at the same time the extreme danger (alienation) or a way for a salvation of us the human beings as human beings, of our essence. The web is (maybe) the "salvation face" of technology.

To make a short story long... What I have in mind is the necessity to go more deep into the critical application of Heidegger's analysis (not just the ones from Sein und Zeit) to the Web phenomenum. And I'm convinced of that on the base of the wonderful fruits you already got in SPLJ by considering only Sein und Zeit.

2002-05-13T21:53:00.000Z

"Writer David Weinberger was part of the triumvirate of Web-heads who came up with The Cluetrain Manifesto a few years back, which broadly outlined how businesses either 'got it' or got left behind."

Okay, which of you guys really doesn't exist?

2002-05-13T12:22:00.000Z

Oy veh. Sorry, Kevin. This was just dumb on my part. I've corrected the online version. Sorry!

(BTW, the LA Times gave SPLJ an excellent review yesterday. Woohoo! Note: It takes a free registration to see it.)

(Also, Richard Pacheter of the Miami Herald just weighed in with a very positive review.)

2002-05-13T09:35:00.000Z

Scott Rosenberg gets it.
Typically, the debate about blogs today is framed as a duel to the death between old and new journalism. Many bloggers see themselves as a Web-borne vanguard, striking blows for truth-telling authenticity against the media-monopoly empire. Many newsroom journalists see bloggers as wannabe amateurs badly in need of some skills and some editors.

This debate is stupidly reductive -- an inevitable byproduct of (I'll don my blogger-sympathizer hat here) the traditional media's insistent habit of framing all change in terms of a "who wins and who loses?" calculus. The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it into a symbiotic ecosystem -- in which the different parts feed off one another and the whole thing grows.
[...]
The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links. This carries pluses and minuses: At worst, it creates a lot of excess verbiage that only the most fanatically interested reader would want to wade through. At best, it creates a dramatic and dynamic exchange of information and ideas.

Is there any doubt that, on balance, we come out ahead? After all, the Internet has an infinite capacity to tuck excess verbiage away where no one need be bothered by it. But we all benefit from a more efficient means for seeing the world through someone else's eyes.

2002-05-13T09:09:00.000Z

Dave's latest JOHO is out.
In the email section he somehow repeats the original version of a little back and forth we had on my sadly-neglected Nonzero blog, implying I retracted it, when in fact we both forgot which blog it was on. Dave kindly corrected this in his blog at the time

Anyway, the point I was failing to make well by exaggerating and parodying was that Dave's orginal 'Web as Utopia' piece makes sense for those of us who are familiar with the web and have fond our place in it, but confuses those for whom it is an alien experience.

I know Dave doesn't really think that the web is 'a transcendent Platonic ideal of Socratic discourse'; I was exaggerating to make the point that we find online what we go looking for, and the web we see is a reflection of ourselves individually as well as collectively.

With 2 billion pages and counting, we can never see it all, and when we venture outside the well trodden paths of the personal web we know, we are more likely to make mistakes in our maps, and come back with 'here be dragons' written across entire continents and tales of men with no heads.

I think this effect, rather than malice or wilful misrepresentation is what is behind such things as journalists' clueless articles on weblogs or congressman fulminating against the net consisting mostly of porn and piracy.

This is part of what I got from reading SPLJ, and I'm glad I provoked Dave into such a clearly expressed retort about connection.

And talking of connecting, try out the Amazon connection browser that (appropriately enough) defaults to starting with SPLJ.

Just to make sure I don't lose this version, I'm 'syndicating' it to my own blog and nonzero too.

2002-05-09T13:36:00.000Z

Kevin--I too cheer every time our Hero's name is evoked on the topic--but it's frustrating when one gets the sense that the columnist involved hasn't gotten the clues. It begins to reduce David to a mere pasteboard prop for a generic "pro-Web" point of view--sort of the friendly theoretical counterpart of Andrew Sullivan (no insult intended, except to the columnists involved).

I'd begin my quibbling with SPLJ now that David's back and over his jet lag, except my blogging son has borrowed my copy of the book (which I loaned him with solemn adjurations that he not just take it up to his room and lose it among in the primeval forest of debris that makes his room a hazmat zone). He's a quick reader, so I should get it back soon, and he may even ask to join the gang.

2002-05-08T09:35:00.000Z

AKMA, perhaps I was just happy to see SPLJ's name in print. Journalists experience of weblogs will match their preconceptions, becuase of the Caliban's mirror effect - they will go looking for things they are familiar and comfortable with, as we all do. John C Mahler did sample 200 blogs, by reading Blogger's most recently updated list, so he probably got a better random sample then we have (though what he did with it was trite).

I just reread Stephen Fry's 'The Stars Tennis Balls' (retitled 'Revenge' for the American market through more cultural cringing), and in it two characters say:

'We are merely the stars' tennis balls, Ned, struck and banded which way please them.'
'You don't believe that. You believe in will. You told me so.'
'Like anyone with a sliver of humanity in them I believe what I find I believe when I wake up each morning. Sometimes I can only think we are determined by the writing in our genes, sometimes it seems to me that we are made or unmade by our upbringings. On better days, it is true that I hope with some conviction that we and we alone make ourselves everything that we are.'
'Nature, Nurture or Nietzsche in fact.'

Thermodynamics combines with information theory. Life pushes against the thermodynamic arrow of decay to disorder. The repetitive state that Nietzsche posited is the ultimate end of the universe, and Baxter pointed out that if one could encode consciousness in a computing machine, a finite state machine that repeated eternally without creating new information would be able to do so indefinitely, and that ultimately this would be the only consciousness possible.

Nietzsche did argue against the possibility of such a disembodied consciousness, as Dave and Heidegger do too, and I would argue that consciousness without learning is nothing. The only Nietzsche I read in full was 'Ecce Homo', and that was at least 15 years ago, so I may be misremembering. I remember it having a similar fascination to Chris Locke's recent EGR's, and about as easy to summarize.

2002-05-08T01:26:00.000Z

I See Dead Print Media

I have to say I think AKMA nails it when he notes that Shulevitz's "close reading" derives from the same narcissistic focus of attention that was operative with the other print commentators. It was amusing to see how, by framing the matter as blogosphere vs. blowdried media content, she attracted some street cred from the blogging community, without managing to shed any light on how that community actually works. (One notes that the bit of her piece that gets cited over and over is the stuff about "the increasing unreality of journalistic culture" - a theme that bloggers have been flogging for what seems decades already, yet when a print journo says it, it suddenly acquires Mosaic authority.)

Meanwhile one of the more interesting phenomena of blogging - the sort of kaleidoscopic formation of nano-groups, of momentary crystallizations of interest and fascination, the curious rise and deflation of one or another style or rhetorical mode - all this and more, suggestively outlined in Small Pieces, has yet to receive the first iota of attention from the print journos. Reminds me of about 1995 when large newspapers first began to look at the Web; all they could see was a potential competitor to the limited supply of eyeballs which they must attract in order to have any cash flow whatsoever. The entire phenomenon of the Net was reduced to "passing fad" "porno run rampant" and "invasion of privacy." There was nothing else to it. So now blogging is all about being a critique of Dan Rather. What does this say about the ability of the journosphere to "closely read" anything?

2002-05-07T23:07:00.000Z

Same Old

I wasn't so impressed with Shulevitz's article, Kevin. When are we going to see a print journalist, a print essayist spend enough time dealing with a variety of bloggers, not just Andrew Sullivan, please, to display some insight into what's going on? Blogs may not be the symptom of an electronic tipping point (as it were), but they're certainly noteworthy as more than just a response to monophonic BigCo media--which is what blogs look like only if you're inhabiting BigCo media world.

By the way, my understanding of eternal recurrence had less to do with dubious math or quantum physics, but more to do with Nietzsche proposing a way to think about everyday life (the unbearable lightness of being) that lends gravity to the ephemeral gestures of any given day. (One way to talk about this might entail drawing on Christian theological premises, but Nietzsche had pretty much burned that bridge; Schopenhauer beat him to the punch with karma; so he devised eternal recurrence as a way of regarding one's life that amplified the stature of the pedestrian.)

2002-05-07T07:33:00.000Z

At Large in the Blogosphere

A fairly smart piecea bout blogs, that cites SPLJ incisively. (Did we just do that to Nietzsche?)
No matter what a blog may actually say, its more visceral effect is to prove, again and again, the irreducible individuality of the blogger. Blogs provide a counterweight to the increasing unreality of mass journalistic culture -- its quality of having been processed beyond the realm of the recognizable, its frequent tone of unearned authority. They're the antidote to the blow-dried anchor, the unsigned editorial, the pronunciamento of the token credentialed expert. David Weinberger, in a smart new book about the Web called ''Small Pieces Loosely Joined,'' notes that human fallibility -- mistakes in movies, books and articles; the faux pas of public figures -- is one of the most popular topics of online discussion. In nitpicking, he says, we seek evidence of the man or woman behind the mystique: ''We get to kick in the teeth the idealized -- and constricted -- set of behaviors known as professionalism.''

2002-05-06T14:14:00.000Z

Love your castle reference, Kevin.

Nietzsche's use of the Eternal Return of the Same always struck me as really bad science in service of a not very interesting myth. I'm no stinking mathematician, but I suspect that there's really nothing to the idea that any sufficiently long random sequence inevitably must repeat itself. Nietzsche seized on this because he was looking for a way to impart some seriousness to life that his more serious anti-metaphysics stripped away. Eternal Recurrence means that we have to live our lives as if there was some consequence to them. Maybe. I haven't actually read anything by N in a long time.

What would our history be like if more philosophers hadn't died virgins? (The myth about N that I recall is that he had sex once and died of syphillis from the event.)

2002-05-06T06:57:00.000Z

I wrote a brief comment on Nietzsche's eternal return and its refutation on New Years day this year.
The idea that all history will be repeated, unchanging, eternally is a throwback to the pre-memetic world - where we cannot learn from each other.

The movie Groundhog Day makes the opposite case most eloquently - that repeating over and over again, we can learn from our own mistakes, and from others' and redeem ourselves as more fully human.

The novel Manifold Time takes an opposite tack - it implies the telos of history and an ultimate goal for mankind is seeding new quantum universes, as otherwise, once the universe succumbs to heat death and no new information can be created, all that will be possible is an eternally repeating set of states, and any remaining consciousness would need to be encoded in this way - repetitive, self-contained, eternal but lifeless.

Nietzsche is in some ways the philosophical equivalent of Ludwig of Bavarias castles - dramatic, initially impressive, rococo, influenced by Wagner, but ultimately empty of human society.

2002-05-05T23:44:00.000Z

David--I know you're dissatisfied with the "metaphysics" page, but there's some beautiful stuff there. The lapidary statement, "Because Web space is hyperlinked, it’s fundamentally moral," points so vividly to your sense of what's important about our situation. This, too, connects to some extent with Kevin's point about the persistence of what we doonline; it's as though Nietzsche's imp hadn't imposed on us eternal but eternal occurrence. Can we live with the flamebait we threw at our online neighbors--forever? That's one reason I try to treat flopnozzles with respect; I hate to see myself look an ass in retrospect.

I'd tie this in directly with Small Pieces itself, but my copy is at the office and I'm writing from home.

2002-05-05T20:59:00.000Z

Antonio, I agree with #1, but #2 seems to me to give the old Nazi too much credit. I somehow think that the "rescue" he had in mind wasn't itself technological. As you know, he lived in a ski chalet in a medieval town in the Black Forest and seems to have considered technology as alienating. He was also not enamored of the "wisdom of the common man" and thought that the great turnings in how the world shows itself to us occur on the pivot point of poetry, not the rantings of the rabble. It's for just that type of thinking that the deconstructionists have critiqued him. POMO is closer to the Web than Heidegger could get, I believe. On the other hand, his refusal to provide any specifics about "the rescue" may mean he would have been open to being surprised.

For my most explicitly Heideggerian, metaphysical approach to the topic of the Hope chapter, see http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/metaphysics/index.html, although I should warn you that I don't like this very much any more.

2002-05-04T02:03:00.000Z

1. The Web it's a whole new world. So new that you've to re-think the basic concepts of space and time. In re-thinking space and time in the web-mode you discover they resembles what Heidegger enlightened as the ontological formal structure of space and time.

2. Heidegger said Technology is the essence of our modern age. We can't fight against it, 'cause this is the kind of revelation of truth we are receiving as our own destiny. But he's no pessimistic at all about that. He seems to look forward for a Hope (last SPLJ's chapter): the Technology is still a revelation of Being, Wo
aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch, where danger is, grows also that which saves, là dove c'è il pericolo / cresce anche ciò che salva.

3. Maybe we're lucky enough to be-here and experiment this phase: technology (sub specie Web) saving the human beings from alienation, from the same alienation that technology did push at the extreme (the danger and that which saves).

4. I've to read "Hope" again. I think it's about that.

PS Please don't laugh too much at my poor English! :-)

2002-05-03T19:03:00.000Z

Making communication instantaneous isn't what the Web (using the standard Weinberger generalisation here) is about at all. It is about making it asynchronous and persistent.
Most existing communication methods are instantaneous (speaking to someone, phoning them, watching TV). But they are also ephemeral.

Letters, journals and books are the classic persistent asynchronous methods (see "I can read people's thoughts" below). These works are asynchronous in two ways - you don't both need to be present at once to share thoughts (this is the part that the Web hugely facilitates, as no physical medium needs to be either), but also that there is an asymmetry of effort - It took Dave at least a year to write SPLJ, but I read it in a few hours.

Email is intrinsicly more efficient than telephony because of these characteristics - this is most obvious with voicemail.

Although things on the Web come and go, most of them are out there somewhere (In Google's cache, or the wayback machine) and the relative speeds storage and connectivity are growing, we should assume that everythign we say online is kept somewhere. This is Dave's point about writing ourselves into existence, but it is also a new kind of Kantian imperative - assume that what you say online will always be available to others. If you are familiar with game theory and evolutionary psychology, you may recognise the 'iterated prisoners dilemma' argument - in a one shot choice, it may be logical to behave in an unfair or untrusting way, but when you are going to have to live with your actions and other's knowledge of them over time, the shadow of the future exerts a pressure to be nicer and more trusting.

One formulation I like is 'never say anything in email you wouldn't want your mother to read on the front page of the newspaper'.

2002-05-03T14:53:00.000Z

Kevin are you proposing the radical notion that parents should actually be involved in parenting? Interesting concept.
Kevin also said:

"I would argue that the idea that philosophy fails in the market is a peculiarly American one - renaming the first volume of Harry Potter to 'The Sorcerers Stone' from 'The Philosopher's Stone' being an egregious example."

Perhaps this is due to modern culture and affinity for the "Now" existance, but philosophy and intellectual concepts that take more than a sound bite to learn aren't as fashionable, that being said that the internet makes communication instantous, yet, ironicly also allows forums like this blog.

I was going to argue perhaps this isn't a place for philosophy, at least as mentioned in the book (p. 130) because it's an open inquiry to better understand certain concepts, but then it struck me that there is a bedrock of certainty in the group and that is the internet and it's importance. So perhaps we are philophizing with a hammer, to borrow a one thinker's phrase.

2002-05-03T06:29:00.000Z

Study Probes Kids' Web Porn Access

Small Pieces ideas percolate back from this committee:
"As a parent, it's important to acknowledge the Internet is a public place. You wouldn't let your small child wander around the airport by themselves and, by the same token, you shouldn't let them wander around the Internet by themselves," said committee member Winifred B. Wechsler, a consultant from Santa Monica, Calif.

Former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh [...]drew a parallel with swimming pools.
"Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences and deploy pool alarms. All of these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one's children is to teach them to swim," Thornburgh said.

Panel member Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago said that while Internet screening filters and law enforcement can help protect children, "Overreliance on those methods will lead to a false sense of security."

The study was welcomed by Judith F. Krug, director of the office for intellectual freedom of the American Library Association.
"I am particularly pleased to see that filters are not touted as the only solution, nor even the best solution," she said. "If you educate children you are developing an internal filter that is going to remain with them throughout their life."

2002-05-02T14:05:00.000Z

The perfume site Kevin points us to is as good an example of the debasement of language and culture as we're going to find. Wow. (So, can we say that the Attics are in debasement?)

BTW, Hegel is a music amplifier. That's the spirit! And Heidegger times out. How appropriate!

2002-05-01T21:24:00.000Z

I would argue that the idea that philosophy fails in the market is a peculiarly American one - renaming the first volume of Harry Potter to 'The Sorcerers Stone' from 'The Philosopher's Stone' being an egregious example.

The last CD-ROM I worked on before that particular bubble burst was an interactive version of the international best-seller "Sophie's World", and it was published in 12 languages.

This is what Joe Mackintosh wrote for it about Heidegger

Anyway philosophy is a perfume...

2002-05-01T14:06:00.000Z

Just as Plato was in olive oil, and Spinoza in lens grinding, so business and industry are metaphysicians in spite of themselves. The only problem is, not only do they not know this, they fail to appreciate the damage they're doing to human discourse and human imagination by not attending to the implications of their marketing, advertising and strategic metaphorics. Or the damage that they're doing to their own "careers" on earth by closing off all access to the roots of their own debased speech. I guess this sounds rather severe, but let's put it this way: we have a society that is under constant siege from the remnants of bowdlerized philosophy (in the language of marketing and more). The Jesuits used to say, "Give us a child at six years of age, and we have him for life." The Jesuits of Business have us by the scrota from before we're born, minimizing the chances of creating any independent headroom.

2002-05-01T00:03:00.000Z

Heideggerian and proud of it. Me too. (ok, except... me too!).
To write something philosophical was your fear, David. But you DID write something philosophical! Maybe it's the right time to tell people that a new opportunity arises: the business can become again "one of" the way to establish relations between us, the human beings! Maybe the business in the Web will be better done from philosophers than marketers! They say Plato engaged himself in the olive oil business, and he did so well he'd been able to finance all his long trips to Italy, Egypt and the likes...

2002-04-30T21:21:00.000Z

AKMA - Apology not accepted because you didn't do nuthin' wrong. The "gentle echoes" are more than that. SPLJ's metaphysics are best termed "Heideggerian." Thanks for pointing it out; in my fear of writing something philosophical (= boring, = fails-in-the-market), I tried to find different ways to sneak up on the issues. But I am Heideggerian and proud of it! (Well, except for the Nazi part. And the adulterously-sleeps-with-Hannah-Arendt part. Oh, and the lederhosen part. And the rest of it, too.)

2002-04-30T00:01:00.000Z

Hey, David--

Sorry; I didn't mean to suggest that you thought, "Heidegger solved every problem and was generally right"--simply that many topics in your exposition of Web reality generated gentle echoes of what I assumed was your appreciation for Heidegger. One of the many positive features of the book lies in its capacity to render a moving, humane version of Heidegger's philosophy--but i ascribe that version to DW, not MH.

I'm pretty firmly non- or anti-Heideggerian at a number of points, most points in fact, so it didn't occur to me that I might be heard as suggesting you were making a blanket endorsement.

2002-04-29T14:12:00.000Z

I'm baa-ack. Sort of. Still massively jetlagged...

Thanks for the generous posts in my absence. Now, wrt to Antonio and AKMA's:

Yes, I consider myself to be fundamentally Heideggerian. Now the question is what that means, and not just in terms of early and late Heidegger. For example, Heidegger was a rural, technophobic romantic who believed that authenticity was literally grounded in the soil - which, BTW, was a piece of his anti-Semitism since "the wandering Jew" was literally ungrounded.

But I don't think "Martin H. figured this all out years ago." He did figure out that meaning and being are not separate, that time is crucial to understanding anything important, and that explanations that fly in the face about how we actually live our lives are likely to be ridiculous. For me he undoes the damage done by Descartes. That's a lot to figure out. And it has guided my thinking ever since reading him as a freshman in college.

But there's also a lot Heidegger got wrong, IMHO. As many have noted, his lack of attention to the fact that we are embodied is a bit scary. And he has - to me - an impenetrable view about Being unfolding itself that scants the dialectical effect of the fact that we live in a material world that we've fashioned for ourselves; he could stand less Hegel and more Marx. I raise these two points among many other possible ones - hmm, wasn't he a Nazi? - because they seem to me to be important to understanding a technology like the Web.

So, I am pretty thoroughly a Heideggerian (of a sort) when it comes to metaphysics, i.e., what counts as real. I'm happy to classify SPLJ's metaphysics as basically Heideggerian. But, I don't think of SPLJ primarily as a metaphysics.

2002-04-27T22:47:00.000Z

The plug on the cover of SPLJ from Daniel Pink states that David's new magnum opus is "in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan..." McLuhan is one of those authors, like de Touqueville, that everyone quotes but no one reads -- and perhaps with Weinberger around, people won't have to.

McLuhan's most similar work is, I suppose, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which shares a structural relationship to SPLJ. McLuhan names most chapters after various disruptive media, like TV, and radio, (and some other less obvious media, like money and roads), concluding with automation, the chapter where he anticipates the web. In his most famous quote, he writes "Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village."

SPLJ echoes McLuhan, from the other side of the threshold. McLuhan was writing in the '60s, in the midst of the upheaval caused by TV and rock&roll, and only anticipating the future 'global computer automation' that SPLJ deals with. McLuhan is like Moses, who came to the river Jordan, but could not cross over. David is one of us, living in this new millennium, and approaching the 'new world of the global village' as a villager, with an intensely personal voice. McLuhan was not from the village, he was a visionary of another epoch of human history, and sounds tinny and strident, like a cheap AM radio, rambling in oracular prose from an almost Olympian, etheric, macroeconomic perspective.

Weinberger is nothing like McLuhan, except in subject, and his sense of the inexorable inevitability of us begin changed by the tools we use. His tone is conversational, while McLuhan exhorts from the pulpit; he illuminates from personal example (his experiences as Everyman, his book reading club, his sensibilities about other individuals making individual choices through the web), while McLuhan paints the sweep of human history in broad strokes with a big brush, hardly ever getting into the thoughts of real people. McLuhan is -- let's face it -- difficult reading, but Weinberger is engaging, funny, and touching: a good read. Weinberger is Spaulding Grey to McLuhan's William Blake.

But even such disparate approaches can converge, as the two come independently closer to the key impacts of a medium like the web, which certainly belongs to the club of potently revolutionary communication media, like the telephone and telegraph, and perhaps in the inner circle, like printing or phonetic writing.

McLuhan presaged the world in which we live, and in the final chapter of UM:EM he sets the stage for the moral issues that Weinberger considers: "It is a principle aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system. Our central nervous system is not merely an electric network, but it constitutes a single, unified field of experience. " McLuhan intuits the impact of the the web, in 1964. And, even more in tune with Weinberger, he writes "We are suddenly threatened with a liberation that taxes our inner resources of self-employment and imaginative participation in society. This would seen to be a fate that calls men to the role of artist in society. [...] Men are suddenly nomadic gatherers of knowledge, nomadic as never before, informed as never before, free from fragmentary specialism as never before -- but also involved in the total social process as never before; since with electricity we extend our central nervous system globally, instantly interrelating every human experience."

Weinberger is a man of our time, in our terms, a digital citizen, while McLuhan pointed the way into a cloudy, unknowable future like a lodestone.

There is another way that Weinberger is likely to parallel the history of McLuhan, and that is his influence both on popular culture and business planning. Weinberger's axe grinding in The Cluetrain Manifesto -- along with his co-authors -- has shaken up the mindset in the board rooms of many corporations. There is little doubt that SPLJ will have a similar, although more measured, impact on businesses approach to marketing to the new wired world.

McLuhan suggested the world would radically change as a result of a new disruptive medium, suggested the form that the change would take on society, and pronounced that this brave new world would be better than the old. Weinberger is living in the world being changed, and suggesting to us -- as individuals -- that we are each of us better off: more free, more engaged, and more likely to deeply understand ourselves and the world that forms us.

Actually, Weinberger goes further. We are better, not just better off, because of our participation in the web society. McLuhan was interested in comparing the society of his time with the society to come, and declared it would be better, but Weinberger makes it personal, because he knows that it is only through personal involvement, one interaction at a time, that we rachet up the connectivity that the web offers. It is not an invisible hand that is typing this blog review, but yours truly, investing my time and self -- sharing and interacting with the village that I call home. Weinberger understands that viscerally, because he is a denizen of my neighborhood, but McLuhan is a foreigner, a man out of time.

Perhaps we will only read McLuhan now for historical purposes, not for guidance. We can look to Weinberger for that.

2002-04-26T18:09:00.000Z

Hey, gang. Kevin hasn't been blogging in isolation--we've just been listening politely and appreciating his provocative offerings (I especially liked the quotation from Douglas Adams--I'll have to save that reference).

I promised David W. that I'd start naming my quibbles with the book once he got back from China, but since Antonio mentions the really quite thoroughly Heideggerian subtext, I'll join in and second the observation. I've never seen anything quite like it. Although David nods to Heidegger once or twice, he doesn't make any grand gestures to say, "Look, Martin H. figured this all out years ago, and he's generally right, let me explain it to you"--but instead composes a richly Heideggerian net-philosophy with hardly any explicit reference to Being and Time. Reading Small Pieces might almost lead you to infer that Heidegger was a pellucid, approachable author. That in itself is a noteworthy accomplishment--but David does much more....

2002-04-26T15:06:00.000Z

Hi all!
I've just finished the book, and it was worthy every single minute of reading. I'm the editor of the Italian version of Cluetrain Manifesto, and was anxious to read the last David's effort: nice job, and it - yes! - it moved me! Consider that I devoted my earlier studies to M. Heidegger's philosophy... what a joy to discover it wasn't wasted time at all!
It seems to me that Dave is underestimating Heidegger's influence on his job: not just about Time and Care (Sorge) and Knowledge, as he's admitting: what about Space, and Thing ("usability"...), Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), Togetherness (mit-Sein), shared World (in-der-Welt-sein), Death (Sein-zum-Tode), and Brokenness, Science..., isn't it Dave?
Another point is about Alienation and contamination from the Web to the Real World: I wrote something on that here.

2002-04-25T20:46:00.000Z

I finished the book last week, but I think I need to read it again before I write a full review. Small Pieces is definately the most heavy weight material released so far by the Cluetrain gang. Almost sociological in tone, good material to stir the brain-matter.

PS- Kevin you are not talking to yourself anymore, now you have another person's thoughts to read, but fear not it's generally considered light reading.

2002-04-24T17:59:00.000Z

OK, following my new policy of talking to myself in Gang blogs until someone joins in, here's something I stumbled across again when looking for another piece - Douglas Adams writing in 1999 on 'How to stop worrying and Love the Internet'.

A lot of the Small Pieces ideas are there too:

...people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

I do miss Douglas, but he has written himself into immortality on the net as well as on radio and paper. Reading dead people's thoughts needs their co-operation when alive.

2002-04-24T07:37:00.000Z

I can read people's thoughts.

Using an ancient technology, handed down over millennia, improved and refined along the way, I am able to read people's thoughts. And not just people nearby, or people I know. I can even read dead people's thoughts.
This gives me a great deal of power and knowledge - I can learn from their lives, their experiences, their dreams and fears, their insights and imaginings. I can study their successes and failures, learn from their great ideas and their mistakes, absorb their experiences, laugh at their jokes and wince at their pain.

This may seem like a scary idea - you may feel nervous and want to avoid me, but don't worry. I can only read your thoughts if you want me to. You need to be part of this too. You need to write your thoughts for me to read them.

That's right. I'm not talking about anything mystical or occult. Or perhaps I am - writing is an amazing technology; only slightly less amazing than language itself. To commune with others, breaking the bonds of space and time, is a wonderful privilege.

Small Pieces describes how a newer technology has made it easier than ever before to experience the thoughts of others and share our own. Truly the last thing out of the Pandora's Box of the Internet is this Hope.

(Yes, I finished the book today. Anyone else want to talk about it?)

2002-04-23T07:34:00.000Z

Hah! Think you can hide in Beijing? I went into Staceys in Cupertino and asked for it, and they had several copies. The shop owner's comment on being asked for it 'Yes we have it - sounds like it should be a novel, but it's filed under computers'.

2002-04-08T00:11:00.000Z

I'm beginning to understand Dave's subtle plan. By taunting me with a vapourous review copy, he is just encouraging me to ask for the book in all the bookstore in the Bay Area. Well, this may have worked yesterday (Borders, Sunnyvale), but I'm off to Las Vegas for NAB tomorrow, and finding a bookshop there is almost impossible (I tried last year with nothing to show for it but sore feet)

2002-04-06T13:46:00.000Z

I’m not yet deep enough in to SPLJ to be able to comment with any real usefulness on the substance of the argument. With two kids, four and two, who has time to read? I’m coming at this book in my own small pieces – a handful of pages at a time on the subway ride home or last thing at night.

But this is far from a bad thing. As it turns out – I need and want to read the book this way. Tom Peters on the jacket copy says it right: “This is a book to savor. Not to speed read.” Walk, slowly, through a small set of paragraphs. Stop. Re-read. Pause to grok in fullness.

So I can’t enter the discussion on content and thesis yet. But one thing I can say, is that the writing is startlingly beautiful. When Weinberger blogs, he blogs like the rest of us – scrambly, scribbled stream of consciousness stuff. But when he writes, man does he write. There is an economy of structure, a light touch that would make Jane Austen proud. Diamond bright sentences stop me in my tracks:

“The facts of nature drop out of the Web.”

“Time like that can spoil you for the real world.”

Even when the language lists close to lyrical, the images still strike with surgical precision:

“We’re falling into email relationships that, stretching themselves over years, imperceptibly deepen, like furrows worn into a stone hallway
by the traffic of slippers.”

For a warm Sunday hammock somewhere, I could immerse myself and draw deep draughts of David’s deliberation. Absent such leisure, I’m content to sample in small pieces, loosely joined. A book to savor, indeed.

2002-04-04T04:42:00.000Z

Happy happy joy joy

*tiny jiggy dance steps*

My review copy of SPLJ arrived today (thank you, David), and I’m utterly hooked. Even though I had already read almost the entire text online as it was being written; the ink is still clearly mightier than the pixel.

Not deep enough in to provide any penetrating comment or feedback as yet, but I love the fact that four pages into the darn thing he’s already dropping palindromes and quoting Monty Python’s “Ann Elk” sketch. Perfect. This is after all a book about the Web which, as we all know, is a medium (place? thing? groupmind?) almost entirely composed of Python quotes and word games.

For the record, I already like it so much, I’ve even bought a copy. Actually two – both Chapters and Amazon emailed today to say it’s on its way. I’m getting Weinberger atom spam.

OK. Dodging off to finish reading Larry Weber now, before I permanently flip my Weinberger groupie bit.

More l8r.

2002-04-03T23:45:00.000Z

Pardon my changing the subject, but since I promised about ten days ago to have my review of SPLJ in a day or so, I thought it about time I actually posted my take on David's book.

Now, go back to what you were saying. I'm catching up from my Holy Week backlogs, and this conversation is fascinating.

2002-04-03T18:57:00.000Z

A group blog certainly can be said to be a locus of multiple viewpoints and idea development. But when one gets to blogthreads, what I've heard David say is that he would like to see a way to capture the back and forth that occurs between blogs. This is something code perhaps will attain, but so far has not. Bond talks about the need for better blog aggregation, alluding to "hive mind." (I'll respectfully take this opportunity to distance my view from any such formulation.) What David and others seem to be wishing for is a means of capturing, spatializing, the development of perspective and ideation on the fly, as it were. Not having the slightest idea how that would be accomplished, I've naturally blogged about it here.

2002-04-03T07:50:00.000Z

Well, a group blog like this where you get multiple viewpoints, and idea development.

Maybe 'clusters' puts it better than 'centres'; the ideal of a University is a community of scholars and a centre of knowledge in that sense. There is a Senior Common Room feel to someof Dave and AKMA's extended meditations...

Dave has referred a lot to blogthreads recently, where debate goes back and forth betwen two or three blogs, rather than in an ad hoc one like this one.
The summary of teoma vs google's ranking algorithms was interesting in this context. Google ranks pages globally by incoming links, then winnows for keywords. Teoma winnows first, then examines links only between the winnowed pages. Google is looking for centres of trust, whereas Teoma is looking for centres of domain expertise.

Teoma fails my solipsist test though - I'm number 1 for Kevin Marks on Google, and nowhere on Teoma.

2002-04-02T21:47:00.000Z

There are a couple of revolutions happening right now in the weblogging world. Social writing and idea development - true joint authorship in a truly distributed way. The development of highly voiced centers of knowledge that will twist the org chart around new axes. Grassroots person-to-person journalism that substitutes multiple viewpoints for the pretense of objectivity. D. Weinberger on frontwheeldrive.

After reading this, I blogged about dumb media takes on blogging. But David's sketch raise further fascinating questions: e.g., the notion of "highly voiced centers" - are they always "centers" of knowledge, and what sort of centrality is this? Then, substituting "multiple viewpoints for the pretense of objectivity" prompts one to ask, where do these multi-views occur? Are they not between rather than in web sites? If that's the case how can one cite, or point to them? If they are in no particular place, what does that say about the place-ness of the Web?

2002-04-02T20:32:00.000Z

There is an evolutionary biology theory that the reason we have such large brains compared to other animals is for dealing with issues of whom to trust and share with - cheater detection and fairness are very important.

That this works online is because we are human online. With the Thomas Pacheco site, I was initially sceptical due to the number of online scams that revolve around sick children, but reading the site dispelled this. Once Elaine and Gary vouched for it too, that reinforced my trust.

2002-04-02T13:42:00.000Z

b!X writes:

What's the Internet for? To move bits. What's the Web for?
To connect us.

Nicely put.

You'll still be assailed on technical grounds - email isn't the Web but it's a severely important type of connection - but I really like the clarity of your formulation.

I also really like your entire article (is that what we call them these days?), b!X. I sometimes point out to audiences that the reasons we trust strangers' sites on the Web are the same reasons we trust people we've just met: we make a quick judgment based on their "voice." Can we be fooled? Absolutely. But more often than not, we're not fooled and our trust (or mistrust) is warranted. (Malcolm Gladwell wrote a terrific article a couple of years ago about research into how accurate our snap judgments are. If I weren't sitting in an Internet cafe in Beijing I'd go surfing for the reference...)

2002-04-01T01:57:00.000Z

FYI, while not specifically about the book, my latest entry on my new "long-form" weblog does make use of bits of the book as part of talking about trust.

2002-03-30T06:35:00.000Z

I would post something to Amazon, or here for that matter, but I am suffering a rather intense spate of boredom.

Not with the book. I think the aforementioned chapter on Perfection is one of the most crucial -- and straightforwardly described -- elements of the Web I've seen in print yet.

But I'm am astoundingly bored and disgruntled about anything I might attempt to write about it. Or anything else.

At least people are starting to post here. Now go post to Amazon, since I don't have it in me right now to say much of anything, heh.

2002-03-29T19:03:00.000Z

I'm about 1/3rd through, just getting into the Perfection chapter. I'll finish it this weekend and let rip on Amazon directly. I'm not through the perfection chapter yet but it prompted me to think about imperfections in software. Software is notoriously imperfect in the sense that it sometimes doesn't work the way it should (this is very optimistic I know - I work for a software company, cut me some slack), yet the whole point of using software is to make your life easier or more perfect. I've yet to see a software brochure murmur never mind holler "Our software never fails, never falls over and always works, basically."

I guess perfection in the context of commercial software development is to make release not too long after a deadline and one which works 'most' of the time. All to often I hear "there's no such thing as bug free" as if that's acceptable. It's acceptable in the context of the web given it's unmanaged state and so therefore it'll always be "a little broken" however not so with managed, organised and totally project managed to within an inch of it's life software development. I guess it's to do with deadlines and commerciality and therein lies another subject altogether which probably belongs on an open source discussion list. Anyway, that's what it prompted me to think about this afternoon. Great read so far.

2002-03-29T14:29:00.000Z

Will someone please write a review at Amazon? Anything at all? I'm feeling so lonely and exposed...

2002-03-29T14:20:00.000Z

I react with a shiver to these charts. First, Chris is one of my best friends so I don't like comparisons. Second, I really like both Gonzo Marketing and Bombast Transcripts. Third, Amazon is wacky; a couple of copies is enough to move you thousands - and tens of thousands - of points on their scale. Fourth, Gonzo zoomed higher faster at Amazon than Small Pieces. Fifth, Chris is one of my best friends.

(Let me save y'all the trouble of looking: Bombast is at 8,797 and GM is at 10,289. Tipping Point is at 152 in softcover and 206 in hardback. Who Moved My Cheese is at a well-deserved #32. The Who Moved My Cheese 2003 Calendar is at 807,228. Not that I pay attention to such things.)

2002-03-29T08:03:00.000Z

A tale of two cluetrainers:
Amazon rank of Small Pieces for last 7 days:

Amazon rank of Gonzo Transcripts for last 30 days:

My theory is that the title was misheard as 'Mall Peaches Juicy Loined', and it has been selling well in brown paper bags, and my postman has censored it.

2002-03-28T21:17:00.000Z

Not just a no-book zone. Netflix seem to take 5 days to send me DVDs, despite being less than 5 miles from their head office. And Airborne Express who were supposed to deliver my repaired iPod yesterday managed to stick a 'you were out' tag on the door while 2 of us were in the house, and then not come back at all.

No wonder I read so much on the web.

2002-03-28T12:27:00.000Z

My book is shipping! (Except to Kevin Marks who has been declared a No-Book Zone. Sorry, Kevin, but it'd just be irresponsible to let a copy fall into your hands. I'm sure you understand.)

No reviews at Amazon yet. Yes, this is a hint.

Anyone know when the knot in my stomach is scheduled to untie itself?

2002-03-27T06:42:00.000Z

Well, you lot are obviously busy reading copies of the book, but I'm stuck with reading Marek and Dave commenting on it as I'm still bookless (though Shadow the Sheepdog did turn up today, so Rosie could read that to the boys).

Maybe I can reconstruct the book from the reviews, like they reconstructed the dead sea scrolls from the concordance?

Though the Villa of Papyri sounds as if it needs more help.

2002-03-24T07:16:00.000Z

I'm feeling a little left out here,as I'm still awaiting a review copy, and I can't even buy a copy retail... but that has never stopped me butting in.

The problem with the search for meaning is the danger that you may get infected with some well-crafted (or evolved) meme that shows you a spurious meaning where there is none. the best defence in my opnion is to expose youreslef to as many alternative explantions as possible and let them figt it out in your brain.

My current favorite is the 'non-zero-sumness' meme I'm channeling crudely over at the nonzero blog. Be that as it may, this article highlights the fragility of the brain, and mind.

Inventing meanings is what our brains do - they are non-stop induction machines, as you only have to watch a toddler exploring the world to realise.

2002-03-23T20:28:00.000Z

Blogspot is pissing me off.

Advance notice: I am going to be moving this blog to smallpieces.spartaneity.com shortly. This will not affect how people post, but it will affect (obviously) the URL through which the blog itself is accessed when reading it.

I won't do this right now, since Blogspot needs to at least be up and accessible for awhile so people can read this notice.