Necessity Creep

The key to living within one's means, especially in these times of austerity, risk, competition, precarity and casualization, is the ability and willingness to classify possible expenditures as luxuries or necessities, with a bias for regarding things as luxuries, and being aggressive about enforcing that line in the sand. The most formidable enemy of thrift is the tendency for luxuries to become necessities. What exactly is the economic or technological history behind something like indoor plumbing becoming an economic necessity? Is it a necessity because life requires it or because policy requires it? To the serious student of economic minimalism it may appear to be a conspiracy against the cheapskates, although there are of course questions of whether urban living can be safe or hygienic without everyone having indoor plumbing, and hence a water bill to pad the "baseline" cost of living. While it is always debatable what are the raw necessities of life (or as Thoreau put it, the grossest of groceries) it's plainly obvious that many product categories have migrated in the direction of the 'necessity' end of the spectrum. These include utility hookups, refrigerators, telephone service (if nothing else, so you have a phone number to put on your résumé), Internet access (because many job openings are announced only online, or even only take applications online), non-casual clothing (again, often a pre-requisite for earning a living). Perhaps the most egregious example of a perverse necessity is cars, in places not well served by mass transit.

In America, and it would seem in all 'first world' countries, it is becoming obvious that the going rate for labor at most skill levels simply won't cover the cost of living in such countries, which is to say, the cost of necessities. If for some reason we must insist on not practicing protectionism, subsidy, or some other Sin against the Iron Laws of Economics, surely we must be duty-bound at least to facilitate what can only be called cheap living, with an emphasis on cheap housing. While I reject the free market ideology, at least those who are principled and reasonably consistent in the market fundamentalism favor radical zoning deregulation, so that truly cheap housing arrangements (say living in someone's garage, or having a lot of roommates) are at very least not illegal. I'm not convinced that there is any guarantee (or even market-equilibrium-seeking tendency) that the cost of necessity procurement will automagically make itself commensurate with the market value of labor, which is one of the many reasons I'm an anagorist, but housing has some potential to relieve some of the pressures that cause hardship, and is one form of economic deregulation I think actually has merit. The existence in the world of cheap labor, without the existence locally of dirt cheap housing and cheap necessities in general, is a death trap, a treadmill of superhuman speed, and a deliberate act of cruelty on the part of anyone who speaks in defense of, for example, minimum square footage requirements.

As for those semi-necessities referred to in the first paragraph, there is a need for a platform for sharing and cataloguing strategies for living without the semi-necessities. There is an art and science of cheap living, and it merits serious, sophisticated and collaborative study.

In memoriam

Today is the 100-year anniversary of the catastrophic fire at New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory, in which 146 fatialities resulted from the fact that the workers were locked inside. That was before my time, but I am old enough to remember the rhetoric surrounding the Berlin Wall, to the effect that free countries don't fortify their borders for the purpose of keeping people in. The point? There is nothing democratic about business. People under lock and key are not free people. The idea that employment is a "contract" between "free individuals" is a lie; one that can only serve the interests of the privileged.

The trouble with PBS

Since it's pledge drive time yet again, PBS member station WTVS has the usual baby-boomer-oriented "pledge programming" slated for the next few weeks on channel 56.1. Meanwhile 56.2 becomes even more repetitive (i.e. less informative) than usual. One presentation they have been treating us to a lot is the US Chamber of Commerce's Illicit: The Dark Trade. Another is The Street Stops Here, jointly sponsored by Don Eberly's National Fatherhood Institute, Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform and an organization called The Clapham Group. Perhaps the people who make editorial decisions at PBS think that if they run enough decidedly right-of-center programming, they'll be spared the budget axe. It would seem a reasonable proposition, but it seems that the meme campaign to paint PBS/NPR/CPB as a left wing extremist organization is already in full force. The public broadcasters, like the Democrats (even the most moderate of Democrats) will be red-baited and branded as extremists no matter what they do. The purpose of the campaign of aggressive repetition is to convince people that "center is the new left," that is, that ideas considered middle-of-the road a generation ago are and should be considered left-of-center today. The negotiation of what counts as "middle of the road" is a far more high-stakes political outcome than an election cycle. The commercial media are obviously on the side of the political right. That the Democratic Party refuses to participate in the tug-of-war over the "center" demonstrates that the conservative (DLC and/or "Blue" Dog) faction of the Democratic Party has an uncontested controlling interest in the party.

Good communication skills still suck

The excellent blog "Good communication skills" sucks pointed me to an ongoing debate on Debatewise about whether "companies should provide alternative interview methods," or alternatives to the job interview for the selection process. The points for the affirmative and negative logged so far are as follows:

All the Yes points

1. Doesn't always suit the job.
2. Can't get a realistic impression of a person in such a short space of time.
3. Unsuitable for employable people with Asperger's Syndrome and similar conditions.
4. Relies too heavily on vacancy details.

All the No points

1. Would create confusion.
2. Misses the point of an interview.
3. A significant number of studies reveal that the first impression is in fact the last impression

Now if I ran the world I'd abolish job interviews entirely. The question here is a little narrower; whether there should be an alternate screening method offered. I see job interviews as the second line of defense of Fortress Employment against the General Public. The first line of defense is of course 'networking,' which I define as the practice of working with rather than against the fact that who you know is more important than what you know. The object of the networking game is to make friends with people who have the authority to hire (or to cut purchase orders if your game is sales rather than job hunting), or at least to become of friend-of-a-friend of such key decision-makers. Another goal of networking is to get unpublished information about where openings are. The fact that most information of this type is unpublished in the first place is itself proof that the criteria of employers are largely other-than-meritocratic. The need to be socially connected to the employer itself in order even to find one's way to the applicant pool demonstrates that employers want to hire people they know; basically nepotism. Whether a vacancy is announced publicly or not, there will almost always be an interview at some point. This puts on display your personality characteristics, social style, race, sex, approximate age, and I suppose the firmness (or dryness?) of your handshake. The idea behind networking, which is to say keeping vacancies out of the want ads, seems to be "hire the people you know." The idea behind interviews, with the implied personality screening and social screening, is "hire the people you like."

Illicit: a case study in package dealing

While generally pretty assertive about my non-Objectivism, I must admit I owe a debt of gratitude to Ayn Rand for popularizing the phrase 'package dealing.' One textbook example of this practice which is out standing in the field is the US Chamber of Commerce's funding of PBS' broadcast of National Geographics's hour-long production titled Illicit: The Dark Trade. Basically the terms 'illicit trade' and 'black market' are used interchangeably. These terms, we are told, cover everything from intellectual property infringement to illegal drugs to human trafficking. The centerpiece of the film is a truly heartbreaking story about hospital patient fatalities in Panama because of some cough syrup tainted with toxic ingredients because some overly-entrepreneurial Chinese firm substituted some cheap-but-poisonous compound for glycerine. Sounds to me not like not so much the consequences of counterfeiting proprietary products as the consequences of information about the supply chain being treated as proprietary. The problem is too much proprietary.

Quotebag #40

“How long that will take I can’t tell you, but I don’t expect it to be very long, because as Watson begins replacing all those professionals in the job market, what do you think those experts are going to be doing? I know what I would be doing… making improvements in the open source versions of Watson to put the company that sacked me so the CEO could keep making a bonus out of business.”—valkyrie ice

“I work you fucking bastards. Isn’t that bad enough for whoever thought of this question to enact this farce, asking a wage slave to describe his work. 8 hours, for life to be expended in Hegelian freedom of choice, for the profit of a fucking wanker”—Anand 'droog' Kumar

“Cooperativity is fundamental … There is no dictator in cell regulation, no first among equals, no master regulator, no top-down system of governance.”—Michel Bauwens

“Where does this belief in ‘only works on the small scale’ come from? Is it based on the belief that people would, if not restrained by the personal effect of direct contact, cheat and hurt each other? If so, then it is only a corollary of the belief in man being innately evil.”—François Tremblay

“The CEO takes 11 of 12 cookies on the plate, then says to the Tea Partier, ‘look out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.’”—Patricia Welch

“I don’t believe in God. And, dammit, I live like I don’t. There’s nothing wrong with that.”—Hemant Mehta

“The most oppressive governments people face are corporate governments, and the most tyrannical forms are usually found at work-places and local areas, not at the Federal Government.”—C. Holte

“A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”—Howard Scott, quoted by Angela Russell

Net metering limited to a few thousand??

From DTE Energy's brochure (pdf) on net metering:

How many customers are eligible for net metering?

Net metering is limited to one percent of Detroit Edison’s peak load, or about 100,000 kW. The eligibility is further broken down like this:

* 0.5 percent for units of 20kW and less
* 0.25 percent for units generating between 20kW and 150 kW
* 0.25 percent for units generating more than 150kW

These limits would allow several thousand customers to participate.

The rather low ceiling makes it clear that net metering is something the company opposes. Those of us who would like to follow Freiburg's example should expect some serious head-butting, against tens of millions of dollars worth of astroturf.

The road to cooperation is not paved with competition

Competition taken to its logical conclusion is global thermonuclear war. Competition stripped down to its bare essence is three men in a two-man lifeboat. A lot of tools employed in the humyn resources field will try to get you to believe in "cooperation within competition" or other absurdities intended to facilitate the cooptation of cooperation by competition, while what is needed in order to create the humane society is the supplanting of competition by cooperation.

Quotebag #39

“I have looked at the big four cell providers in the US, but all their websites are just as complicated one compared to the other… it’s as if they don’t want us to know how much exactly things will cost.”&mdashmichelito

“The real problem is the competitive nature of [the] economy across the world. IT and Engineering jobs have disappeared due to outsourcing.”—anonymous

“I think that the idea that economics is not always zero-sum (certainly true) has lead some people, in that sunny American way, to assume that economics is never zero-sum (false, in my estimation).”—Freddie

“Yeah, well, there comes a point where you gotta ask, even if it’s literally true, do you really want to choose to be on the side of someone who would do that kind of shit?”—David Brin

“Simply trying to be an upstanding, independent, individual is not the essence of capitalism any more than being a good person is the essence of Christianity.”—John Madziarczyk

The New Normal

Give a man [sic] a job, and he'll work for a few weeks. Give a man a killer resume, and he'll work a few weeks, every few months, over the next few years.

As seen at Meijer

Another phishing domain

irridian.com appears to be a phishing domain. Their MO appears to be facebook impersonation.

Introducing Feasibilism

Many tendencies of rightist thought go by monikers akin to 'voluntarism,' 'volunteerism,' or 'voluntaryism.' These power-words serve to drive home the point that everything that isn't coerced is considered voluntary. The use of the word 'voluntary' and its various contrived inflections open the door to trite belittlements such as "nobody's holding a gun to your head," and "if you don't like your job or income you can always go elsewhere."

The voluntarist meme has now infected the self-described left-libertarian movement. To their credit they view it as a necessary but not sufficient condition for freedom.

Getting back to the snarky cliché about the worker always being able to go elsewhere:

* If a lifestyle that doesn't involve work is feasible, then work can be thought of as voluntary.
* If a workplace you like is feasible, then a job you don't like can be thought of as voluntary.
* If living dirt cheap is feasible, then working for a low income can be thought of as voluntary.

Feasibilism can be thought of as a sort of 'thick voluntarism,' paralleling thick libertarianism and thick individualism.

The Trouble with Virgin Mobile Broadband2Go

As is the trend in the ISP industry, the price of bandwidth is going up, so nickel and dime tactics become a more central feature of business models everywhere. In Virgin Mobile's case it takes the form of a "speed cap." I expect customers' threats to go elsewhere are little more than face-saving bluff, and most will eat the de-facto price increase. Demand for bandwidth, it seems, is like a gas, in that it automagically fills whatever space of whatever shape. In that regard it is like autosprawl—no amount of road-building will bring the end of traffic jams.

The empirical question is, is this the result of exogenous market forces such as an unavoidable traffic jam, or a structural increase in the price of bandwidth, or is it a case of operators milking the business model more aggressively? Is it still the case that one's ISP dollar goes significantly farther practically everywhere outside the United States? Is it still the case that the non-US market features much more competition in prepaid services, and much more willingness on the part of network operators to work with 'unlocked' mobile devices? Having never had much opportunity to travel, I have to take other people's word on such matters.

Is there some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that prepaid services are more expensive or otherwise less of a value for the money than postpaid? If there's any truth to the Time Value of Money, than logically, the opposite should be true! Since the market for postpaid services consists pretty much by definition of people with steady-eddie enough income and cash flow to commit to at least a two-year hitch (what my mom calls 'established' people), the prepaid market can justifiably be thought of as in some respects a captive audience. Does the difference in value between prepaid and postpaid offerings reflect anything beyond 'because they can?' Hopefully inquiring minds will somehow devise an empirical study of these market behaviors.

And on a tangentially related note, what's this cock and bull story the Social Security Administration is telling our elders about the non-inflationary times in which we're supposedly living?

Here's the email from Virgin Mobile, just to give you the reader a taste of the tone:

Hey Lorraine,

Here at Virgin Mobile, our mission is to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Sometimes that means making difficult choices in order to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of customers.

To make sure we can keep offering our $40 Unlimited Broadband2Go Plan at such a great price, we're putting a speed limit in place for anyone on that plan who uses over 5GB in a month.

How will it work?
Starting February 15, 2011, if you go over 5GB in a month on the $40 Unlimited Plan:

* Your data speeds will be limited for the remainder of the monthly plan cycle. During this time, you may experience slower page loads and file downloads and lags in streaming media.
* Your data speeds will return to normal as soon as you buy a new Broadband2Go Plan.
* This change will only affect plans bought on or after 2/15/2011.

How will it affect me?
Keep in mind, 5GB is A LOT of data. To give you an idea, it's about 250 hours of web browsing or over 500,000(!) emails*. So this change shouldn't affect you unless you're a heavy downloader/streamer/etc.

How will I know if I'm getting close to 5GB?
We've updated the progress bar in your Connection Manager to show the amount of data you've used. If you go above 5GB in a month, the bar will turn yellow, letting you know your data speeds will be reduced until you buy a new plan.

By putting this speed limit in place, we're making sure we can deliver the same quality service you've come to expect from Broadband2Go. We hope you understand.

Thanks for being a Broadband2Go customer.
Virgin Mobile

* Data usage per activity is based on an average. Actual usage varies depending on the types of websites, video, email and other internet applications accessed.

Perhaps respect for belief diversity goes in cycles

The McCarthy era saw the institutionalization of a lot of 'civic religion,' such as addition of 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance, and 'In God We Trust' to the currency, and the inevitably sectarian 'National Day of Prayer.'

The present pattern of secular-bashing will perhaps dissipate if/when the public (both religious and not) comes to see gratuitous God-talk in political speeches for what it is; namely delineation of in-groups and out-groups.

Quotebag #38

“Vernor [Vinge] is too smart to blog. He writes books! ”—David Brin

“I am aware of the counterargument, which is that government needs to do some things in secrecy because doing all of its business in public makes it impossible to get those things done. True, however, if the price of ‘empire’ is that we accept that and stop trying to find out what our government is doing in our name, then I’m not certain that ‘empire’ is anything remotely what the Founders had in mind and I’m certain it’s not what I want.”—Eric B.

“Partisanship is something I get. And when you ask for too little, as is always done, you end up compromising more than you bargained for.”—Dyssonance

“When resistance has a logo, you can be sure it isn’t resistance but capture.”—Dale Carrico

“I’m not a misanthrope: I like people; but in small doses.”—chaotic idealism

“Unfortunately it seems that the Wild West of the Internet is being tamed by the Railroad of commerce, with its twin rails of paywalls and data mining from social networks. Net filtering is the sleepers…ow my analogy hurts”—Ben Callinan

Final project for course titled “Thinking what we are doing”

This post is the outcome of an impromptu decision to do some online coursework. The assignment is the final project for Dale Carrico's course Thinking What We Are Doing. The reading list for the course is here. The instructions for this assignment are here.

constraints	restraints	tactics
25. commons The public, and the need to deal with it. But whatever the mix, and whichever factor was most significant, the consequence of this strategy was to leave open the field for innovation in telecommunications. AT&T did not control how its wires would be used, because the government restricted that control. By restricting that control, the government in effect created a commons on AT&T’s wires. (Lessig, 2001, p. 45) 48. digital divide The fact that connectivity is privilege. I am not as optimistic about the present or the future of Cyberspace as a free and democratic space as is Barlow. We, the homesteaders here in Cyberspace, are at the mercy of the code, at the mercy of the hardware and software, at the mercy of the sys admins and wizards. Economic factors around the world affect our ability to access information; race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and all of the other factors that often interefere with f2f communication also interfere with cyber-communication. (Walker, in reply to Barlow) 51. elite The de facto powerful. Not to be confused with the so-called intellectual elite. If the technologically advanced countries can secure property rights over resources that only advanced technology will reach, goes the argument, then patent rights over the genome are a kind of second colonial expansion. (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 5) 95. precarity Being on the receiving end of a risk shift. Data-entry workers, shop clerks, and the warehouse staff at amazon.com will face the same problems as ever: depressed wages, battles over benefits, barriers to unionization, and inadequate political representation in a Congress whose resemblance to the House of Lords is for them a matter of economic class more than of anachronism. Their situations will be the less stable for the “creative destruction” of firms and industries that Kelly celebrates. Tribalism will do them little good, as is generally true of lesser tribes. (Purdy) 104. publication Publish or perish. One wonders what Macaulay would have thought about the attempt by Margaret Mitchell’s estate to prevent the publication of The Wind Done Gone. (Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, p. 56) 105. public good The public is good. The maximalists favor expansive intellectual property rights. They tend to view exemptions and privileges on the part of users or future creators as a tax on rights holders and have sympathy for thinly disguised ‘sweat of the brow’ claims. They exhibit a kind of economic bipolar disorder: being deeply pessimistic about market functioning around potential public goods problems in the absence of intellectual property rights, and yet strikingly, even manically, optimistic about our ability to avoid transaction costs and strategic behavior “anti-commons effects” that might be caused by the presence of intellectual property rights. (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 9) 112. rivalrousness Sometimes life really is a zero-sum game. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish. (Barlow) 124. spontaneous order Spontaneity gives way to order. Wiener works up to the fantasy by pointing out that there are many organizations whose parts are themselves small organizations. Hobbes’s Leviathan is a Man-State made up of men; a Portuguese man-of-war is made up of polyps that mirror it in miniature; a man is an organism made of cells that in some respects also function like organisms. This line of thought leads him to ask how these “bodies politic” function. “Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members” (p. 156 [Cybernetics]). The flow of information is thus introduced as a principle explaining how organization occurs across multiple hierarchical levels. To illustrate, he instances the “sexually attractive substances” that various species secrete to insure that the sexes will be brought together (p. 156). For example, the pheromones that guide insect reproduction are general and omnidirectional, acting in this respect like hormones secreted within the body. The analogy suggests that external hormones organize internal hormones, so that a human organism becomes, in effect, a sort of permeable membrane through which hormonal information flows. At this point we encounter his first demurral. “I do not care to pronounce an opinion on this matter,” he announces rather pretentiously after introducing it, preferring to “leave it as an interesting idea” (p. 157). (Hayles) 125. stakeholder The principal. A reformed state that operates within a context of multistakeholdership and which is no longer subsumed to corporate interests, but act as a fair arbiter between the Commons, the market and the gift economy. (Bauwens) 131. "Tragedy of the Commons" Yet another exercise in fundamentalist apologetics. It is worth noting, however, that while earlier scholarship extolled enclosure’s beneficial effects, some more recent empirical work has indicated that it had few, if any, effects in increasing agricultural production. The tragedies predicted in articles such as Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons did not occur. In fact, the commons frequently may have been well-run, though the restraints on its depletion and the incentives for investment in it may have been “softer” than the hard-edged norms of private property. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 36)	3. access Rightsestrictions management. One of the most salient lessons from the copyright wars of the last few years is that if express permission is required before one can post a collection of anything on the Internet, one will be unable to do it. (Litman, p. 14) 4. accountability A cheap substitute for transparency. How about an intellectual property ombudsman to represent the interests of the public and the public domain? (Boyle, …Genome…, p. 18) 5. agency Dignity We must…take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green. (Lanier, 2010) 31. control Kill the controls! For much of the twentieth century, it was essentially illegal even to experiment with the telephone system. It was a crime to attach a device to the telephone system that AT&T didn’t build or expressly authorize. (Lessig, 2001, p. 30) 32. copyright Copyright means copy is not a right. For example, Lindberg and Patterson’s book The Nature of Copyright reverses the polarity from the normal depiction, and portrays copyright as a law of users’ rights. The public domain is the figure and copyright the ground. The various privileges and defenses are not exceptions, they are at the heart of copyright, correctly understood. Copyright is, in fact, a system designed to feed the public domain providing temporary and narrowly limited rights, themselves subject to considerable restrictions even during their existence—all with the ultimate goal of promoting free access. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 60) 59. fair use That which is not permitted is forbidden. That which is not forbidden is permitted. Thirty years ago, when you saw something you wanted to use or share, the default rule was that you were entitled to do so. (Litman, p. 15) 89. panopticon An authority figure wearing mirror shades. Once a new intellectual property right has been created over some informational good, the only way to ensure efficient allocation of that good is to give the rights holder still greater control over the user or consumer in the aftermarket so as to allow for price discrimination, since the only efficient monopoly is a monopoly with perfect price discrimination. Yet, to achieve perfect price discrimination with digital intellectual property goods, whose marginal cost is zero, the rights holders will argue that they need even more changes of the rules in their favor: relaxed privacy standards so they can know more about our price points; enforceable shrink-wrap or clickwrap contracts of adhesion so that we can be held to the terms of our particular license, no matter how restrictive; and changes in antitrust rules to allow for a variety of practices that are currently illegal, such as resale price maintenance and various forms of tying. Rights holders will also claim that they need technical changes with legal backing, such as the creation of personalized digital objects surrounded by state-backed digital fences, objects that are tied to particular users and particular computers, so that reading my e-book on your machine is either technically impossible, a crime, or a tort—or possibly all three. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 50) 97. privacy Privacy is a technological impossibility. Get over it. We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. (Hughes) 114. secrecy Secrecy is to privacy as institution is to individual. The political power, however, clearly belongs to the pharmaceutical industry, which actually tried to eliminate “notice and comment” requirements for exclusive drug licenses in 1999. Current law allows the public to obtain basic financial information about a drug's development and sale, such as royalty rates paid on licenses, subsequent development costs, sales figures, and so forth. The government must disclose such information and allow the public to object to the approval of a company's license. Fortunately, the industry's attempt to throw a veil of secrecy over the granting of exclusive drug licenses failed—a small victory against the modern enclosure movement. (Bollier)	1. abundance Abundance is a prerequisite for dignity. At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. “‘Free’ as in ‘free speech,’” Richard Stallman says, not “‘free’ as in ‘free beer.’” But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn’t charge—well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice. Yet that is what we are doing. (Boyle, …Enclosure…, p. 48) 6. amateur The luxury of not being in it for the money. The most powerful engine driving this information space turns out not to be money — at least if we’re focusing on generating and disseminating the content rather than constructing the hardware that it moves through. (Litman, p. 8) 18. broadcast Shevek's broadcast of transilience theory in The Dispossessed, or John Galt's radio address in Atlas Shrugged. Broadcast spectrum was originally so plentiful that the government granted radio licenses to anyone upon request. But by the 1920s, the proliferation of broadcasters was producing signal interference, which prompted a debate about how to allocate control of the electromagnetic spectrum. (Bollier) 23. code Dog whistle. Also program code and genetic code. The code of cyberspace—its architecture and the software and hardware that implement that architecture—regulates life in cyberspace generally. Its code is its law. Or, in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) cofounder Mitch Kapor, “Architecture is politics.” (Lessig, 2001, p. 35) 24. collaboration The privilege of collegiality. The interesting questions are how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to go, how much those changes will be mirrored in group work, and how much better collaborative filters will become in locating freely offered material. (Shirky, 2003) 36. crowdsourcing Collaboration minus privilege. What we used to class as trivia (and therefore useless information) becomes a matchless resource when it is combined with other trivia in searchable form (Litman, p. 6) 40. cybernetics The science of automata. In March 2002, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at Reading University, had his neuronal system directly linked to a computer network. He thus became the first human being to whom data could be fed directly, bypassing the five senses. (Žižek) 42. cyberspace The domain of automata. Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation. It is the virtual reality of paranoia, a well-populated region in the last quarter of the Second Christian Millenium. (Haraway) 53. end-to-end principle (e2e) What goes around comes around. In the laboratory the behaviorist approach leads to “black box” engineering, in which one assumes that the organism is a “black box” whose contents are unknown. Producing equivalent behavior then counts as producing an equivalent system. (Hayles) 68. gift economy An oxymoron. These are communities of shared values in which participants freely contribute time, energy, or property and over time receive benefits from membership in the community. (Bollier) 69. information Does not want to be free. Must be forcibly liberated. Recall that Gregory Bateson defined information as a difference that makes a difference; if there is no difference, there is no information. Since entropy tends always to increase, it will eventually result in a universe where all distributions are in their most probable state and universal homogeneity prevails. Imagine Dr. Zhivago sitting at his desk in a cold, cold room, trying to telegraph a message to his beloved Laura, while in the background Laura’s theme plays and entropy keeps relentlessly increasing. Icicles hanging from his fingers and the telegraph key, he tries to tap out “I love you,” but he is having trouble. Not only is he freezing from heat death; he is also stymied by information death. No matter what he taps, the messages always come out the same: eeeeeee (or whatever letter is most common in the Russian alphabet). This whimsical scenario illustrates why Wiener associated entropy with oppression, rigidity, and death. (Hayles) 73. mapping The art of figuring out what the hell is really going on. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear. (Haraway) 84. network Friendship is sacred. Networking is profane. If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened. (Vinge) 85. node Vertex Like Katie King’s objects called “poems,” sites of literary production where language also is an actor, bodies as objects of knowledge are materialsemiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction among humans and non-humans, including the machines and other instruments that mediate exchanges at crucial interfaces and that function as delegates for other actors’ functions and purposes. (Haraway) 87. open source Self explanatory. The General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code), the related Open Source Initiative, and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role. They enable the protection of common use-value and use viral characteristics to spread. GPL and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their adapted source code in the public domain. (Bauwens) 88. participation The privilege of inclusion in a group undertaking. For many of us, the irony made it possible to participate—indeed, to participate as fully committed, if semiotically unruly, eco-feminists. (Haraway) 90. peer A peer of the Realm, or a source of peer pressure. [P2P processes] make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or ‘peer property mode’: a ‘third mode of ownership,’ different from private property or public (state) property. (Bauwens) 91. peer to peer (p2p) The less hierarchical approach to networking. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. (Barlow) 102. prosumerism Getting past the false dichotomy between capital goods and consumer goods. The web (in particular the Writeable Web and the Web 2.0 that is in the process of being established) allows for the universal autonomous production, dissemination, and ‘consumption’ of written material while the associated podcasting and webcasting developments create an ‘alternative information and communication infrastructure’ for audio and audiovisual creation. (Bauwens) 103. public All of us. Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the “lack of scientific certainty” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “primary issue.” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast? (Latour) 107. reductionism The important practice of analyzing the subsystems in isolation. Similarly, if the existence of a species is reduced to a matter of recoverable genetic information, we may be comforted about the loss of the ecosystem that it now inhabits. Still, the reader is right to think that something—perhaps the most important thing—is lost in this view. (Purdy) 108. relational The privilege of analyzing the data points in aggregate and not only in isolation. [Norbert Wiener] realized that one of the subtle implications of [the probabilistic] view is that messages are constituted, measured, and communicated not as things-in-themselves, but as relational differences between elements in a field. Communication is about relation, not essence. (Hayles) 116. sharing The privilege of being able to let your guard down. The internet’s hierarchical elements (such as the stacked IP protocols, the decentralized Domain Name System, etc…) do not deter participation. Viral communicators, or meshworks, are a logical extension of the internet. With this methodology, devices create their own networks through the use of excess capacity, bypassing the need for a pre-existing infrastructure. The ‘Community Wi-Fi’ movement, Open Spectrum advocacy, file-serving television, and alternative meshwork-based telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of this trend. (Bauwens) 122. sousveillance The art of seeing through mirror shades. The flood of information has to go someplace. (Brin) 132. transparency The neutralization of mirror shades. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. (Lewis)