ASCII by Jason Scott

I can’t help but feel, thinking back to the last 400 weblog entries I’ve done, that I made some promises regarding this weblog. One of them was that I would refrain from being a mere link weblog, using some other event to be a sort of pithy Empathy Tourst before moving on with nary a consideration. I don’t know if loading on a bunch of paragraphs along with the links entitles me to some sort of “out”, but let’s try it anyway. I promise to add content. In fact, I’m threatening to add content.

This “thing” happened recently. Basically, a guy named Ric Silver, who created a dance move called the “Electric Slide” in 1976, copyrighted the “dance”. He then has gone after anyone showing videos of the “dance”, whether they be home videos, music videos, people talking about how to do the dance, you name it. He’s done this under the DMCA, which is its own level of Satan’s Tool.

So this was going on, and the EFF, our guardians of freedom and justice, sued the guy back on the behalf of one of the takedown “victims”. As a result of this snap-back, Silver and the EFF negotiated a “settlement”, in which Silver agreed to license his “copyrighted” dance Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0. This has been hailed as a victory and wonder for all involved, a dashing collision of web 2.0 thinking and backwards dance-hall misguidedness.

I just don’t agree, on two levels.

The first is that this somehow legitimizes the entire idiocy that you can “copyright” a dance. I understand that you can copyright your tapes showing how to do the dance. I understand you can copyright your movie in which your dance appears. I understand that someone could ask you to be the choreographer for your movie, and that you sign a contract, and if they go use your choreography and don’t pay you, you can sue their Stealy-McStealerson asses. I also understand that you can “trademark” a name that represents a product. That is, if you have a dance tape business and you sell a product called “The Electric Slide”, you can then go ahead and sue someone who comes out with a dance tape called “The Electric Slide”. That is, if you have a trademark. If you have a copyright for the “Electric Slide” video, and someone comes out with an “Electric Slide”, you can maybe, possibly, assuming you have a good lawyer, convince a judge somewhere that the “Electric Slide” video being sold is being made to be confused with your Electric Slide Product. But again, you’re going to rely on your trademark. This is, as I understand it, how the whole thing works. You can’t copyright a fucking dance move.

Second of all, the EFF license makes no sense because after submitting a legal brief in which they claim the copyright is entirely, completely unapplicable to people just fucking dancing in a video, they then tacitly agree that they do agree by agreeing to settle with it being licensed under Creative Commons. But that makes no sense; how the fuck do you Creative Commons license a dance move? Again, I understand you can CC license a video of you doing the dance move, CC license your description of how to do the dance move, and CC license photographs of yourself doing the dance move. But the dance move itself? If I weave a basket, and every few loops I cut a nick into the wicker in a distinctive pattern, can I copyright or CC Licence my hot-rockin’ Wicker-Nick move? Can I “allow” people the right to remix, share, and attribute to me the Wickernick maneuver? Is that even sane?

One of the initial complaints with regards to the Creative Commons was the creation of a “Creative Commons Public Domain” license; which said, basically, it was in the public domain. You can understand the argument of the Creative Commons, which basically was “Well, this way it’s very clear and legally sound when a person makes the declaration.” But on the other hand, maybe you can also see the issue where other people went “Why the fuck are you branding your own form of “Public Domain” and using that exact term for your contract?” They could called it the “Absolutely Free” license or something else, and it would have effectively been Public Domain, but they had to go ahead and use a generic term and brand it, even ever so slightly, for themselves. And that blows.

And again, this is not a release of this idiotically un-copyrightable thing into the “public domain”. As a CC-SA-NC 3.0 licensed item, you can now “remix” it. (So I guess you can do it “wrong” or add some moves to it or totally mess with it) You can now “share” it. (So besides being able to freely share it to people, you can also share… the moves?) And it’s “Non-commercial” meaning you can’t sell it, so you better not have any adword ads, banners, or anything else on your webpage with it! Actually, to be honest, this last part has, to my knowledge, never really been worked out. If you click on a banner and it’s near a CC-NC work being shared… are the people hosting the CC-NC work violating the license?

Naturally, people are praising all this shit because it has the words “Creative Commons” and “Settlement” in it. But it is, as far as I can tell, Grade A Bullshit.

As an example, Wired Blogs gets it wrong, claiming that the dance is now “in the public domain”. No, it really isn’t, if you believe the claim; it’s merely licensed for non-commercial use along the substantial license language in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. I fear a lot of people are going to make this mistake. And, of course, fail to “attribute” Ric Silver in all their videos of the Electric Slide as per the license. Fail to do that… and he can sue you!

So, here’s where you come in, faithful readers (there’s a couple thousand of you, by the way). Talk me into or out of the following thing:

• I put up a video of myself doing a very “Electric-Slide-Like” dance, wearing a very silly hat.
• I do not call it “The Electric Slide” because I heard some asshole has the copyright on the name.
• I will copyright it.
• I will charge you $1 for it.

I’m mulling over my plan, looking for the positives and the negatives. I see the massive advantages in the rainfall of electronic dollar bills coming to me from around the world as the Jason Scott Slide makes its ways into entertainment centers and movie-olas. I see the upturned hands of a million new fans, all taking an interest in computer history because if that area of study can produce such amazing dancers, surely it’s worth a closer look. I see, in a nutshell, global domination.

I will donate the money to a charity other than the EFF because as far as I can tell, they’re being tards about this today. I donate money to them regularly; I consider it a retainer.

Tell me your thoughts. In two days I make a decision.

Go.

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I’ve had a mind to do a podcast/audio show for some time. The reason there isn’t one yet is because I want it to be good.

This minor hurdle doesn’t stop a lot of people; they’re doing it for themselves and for the people they think are like themselves and so they kind of go for it. In some cases, they’ve already had audio/radio experience… in fact, some podcasts are simply syndicated collections of already-extant radio shows. I’m not sure if those “count” by some standards.

Mine will not be live, it will be edited. It will have interviews, music, and a bunch of stuff, but hopefully be about a solid hour. I would be unlikely to do it more than once a month. I would be shooting to make it a sort of timeless work, which would still be listenable for years afterwards.

Obviously, I have a lot of priorities ahead of it. But I do think it over occasionally.

Here’s some of my promises of stuff my podcast wouldn’t/won’t do. Maybe it should be a pod-listeners’ Bill of Rights.

• I promise that my podcast won’t start and stop with a complete song, as if I’ve got some sort of syndication deal and the music is providing a buffer for all my syndicate stations (which is why most syndicated shows do this). There’s a number of words I feel go by in my mind when a 40 minute podcast has a 4 minute song at the beginning and a 4 minute song at the end; those words include unnecessary, bloat and wasteful. Do people who do this seriously think the listeners are queuing up for the show while the music plays?
• I promise to never ever ever read directly off a newswire or weblog posting. I realize that by doing this, I end up being mildly annoying to the people who play podcasts at double speed, and actually sucking the life out of others who don’t. I realize that if all I do is tell you the day’s top headline, I am foolishly hoping my voice training is better than a syndicated radio announcer’s and inevitably failing at such, meaning now I’m just some guy in your headphones reading the paper over your shoulder, out loud.
• I promise that if you hear the microphone “pop”, hear rushes of wind as I move stuff around in front of the mic, or hear papers being shuffled around, you can have one of my lungs as a cat toy. I took many classes in audio production. I would use what I learned.
• I assure you that I will take advantage of the medium and not set myself up to be easily replaced with a text-to-speech converter. It will be in stereo and need stereo, and have multiple tracks and need them.
• I promise not to use commercial music, making it needlessly sketchy to store copies of my podcast and demonstrating to my audience that I can’t even talk a good game about using ‘free culture” material with my own stuff
• Holy shit I would never use Skype ever. Or interview people over the phone. Or interview people over skype. The intense irony of people lauding the future and the wonders of technology and then having their interview subjects sound like their aircraft carrier is under attack wears off after a few minutes. In its place it leaves a sort of entertainment black hole.
• I promise I will have fun.

And yes, this comes from listening to the hundreds of podcasts and “shows” I’ve listened to over the years. A few were simply amazing. Others have literally caused my hearts to dwindle down, like a Zelda game.

I’ll keep you updated as to this side project’s progress.

5 Comments

On Saturday I saw Zoo, which is the gentle, artistic documentary about a guy who died having sex with a horse.

The guy dying was all over the place when it happened in 2005, and this film takes the approach of making such a lyrical, prettifying movie around the subject that you will at least listen to the side of the members of his community, even if one might find the whole circumstance abhorrent.

I saw it on video, basically, in the video theatre at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. This movie shouldn’t be seen on video, or at least, it should be seen in high definition video if film isn’t available. It was obviously shot to be really, really, pretty. I wanted to see it in a theatre because that way some amount of “voting” came back to the distributors that I appreciated the film being made. I happened to speak to one of the staff about the showing being on video when the movie was obviously shot on film, and he said the distributor simply didn’t forsee crowds justifying the cost of a print being made. And he was right, in a way, since our Friday evening showing was less than a dozen people. The “minimax” theatre that shows video holds less than 15, anyway. So there we go.

I hadn’t been to the Coolidge Corner in a while; holy crap did they do amazing work on it! I used to be very annoyed with how they gave their lobby over to a pizza parlor years and years ago; you could see, obviously, where they’d just closed the inner doors, put a refreshment stand in front of it, and then drilled a hole in the side of the building for a new lame entrance and ticket window. I went, of course, because the main theater was great-looking and they had great lineups and all the rest of the “real” reasons one goes to a revival/art-house location. But since I was there last, they’ve totally redone the place so beautifully that you would be absolutely pressed to think it wasn’t always this way, that it always looked this beautiful and open and art-deco and the rest. I mean, I’m not being superlative when I tell you it went from banged-up showgirl to stunning world-class diva in terms of presentation and layout. I’ll be going there quite a bit this summer when I have time.

So, two reviews, related and not related.

Zoo, itself, pushes the envelope for me as to what a documentary is; as a radio, “This American Life” episode, it would have had the real voices of the people involved (it only has roughly 4 people who were “there” in various ways) without having to resort to the legion of actors completely re-creating the entire event from the ground up, which is what happens. The film, in other words, serves as “illustration” for what is essentially an audio collage. Now, make no mistake, it’s fuckin’ beautiful and there’s amazing shots, setups, and music there. (It’s also paced a little too slow for the audience I was with and was pushing it for me.) But in the end, you really can’t tell what was there and what was real and what was not “real” and so on. Even if based in reality, doing shots anywhere but at the event as it happens means a lot of artistic license can be taken, and so it’s barely a documentary on that front. I think the distinction can be made between a pleasant cinematic experience and an accurate/realistic film. I think that distinction is harder to make when the whole production is called a “documentary”.

The second review is a thousand times more petty: the red-haired guy working the ticketing/lobby was a dick. I’ve dealt with this guy before; he’s bitter, nasty, and he makes up rules. Tonight’s made up rule was “Jason can’t stay in the lobby marveling at the improvements to the lobby but has to immediately go wait outside in the rain, even though Jason’s buddy was waiting for 15 minutes in the lobby for Jason to arrive.” It’s a tough but fair rule, I guess, inside the guy’s head; but if the issue was that I was talking too loud, it’s not without precedent to ask a patron to keep it down during showtimes, even as they’re heaping accolades to his movie buddies about how great this theater has been renovated. Especially if, as was my case, hundreds of dollars were donated by that person into the Coolidge’s renovation fund over the last 4-5 years. My name is etched on a seat, actually.

My buddy who was going with me was in the process of buying tickets to a charity event at the theater being held in June, and he later confided to me he nearly stopped the sale watching the guy’s attitude and treatment of me. That’s not a good situation for such an amazing theater, but it does show an important lesson: it doesn’t matter how nice the car is, if the chauffeur’s a jerk.

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While at Notacon this past April, I gave another speech about Wikipedia, probably my last one unless specifically invited to do so by an organization or event. It’s called “Wikipedia, Brick by Brick” and I’ve added it to the archive.org TEXTFILES.COM audio connection at this location.

It’s about 40 minutes, and man am I tired during it; if you know my voice, that’s what sounds a little off. I had gotten a total of 2 or 3 hours of sleep, working on the Blockparty webserver and other such considerations for the demo party, and then had to give a talk at 1pm on the Friday of the event. The good news was that after this talk and a second one I helped present at 3pm, my time requirements shifted to being able to focus on Blockparty for the rest of the event, but the price I paid was very, very little sleep.

All in all, there’s no “finality” about the piece, just further observations of funny crap and interesting memories of research on Wikipedia from the last year. A few good laughs, a bunch of declarations, dramatic pauses… my usual stuff. Plus, if you follow some of the advice, you could probably cause a bit of trouble on Wikipedia… or really, anywhere that encourages user-generated content.

Again, it’s here.

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From this moment on, my next 5 months are spoken for. I’m travelling to New Jersey, Las Vegas, California, Seattle, Chicago, and a rash of other cities. Some of them multiple times. I’m also going to a bunch of events, ranging from pinball expositions to classic gaming expos to computer festivals to just driving endlessly.

Meanwhile, I am going to be editing this film, filming more interviews, and trying to get any of a bunch of things done.

It’s almost paralyzing, how much is before me. But I wanted it, I asked for it, so down I go.

Let’s see what breaks first, and how fast this thing goes.

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Life drapes accolades and fame and celebrity on you with very little consultation beforehand. You might do crazy stuff for years and then you do it and a camera catches it and suddenly you’re all Mr. Crazy Guy, known worldwide. I’m definitely not the only computer historian, and I’m definitely not the only weblogging pundit, and most critically, I am not the only person who has dropped the sacred image of Goatse onto a hell of a lot of people. Granted, the fact the number is well over a quarter of a million IPs would probably get me a key and membership card to some relatively exclusive club, but none of it is unique. Right place, right time, right gaping ass.

And so instead of going “no, no, I have done so much else with my life”, I’ll handle the whole “Yes, I’m that guy who Goatse’d MySpace” mantle with pride and aplomb until I become famous for something else, like, “The guy who went across the table and strangled Brian Dear“. And to be honest, having Renderman, who I greatly respect, come up at the Shmoocon event to personally accolade me for it was a high point of my year so far. It’s good to be the king! Well, Goatse King, anyway.

So naturally people come to me with “somebody Goatse’d a lot of people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” type letters, which happens a lot less than you would think. But it was definitely this thread on livejournal that caught my eye. Not so much for the new attack vector, which is quite interesting, but the unique livejournal-y responses it has garnered and what can be learned from that.

Quick Summary: Guy creates a “livejournal meme”, which is a slightly inaccurate term now in wide use that means “quiz or game or questionaire presented to people to try out, and which others can post as well”. This meme, however, eventually goatse’s you. Shock! Surprise! Gaping Ass!

Now, like a proper guide, I’m going to tell you to keep your hands in the goddamn boat – they bite! Also, I’ll be making use of my new favorite friend, WEBCITATION.ORG, which is most vital in this particular situation, as one of the things that happens when you shed light on something like people writing lots of stuff is that those people quickly hie up their bags and run out of town. Most won’t, but are there words more annoying than “This post deleted by author”?

As was mentioned in the entry that inspired me, the prank involved creating a fake quiz/questioning thing, which can be posted on a livejournal. First, you are presented the bait: the opportunity to indicate people you dated or people you’re interested in. Then, after you answer the questions, you are shown an image of Goatse. Pretty simple!

As a nice additional touch, the disclaimer for the page, before you enter anything, says “By participating in this quiz you agree we can do anything with the collected data and resulting result image we like, including publishing it publically or hotlinking to an image of goatse.”

The prank is vaguely hilarious to me, but I want to get beyond that. Obviously you can come down on a “side” about this prank, about pranks in general, about levels of pranks, of what represents a good or bad prank, etc. Pranks are intended to get emotional reaction from the victim, and in doing that crazy deed, they often result in having completely crazy, unintended effects. So instead, let’s discuss context and result. HEY! HANDS! IN! THE! BOAT!

An important thing to note is that, based on observation, Myspace and Livejournal are very, very different environments. Part of this is the software; MySpace’s is horrible, and Livejournal’s is techy-wonky. On Myspace, you have to constantly, unendingly reload and try to negotiate things, and the main reason you’re on there is because your friend is on there or potential customers are on there. Since there’s a way to host “music” on your page, this works out for selling/promoting your music to your potential customers. And since you generally don’t know any better, you end up using MySpace for things that a weblog would do much better for you. It also encourages the leaving of beloved “hey how you doing” messages on other’s pages, so if you look at the average page, it’s mostly filled with one-liner HOW YA DOIN’ along with some sort of photo or web knick-knack. So basically, the whole place looks like a high-schooler’s ugly-ass bookbag.

Livejournal, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up for messages, specifically day to day postings of events, with the ability to handle multiple postings a day. It also has very simple ways to bind users into networks, either based on calling each other “friends” or creating “communities” that sets of user accounts can join. As referenced in my “shit-gun of terror” hypothesis in my Goatse entry, this means that you can both assemble groups of people who think like you do, or unintentionally link together people who would kill each other in the wild.

Also, there seems to be a natural lack of awareness of just how public each posting is. More aware/burnt-fingered users know about the “friends-only” posting ability, where only those in your trust networks can add messages, and some are additionally aware of “filters” that can be applied to sets of livejournal users so only they can read your messages. But a pretty large number don’t.

Subsequently, I’ve had lots of fun finding someone discussing the BBS Documentary on a livejournal posting, dropping in with my account, and commenting on their accolades or criticism. Sometimes people say “Wow, I can’t believe you’ve been reading my journal”, or its evil twin “Surely you have no life to be posting a response to my criticism of your suck-ass movie.” In both cases, I’ve merely taken advantage of a RSS feed on technorati.com. My little client occasionally goes “Hey, someone said something with BBS and Documentary in the entry” and off I go, simple as that. Believe me, we’re not taking many cycles in the Jason Operating System for that one. Either way, the shock that something posted public is in fact publically posted gets some neat reactions.

One of those, unfortunately, is the re-discovery of the “friends-only” option, or even worse, deletion of the entry in question altogether, making future references to Dumb-Ass(tm) a little more difficult. But not impossible.

So, speaking of Dumb-Ass(tm), the debate raged hard and fast on the whole Livejournal-Goatse situation, many of the usual positions being taken up. For a quick recap, here’s all the usual positions:

• Ha ha!
• I spilled hot coffee in my lap YOU BASTARD
• Good one, mate, I used it immediately on everyone including my sister!
• This is illegal!
• This is horrible and I will now speculate for paragraphs about you and who you are for doing this.
• How do I do this myself, preferably using copy and paste functions?
• Dick-suck cock-bear fuck-bag ass-munch douche-licker

All in all, the perpetrators claim 60,000 goatses throughtout the prank. By the way, I goatse’d 29,000 sites in April and we’re somewhere around 14,000 this month. Unlike them, I kept it going; they chose to instead link back from the prank to their explanatory livejournal entry. This has two consequences worth mentioning: it encourages the curious to investigate and then let them comment, and it throws together a mass of variant sub-networks/cultures within Livejournal.

Again, Livejournal encourages creation of networks, but in doing so, it also encourages closed-circle networks that might recruit or might not but end up not growing after an initial burst. So it is possible for you to use Livejournal and not bump into anyone else outside your little group of comment-y friends. Until something like this enters your stream, and suddenly you’re given a journal in which it is now your chance to bitch.

This is covered, within livejournal and weblog culture with the all-encompassing term “drama”. I don’t like the term at all, never have. It’s way too general a paintbrush to paint any heated discussion. Sometimes you have two people who will never agree locked in a message base like two cats in a bathroom. The only way things are going to simmer down is to distract them with shiny things, kill one, intervene as a system operator (mere insults from other users won’t do it) or close down that discussion area (locking down or deleting the topic). That’s certainly dramatic, but I wouldn’t call it drama. On the other hand, a situation where the discussion topic is augmented by a there’s-no-way-you-could-know-it ancillary event that is the actual problem at hand is definitely drama. Without the “reveal”, it’s just heated. But if you find out the two participants used to sleep with each other, and broke up over the subject being discussed…. well, then you got something.

Drama is also now thrown at any heated soliloquy, before any discussion begins: you’re causing drama to potentially begin. It’s a great term, “drama”… once you put it in there, people say “well, to engage in further discussion would make me appear to be a person incapable of rational interaction and so I will not be involved”. So while I am sure it is shocking when someone launches into an over-the-top manuver in the middle of a debate or topic discussion, I have a hard time using the “drama” label. So let’s go with a more accurate term: goes completely bugfuck.

When someone goes completely bugfuck, now you have something worth watching. Light and heat. Because of the nature of online communication, and assuming the person does not realize how crazy they just went and deletes/attempts to delete all evidence they did something, you can have a pretty nifty show.

Consider, then, the reaction of two individuals, kenjr and beckyzoole, who go about things a most interesting (but done before) way:

• First, become completely horrified that this was done to 60,000 people.
• Then, speculate on the possible laws or rules broken by this act. Kenjr postulates that people who end up with goatse in their browsers or cache will either be fired, or worse, go to jail. That’d be quite the bail hearing, let me tell you. There is also the theory that were these people to be subject to termination and/or arrest, the perpetrators of the prank would be immediately subject to the exact same punishment.
  
• Next, assume that something must be done. This is key, because otherwise you are simply being a sympathy tourist, reading about something and not lifting a finger to correct the action. Along one school of thought, inaction to a perceived wrong is the same as not just supporting that wrong, but letting the wrong use your couch and eat your TV dinners until the wrong is back on its feet.

• Since you’re not a Sympathy Tourist, you can instead be an Internet Hero. An Internet Hero uses the Internet to do heroic acts.
• Beckyzoole then writes to LiveJournal to complain about this situation. This may or may not work, but Internet Heroism is very easy to do (hence the lack of will you show by not doing it) and so it is done.
• Naturally, Beckyzoole insists that the New Zealand Authorities get involved. This is an interesting, “take it out of town” solution. She also goes far enough to link to a “HOWTO” to get the personal information of the pranksters, with only the “dun dun DUN” missing from her “and you’ll know what to do” kind of message.
• Finally, she sits back, opens up a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, and wonders what new adventures will come down the way to the Internet Heroes’ League.

This is all spectacularly fucking fantastic, but the days of when you could get someone banninated from the Internet are mostly over. You might be able to get them arrested, but you’re going to have to show them a crime was committed. You’re especially going to have trouble if the crime being committed was others linking to your site, as in my case of Goatse’ing, or where people are voluntarily visiting the site in question. Oh, sure, they could probably have found some way to commit this “crime” so that they might actually be criminally liable, like shooting a baby every time someone hit the website. But that didn’t happen.

Anyway, the point is, this situation highlights the “dark mirror” I’ve spoken of before, where this networking facility allows people to go from 0-60,000 displays of a stretched rectum in just a couple days, where that same period of time can lead to hundreds of people “discussing” what is essentially a prank, and the bell-curve of likelihood of “Internet Heroes” reaching out in all directions until finally, ultimately, someone’s calling the Kiwi Kops to get you booted off the Web.

This is new compared to BBSes because we never had that critical mass. It’s worth exploring, in a future posting, the situation of the Mars Hotel and other Internet BBSes when they came on the scene in the early/late non-commercial Internet and what amazing stuff happened then…

..but not today. I’m almost done watching the third season of House. Now that’s drama.

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Some small ideas, probably to be developed in future entries.

Dear Guys Who Purchase the BBS Documentary From Other Lands: I love you very much and I feel a bond with you, but when you request that I list the “value” of the documentary set to be $10 and the designation of the package to be “gift”, you are requesting that I commit a federal crime, mail fraud, which will result in a jail term that I myself will have to serve and not you. So don’t request that I do that, or, at least, be surprised when I don’t.

In 1988, one of my college teachers at Emerson college wrote up a note in my permanent record (I found it later doing a search) in which she talked about my suspicious behavior and her worry that I was cheating in her class. What was I doing? Bringing a laptop to take notes. She was unable to find a way to knock back my grade, however, so no harm, no foul.

It has been over a year of filming for GET LAMP. I better finish that up. A smattering of letters goes out this week and then I will have hopefully scheduled and initiated final discussions for remaining interviews (others inevitably pop up but these will be bonuses).

It is a major problem that people both laud the wonder of the internet’s ability to spread information, and are quick as vipers to turn on information they don’t like because “it just some crap on the Internet”. There’s money and power to be made in reputation systems, or maintaining a gold standard on specific websites. Of course, once you do that, it stops being cheap and it can’t just be one or two people anymore. But until this schizophrenia is addressed, we’re kind of in a bad way because everything is going online.

One side effect of being a collector is that you tend to want things to ‘end’ because once they do so, they’re more easily collectible. This is somewhat incompatible with people who generally want something they appreciate to never end. I’m going to stick with the ‘end’ crowd because nothing seems to be worse than something that hasn’t ended but kind of really has.

I was diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) about 7 years back… but it’s workin’ for me!

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My man “Flack” O’Hara and I were having a chat about this whole “Where Have All the Philez Gone?” thing I mentioned last week. He goaded me into writing a letter to 2600, so I did, which was generally a good thing (we’ll see if I get into HOPE in a year and a half) and we kept discussing the fundamental issue. Here’s some excerpts from his latest letter.

The former journalism student in me died a little when I read the article. You and I are old enough to remember the days of, you know, LEGWORK when it comes to writing an article. When you’ve read so many BBS-era text files, there’s this thing … it’s hard for me to describe but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. There’s this voice that people use that, when you read it, you can instantly tell they didn’t do any research. Key phrases stick out, like “I’ll bet” or “probably” or “I’m guessing.” The real red flag is when you see two or three of them in the same sentence. “You know, I’ll bet that at least half of the people probably don’t think this.” It’s a way of writing that lets your audience know that you did absolutely no research on the topic you’re writing about and you have no confidence in your own opinion or stance.

I think you saw this a lot in old BBS textfiles because, let’s face it, doing research meant actual work back then. To be a good journalist you should know or at least comprehend the topic at hand. To be a real journalist, you need to know more than your audience does about a topic. In other words, on a scale of 1-10, if I know 5 and my readers know 3, that’s okay because you are still conveying new information to them. If your readership is a 5 then you had better be bringing a 7 or an 8 to the table. The thing is, back in the BBS days you could often get away with a 1 or a 2 because people were not going to go out and research whatever it was you were writing about. But now, thanks to sites like Google and Wikipedia, you can. It’s like that scene in the Matrix where Trinity learns how to fly a helicopter in seconds. We’re not there yet, but we’re close. I can appear knowledgable about any topic in minutes thanks to search engines. So if you’re writing an article, you had better AT LEAST have used the web at some point, because your readers will, and any bullshit fluff is going to be caught very quickly.

On a slightly different tangent, does this not make you weep for the readers of 2600 a bit? It’s like one moron making up stories and spreading them to a bunch of morons. There must’ve been at least a few people who read that article and went, “huh?” I don’t know, man. The whole revisionism angle bothers me as much if not more than the shitty journalism. I guess people are used to just walking on to forums or into chatrooms and spewing bullshit and hoping that enough people will just believe them. It also makes me really, really sad about the state of 2600. Are there really no hackers left?

I dispute across-the-board quality of the files, of course, but the ones that stand out, which I laud freely, show signs of research. If we start out with a early file, say ‘To All Who Dare, The Black Box”, you have a well-presented work, talking about a neat circuit that can give you something neat (free phone calls, or free phone calls to people who call you), with a clear presentation of how to do it, what it achieves, and the theory of operation. That’s pretty well-put together. And to the end of my days I will promote the incredible quality of Bioc Agent 003’s series The Basics of Telecommunications as one of the highest watermarks on BBS textfiles. Meticulous information, beautiful presentation, world-class layout. (Number 7 is particularly well done.)

On the other hand, even the utopian, freewheeling era of the 1980s gives you scampy articles like Masturbation Techniques and Info, which reads more like a random-riffing stream-of-consciousness typing test than anything else …and the 1990s give us random-direction-filled files like How 2 Make Free Copies, which fails to alight the audience about specific copier models, context for the way copiers (and copy machine coin boxes) work, and a razor, razor-thin justification (you need a lot of copies to plagarize properly).

Perspective might come from this article from TAP magazine, a 1982 issue. For historical context, TAP (Technological Assistance Program) was the proto-2600, or you can think of 2600 as the new-school TAP. By 1982, things are starting to fall apart a tad for TAP, and there was a one-two punch of a firebombing (!) of the office and “I’ll help you” staff not quite up to the task of keeping the endeavor together. As a result, quality controls are starting to slip a little, and you get an “informative” article/textfile that reads like a guy you’re in a line for the bathroom with who’s struck up an unwanted conversation with you:

“In Berlin, I purchased ten grams of hash on the street for 8 German marks per gram. For those who are not up to date on the exchange rate of US dollars to Marks, the price is translated into $3.85 per gram! But how good is the hash you ask? Well, a friend and I smoked a rolled up cigarette laced with a small amount of hash while on the return flight to New York and in a matter of five minutes, we were knocked out. When the plane began to fly upside down, we knew we were stoned off our asses. Incidentally, one should smoke hash in the lavatory of the jet, not in one’s seat!”

Not exactly a spectacular piece of journalism.

The spectrum test Flack suggests is the jewel here. The idea that someone who is only nominally ahead of the learning curve than someone else but able to construct a decent explanation of where they are, could still be of use to them, is the fundamental idea behind science. You learn a bit, you explain yourself properly and clearly, and then draw the best conclusions you can, which give others the inspiration to research further, and hopefully adding their own bit.

This works well for journalism. Doesn’t work as well for entertainment.

In entertainment, you don’t actually want people to learn too much, other than you’re good at providing them entertainment so they’ll come back. You don’t look into stuff too deeply, because you’re basically telling a good story, and reality gets in the way of a good story. Instead, you’re trying to be funny, you’re exaggerating where needed, and if you think that people will buy in if you paint it with a slight amount of “authority”, it’ll work better for your interests and those of your audience.

Once you regard articles like How to Kill Santa Claus: DEAD! as nothing more than entertainment, you’re relieved of expecting important information from them, and on the side of people looking for “meaning”, the pure inherent destructive evil of a little story-telling jaunt like this fades away. Entertainment is easier to write, too, so when you read something like the “drug” file mentioned above, you realize it doesn’t matter if the guy is right or not; he’s just spinning a yarn and drawing silly conclusions and the editors are letting it sail through because who can it hurt?

It’s only when you try to play the game that some of your articles are journalistic and others are entertainment, and pretend you’re only journalistic, that us “old-timers” get a little cranky. Not because we haven’t seen the work before, but we don’t like the implication that a half-baked blog entry printed on actual paper gets the same regard as a slaved-over textfile written 20 years previous.

And yes; the web has made the world into one gigantic cheat sheet, enabling you to get through 2 minutes of reasonable conversation on a subject without having to excuse yourself early to get another drink. But it sure won’t enrich either side of the endeavor. And while entertainment is a great thing, it’s not known for nourishment.

I think it’s being able to distinguish between the two that’s the real lost skill, not making heaping plates of either.

Comments Off on Catching Flack for the Philez

Friends, both old and new, like to do the ol’ Wikicritic a favor by pointing out to him any little flame-up of wikipedia discussion that hits a prominent or not so prominent weblog or website or newspaper or the like. Almost none of these recent whorls of discussion expound on how great Wikipedia is; that’s old news and not interesting. Instead, a lot of them are making declarations of faults in Wikipedia’s setup, which is up there with reporting an occurence of drunken binges on college campuses to me, but apparently a novel enough angle to still get attention.

So yesterday I was aimed at this clusterfuck of a blog posting and comment collection, which has fallen into a template so firm that I feel like I should be able to type CTRL-W into an editor and generate it automatically.

Here’s how the template works.

Blogposting, by Blogger: Wikipedia. I am not completely fucking in love with it. I either hate it or am unhappy about some aspect of it. Here is more detail than you could possibly want about my specific thing that pissed me off about Wikipedia, and from this I’m just saying, I am not completely fucking in love with it.

COMMENTS:

• The thing about Wikipedia is that it is not perfect, that’s true, but it’s good enough for my needs. Just like I’m quite happy to have Beef Jerky instead of steak, and to crawl on broken glass instead of riding a monorail, I get by using Wikipedia for subjects I don’t know because somewhere in that thing there must be something accurate. Also, please ignore the fact that I act like I am actually eating steak on a monorail anyway. Signed, Don’t Give a Shit.
• I agree with you entirely about Wikipedia and let me take this time to tell you a very long and equally involved story about an incident I was part of, including this one Wikipedian I hate so, so very much. If we only got rid of that one Wikipedian and anyone like him, Wikipedia would be perfect. Signed, I Know a Lot About Geology.
• When you really sit down and think about it, absolutely no facts are really true, nothing is real, all things are variant, there is no objective final answer, and so Wikipedia accurately reflects reality, which is itself variant. Signed, I’m Writing This At Work.
• The problem for most people is they don’t realize Wikipedia is a work in progress and even though it’s the first match for everything on Google and is now cited in legislation, patents and newspaper articles, and is one of the top ten websites on the Internet, we should treat it like it’s some kid’s high school project and give it an award. Signed, I Occasionally Wear a Seatbelt.

As a bonus, this one included Cory Doctorow in the mix. If you haven’t figured out that most of Cory Doctorow’s opinions are formed, formulated and delivered as one delivers an analysis of a country from a moving train car… you’re not reading very closely.

A worthwhile endeavor, which I’m not in the mood to enumerate tonight, is to read the Wikipedia edit/discussion records of advocates of Wikipedia when they’re actually dealing with it. Go look up danah boyd, Xeni Jardin and Cory. Mix well. Enjoy. Bring a cup of tea.

But more than all that, I’ve lately been focusing less on Wikipedia’s problems than the problems of collaborative websites in general. What works, what doesn’t work, how different places handle this. While it’s fun to concentrate on a place that is unusually popular, that very popularity is causing such a crowd mass that the architectural flaws of Wikipedia are being stretched into all-out cascading failures. It’s become very hard to tell what’s a case of actual problems with the site’s setup, and what’s the result of an endless assault of Dumbass Torrent breaking the fort walls.

I will say, however, that right now the only thing that really makes me angry in the whole Wikisoup is the pride and joy of deleting articles by the truckload, daily. Not newly-created articles with names like “BONER MUNCH” and “I MADE A THING YOU SHOULD BUY”, but articles that last for months and months are are maintained by the work of dozens and then a random set of do-gooders go along and send it to oblivion. This is, in my humble opinion, the Web 2.0 equivalent of hunting elephants for tusks or killing buffalo to extinction using a few cuts of meat and letting the rest rot. It’s a nearly-unfathomable waste, one we’ll probably look back at with horror and regret; the realization that when the internet was relatively free and a lot of people were united in working on a project, a ton of effort was squandered. A shame.

So yeah, still not buying in, sorry.

The closest real-life metaphor for Wikipedia is the American Red Cross. Nobody dislikes the idea of the Red Cross. What a fantastic idea it is. However, if you look at a lot of how the Red Cross operates, it’s ugly, has had issues of corruption, waste and poor management, and does some pretty hairy scary crap in the operation of its business. While it’s entirely cool that people want there to be a functioning Red Cross, right now it’s not doing so well, and it would probably be a matter of a few minor but important shifts in policy to get things back on track.

I have no doubt that when Wikipedia inevitably moves towards a beta-release system, where you have a page that anyone can edit and a page that is the official “last good” one, that a lot of the current noise will cease, with regards to the issues of vandalism, edit wars, and the rest. That it hasn’t gone to that system yet is merely a case of the right people not feeling the pain yet. Eventually they will, and it will be portrayed that it was always a good idea to do this. Because it is.

But the endemic disregard for people’s effort, the inherent dislike of people who actually have experience in a subject, and the bushel of bad decisions masquerading as brave choices tell me that when I walked away years ago, I made a pretty good choice.

Make a template for that.

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I don’t know why I care, but I do.

The sudden web-mainstreaming of “LOLCATS”, or “Image Macros”, inevitably leads to a discussion of the genesis of this weird way or writing stuff, which leads to some mention of “Leetspeak”, which then collapses into a pile of speculative jelly as to where the hell all this weird writing style came from.

“LOLCATS” itself has one general goal at this point: to drive traffic towards advertising. Good luck finding any site that isn’t caked around the little bastards with ads of every stripe; I sure couldn’t. Even BoingBoing, which resembles a NASCAR entrant these days, gets a bit of the tasty pie. Personally, I dig the whole fucking-around-with-images-and-adding-text thing; it’s been around for a very long time in various amounts and when it’s funny, it’s really funny. Like any fast food, it’s not good to make it your steady diet, but it doesn’t hurt to jump into the stupid and make stupid angels every once in a while.

But the whole “Whence does come the Leetspeak” question is always handled kind of oddly, although I’m happy to say that it appears the knee-jerk response is no longer that it was invented 5 minutes ago. People harken back to 2001, to 1995, to 1988… not bad! Wrong, but not bad.

Boing Boing links to an essay by David McRaney which links to the Wikipedia article which then links to this article by Anthony Mitchell. In it, he basically pulls a theory out of thin air:

The cultural attitudes and some of the early slang behind leet can be traced to the 1970s and early 1980s, the heyday of the phone phreak era. During that era, individuals and informal groups sought to explore the public telephone system in the U.S., often to make illegal long-distance telephone calls. The most proficient individuals in the phone phreak subculture received recognition and status that enabled them to become cultural bellwethers.

When computer bulletin board systems (BBSs) became available in the 1980s, phone phreak culture gained a written medium in the online exchanges that were often so slow and clumsy that users would shorten words or phrases to be able to send messages more conveniently. For example, ‘you are’ or ‘your’ could be shortened to u r or ur.

Short leet forms are commonly observed today in SMS Latest News about SMS (Short Message Service) text messages composed on mobile phones. The popularity of leetish truncations on SMS is driven by the keyboard designs on most mobile phones. While computer users have access to full QWERTY keyboards, on most mobile phone keypads each button is shared by three letters. Little keypads encourage leet.

Uses of leet that substitute numbers and punctuation marks for letters can be traced to the 1980s when bulletin board administrators sought to discourage the use of BBSs for the storage and distribution of pornography and stolen software. To circumvent BBS restrictions, spellings and words were altered by some BBS users. Enduring relics from that era are the leet terms pr()n and pr0n, which signify pornography.

Another relic is the translation of the word hacker, which was banned by some BBS administrators. Initial leetspeak translations to hack0r or h4cker led to filtering and bans on those leet terms, pushing leetspeakers to develop more obscure, less recognizable translations such as h4x0r and |-|^><()|z.

To his credit, this is listed as an “opinion” piece, not an academic work, and so he feels absolutely no responsibility to cite any sources for this belief. The fact that Wikipedia then cites this speculation in a manner that makes it look like it’s an informed statement shouldn’t be a huge jaw-dropper either.

I care about this because I spend so much time collecting BBS stuff, and to watch someone randomly make up sources for these things and reasons that I’ve never heard of ever, it’s just a tad frustrating.

I’ve got an entire directory of printouts from circa 1980s BBSes, early stuff, which shows that nobody was trying to get around any sort of filtering system. Crap-ass ideas like trying to regulate your users to that level are spotty at best in BBS history. And it certainly didn’t stop people from talking in that way.

I traced the meaning of “K-Rad” some time ago. I found the specific place it came from. Watching the entirely made-up histories of the phrase show how tenuous a connection can be drawn between history and speculation when reading about where stuff “came from”.

LOLCATS, in case you want to play history tracing games, definitely links back to Amos and Andy and 1800s-era renditions of black language. Directly? No, but it exploits along the same lines of pseudo-infantile language portraying complicated (and not so complicated) concepts in a messed-up manner. And done right, that shit is funny! Done wrong it’s insulting and boring. Actually, sometimes it’s done right and is BOTH insulting and funny.

And you can cite that!

Anyway, I can definitely tell you that the weird “1 for I”, “0 for O” stuff was already a cliche by 1984, with the Real Pirate’s Guide by Rabid Rasta mentioning this:

REAL PIRATES DON'T SAY "K-K00L", "K-AWESOME", "X10DER", "L8R0N", OR ANYTHING OF THE SORT.
REAL PIRATES KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BE- TWEEN "F" AND "PH" (I.E.  "PHILES", "PHUCK", "FONE", ETC.).
REAL PIRATES NEVER USE TEXT GRAPHICS IN THEIR MESSAGES.
REAL PIRATES DON'T SEARCH FOR NEW WAYS TO SPELL "WARES".

I spent an enormous amount of time six years ago annotating the Real Pirates’ Guide, so go enjoy that if you haven’t seen it.

The point is, primary materials abound. Stop making shit up, it drives everyone putting the primary materials online nuts. LOL.

6 Comments