Whats Hot and Not XML Summer School 2004

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Whats Hot and NotXML Summer School 2004

• Andrew Orlowski
• The Register
• andrew.orlowski_at_theregister.co.uk

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When to time your toilet break

• 1 Some examples of very stupid things
• 2 you just dont get it!
• and why this doesnt help anyone
• 3 Prolonged stupidity may be curtailed in the
  near future
• 4 Our role in all this
• 5 Two characteristics of technology thinking that
  arent very helpful
• 6 Reasons to be cheerful?

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There is no shortage of stupid things

• But what is stupid?

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Some very stupid things
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Some very stupid things

• The 350 microprocessor

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Some very stupid things

• The 350 microprocessor
• The Mobile Internet

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Some very stupid things

• The 350 microprocessor
• The Mobile Internet
• The Microsoft Inch

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Some very stupid things

• The 350 microprocessor
• The Mobile Internet
• The Microsoft Inch
• Google is God!

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Google is God

• "If I can operate Google, I can find anything...
  Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like
  God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God
  sees and knows everything. Throughout history,
  people connected to God without wires. Now, for
  many questions in the world, you ask Google, and
  increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."
• Alan Cohen, V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi
  provider
• New York Times, 6/29/03

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Google is God

• "In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide
  from its consequences - which in this case is
  millions of terabytes of unreliable information,
  badly designed and clumsily written. We have
  failed our own creation and given birth something
  truly awful. We're just too busy cooing over the
  pram to notice.
• (anon)
• http//www.internetisshit.org/

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Some very stupid things

• The 350 microprocessor
• The Mobile Internet
• The Microsoft Inch
• Google is God!
• Let Us Praise Sloppy Code!

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Let us praise Sloppy Code

• "What should reassure the technophiles, and
  unsettle the technophobes, is our world of lousy
  code. Because it is lousy code that is bringing
  the digital universe to life, rather than leaving
  us stuck in some programmed, deterministic
  universe devoid of life. It is that primordial
  soup of archaic subroutines, ambiguous DLL's,
  crashing Windows, and living fossil operating
  systems that is driving the push towards the sort
  of fault embracing template based addressing
  that proved so successful in molecular biology,
  with us and our computers as one of its
  strangest results.
• Let us praise sloppy instructions, as we also
  praise the Lord.
• - George Dyson

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Part Three You Just Dont Get It!
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You Just Dont Get It!

• Translates as
• I cant understand you!
• I dont want to understand you!
• I cant be bothered to explain

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• The giveaway that cult thinking is present in
  any environment is how responses are given from
  possible cult members to probable nonbelievers.
  If you disagree, then you "don't get it." Werner
  Erhard of EST (the über-cult of the 1970's) used
  to use this phrase over and over.
• Tell Erhard that something makes no sense. "You
  don't get it."
• Tell him that something is self-contradictory.
  "You don't get it."
• Tell him that something is just plain stupid.
  "You don't get it."
• This is the level of debate you can expect when
  cult thinking is present.
• But, of course, "I don't get it.
• (John C Dvorak, PC Magazine, Feb 22 2002)

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Getting It
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Do they mean us?

• "Once people are online, the net can be used to
  entrench other forms of exclusion and privilege"

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• Like the American settlers, internet dwellers
  create a myth that there was no politics before
  they arrived. In order to establish entirely new
  and egalitarian communities, American settlers
  had to ignore the fact that the land was already
  occupied.
• To the same end, Internet settlers choose to
  ignore the historical and sociological facts of
  how the internet is run, who lacks access to it
  and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide
  people. The risk is that the politics of the net
  follows America towards gated communities, each
  having only an inward-looking, group-based notion
  of politics, and ceases to question the macro
  institutions and systems around them.
• William Davies, NotCon, June 2004

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Maybe these people get it ?
TV satellite dish, Lafayette La.
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Hello, earthlings!
Spoof Wired story makes it past the sub-editors
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The destination

• is not a destination

Technology that is not for everyone is not going
to be accepted by anyone
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We Never Had It So Good

• Cynicism now rampant
• Offshoring makes the problem go away

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If we cant fix our own mess?

• Spam
• I would suggest they just write a new protocol
  from the beginning
• - Suzanne Sluizer, co-author of MTP, (SMTP's
  immediate predecessor)
• CNET August 1 2003

• Internets Background Radiation

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How can we fix yours?

• Ideological objections
• End-to-end principle
• Freedom, Choice and Openness again
• If we cant fix our open network, then closed
  networks will win
• Because they work

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Does IT Matter?

• IT investment brings diminishing returns
• Competitive advantage?
• Not for long
• What do we do when were done?

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Part Four whats the real role of technology?
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Part Four whats the real role of technology?

• Economic Efficiencies

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Part Four whats the real role of technology?

• Economic Efficiencies
• Faster obsolescence

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Part Four whats the real role of technology?

• Economic Efficiencies
• Faster obsolescence
• We dont live in a bubble

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Part Four whats the real role of technology?

• Economic Efficiencies
• Faster obsolescence
• We dont live in a bubble
• Will analytical processing save the
• IT industry?

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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!
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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!

• Because Here Be Information

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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!

• Because Here Be Information
• We Dont Offer Knowledge

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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!

• Because Here Be Information
• We Dont Offer Knowledge
• Information is NOT a special kind of stuff

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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!

• Because Here Be Information
• We Dont Offer Knowledge
• Information is NOT a special kind of stuff
• Is it raining?

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Part Five Here Be Knowledge!

• Because Here Be Information
• We Dont Offer Knowledge
• Information is NOT a special kind of stuff
• Is it raining?
• In the absence of real knowledge, is more
  information better?

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Information doesnt

• Supplant religion or ideas
• Or metaphysics
• Doesnt make us wise
• Thinking produces knowledge
• Machines dont think
• Desire to make machines Magic

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More Information problems

• Veneration of the transmitters
• Bad metaphors biological wishes
• You get knowledge by thinking not by gathering
  facts, or even asking questions
• "Let us praise sloppy code"

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If More Better?

• "a thousand minds all contributing small pieces
  to a project trumps 20 geniuses on a payroll
• - Steven Johnson
• Discover magazine, January 2004

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If More Better?
"a thousand minds all contributing small pieces
to a project trumps 20 geniuses on a payroll -
Steven Johnson Discover magazine, January 2004

• Then monkeys wrote Linux!

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Part Six

• This isnt the best time to lose our minds

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Mind and Information

• Cybernetic Totalists
• - Jaron Lanier
• Positivist Mysticism
• - Richard Barbrook
• Empowerment through technology
• Who is empowering what, exactly?

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From Whizz For Atoms

• To looking for patterns Biology wants to
  replace Physics as the grand narrative Some
  very contentious claims being made. And some
  very dubious philosophy, cf. Thermometers have
  souls Daniel Dennett Many biologists even
  evolutionary biologists object Junk science
  So, man is just a very complicated machine?

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Mind your mind

• The mind itself be from the very outset not left
  to take its own course, but be guided at every
  step, and the business be done as if by
  machinery.
• Francis Bacon

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• At last the human brain, ensconced in a
  computer, has been liberated from the weakness of
  the mortal flesh...It is in control of its own
  destiny. The machine is its body it is the
  machine's mind...
• It seems to me that this must be the mature form
  of intelligent life in the Universe. Housed in
  indestructible lattices of silicon, and no longer
  constrained in the span of its years by the life
  and death cycle of a biological organism, such a
  kind of life could live forever
• Robert Jastrow

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Checking Into the Hive

• Computer mediated communication
• The return of structuralism
• Look whos talking
• LSD and birth of the cyberculture In the trip
  atomization of the ego
• Not all egos survive
• but some emerge stronger than ever!

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Checking Out of the Hive
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Death by Bad Metaphor

• Metaphors are not prescriptive
• Good metaphors may make for bad prescriptions
• Bad metaphors will always make bad prescriptions

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Immediate Problems

• False hopes
• The Dean Bubble
• Problems of accountability
• GMail
• Fatal consequences
• Emergent Cheese Sandwiches
• Bad Social Policy
• Viewing society as a networked system

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• pace The Prisoner

I am not an IP node I am a Free Duck!
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Introducing the Bosak Machine

• Roberts Rules of Order

A distributed and asynchronous yet legally
binding process makes possible - Global
decision-making - Local decision-making -
Every layer of governance in between If it
works, this could be a viable way to solve the
big problems facing us
Jon Bosak, 2000
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Whats wrong with this?

• The first reaction I had from someone was a very
  smart person that I work with at SUN. He could
  not decide if this was insanely great or greatly
  insane. I dont know either and it is going to
  take some groups to figure that out

Jon Bosak, 2000
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Whats wrong with this?

• The first reaction I had from someone was a very
  smart person that I work with at SUN. He could
  not decide if this was insanely great or greatly
  insane. I dont know either and it is going to
  take some groups to figure that out
• Everything taken care of except consensus.
• Thats the tricky part

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6. Reasons to be cheerful

• Karaoke machine and Mobile Phone show it can be
  done

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6. Reasons to be cheerful

• Karaoke machine and Mobile Phone show it can be
  done
• People resistant to Junk Science

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6. Reasons to be cheerful

• Karaoke machine and Mobile Phone show it can be
  done
• People resistant to Junk Science
• We dont have a choice

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6. Reasons to be cheerful

• Karaoke machine and Mobile Phone show it can be
  done
• People resistant to Junk Science
• We dont have a choice
• But everyone must be on board

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What next?

• Write to me!
• Download this presentation
• http//www.badpress.net/talks/
• Much more interesting stuff in the book