Posted 22:53 by Evan

Meme du Jour

It was just about a year ago that I overheard my friend Heather saying to my wife, "I just blew a whole morning doing nothing but making comments on other people's blogs."

I was, at the time, only paying the barest fragment of attention to blogs, but something about the sentence caught my ear. It's kinda lopsided, I thought. After all, we're dealing with a subculture so frenetic and fastpaced that weblog, fergodsake, takes too long to say, and only blog will do. And yet there's no tight little monosyllable to take the place of the phrase "making comments."

I mentioned this to the group, and people immediately began nominating candidate neologisms. My wife, Wendy, made a suggestion, and her coinage won the instant approval of everyone present. It has since entered the everyday vocabulary of my circle of friends, as both noun and verb, and in hopes that it will spread farther through the online world, I commend the term to your attention now.

I think it works because it clearly conveys the bidirectional, give-and-take nature of these things. Input/output. Flipflop. Ping pong. GnipGnop. Blogs, and...

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Posted 19:51 by Evan

More Thoughts on Ad Pollution

There's a lovely scene in Neal Stephenson's Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (gratuitous affiliate link), which I'd quote in full, but it appears my copy has been toddlered, so I'll just have to summarize:

Protagonist Sangamon Taylor is a chemist and environmental activist; he works for GEE, an organization that resembles Greenpeace. He meets up with a co-worker who has been driving a GEE-owned car; when they stop at a gas station, he discovers that the dipstick is dry. When she shrugs off the matter as uninteresting, he flies into a rage, lecturing her about the cost, both environmental and financial, of replacing a car, and then he reminds her of The Tragedy of the Commons and the tendency of people to undervalue that for which they do not have to pay directly.

"Checking the oil in the Omni," he finishes, "is another kind of environmentalism."

That phrase has stuck with me for years, and come in handy in many a situation. Because what's environmentalism all about, really? Protecting the commons. It's misunderstood by some as being about the hugging of trees and the cuddling of fuzzy baby owls, but what it's about is making sure that in the future, you won't have to be rich to breathe fresh air and drink clean water and eat nontoxic food and look at a pretty landscape now and then. Those things are our common heritage... and the people who want to take them away, destroy them, and then sell inferior substitutes back to us for a profit, must be fought.

And, of course, it's not the only kind of commons.

Why is it wrong to shoplift? I'll pick a favorite example: You know those stupid little plastic packets of condiments and envelopes of salt and sugar that you get at cheap restaurants? Those sure do suck, don't they? You know why we have to put up with those? Because the salt and pepper shakers kept getting stolen. Oftentimes--probably more often than not--by people who could easily have afforded to buy salt and pepper shakers, who thought the the item was so cheap that no one could possibly miss it. This is just the tiniest, most trivial way our shared world has gotten uglier, more annoying, and less congenial--especially in places frequented by those who aren't rich--because our trust in each other has been eroded away by petty theft. Not stealing is another kind of environmentalism.

Why was Eldred vs. Ashcroft such a horrible blow? Because our generation and those that came before us were lucky enough to have a rich public domain to draw from in creating new artistic work, and our descendents will be stuck with no more than what we had--after we've already thoroughly mined it--and anything else, they'll have to pay for. Disgusting. Protecting the public domain is another kind of environmentalism.

Why are free and open-source software such good things? Because they balance the tendency of commerce to put fences up around the commons, with an opposite process--the creation of whole new commons, by people who understand that shared effort leads to shared benefit. Linux is another kind of environmentalism.

And--at last, we come to the point--it's not a coincidence that when I posted the other day about removing brands and banner ads, I used an environmental metaphor, "walking out of a vast cloud of poison".

Perhaps the very least appreciated commons is precisely the one that we'd most need the use of if we wanted to appreciate it: clarity of thought. Our lives are short, dammit; we deserve to have our brains operating at peak efficiency so we can make the best use of the time we have. And instead, we have created a half-trillion-dollar industry entirely devoted to filling our brains with mahooha.

The amazing thing is how little it bothers me, most of the time. I rarely think about it. I wouldn't be thinking about it now if Mike hadn't brought the subject up the other day. But just read his rant for a taste of how ubiquitous this crap is. And I know from my own experience how much of a burden it is--simply freeing myself from the relatively benign and unobtrusive banner ads that litter the web was a nearly religious experience. Installing SpamAssassin recently was perhaps even more of a relief (though not as dramatically eye-opening, of course, because the one thing no one will ever say about spam is Huh, I never noticed before how annoying that stuff is).

If you haven't tried turning down the volume, you just can't imagine how noisy the world is, how much it knots your muscles, how distracted you are. (And there aren't any technological tools for eliminating billboards and brand names and "swoosh"-logo t-shirts.) And yet, mostly... we don't notice. We're the proverbial boiled frogs.

And I haven't even mentioned the content of the noise. Yesterday, as it happens, my wife read me a passage from the book Affluenza (another gratuitous affiliate link, but please don't buy it if your library has it, or this ever-lengthening screed will be rendered somewhat hypocritical); it was a description of a marketing conference called "Kid Power" that was held at Disney World in 1996, with a keynote address called "Softening the Parental Veto":

Speaker after speaker revealed the strategy: Portray parents as fools and fuddy-duddies who aren't smart enough to realize their children's need for the products being sold. It's a proven technique for neutralizing parental influence in the marketer/child relationship. [...] "Anti-social behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing," [speaker Paul] Kurnit stated calmly, suggesting that advertisers could best reach children by encouraging rude, often aggressive behavior and faux rebellion against the strictures of family discipline.

Hoo ha. I can't wait til my kid starts marinating in that crap.

(There's a discursive point to be made here about the ironic fact that those politicians who make worshipful obeisance to and disdain the least interference with the almighty Free Market!, and grant privelege after privelege to the ones who so eagerly send exactly these messages, are exactly the same politicians most inclined to kvetch about family discipline and the lack thereof. But I don't feel like going there just now, so let's take the thought as the deed, 'kay? Thanks.)

It boils down to this: The ability to string two thoughts together without being shouted at is another commons. And they're stealing our commons. For money. Again.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone?
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

But Joni got it wrong; sometimes you don't know what you've got even after it's gone.

And shutting off the ads is another kind of environmentalism.

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Posted 11:09 by Evan

Toddler poetry

No

No.
No no no.
No... no, no no. No!
NOOOOOOO.
No?

Big fat no.


-- Car seat, 11 June 2003

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Posted 20:54 by Evan

The Logo and its Discontents

Just a quick link to a brilliant rant from my friend Michael Taht about his efforts to eliminate brands from his life.

Michael used to work for one of the bigger banner-advertising firms on the web; at the same time, he was running an ad-filtering proxy server from his home. When I started reading the web via that proxy, it was flippin' amazing how much of a psychic burden the absence of banner ads lifted from my mind. It was like I'd been living in a vast cloud of poison, and never noticed it until I walked out of it one day, and breathed fresh air for the first time in years.

Reading via a proxy made a number of web pages work less well or not at all, and eventually I took one last deep breath, and willingly walked back into the poison--glad, at least, to know that it was a choice.

But I remember the feeling of peace... and I'm sure that if the brands and logos on all the objects in my home and office were to disappear tomorrow, that same feeling would be there again.

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Posted 18:27 by Evan

Hi everybody, I'm back.

I've been getting complaints. Turns out there are people actually checking this blog periodically, almost as if they were expecting me to post to it. Like that was what it was for or something. Weirdos.

Okay, my excessively optimistic readers, I'm sorry. It's been over a month. My last post was long and it was hard to write, a big commitment of time and effort and a trip through an emotional mangle, and finishing it kept me up late and irritated my wife, and I just found it hard to motivate myself to do it again. Plus, a number of people were kind enough to link to it, and I really did want it to be read, and the permalink was bloggered, so I hesitated to post a followup in the interest of keeping it up near the top of the blog.

But most importantly: I started this blog thinking it was mostly going to be for the telling of a particular ongoing story--to wit, my layoff, after fifteen years, from SCO. Well, I've been laid back on. They extended my job for two months, then finally cancelled the layoff altogether. I have concluded that "ability to remain employed at SCO" is my superpower. One of these days I'm sure I'll figure out how to fight crime with that.

And though I don't feel anywhere near as secure here as I once did, I'm happy about the turn of events. My life doesn't revolve around work as much as it used to, and what I want more than anything is time with my family and friends. SCO gives me a short commute, a 32-hour-a-week working schedule, co-workers I adore, and a skimpy but nevertheless adequate salary. A part of me thinks that in clinging to this job I'm turning down an invitation from life; maybe I should have let the currents of reality float me to another, maybe better career; maybe this was an opportunity to reexamine my life and priorities and do something truly new. But a bigger part is just glad to be spared the hassle for a while; this is what I care about today.

I do want to say something about SCO, though. Look: I really, honest-to-god, have no opinion at all on the merits of SCO's claims in the lawsuit they're currently pursuing against IBM. I don't have any knowledge of the code in dispute, and I wouldn't be allowed to discuss it even if I did. But I want to make a few general ethical statements, because it's an important issue to me, and to some very dear friends (including one who has linked to this blog).

Ethical statement 1: Taking someone's code and re-releasing it contrary to his or her wishes is wrong. If someone did that, then it would be right for the injured party to get some redress. Whether it happened or not is for the court to figure out, but if it did happen, that's not okay.

Ethical statement 2: I believe passionately in open source (as well as the subtly-distinct category of free) software. I really do. This world is a far better place for the existence of Linux and *BSD, and if they eventually take over the market to extent that I can no longer make a living working on proprietary UNIX, I will accept that outcome with equanimity and even happiness. I want the gift economy to thrive. I want to prove that such a radical idea can be made to work--because I think it might well be the first step that leads us into a much better future.

So I have a certain amount of cognitive dissonance here... because the leaders of the free and open source software movements, people I deeply respect and admire, apparently think my company's lawsuit is a threat. And I don't know that they're wrong. I hope they are. But I'm just caught in the middle, like a child of divorce, hoping against hope that everyone will win.

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