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| Monday, July 24, 2006 |
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Hung over 
| | The plane from Santa Barbara to LAX was two hours late, so I missed my connection to Portland. The AC is broken at LAX (or the part where I am), so that's no fun either. |
| | Should get to the hotel around midnight tonight. |
No, it's "In the Beginning..."
| | In the end, it's really an argument about who will bear the costs of building out the robust networks that we¹ll all use in the future. And while net neutrality has received the most press, in the end it may not change the status quo as much as either side fears or hopes. If the networks win, the government will probably intervene if it sees unfair discrimination against competitors or censorship. If the Googles of the world win, the network owners will undoubtedly figure out some other way to raise prices. |
| | No matter which way it goes, it means a new element of government regulation. And as far as who pays to build out the networks — in the end, one way or another, most of the costs will still be passed on to the consumer. |
| | More than three years back, David Weinberger and I wrote World of Ends. I still think it was basically right, but it has also proven naive. The problem is that most of us &# 151; in the U.S. at least — still think the Net is gravy on the meat of telephone or cable services. You get a gizmo from the cable company or the phone company, plug Ethernet or a wireless router into it and you've got Internet. Right? |
| | Wrong. The Net, as Bob Frankston puts it, is the real infrastructure. It's the superset, not the subset. It's the ultimate context. TV, phone, radio, publishing, commerce and everything else will eventually come to you over the Net, if it doesn't already. |
| | The problem is, the Net is really nothing more than the shortest data path between two devices. You want fast and free Internet for the same reason you want a fast and free connection between your computer and your keyboard and your screen. |
| | Think of the Net as a giant three dimensional zero. Everything across it is zero distance from everything else. The cost of using it isn't zero, but once it's built, that's what it rounds to. (As I explained here a few days ago.) |
| | How do we build that out, and who do we trust to do it, without screwing it up? There is plenty of business in building it out, as there is in all forms of construction. But maintenance shouldn't look like the cable TV or phone businesses, any more than highway maintenance should look like a theme park. |
| | More to the point, why trust building the "first mile" of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than "consumers" of one-way "content", and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they're the only ones in a position to do it? That's not a good enough reason. It's also not true. |
| | The phone and cable companeis will be the only ones in a position to do it if we let them lobby that privilege into law. That's their real agenda, and that's the important story here. And it's a lot bigger than Net Neutrality. |
Stuff worth crying about
| | People have been asking me what I think of this story here (read it before it scrolls behind a paywall), about photos of kids made unhappy when the photographer took away their lollipops. (The photographic purpose was high-minded, but that's the way the story has played out, in many blogs.) |
| | The mess reminds me of Jackie Cooper, whose book about being a child actor was titled Please don't shoot my dog. |
| | Also of what a priest friend once said: "Childhood is traumatic". Meaning, in any case. |
| | I love kids, and hate the thought of doing anything to make a kid cry. But I was raised by strong and loving people whose main response to crying was "you'll get over it." Which I did, far as I know. |
| | Meanwhile, isn't there a war going on? |
| | [Later...] I should add that, in respect to the whole public/private/anonymity issue raised (on the blogging side of this thing; not the photography side), I believe that the bigger problem here is the absence of a commons. We may talk about having one, but I believe we don't. And that we need to build one. Blogs are good things, but they don't suffice. If anything, they bring the absence into sharp relief. |
See what you think. Or vice versa.
| | Dabble is up. I've been following the beta and like it. |
Of points and pointage
| | After reading what I wrote here about I.Q., a freind sent me an email pointing me to David L.Kirp's After the Bell Curve, which ran in the New York Times Magazine. |
| | As somebody who knows first-hand what it means to be called dumb (when one isn't) and smart (when others are clearly smarter), and whose known IQ scores have an 80-point range, I reject completely the notion that a person has "an IQ." It should be ludicrous, on the face of it, to think intelligence could ever be reduced tone number, much less derived exclusively from one's ability to answer questions and solve puzzles. |
| | This whole article is framed by the belief that a) IQ is real (while it's not... it's a test of puzzle-solving performance, at one moment in time) and 2) that the answer to this (as well as other) disadvantage problems is more school of some kind. |
| | I reject the latter too. Yet IQ testing and schooling are both so ubiquitous and normative that it is almost impossible to get our heads outside of either. |
| | So I remain an outside head, yelling in the wilderness. |
| | In that last link, I wrote, |
| | In the flat new world, educational opportunities are limitless, even without help from school, government, churches or business. Much of what you need to know about pretty much everything is out there on the Web somewhere--especially if you're a technologist. Yes, the Web isn't everywhere. But it's in all the flat places, and the flatness is spreading, fast. Which is another of Tom's points. |
| | Of course, the average and the dumb are still plentiful, no doubt about it. But try this concept on for size: most of them were made that way. They were shaped in large measure by school systems that have had, from the dawn of the industrial age, a main purpose: to produce employees for boxed positions in corporate org charts that take the shape of pyramids, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. The many supporting the few. We may have needed a caste system that made each of us a ranked product--and we still call ourselves that--of an education. There were few alternatives in the industrial age, aside from farming and other relatively solitary occupations. But there are plenty of alternatives now, as many as there are individuals with access to broadband. |
| | On pages 303-4 of the latest edition of The World is Flat , Tom Friedman quotes most of the above and adds, |
| | For all these reasons, I have concluded that in a flat world, IQ — intelligence quotient — still matters, but CQ and PQ IQ — curiosity quotient and passion quotient IQ — matter even more. I live by the equation CQ + PQ > IQ. Give me a kid with a passion to learn and a curiousity to discover and I will take him over a less passionate kid with a high IQ every day of the week. |
| | I thoroughly agree with Tom's main points here, so it's really pointless to argue that curiosity and passion are equally immeasurable as intelligence. All three are useful, whether or not they are measurable. |
| | And I'd rather invest my curiosity and passions in other subjects at this point. |
Back, then forth
| | Yesterday's saga ended when we arrived home, in the rental car I drove from Los Angeles, around midnight. That's 3am back where the trip started. I had been up 24 hours at that point, operating on one hour's sleep in a bed. |
| | I did manage to sleep a bit on the plane — a United 777 that flew smoothly, though it dodged a lot of thunderstorms along the way. I was disappointed that the little map that shows where you are didn't work. Other trivia wasn't in great shape, either; but at least we were able to swap seats so the kid and I could sit together. We were next to a window, but also over the middle of the wing, so I was spared the temptation to stay awake and take pictures. (Well, there was this one of downtown L.A. in the evening haze.) |
| | On the ground at LAX we waited the duration for our bag to appear on the carousel. When it didn't, we waited at the baggage office to find out it was waiting for us at the airport in Santa Barbara. |
| | So we waited for a shuttle to Budget, where my FastBreak membership meant a car was waiting for me in Area 1 at the agency's yard near the airport. That's what it said on one of the non-broken Windows monitors (one was blue-screened; another displayed a network error) under the canopy where the shuttle dropped us off. In Area 1 we had a choice of four little Chevy Aveos, each with crank windows and other inconveniences. None were the usual Chevy Cobalts, which I would consider in the same class as the Ford Focus "or similar" I had rented online earlier in the day. |
| | So we waited on line at the Budget counter before politely making our case against driving a bottom-class car when we had booked a next-to-bottom one. The guy there switched us to a Malibu, which was nice. Then we hooked up the Sirius satellite radio and listened to LA traffic to see whether we should take the main 405/101 route, or opt for the Pacific Coast Highway. It said the main route was clear, and we double-checked with reports on KNX and KFWB as we drove up Airport Drive and La Tijera, to pick up 405 North. |
| | Which we didn't. Soon as I saw the river of red tail lights under the bridge, I said "It's parked" to the kid. "No, it's barely moving," he said, correctly. So we took the coast road, which is usually my preference anyway, if Lincoln Boulevard isn't backed up (something no traffic report ever talks about). |
| | Eighty miles later I realized that I would get to the Santa Barbara airport after everything was closed, so we went straight home and promtly got six hours of steady sleep before heading out to the airport, to retrieve the bag. |
| | Now I'm re-packing for flying to Portland this afternoon. See (some of) ya'll there. Hope it isn't as hot as everywhere else I've been, including here in Santa Barbara, where air conditioning is a rarity. (Whoa. Portland is hot too.) |
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