christopher robbins blog:

It's me in French: L'Amour, les Anarchitectes et le Futur du Web Indépendant.

(here's the original version in English)

A note of unimportance: I said ‘here's where I start lying’ and it became ‘Here's where I abuse my poetic license’

‘Ahh, editors,’ he says nodding his head pretending to be wisened this way. Speaking of unfortunate edits, check out this terrible little one they yanked from a chapter I did in this book:

The context was Object Oriented Programming» Parent-child scripting» How to kill a child. And I thought I was soooooo witty with

‘1 part arsenic, 2 parts fruit-juice, sugar to taste.

Oops, wrong book.’

But it didn't make it to the final cut. What's with this rampant puritanisation of the web industry!?!

Hermph. Really I was just looking for a way to say what I'd said and to so suavely plug myself a bit. Now that I am all corked up and self-satisfied...

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Bizarre. Surreal. Inane. American government hard at work harassing spoilt smart-ass kids. Raided cypherpunk on probation replies to Politech post

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Ooh! Ooh! This looks good: The Shape of Nets to Come

Put together by the illustrious Richard Barbrook, this looks to be an analysis of the Internet's development so far from an intellectual perspective.

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They unabashedly stole apple's site, but InterConnection looks like they're doing enough nice things to make us forgive 'em.

They donate web sites (including design and hosting) to positive, not-for profit organizations in developing countries, and run a very promising Virtual Volunteer Program.

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Dmitry Sklyarov can go home, but he has to testify against the company he was working for when he wrote the program that landed him in the U.S. courts.

on New York Times (login required), Slashdot, WIRED, International Herald Tribune and The Register.

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Cyberghetto or Cybertopia? was an attempt several years ago at bringing the ivory tower theories of the netelligentsia down to earth.

As a damn-fine Amazon review puts it, ‘This book reflects and exposes many of the utopian views of the Internet as the rose-filtered fanatical visions that they are. But it also exposes the dystopian visions by showing real efforts at community building, and good effects for real people, coming from the Internet.’

Do I see a theme emerging this weekend?..

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More peering into the Internet as it is being taught at University: 39.795-38 The Law in Cyberspace -- Syllabus

This is an incredibly rich themed-link resource in it's own right, plus even when it is less-than inspiring, it's interesting from a psuedo anthropologist's perspective as a perspective on toehr people's views of the Internet. And we don't have to hand anything in by 9:00 am.

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‘The Internet has become an integral, ubiquitous part of everyday life in many social domains and international contexts. Yet, most of the public attention on cyberspace remains fueled by utopian or dystopian visions, rather than being informed by the growing body of research on the Internet as a complex fact of modern life. ’

Well, I'd say that most of the public attention on cyberspace remains fuled by free porn and email accounts, with the occasional pop web-culture-virus, but this is a good ice-cold call to arms for those approaching the Internet more intellectually^*.

The Association of Internet Researchers is accepting submissions until Feburary 15, 2002 that ‘reflect on how to theorize what we know about the Internet and on how to apply what we know theoretically in practice’

^*Amidst all our self-absorbed networked navel-gazing and impregnable interfaces let's not forget that our tiny segmented Internet cliques are an extreme minority in Internet thought.

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For its 6th award, in 2002, the ALTRAN Foundation for Innovation has chosen "technological innovation for developing countries" as it's theme.

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‘Hey Virions,

Here is the list of all the "worthy" messages I picked out up to and including december '96.’

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Monitoring Report on ICANN’s At-Large Elections

Amidst worries that ICANN has come to be run almost entirely by commercial concerns with only the most superficial glimmer of citizen representation, this report was an important statement in and of itself.

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The Story of CPHack

Uncovering the hidden agendas and commercial backscratching behind Cyber Patrol, this story not only shows the dangers of Censorware in general and Cyber Patrol in specific, but also demonstrates that criminalizing reverse-e engineering can end up preventing much more than copyright infringement. Without the right to reverse engineer software, we lose the right to uncover the underhanded tactics that can then be hidden in an untouchable binary. Generally it is very difficult to convince a member of the *General Public* what value reverse-engineering can have other than for cracking copyright protection. Claims of curiosity just don't cut it with most people. But this story shows a tangible result of reverse-engineering that has nothing to do with making copies of a program. This is programming as research, and making this illegal is analogous to criminalizing investigation.

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Creative Exchange
The Network for Culture and Development

‘We believe that arts and culture play a significant role in improving quality of life of poor and disadvantaged people and in achieving sustainable human development.’

Patronizing tone, but nice idea, though I have to admit the reason i am excited about it is not because I think it will make some grand difference, but because it looks like a great opportunity to do art for a reason other than selfish self-expression from tiem to time.

And a terrific collaboration venue.

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Continuing our theme on insidious marketing schemes: Children's ‘Mobile Phone Family’ drawings.

(no comment necessary)

- via <nettime>

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Hunger Strike Against Internet Rating System Highlights Public Concerns

‘Seoul, Korea -- Chang-soo Lee, president of "Progressive Solidarity For A New Society," began a hunger strike yesterday for the suspension of the internet contents rating system. The controversial rating system was put into effect by the South Korean Ministry for Information & Communications (MIC).’

A more main-stream take on this system, Content Rating System to Filter Harmful Sites on Web starts out predictably enough, yanking strings as it points out out how this system will keep the escalating porn and violence out of children's reach. The article does own up that ‘the Web regulations have long been opposed by netizens who fear the infringement on freedom of speech.’

It turns out this system is a compromise created so that people could self-police, after earlier Goverment attempts at installing filters at major ISP's met with vicious backlash, though for the majority this seems to be due more to concern about infringed access speed than civil rights.

The fear is with Korea's track record on Internet rights, this is just the first step to something much more sinister.

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Hearts and Minds: propaganda in wartime (REAL AUDIO needed -sorry- I hate it too but Ira Glass is worth it)

Well, the title says it all. Takes my rant on the evil of marketing to an entirely new level. Related national security archives and clandestone radio pad out the story.

-via This American Life archives

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These look at the Internet in many different ways.

And now an aside I feel the need to state: I've been getting my inspiration lately from theory, from abstract ideas. This is an interesting way to get ideas, very different from my usual brushes with inspiration, but it is akin to looking to the paintbrush itself for inspiration:

‘Look at the brush! Look at the brush! It is made of wood. And look at the bristles! Look at the bristles! They are made of horsehair. And some are flat and some are pointed.’ to which I (and any similiarly sane^* individual) would respond ‘Shut up an' paint, already!’

So this is just to say that I acknowledge this obsession with [analyzing the Internet] as a [creative tool] per se can be quite besides the point in the grand scheme of things. It is a temporary experiment and then I'll go back to inspiration the good ol' fashioned way.

Of course, this experiment is set to take me about a year or two more to accomplish in full, so...

footnote: ^*if you are as sane as I, you are in trouble

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The Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences*

This is great! I've decided that specialist dictionaries are the way to go for a quick, superficial understanding of complex topics. It's a technique I've been using without really being conscious of it in the greater scope of my current till 2 am on a Tuesday obsession as a sort of objective narrative for this purportedly un-narrated tangle.

Flaubert's dictionary of Received/Accepted Ideas gives a biting glimpse at the prides and prejudices of the French Bourgeious in the mid-nineteenth century. My favorite: ‘IDIOTS: those who think differently from you.’

Brent Simmons has beaten Kottke to creating his own modern-day Dictionary of Received Ideas, seemingly aimed at the ‘Limousine Liberals’ of today, as my old (as in former, not as in aged)Illustration teacher Kye Carbone calls them.

He forgot one: ARTICHOKE: featured in Sunday Times LifeStyle section.

And then there's the Cyberpunk Dictionary and the Skeptic's Dictionary and the Cyberspace Dictionaryand the Buddhist Glossary and the Glossary of Kant's Technical Terms and of course, the Jargon File.

Perfect for our time-deprived, air-putting-on, psuedo-intellectual societies. This place the perfect example!

Let me pre-empt your question by pointing out myself that the relation between specialist dictionaries and the url perched atop this page is less than obvious. But ah, everything is intertwingled and there is always a point behind my posts. Well, not always.

So, here is how I initially came to post this: Interaction is ‘the’ unique property of this wonderful medium. The situationists have taught us that society is a medium, and the post-modernists (and the bloody marketers) have taught us that we can manipulate it. The scientists have taught us that the Internet behaves like a network of living organisms. And I like to say ‘The Internet's veins may be wires, but its blood is human thought, human emotion.’ So, following traditional witch-bludgeoning logic (‘If the light of Venus' temple cannot be extinguished, if the moon is reflected in water, if a person can be changed into stone, why should not the Blessed Virgin be able to generate?’), we clearly come to the conclusion that if Interactive systems are modelled on societal systems, we may finally suceed in extending the time-frame of Interaction into something meaningful.

I am well aware that this makes no sense to anyone but myself, but I'm pretty sure I'm not full of shit here, and that 2am obsession I mentioned earlier, that's part of my grand attempt to create a web thing that gets this all across in an engaging way. Besides, better to get your inspiration from theory than from other people's interfaces.

I see you are still not with me on the relevance thing. Well then, c'mon, when's the last time this site was truly about WebActivism?

(i have just realized that i am justifying myself to a voice in my head)

‘Well’, as they say in the YooKay, ‘then.’

- via various contortions of my mind that began with a link from this article by this man.

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<It is dishonest to edit or spellcheck rants>

I think i need to stop trying to show how smart I am and just talk. i hate that i seem to always have some angle on what I write. I rarely do it when I speak, but I always find myself trying to craft intellectual-sounding phrases wrapped in a lightly self-mocking tone- you know- the parachute- a way to bail out if someone calls your bluff.

So, let me say it now. I'm glad the industry doesn't expect academic rigour because I doubt my stuff would hold up under that level of interrogation. I tend to hide mediocre application behind high-falutin' theory. I think I'm smarter than most of you. I know I'm not as talented as most of you.

My first take on designing for web was ‘nah, I like to smell my work.’ I only leanred to love the web, and as much as I believe I love it, there is that old fashioned part of me that still feels one can never really learn to love anything. It's either love at first site or it is self-imposed bullshit. Rationalization.

And speaking of bullshit, I hate marketing. I think it is one of the most evil things on the planet and I blame it for everything from the U.S. political stance to racism to the pollution of this planet. I think it stupefies our cultures more than television, and hate how it has somehow claimed a natural right to all sensory input. Marketers belong in the 3^rd hell with the Sycophants and Lawyers.

At least prostitutes are honest.

I'd rather be a primadonna designer caring for nothing but his line and whitespace than manipulate people's minds. And I realize this makes me a hypocrite.

I love myself and I think I am somehow better because I admit my hypocrisies, even though I really know that is just another parachute (see earlier).

I have no idea where this rant came from but ti doesn't seem to want to stop. And already I am picturing people reading it. I often wonder if I really, truly do anything purely for myself.

I feel guilty every time I use a tag. I used a tag in the ascii thing below, and I know I will spend some days in HTML purgatory for that one. I'm not joking. As no-nonsense as I believe I am, I still believe in karma, and I truly expect some primordial virtual backlash for every nested table or I have coded.

At the same time, I think that people who get too caught up in standards per se can sometimes be real weenies. We learn by subverting systems, by forcing tools to do things for which they were not designed, and sometimes one can get so drawn into the dogma of webstandards as activism that we become Nielsonesque, forgetting the art of it all.

I feel very guilt because I use email effects to create ascii drawings. I feel more ashamed of that than I do of using a tag today.

I love everyone I insult and hate everyone I praise, to a degree. I often express strong opinions on things I don't really understand, and say things very confidently that I probably won't agree with in two months. Like the first sentence in this paragraph.

I believe that the fact that there is no HTML entities for ellipses (...) seriosuly degrades the class of the original creators of HTML. I know that makes me a weenie.

I do a terrible East London Accent. It sound like Rockie with a scone up his bum. I think that the fact that English tea is disgusting proves that the best is not often the first. Which makes patents an even more absurd idea. Patents force people to be greedy, like some kid stuffing food down his throat not because he is hungry but because he is afraid someone else might eat it.

I do not believe in intellectual property. I think the fact that people can even say the term without irony shows just how far we have sunk as a culture. I have just probably used the word ‘irony’ wrong, and I know that Dave Eggers will give me several more points in purgatory for that.

I think I like Dave Eggers because I am vain, and because reading his words makes me realize that my sense of the world consumes a generation.

I wish more pople would email me about the things I say here.

I don't get praystation, and have never had the patience to really delve through that cockamamie navigation. Once upon a forest used to draw me in and leave me giggling or sedate or inspired or dumbstruck, but I just don't get praystation. And I guess I think that makes me worse than everyone who does. I love to watch him grow and grow. I value what he says. I bought every book he mentioned in some interview. (tho' I must admit I was absolutely aGHAST to find a fake history that takes itself seriously in there. Say it aint so, josh. It's like The Sun for ethnographics!)

But, with no malice intended, I-just-don't-get-praystation.

I really wish I wasn't so bald. I don't care that I'm short; that's a big part of what I am, but the hair- God- the hair, what use could you possibly have for this stuff? And moving it to my back was entirely uncalled for. Was that for all the tags?

Good night, then. I told Shelly I would read Harry Potter with her in ten mnutes about 2 hours ago. This computer is worse than another woman.

</It is dishonest to edit or spellcheck rants>

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Free Access to SAGE Electronic Journals during November and December 2001

Like the quartlerly New Media and Society. You'll have to register for this, but it is well worth it. These are usually very expensive things. I'm not supporting the extortion racket of academic journals, and while I think it's awful the prices charged to Universities by some of these organizations, there is no disputing the fact that this is top quality stuff.

After getting so complacent in the world of half-baked usability experiments (what, no control? a sample of 25? based entirely on self-reporting?) and the skin-deep framework of competitive analysis, it's refreshing to see the field through the eyes of some people with good ol' fashioned academic standards.

Beyond modernism: Digital design, Americanization and the future of newspaper form looks at the effect the Internet has on print newspapers, claiming that the prominence of homogenous information and ease of copying and distribution has forced the print editions into a role more akin to that of an analyst than a straight journalist. Funny, I blamed it on the U.S. Government and the almighty bottom-line.

And even when they're talking about quaint old-hat- Media participation: A legitimizing mechanism of mass democracy- it's interesting to see these themes presented without the adolescent potshots of most online rants.

Now, don't get me wrong. I do feel that academics often fall into the trap of binding metaphor to metaphor until we're suspended in an abstract tangle far above anything remotely applicable to reality. But since everyone distorts their lense in their own way, we may as well sample as many different kinds of distortions as possible.

And these are some finely researched disortions, I tell you. Plus it'll give you lots of big words and important-sounding publications to cite when dealing with clients and managers.

And they're only free for a few more weeks.

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Well, it's been a year I've been puttering away at this particular spot. Has this place changed?

Letsee, December 2000 I was talking about Zeldman, XML, and quasi-anarchist net theory.

December 2001 it's Zeldman, XML, and quasi-anarchist net theory.

Is that called keeping true to format, or kicking a dead horse? Well, I am much more garrulous nowadays. Funny, I started this thing with the expressed plan not to ramble on and on like so many dainty blogs, but it turned out it was my innefectual comments that people like.

Always happy to oblige, especially if it involves running at the mouth.

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More old Internet theory.

This is a good thing.

We've got Leary and Huxley and Hesse, a few manifestos and FLATLAND!

So fire up mosaic and wax poetic about the promise of these mediumed times.

^{The author would like to clarify the nature of his appreciation for Mosaic, so as not to be seen as posturing in the exact way that he is. Like a child who grows to like his parent's James Brown Albums because they sound like Tribe Called Quest, it is learned nostalgia for a past he never had, not memories of the first time seeing images on the Internet, that makes him all foggy. Or perhaps it is so nice to see the money-people's theories falter while the older theories of the hippie anarchists who built this thing still seem to be on the right track here. He would also like to acknowledge that he is copping Dave Egger’s style by speaking in the third person and contradicting himself, and fully realizes that he is not pulling it off very well. Do you even know what i am trying to say?!? This is the textual equivalent of a vestigial virgin arrow.}

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I've become very interested of late at the repurposing of tools, at those moments when a tool is redefined. I love the way this new awareness changes not only the tool, but the medium on which it works. A Brief Theory of the Internet offers up one such wonderful example:

‘When the Lumière Brothers invented cinema, there was no other idea than recording real events... But then a genius — I call genius a historical pivot — emerged: the French circus “magician” Georges Méliès. He found he could film lies, so he created fiction film-making.’

There is much empty rhetoric to sludge through, but the little gems like this make it worth it.

I found this link through Matthew Turlington, who I found through my referrer logs. I always feel somewhat squeemish linking to someone who is linking to me, like we have started some hyper-infinite circle jerk.

Of course it's inevitable. We're linked by those with similar interests so the chances are we'll find something similarly interesting where we were linked.

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‘If there was (sic) a scorecard for copyright lawsuits, this week it would look like this: entertainment industry 2, free speech zip.’

2600 lost a case defending the right to publish the DeCSS code, claiming this was protected by the right to free speech.

The basic logic of the decision was not that code in general has no claim to free speech protection, but its practical effect is nearly as severe. This decision portrayed Code as a tool- like a key- not as a mode of expression. Giving out copies of keys to someone else's home would be illegal, even if we'd written messages on them.

I guess I am not too broken-hearted. I think the DMCA is a horror, but I understand why the general public still sees it as fair. Until an abuse of the DMCA is becomes so severe that the general public sees the fallacy of the law, we will never get the public support we need to turn this thing down. (though come to think of it, how much sway does public opinion hold on a judge?)

Perhaps the cases of Dmitri Sklyarov and Ed Felton will acheive this.

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