"Remember the new economy? What does it mean - if anything - anymore?"

"Impressive as the wonders of the Internet may be, historians point out that all of the technological advances of the post-World War II era probably cannot match the burst of invention that came from the 1850's to 1903: the Bessemer steel-making process, the telegraph, the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the radio, the automobile, rapid transit (subways and elevated trains), the diesel engine, mechanical refrigeration and the airplane."

Business 2.0 Peter Drucker Interview

"But it is reasonable to expect that we have not yet really discovered what the Internet is best suited for. Mind you, the steamship was not a great improvement over the first sailing ships. Up until the end of the 19th century, most of the world's ocean freight was still carried by sail. What eliminated the sailing ship was that it takes several years to learn to be a sailor, while it takes 10 minutes to learn to shovel coal into the steamship boiler. The sailing ships died because they couldn't get crews and the steamship crews are unskilled. You need only a very few skilled people on a steamship. To furl and unfurl sails is highly skilled? But the railroad immediately created mobility, on the land, which had never existed.

Today, the Internet eliminates distance for communication."

"The pattern of war in the twentieth century, the pattern that long ago became old and familiar, was established in the aftermath of World War I. For a hundred years before that war, the Western countries had indulged in a comforting sentiment of historical optimism, serene in the conviction that rationality and order were steadily progressing and would go on doing so into the future, and modernity was going to be good. Even the crimes and massacres committed by the Western imperialists in distant places could be pictured as part of the greater landscape of worldwide progress, or at any rate could be kept out of sight. But World War I was an outbreak of something other than rationality and order, and the outbreak took place in the heart of civilized Europe. That was a shock. And a series of extremely powerful movements rapidly arose, each of which rested on the idea that the premises of liberal rationalism and modernity had turned out to be a lie and that modernity in its conventional Western version was a horror."

The Nation Against Rationalization

"Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon."

The New York Review of Books Notes on Prejudice

"Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth: especially about how to live, what to be & do - & that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: & need restraining or suppressing. It is a terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right: have a magical eye which sees the truth: & that others cannot be right if they disagree."

"The only cure is understanding how other societies - in space or time - live: and that it is possible to lead lives different from one's own, & yet to be fully human, worthy of love, respect or at least curiosity. Jesus, Socrates, John Hus of Bohemia, the great chemist Lavoisier, socialists and liberals (as well as conservatives) in Russia, Jews in Germany, all perished at the hands of "infallible" ideologues: intuitive certainty is no substitute for carefully tested empirical knowledge based on observation and experiment and free discussion between men: the first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas & free minds."

"Netwar is an emerging mode of conflict in which the protagonists - ranging from terrorist and criminal organizations on the dark side, to militant social activists on the bright side - use network forms of organization, doctrine, strategy, and technology attuned to the information age. The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory, as both civil and uncivil society actors are increasingly engaging in this new way of fighting. We suggest how the theory of netwar may be improved by drawing on academic perspectives on networks, especially those about organizational network analysis. As for practice, strategists and policymakers in Washington and elsewhere have begun to discern the dark side of the network phenomenon - especially in the wake of the "attack on America" perpetrated apparently by Osama bin Laden's terror network. But they still have much work to do to begin harnessing the bright side, by formulating strategies that will enable state and civil-society actors to work together better."

The New York Times Securing the Lines of a Wired Nation
[requires 'free' registration]

""People aren't going to be killing us with computers," Mr. Hunker said, "but our life may be hell because of computer attacks."

The likeliest use of the technology, he said, would be to complicate matters further after a real-world attack, a tactic he describes with the military phrase "force multiplier." That could involve planting false information on the Web to create a panic or taking down crucial computers in the financial or communications sectors."

redux [09.12.01]
BBC US computers networks at risk

"One day after the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, a congressional report has warned of the vulnerability of the country's computer networks."

""Despite the importance of maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of important federal computerised operations, federal computer systems are riddled with weaknesses that continue to put critical operations and assets at risk," he said."

redux [08.19.01]
AsianWeek Get Ready for Cyberwars

""Taiwan has one of the world's largest computer software and hardware manufacturing bases," said D.K. Matai, managing director of the British-based Mi2. "The computer software programmers in Taiwan are world class. Our view is that getting involved in any kind of conflict with Taiwan, given the kind of intellectual capacity the country has, may prove detrimental."

The Chinese government has been quite open about its future strategic military objective. In paper appearing in the spring issue of China Military Science journal, a member of the Chinese Committee of Science, Technology and Industry of the System Engineering Institute, wrote: "We are in the midst of a new technology in which electronic information technology is the central technology. The technology provides unprecedented applications for the development of new weaponry...Military battles during the 21st century will unfold around the use of information for military and political goals.""

redux [03.01.01]
SecurityFocus Report: U.S. cyber-defense on track

"Three years after declaring cyber-defense a national security priority, the United States government has won the trust of a once-skeptical tech industry, fortified security on military networks, and "created effective public-private partnerships" to combat computer attacks, according to a report released last week by the Critical Information Assurance Office (CIAO)."

"Despite the government's efforts, "Potential adversaries-be they nation-states, cyber-terrorist groups, criminal organizations, or disgruntled insiders-can easily develop effective cyber-attack capabilities" to disrupt the United States' economic power and national security, the report claims."

redux [09.06.00]
Rand Corporation In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age

"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts both in how societies may come into conflict, and how their armed forces may wage war. We offer a distinction between what we call "netwar" -- societal-level ideational conflicts waged in part through internetted modes of communication -- and "cyberwar" at the military level. These terms are admittedly novel, and better ones may yet be devised. But for now they illuminate a useful distinction and identify the breadth of ways in which the information revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the conduct of warfare.

While both netwar and cyberwar revolve around information and communications matters, at a deeper level they are forms of war about "knowledge" -- about who knows what, when, where, and why, and about how secure a society or military is regarding its knowledge of itself and its adversaries."

redux [01.04.01]
MSNBC Bytes without the blood in Mideast

"Scenes of street violence are played out day after day in Palestinian towns across Gaza and the West Bank. But another modern-day arena for battle between the Palestinians and the Israelis is growing ever more heated, so much so that the Internet war waged by computer-savvy political activists is being dubbed an "e-Jihad.""

redux [03.22.00]
CNN Kashmir conflict continues to escalate -- online

"A group of Pakistani hackers has used the conflict in Kashmir as a reason to deface almost 600 Web sites in India and take control of several Indian government and private computer systems, according to the group."

"Unlike the majority of Web vandals, the MOS members say they secretly take control of a server, then deface the site only when they "have no more use" for the data or the server itself.

"The servers we control range from harmless mail and Web services to 'heavy duty' government servers," says the MOS representative. "The data is only being categorically archived for later use if deemed necessary."

The Christian Science Monitor Wars of the future... today

"Take the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade several weeks ago. Rage spread across China and hackers from the mainland attacked the Web sites of the US Departments of Energy and the Interior, and the National Park Service. A subsequent attack brought down the White House Web site for three days. The attacks generated headlines across the country.

What the news media didn't report was that the US government had known for a long time that someone had been in its computer systems - they just didn't know who. Then, in a fit of anger, the Chinese hackers caused some real damage - and gave away the hidden "location" of several "backdoors" they had built in US government networks."

"The US Government Accounting Office estimates 120 groups or countries have or are developing information-warfare systems. According to a report issued by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 23 nations have cyber-targeted the US."

"Bolstered by their successes against Napster and Scour, trade organizations representing the movie and music industries have set their legal sights on three more file-trading services."

"Right now, they are just killing a nest of roaches," said Ric Dube, a senior analyst with Webnoize, a digital entertainment research firm. "But there are always going to be roaches in the house.

"A bunch of smart kids are going to reverse-engineer this code, and they are going to build better versions of open-source FastTrack software. All the recording industry can do is shut down people trying to make businesses out of file trading.""

DotCom Scoop Internal Memos Outline RIAA's Strategy To Launch Offensive Against Peer-To-Peer Networks

"We have solid claims against FastTrack, MusicCity, and Grockster of secondary liability for copyright infringement. The claims are not as strong as those against Napster, but they are also not so remote as to be wishful.

Our claims would likely be strengthened by learning more about the designation of supernodes and the content of communications within the system. However, the encryption of this communication precludes further learning absent cooperation from one of these companies or court ordered discovery."

redux [09.21.01]
News.Com Rocky financial road awaits file swappers

"Droves of Napster clones are proving that it's still cheap and easy to create file-swapping services under the nose of the entertainment industry--but such ventures promise mostly high risks and little pay for the people behind them.

Even as the U.S. courts have effectively shut down file-trading giant Napster, numerous would-be replacements have taken root. Most hope to avoid legal entanglements and eventually profit on the immense popularity of services that offer free access to popular music, videos and other files."

"Although consumers continue to flock to peer-to-peer services, it's unclear whether large numbers will ever translate into large profits."

BBC Poor outlook for paid-for online music

"As the major record labels prepare to roll out online subscription services, a new report suggests young people are not yet ready to pay to download music from the internet.

Researchers found that 62% would continue to access MP3 music files for free and had no plans to stop."

redux [07.24.01]
NPR: Morning Edition Next Napsters

"NPR's John McChesney reports on the new generation of file-sharing companies that has sprung up on the internet in the wake of the federal ruling shutting down Napster. These new services are rapidly gaining an online audience and may prove a whole new challenge to the music companies that want them out of business. (5:31-6:20)"

Wired News What If Napster Was the Answer?

""In some respects, this brings the labels back to square one," Mooradian said.

One label executive agreed, saying, "I fear we're getting into a game of whack-a-mole, where we sue Napster, then we sue Aimster and so on and so on."

"If (the labels) killed Napster -- and that's 'if,'" said Johnny Deep, CEO of Aimster, "they killed their only chance of a viable online strategy. Napster was easy enough to use, and there was loyalty and confidence in the brand. That's something the labels can't recreate, even if they spend a hundred million.""

redux [07.20.01]
The New York Times With Napster Down, Its Audience Fans Out
[requires 'free' registration]

"The record industry's largely successful effort to cripple Napster, the online music site turned social phenomenon, has left it facing something potentially worse: a new generation of music-swapping sites, more numerous and much harder to police.

Figures to be released today show that a precipitous drop in Napster's traffic over the last several weeks has been paralleled by marked growth in more than half a dozen less centralized services. Those services, some of them based overseas, not only welcome millions of Napster refugees, but also complicate matters for the industry by scattering a once-concentrated audience, and relying on technology that may be insulated from legal attack."

Salon Revenge of the file-sharing masses!

"It didn't have to be this way, of course. The music industry has had the opportunity for several years now to begin offering reasonably priced access to comprehensive catalogs of digital music across the Internet, sweetened with special premium additions for fans willing to pay even more. Such a service could satisfy the hunger of millions of people for ready access to new and old music while preserving a reasonable income for the artists who make that music. Fear has stayed the industry's hand -- fear that today's unconscionably high CD prices can't be sustained; fear that the many layers of middlemen in today's industry might find themselves out of jobs; fear that the superstar system couldn't survive such a change; fear of the unknown.

The industry's paralysis is a tragedy for anyone who believes that artists should be compensated for their work as well as for anyone who loves music, period. But it's clear that the record labels would rather sue than find a sensible rapprochement with the new world of digital distribution."

The Standard A Post-Post-Napster Guide

"You've seen the headlines about Napster's imminent shutdown and then putative resuscitation by an 11th-hour deal with three major labels. It seemed like a crushing blow: After months of half-hearted compliance with the filtering system ordered by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Napster finally caved. Not that we're taking sides, but there's still plenty of downloadable music on the Net. For comparison's sake, we searched each service for certain songs and performers. We chose British rockers Radiohead since they're the closest thing we have to an official band of the Net, thanks to the famed Instant Messaging Radiohead Bot. And we picked Prince because, well, unlike many Internet execs, he's still partying like it's 1999."

redux [09.21.00]
Silicon.Com Lawsuits dubbed 'a waste of time' in online music wars

"It is pointless for music companies to try to outlaw Napster-like file sharing with expensive lawsuits, according to a report published today by Forrester Research."

"The music giants would do better to steal back their markets by offering quality alternatives to pirating software, it claims.

According to Forrester, music publishers stand to lose as much as $3.1bn by 2005 as online music piracy increases. "You have to beat pirates at their own game, otherwise record companies could sustain large losses," said Eric Scheirer, analyst at Forrester and author of the report.

Peter Beverley, vice chairman at Magex, Natwest's Digital Rights Management (DRM) business, added: "The legal process on its own won't solve the piracy problem and nor will digital management technology. Instead you need to offer products that are worth having."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'

""The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway.

There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers.

And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt."

"Sperling is the very model of an entrepreneur who has firsthand experience with the "inefficiencies" in the educational marketplace and knows how to exploit them. Sperling knows that quality education is often a secondary - or even a tertiary - concern of universities. After all, a university is not just a marketplace of ideas; it's a marketplace.

Will that marketplace be driven more by for-profit or not-for-profit sensibilities? (Or as Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman likes to put it, "tax-paying" versus "tax-exempt" sensibilities.) It's one thing for an MIT or a Stanford to benchmark itself against a Chicago or a Berkeley; but what does it mean to benchmark itself against a Phoenix or a DeVry? Or is that too ridiculous to even contemplate? Sperling has no (apparent) illusions about direct competition with the elite schools, because the fundamental missions are so different. But when it comes to opportunities in continuing education, distance learning and the Internet, he has no doubts about which kind of school is in the best position to profitably innovate."

redux [04.04.01]
The New York Times M.I.T. Course Materials Free Over Web
[requires 'free' registration]

"At a time when online knowledge can be a valuable commodity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to offer nearly all its course materials on the Internet for free."

"The plan counters a trend toward the "privatization of knowledge," where ideas are owned by companies or institutions, said professor Steven Lerman, chairman of the MIT faculty.

The school is still considering ways to use the Internet to generate revenue, such as selling research updates to alumni, said MIT President Charles Vest. But this venture is essentially altruistic, he said."

NPR: All Things Considered MIT Classes on the Web

"Linda Wertheimer talks with Charles Vest, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the school's offer to create a Web site for most of its classes and to post materials from each course. (4:30)"

redux [02.16.01]
The Economist Lessons of a virtual timetable

"Belief in e-learning, as it is often called, has so far weathered the downturn in the wider dotcom world. John Chambers, the influential CEO of Cisco, which supplies much of the Internet?s hardware, asserts that the scale of network traffic generated by e-learning will make today?s exchange of e-mail messages look like a rounding error. But his firm?s business depends on an ever-rising flood of electronic data passing over the connections which it makes for electronic networks. More disinterested voices caution against confusing the obvious need to learn computer-literacy skills with the less obvious need to learn everything else via a computer."

redux [12.04.00]
NPR: Morning Edition Higher Computer Education

"NPR's Ina Jaffe reports that more and more students are turning to computers rather than campuses to earn their college degree. This may make a college education possible for a wider range of students, but some in academia are concerned that internet degree programs only in it for the money will influence course curriculum for everyone. (7:30)"

Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks Higher Education in an Era of Digital Competition: Emerging Organizational Models

"Growing demand among learners for improved accessibility and convenience, lower costs, and direct application of content to work settings is radically changing the environment for higher education in the United States and globally. In this rapidly changing environment, which is increasingly based within the context of a global, knowledge-based economy, traditional universities are attempting to adapt purposes, structures, and programs, and new organizations are emerging in response. Organizational changes and new developments are being fueled by accelerating advances in digital communications and learning technologies that are sweeping the world. Growing demand for learning combined with these technical advances is in fact a critical pressure point for challenging the dominant assumptions and characteristics of existing traditionally organized universities in the 21st century. This combination of demand, costs, application of content and new technologies is opening the door to emerging competitors and new organizations that will compete directly with traditional universities and with each other for students and learners.

This paper describes and analyzes seven models of higher education organization that are challenging the future preeminence of the traditional model of residential higher education. These models are emerging to meet the new conditions and to take advantage of the new environment that has created both opportunity and risk for all organizations, and which demands experimentation of structure, form, and process."

redux [11.22.00]
The New York Times Magazine This Campus Is Being Simulated
[requires 'free' registration]

"The internet will have a very different effect on the most prestigious institutions from the one it will have on those in the middle and lower echelons. The Harvards and the Williamses are in no danger of virtualization, because both their communal life and their intellectual life are integral to their natures. They will be the brand names coveted by students at the less grand institutions, not to mention by lifelong learners. And they will, if they wish, earn lots and lots of money, which in turn could permit them, as Herb Allen and Mark Taylor suggest, to lower tuition and thus reach out to a wider, or at least different, audience. Or perhaps all that money will encourage them to behave like the market actors they will have become. Once a university permits itself to be subsumed into its brand name, it becomes, as Charles Nesson puts it, "a production house for making knowledge products.""

The Standard Ivy Online

"Columbia is not alone in its Internet ambitions. The nation's elite universities, long secure in their centuries-old reputations, face a rapidly changing world in which any school, from the University of South Alabama to UC Berkeley, can put its courses online and court a global market for continuing education. Fearing that they will be left behind, Ivy League administrators are becoming dealmakers, and buzz phrases like "leveraging brands" and "tapping intellectual capital" echo from the Stanford Quad to Harvard Square.

"Thanks in part to the Net's ability to distribute courses to students anywhere at any time, learning is becoming another commodity, part of the $740 billion "education industry" that has attracted keen interest on Wall Street."

redux [05.09.00]
Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)

"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

redux [07.06.00]
First Monday Technology and Education: Between Chaos and Order

"Technology in all forms, young and old or simple and complex, can be potent tools that engage learners in meta-cognitive reflection. These tools engage learners to rethink their old beliefs, knowledge, and understandings. These tools might allow learners to compare new ideas with other individuals to assess whether new concepts and ideas are plausible and fruitful. Technologies can be educators' tools in finding creative ways that encourage students to self-test, self-question, and self-regulate learning in helping them to create solutions to complex problems. Educators need to help students realize that understanding about knowledge and beliefs are essential to human growth and development. Technologies should not estrange us from our humanity or the noble profession of educating competent citizens. We should not become "high-tech, self-driven slaves to technology.

"Protecting the embodiment of quality education encompasses learning to think, learning to teach, and learning to lead creatively, not only within the classroom (virtual and traditional) but also throughout all institutions of higher education."

"We work hard because we believe that with material success comes happiness. But we find that there is more truth than we care to admit in the cliché, money doesn't buy happiness. In his book, When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough Rabbi Harold Kushner frames the question: "Is happiness, like eternal youth or perpetual motion, a goal that we are not meant to reach, no matter how hard we work for it?" Lazear would say no. But to find happiness may require setting new priorities.

Lazear summarizes his argument: "Work protects us from having to live a full life."

redux [02.24.01]
SatireWire Study Finds You Don't Really Make a Difference

"In an unprecedented study, British and American researchers have concluded that despite what you've been told at work, you really don't make a difference, and are not remotely integral to your company's success.

"In our research, we found that you've been encouraged to believe that your hard work and contributions are substantial, and that you are a significant member of the team. But what we discovered is that in your particular case, there's no way," said Neil Romsby of the London School of Economics."

redux [06.03.00]
The New York Times Magazine I'm a Loser
[requires 'free' registration]

"If you go back to the early 1800's, to be a failure meant basically one thing: to go bankrupt in business. Today if we say I feel like such a failure, we think generally of someone who's a loser, somebody who has so me defect in his personality. The meaning of failure has fundamentally changed from being a crisis you pass through to being more of an identity. My understanding of the failure ethic in Silicon Valley is that the profits of success are so enormous that the risk of failing is worth it."

redux [11.05.00]
Journal of Mundane Behavior Shame As The Master Emotion Of Everyday Life

"This article outlines a social psychology of the basic emotions in social relationships. In our theory, shame and pride are the emotional building blocks of interpersonal relations. But because there is so little empirical evidence about pride, we focus mainly on shame. First we review Mead, Cooley and Goffman?s concepts of the self, showing how they imply the centrality of shame and pride. We define shame as a class name for a large family of emotions which includes not only embarrassment and humiliation, but also "discretionary" shame, such as modesty, shyness, and conscience. The common thread in these variants is seeing self negatively in the eyes of the other(s), and therefore perceiving a threat to the bond. To illustrate this idea, we apply it to a single episode, a phone call between two friends. We present this episode in the form of a dialogue with the reader, to help overcome the counter-intuitive nature of our framework. We ask the reader to employ not only analysis, but also introspection. Finally, we propose that shame is the central affect in social relationships, a way of making them visible."

"John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics and a much-quoted thinker on these matters, spoke for many last week when he declared that the era of globalisation is over. "The entire view of the world that supported the markets' faith in globalisation has melted down...Led by the United States, the world's richest states have acted on the assumption that people everywhere want to live as they do. As a result, they failed to recognise the deadly mixture of emotions - cultural resentment, the sense of injustice and a genuine rejection of western modernity - that lies behind the attacks on New York and Washington...The ideal of a universal civilisation is a recipe for unending conflict, and it is time it was given up."

redux [04.30.01]
The Economist Mayhem in May

"For all their entertainment value, the anti-globalists' demonstrations cannot be dismissed as a recurring juvenile joke. How to reduce poverty in the third world - and whether globalisation is a help or a hindrance - is one of the most pressing moral, political and economic issues of our times. Undeniably, anti-globalism demonstrations have moved these questions higher up the public agenda. Whether they are pushing governments towards more enlightened answers is quite another matter."

redux [04.16.01]
Salon Follow The Money

"Garson set out to write a book about the global economy, a daunting subject that instills equal amounts of terror and confusion in most ordinary souls. Interest rates and currency exchange speculation do not usually make for riveting, or comprehensible, reading. But the remarkable thing about "Money Makes the World Go Around" is that her investigation of the movement of capital around the world ends up as easy to swallow as that cool Singha beer on a hot day at the beach.

The result is subversive, a sugar-coated exposé of the way the world works that is halfway digested before you realize how radical it truly is. And by then it's too late. You're stuck: Now you know why peasants in Thailand pay the price for bad loans made by Citibank and Chase Manhattan, or why the unrestricted flow of billions of dollars around the globe in a ceaseless search for higher and higher rates of return ends up benefiting very few people."

redux [03.08.01]
Feed This is Planet Earth

"Globalization. Clearly something is happening to humankind. "Everybody's in everybody else's business," is how the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whom I visited on the first day of my journey, puts it. The question, a lot of people's question at the moment, is what this great and growing overlap in humankind's business means. What does globalization portend, to narrow the subject just a little bit, for those sets of idiosyncrasies, habits, prejudices, and accumulated wisdom we call human cultures?"

redux [08.07.00]
First Monday Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet

"As the Internet is spreading around the globe, a problem is created concerning its impact on the local cultures. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, where the technologies bring about one global monolithic culture, nor by an erecting of barriers separating one culture from another, where there is no impact at all. Instead, local cultures usually find ways to cope with the impact and are resilient enough to absorb it without losing some kind of identity. A case study is presented on a local Internet scene in Thailand to see how Thai culture co-opts the Internet and how its identity is being constantly negotiated."

redux [04.23.00]
Netfuture I'm Glad The Internet 'Corrodes' My Culture

"I have spent my whole life in Corrientes, Argentina. Even as it is a state-capital and my family is relatively well-off, there are tons of cultural treasures that I couldn't have known if it wasn't for the Net, and not only knowledge or information, but whole mental frames: a passionate, whole-hearted love for science and philosophy, self-respect as a computer geek, excellent non-contemporary thinking (like Chesterton's, Voltaire's or Shaw's), non-hispanoameric poetry, enlightenment values and, yes, all kinds of erotic information and art (OK, pornography, too :), along with lots of other things.

Those things, althought mostly intellectual in nature, have, as you have pointed, corroded my "native" culture, to the point that I feel more at ease with Scientific American, the Need to Know e-zine, the Linux scene or the Discordian(-like) humor|philosophy. I still have my friends, my girlfriend and my family here, but I don't think I share my culture with them anymore (not that this started wholly with the Net; I have read Asimov from age 6, programmed from age 7, &c., but the richness of the Net has deepened it to the point of making myself councious of it).

It has its social and psychological side effects, but I wouldn't go back for all the group status of the world. I like this culture a lot more than my "native" one, for sheer deepness, meaning and beauty."

redux [02.18.01]
The Third Culture The Globalization Debate

"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."

According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The New York Times Magazine The Eroded Self
[requires 'free' registration]

"A liberal state should respect the distinction between public and private speech because it recognizes that the ability to expose in some contexts aspects of our identity that we conceal in other contexts is indispensable to freedom, friendship, even love. Friendship and romantic love can't be achieved without intimacy, and intimacy, in turn, depends upon the selective and voluntary disclosure of personal information that we don't share with everyone else. Moreover...privacy is also necessary for the development of human individuality. Any writer will understand the importance of reflective solitude in refining arguments and making unexpected connections: in an odd but widely shared experience, many of us seem to have our best ideas when we are in the shower. Indeed, studies of creativity show that it's during periods of daydreaming and seclusion that the most creative thought takes place, as individuals allow ideas and impressions to run freely through their minds without fear that their untested thoughts will be exposed and taken out of context. "

"We are trained in this country to think of all concealment as a form of hypocrisy. But perhaps we are about to learn how much may be lost in a culture of transparency -- the capacity for creativity and eccentricity, for the development of self and soul, for understanding, friendship and even love. There is nothing inevitable about the erosion of privacy in cyberspace, just as there is nothing inevitable about its reconstruction. We have the ability to rebuild some of the private spaces we have lost. What we need now is the will."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""