[tags]web 2 0, american pie, que sera[/tags]

[tags]kathy sierra, no hard feelings, defamation, deprivation of income, pain and suffering, steal your face, who’s your uncle[/tags]

I think we’re sitting on the rusty tracks of a railroad siding in China Camp in the spring of 1983. Matt is on the left, Ben is on the right, and some young guy with no gray hair is in the center. We’re tossing stones and talking smart.

[tags]fun, family, foolishness, mean kids, not[/tags]

Given the limitations of a family life, we do what we can, Frank. Did I drive my car to work today? Yeah, well… Okay, but I won’t beat myself up about it. Look at the countless millions who shared the roads with me. Did I slag the Bush administration for continuing its cynical campaign to tie up futures in the oil market while the poppy fields flourish again under an Afghan sky and countless thousands stand to die? Yeah… but that was fun. Well, as far as I’m concerned, being human should be fun. I don’t believe we’re here to suffer. And besides, King George is but a symbol to me. He is no man. He is Bob Mugabe kicking commercial farmers off their land and millions into starvation. He is Thabo Mbeki pursuing a ludicrous AIDS policy visiting an unimaginably ghastly death on millions of South Africans. He is Ariel Sharon, pursuing the obliteration of the Palestinian people with whom he refuses to accept as his neighbors. He is Slobodan Milosovic and Jonas Savimbi and Laurent Kabila and Idi Amin and Stalin and Hitler. George W. Bush is a nebbish, a nobody symbolizing that which I despise in those wielding power uncaringly and irresponsibly.

I need to tidy up around here too, pull some of the random stuff together, ditch the extraneous, exercise my voice, practice my bloggy vocalise (not vocalese… you know I’m more of a scat man if it comes to that).

For almost two years I’ve struggled with local power transmission system issues, a struggle that is far from over.  I’ve recently picked up a commitment to study incarceration practices and translate that into a prisoner support program.  I have a Web 1.5 product that needs polish and promotion.  I have family and friends whose company I enjoy and to whom I owe energy and support.  I have some writing commitments.  The house needs a coat of paint.  The country needs a new president and congress.  The dog needs long runs and continual frisbee practice.  Generations X and Y are howling after us post-war oldsters like Siberian wolves in pursuit of a sleigh and troika on a cold winter night.

Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and chat… how am I ever to manage all that?

I need to carve out a sane space on the web to advance my interests, while I noodle here — trying on ideas, providing a level of realistic existential raving, offhand notes and commentary…

Listics is vocalise… it’s not going away, but I’ll let you know the venue of the real performance later.

Earlier this week Kathy called me and I assured her that the work was there waiting for her, that she will never want for creative purpose or opportunity. She proved me right a day or two ago with this post, a statement regretting her needful departure from her current blog, and a list of many directions, signposts pointing every which way to the multiple paths she might follow. I wish her the best of luck choosing the right path and following it with the passionate conviction she brought to her erstwhile blog.

This topic is personal for me because I owned the domain name for a blog called MeanKids. It was a group blog with multiple authors and no moderation. The name of that blog has become a shorthand for threatening behavior on the net.

I’ve avoided comment so far because I don’t know how to address this without continuing the pain and discomfort that the whole matter has brought to the surface. Still, I think it is important to begin to piece together different perspectives. Here are some facts:

• Satire, not cruelty, was the intended content of the MeanKids site.
• I am very distressed by Kathy Sierra’s suffering. She knows this, and is generally grateful for my support.
• When over-the-top cruelty showed up on MeanKids (from a single author and an anonymous commenter) I shut the site down. Chris Locke and Jeneane Sessum supported and encouraged that shut-down. I shared the commenter’s IP address with Kathy so she could collate it with some actual threats she had received on her own blog,. Meanwhile, the author of the post came forward privately and assured Kathy of the satiric non-threatening intention of the collage that contained the fearsome symbol.
• Kathy’s perception of two Kathy-related posts as scary was influenced by horrible stuff that she had received from her own readers in email and comments on her own blog.

Deconstruction of the situation should reveal that while a few close friends and I were associated with a site that published satire and parody, there was a confluence of threats in Kathy’s own blog and personal challenges she herself faced that led her to bring her fears to broad attention. The MeanKids blog was not the proximate cause for her fears, but it was graphically outrageous enough to illustrate them and to permit Kathy’s readers to infer the culpability of the writers posting as MeanKids.

It is difficult to write anything balanced about this without appearing to blame the victim, and that is not at all what I am doing. Nevertheless, at some point people need to be able to isolate root causes of the mob mentality that has effectively silenced some of the people who wrote as MeanKids. What did Kathy intend when she addressed her huge online audience with a post that conflated real threats with our parody and satiric criticism?

I’m afraid that we have quite a ways to go before we reach true clarity on this concern, but now — three weeks after the curtain came down on MeanKids — I am no longer afraid to write about it.

There are many people who encouraged moderation, who didn’t stoke the flames of misunderstanding and whose good insights I recommend to everyone thinking about these matters. None of these people support hate speech, misogyny, or violence and bullying on or off the web — nor do they support a mob mentality and a rush to judgment. Here’s the beginning of a long list of people who support a balanced discussion…

• Zo
• Ronni Bennett
• Betsy Devine
• Mitch Ratcliffe
• J. Black
• Shelley Powers
• Dean Landsman
• Rogers Cadenhead
• Laura Lemay
• Nicole Simon
• Chris Pirillo
• AKMA

Update… I’m glad to see today’s posts from Jeneane! I feel a little bit like the turtle who fell asleep on the warm pavement while crossing the road. Turtle wakes up, sticks his neck out and ZOOOM, almost has his head crushed by a passing truck. Turtle pulls his head back in and thinks “I’ll just hang out inside until it’s safer out there.”

Jeneane, let’s just get ourselves across this road!

[tags]MeanKids, MKULTRA 2.0[/tags]

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— W. B. Yeats

I listened-in on a conference call yesterday (February 10, 2024) featuring a panel that included Lawrence Lessig, Mark Cooper, Jeff Chester, and Ben Scott. Here’s what I came away with:

A battle of Star Wars proportions rages around us and we, the people, the consumers of Internet services at the edges of the net don’t even know it. I’m not sure who plays Yoda, but the four panelists on yesterday’s call are certainly among a ragtag band of Jedi knights who have our best interests in mind. The forces of “the empire” have several faces and a monolithic interest in controlling content. They include both cable and telephone companies, companies like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, Bell South, Charter, Verizon, and Qwest. While the giant cable companies and telcos battle each other for the broadband market, we – the consumers – are likely to get trampled.

An alarm must be sounded, a wake-up call to Americans who are in danger of sliding even further into a second class swamp of deteriorating end-to-end service while Europe and Asia using a model of network neutrality provide ever faster on-ramps and cheaper and better transport than we expect.

What would it be like to have a metered Internet, an Internet where every data packet that leaves your house is inspected before it is delivered to the end-point? The capability for metering is in place and the telcos are promoting it as a “Quality of Service” initiative. The argument is seductive. The sequence of packet delivery for audio and video is important. Why not prioritize them on an express track and put all the email spam over on a siding while the media content goes roaring through?

I’m afraid some babies will drown in that particular bath water. If we give the telcos and the cablecos gatekeeper privileges, if we allow packet inspection, then we will see services blocked. Why should SBC allow Skype or Vonage service through its pipes if it can block that service and require you to use the SBC voice services? Content will also be “managed.” If the bandwidth providers can block your access to a website, if they can sideline the delivery of a message from your computer to my computer, then they will be limiting free speech in a terrible way.

Sascha Meinrath asked “What are the critical battles?” and Yoda umm, Lessig said that step one is to fight for Network Neutrality principles. Step two, and also of critical importance, is to influence the government to turn over a meaningfully large chunk of unlicensed broadband radio spectrum for wireless broadband access competition.

The rest of the world is pretty much united in imposing Network Neutrality principles, but in the United States there is a trend toward empowering the owner of the network with control over the content. There is, in other words, no longer a principle of regulating a common carrier.

If you’re still reading, then it’s likely you have more than a vague interest and understanding of all this. In that case, you might find the following post rewarding. In it, I offer you a chance to go to Washington DC and get deeper into just what Freedom to Connect actually means.

February 11, 2024 | Permalink

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Posted by: I. M. Marginalized | Mar 3, 2024 1:25:12 PM