Rants & Raves - Rants & raves
Global Biased Network Would someone please ask Joel Garreau to get up off his knees and wash what must be a very bad taste from his mouth? The tone of this article ("Conspiracy of Heretics," Wired 2.11, page 98) goes beyond sycophantic and enters the realm of the pathetic. This kind of worshipful self-promotion is too much for even my hardened sensibilities to endure.
As I drew toward the end of this amazingly uncritical article, the most amazing thing I noticed was how really amazing everything about GBN seems to be to the starry-eyed Garreau. Nothing seems to inspire so much awe in this man as the fact that this "conspiracy of heretics" has been of service to Really Important People doing Really Important Things. Tell me, for every valuable scenario they concocted, how many wound up in the recycling bin? Surely Garreau doesn't mean to imply that they have a perfect success rate, although one would be hard-pressed to determine otherwise given the information presented here.
The biggest laugh in the whole mess comes in the final few paragraphs, in which Garreau compares being "chosen" by GBN to being selected for a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Better not show him this letter. The bigger the bubble, the louder the pop.
Lorne Beaton beaton1@server.uwindsor.ca
Your article about GBN filled me with a vague unease, especially from a magazine that positions itself as the mouthpiece for a braver new era.
I observe that GBN is operating on the same tired-and-true business and power models that have governed Western economies for hundreds, even thousands of years. I see white men (albeit of no mean accomplishments) banding together to give people advice. I see few other races in this organization. I see obedient token women who "are inclined to cut the organization some slack," dutifully supporting the first wave of white male leaders, pointing to a better future when women will be included in the decision-making. (Golly, thanks, boys.) And I see that the principle "clients" of GBN are the same big-business interests that have taken us to the heights of consumerism, economic instability, and ecological disaster. Is GBN now seriously toying with the idea of creating a "slave class of genetically modified chimps?" As I said, I thought I was reading a sendup. Worse yet, it's a sort of sinister déjà vu. Tell me this is parody, guys!
One gets the feeling that, once again, an élite group has self-proclaimed its leadership and superiority in solving the problems of the world.
This has been the model for world problem-solving throughout the history of most Western civilizations. We can see where it has gotten us.
Mary E. Carter themook@well.com
Natural Born Defensiveness Popular culture - like the kind promoted by Wired and other mass media - is certainly one of the main culprits responsible for the decline of America. Jon Katz did nothing to cast better light on that dismal fact in his article.
In looking at the numbers, Katz pulls federal statistics out of his hat that show only black murder-rate increases, while claiming that the murder rate "decreased sharply for whites." This is incredible. The Uniform Crime Reports issued by the US Department of Justice provided the Federal Information News Syndicate with a special update by fax (December 5, 1994), on the data for murder rates. This report states, on page 173, that between 1968 and 1993 (the dates Katz cites), the murder rate of white persons per 100,000 persons in the United States, increased almost 40 percent, while the rate for non-white persons decreased by about 14 percent during that same period (from 38.6 to 33.7 per 100,000 persons).
In looking at the causes, Katz seems blind to any finding by government or academic study that music or broadcasting is the "primary cause" of violence-related social problems or crime. (I am reminded of the false claims of the tobacco companies that smoking is not the cause of cancer.) Compelling statistical links between crime and television violence have been found by many serious studies over the past four decades. A summary of such reports was compiled by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary (Serial No. J-100-27, June 25, 1987).
The mass media, by making aggression and sexual exploitation instruments of programming, are maximizing profits at the expense of society at large.
Katz's story is flawed with racist statistics and infested with the kind of grossly distorted news coverage that far too often governs the mass media in this sweet land of liberty.
Vigdor Schreibman, Editor and Publisher Federal Information News Syndicate fins@access.digex.net
Only distance and my natural reluctance to kiss strange men prevent me from kissing Jon Katz for writing "Natural Born Killjoy" (Wired 2.12, page 126).
Stone is a relentless self-promoter, whose technical skill in constructing movies frequently obscures the profound banality of their content. I have always been stunned by the idea that The Doors provided deep insight into the character of Jim Morrison, or that JFK did anything but promote Oliver Stone.
The delicious irony here is that Natural Born Killers is recursive - a movie bashing the media that is itself an instance of that which it bashes. Even so, the idea that such manifestations of popular culture as computer games, TV, supermarket tabloids, and Stone's films are responsible for violence in America is simply an exercise in scapegoating, not to mention a handy way of denying the real, disturbing, and deeply intractable issues that are in fact responsible.
Steve Whitney steveW1960@aol.com
If the premise that mass media are fanning the fires of cultural violence is "demonstrably false," why haven't we seen the proof? And why are media execs so visibly defensive about it?
If I were a former producer of The CBS Evening News, I'd be defensive too; if I felt that my work had in any way contributed to the de-evolution of a nation into a mob of uneducated gun-toters, my conscience would be as uneasy as Katz's obviously is. He attempts to distance himself from sensationalist journalism, not recognizing (or pretending to ignore) the laws of the marketplace, which insist that the mainstream will bend or mutate itself to emulate any hot new form, in this case, tabloid TV.
The media droids, after decades of cramming whatever-this-shitis down our throats while pretending it was all in the name of culture and education, are taking themselves much too seriously.
You made our bed, Mr. Katz. How are you sleeping in it?
Mike Bottas San Francisco, California
I am totally comfortable with the accuracy of the many statistics, books, findings, and government reports I have read that show a phenomenal rise in underclass minority deaths and injuries in recent years, primarily among the young, and overwhelmingly by gunshots. I'm amazed at the suggestion that deaths and injuries among the underclass young has not increased.
Andrew Hacker, in his brilliant, much-praised book, Two Nations, among many others, has richly documented the fact that, for young, minority males in many urban communities in America, the leading cause of death is now a bullet. Hacker Elijah Anderson, Derrick Bell, Christopher Juncos of Harvard (Race, Poverty and the Underclass), innumerable Justice Department studies, and a number of other sociologists and researchers have repeatedly, and in meticulous detail, affirmed these statistics.
In l963, for example, there were 549 homicides in all of New York City - only 25 percent were committed with handguns. In l992, there were 1,995 homicides reported in New York: 77 percent were committed with guns. In our cities, handguns are now the leading cause of death for people under 25. These victims are overwhelmingly African-American and Hispanic. Sensational TV shows or offensive rap lyrics are not responsible.
To me, the real racism comes from ignoring this reality - pretending that the toll among victims of crime is distributed equally, regardless of race or economic status - and permitting it to continue. Or in suggesting, as Oliver Stone did in Natural Born Killers, that movies, videogames, music lyrics, tabloids, or TV - rather than racism, poor education, the availability of guns, deteriorating family structures, outmoded or corrupt police procedures, the drug epidemic, the lack of economic opportunity available minorities - are responsible. - John Katz
Expression, Repression ... or Cliché? Nicholas Negroponte's avant-garde pronouncements ("Digital Expression," Wired 2.12, page 222) are just a regurgitation of decades-old educratic clichés.
Cliché #1: Our educational system represses children, often glorifying the analytical and repressing the artistic.
Rubbish. The inmates have been running the prison for some time. Our schools are in no danger of over-stressing the analytical. The public-school establishment has dominated school policy making: it has spent the last 40 years perusing various versions of open classrooms, discovery learning, and child-centered education - none of which could ever be said to push a "hard-line mode of teaching."
Cliché #2: Children divide themselves into two camps: the left brainers and the right brainers.
Negroponte seems to contend that children "are" either one or the other, and that the public school system "caters" to children who are "compulsive, serialist ... bookworms."
Cliché #3: Technology will save the day. "Computers will make our future adult population much more visually literate and artistically able."
Negroponte, Seymour Papert, and their fellow educrats at MIT have been saying that for years - at least since Papert's Logo language was made widely available for personal computers in the early 1980s. Despite enormous support in the public school system, Logo has done little to improve the mathematical abilities of our children.
Visual literacy, computer literacy, and their poor stepsister, actual literacy, all depend on the disciplined acquisition of fundamental skills and knowledge. Those fundamentals don't suddenly change because we have personal computers.
Thanks to the efforts of our public-school establishment, at least 20 percent of our teenagers are functionally illiterate. If you can't read the ingredients on a tin of cat food, you sure as hell can't log on to the Internet and express yourself in a more whole-brained, porous, artistico-scientifico mannero.
Peter Bell-Irving Essential Learning Systems Ltd. pbi@infomatch.com
Alive and Well in (a Hacked) Cyberspace I just received my Wired 2.12 issue yesterday and was curious about some of the ideas set forth in your cover story ("Gang War in Cyberspace," Wired 2.12, page 146).
Even though the golden age of phreaking is over, telcos around the country are not as advanced in phreak tracking as you would like people to believe. Even now, there are people in this world (several of whom I know personally) who still have the ability to enable and disable phone services, shut off service, or switch a line from a standard loop to a coin loop (turning a normal phone into a pay phone).
Granted, there are very few people who have the skill of the LOD/MOD hackers in complex phone-switch programming, but I think the myths proponing the death of phreaking should be dispelled.
Also, you mentioned that a blue box is "a device cobbled together from top-secret Radio Shack parts that simulates the tones of coins dropping into a pay phone." This is completely inaccurate.
A blue box was (past tense, as they no longer work) a device that sent a 2600-Hz tone down a phone line. This tone was officially used by telephone company linemen to open an outgoing trunk line. By using a blue box, one could obtain free long-distance phone calls. A red box, however, is the box that generated quarter tones. It can be made very simply from several sources, none of which are top secret. For example, a Radio Shack tone dialer (about US$20) can be modified to send red box tones in under five minutes by simply changing the crystal oscillator. Red boxes can also be made from such things as Hallmark greeting cards.
Robert Dekelbaum deker@glue.umd.edu
Rating the Cause, Not the Effect I could spot the particular dance Rogier van Bakel was going to do in his article on this videogame ratings (Wired 2.11, page 120) by the second paragraph. Unfortunately, van Bakel's argument throws forth the same old shit.
Fact is, except in the context of defensive articles such as this concerning proposed ratings/boycotts/censorship, the industry press never actually engages in a serious dialog about the cultural significance of videogames. It is assumed, on the one hand, that videogames do no harm, that they are just fun, that, in effect, they have no significance. A videogame company will tout the learning benefits of Learn to Read with Wally while decrying the notion that Rape Camp Inspector might possibly have some effect on human conditioning - as if a product's cultural significance is accrued only when deliberately placed there by its creators.
In step with this time-honored dodge, van Bakel happily allows an Epic videogame developer to indulge in the "time-bomb" defense: only violent people become violent after playing violent games - anything could set these people off, even, our sophist argues, "not getting pickles on a burger." Imagine, conversely, claiming that a CD-ROM for children on the vanishing rain forest does nothing to promote or cause environmental thinking or behavior, because only those predisposed to such thoughts or behavior would be so affected.
I agree that the jury's still out on causality; that banning products (ideas, if you must) is wrong without more conclusive evidence than currently exists. I don't, however, think the above is the only issue. "The premise behind putting warning stickers on games is that screen violence contributes to actual violence," the author states. Incorrect. The premise, in part, is that consumers should know what they're buying.
Whether or not screen violence contributes to actual violence, it does shape our attitudes toward violence. The media and society cannot be divorced.
Free speech may be endangered now and again, but free enterprise is much hardier. To the extent that ratings harm sales in a multibillion-dollar industry, it is the ratings - not the games - that will be neutered.
Darcy Sullivan San Francisco, California
No Great Loss The Future of CDs (Reality Check, Wired 2.12, page 60) was misleading in its discussion of compression on audio data. Two of the "experts" claimed that the compression algorithms used on audio data must degrade fidelity. This is simply not true.
My work involves compression of video streams. Compression algorithms can be divided into two groups: lossy and lossless. Lossy algorithms may produce some loss of data, but can provide much greater compression than lossless algorithms. Inversely, lossless algorithms will not lose one single bit of data, but may not provide as much compression as you'll get with lossy.
Lossy algorithms are used in real-time applications such as videoconferencing. In real-time audio and video applications, some signal degradation is acceptable and will most likely not be noticed by the end user. Downloading music to record on CD is not a real-time operation. There is no reason to use a lossy compression algorithm on audio data as it is being retrieved. Lossless compression can be performed on the data before it is archived. It is therefore possible for the end user to then pay to download an album of identical quality to a store-bought CD. Real-time previews of albums might also be provided. These previews could be compressed by a lossy algorithm, as they are unicast to the end user. If the end user were to record the preview, then he or she would have a substandard copy.
David Aschkenasy aschked@r.cs.orst.edu
Hey! Who Turned Out the Light? To me, the wonder of the Net is that I can send casual opinions or mindless witticisms to a few close friends, then some weeks later, inform my wife that I'm famous because I've been published (ha!) in Wired ("Illuminating Geek Jokes," Wired 2.12, page 47).
Bonus Question: How many human resources personnel does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We have your bulb on file, and as soon as a room becomes dark, you'll be notified by mail.
Dave Webb davewebb@wordperfect.com
At Long Last! I had sincerely begun to think that you guys had "sold out" to some unknown interest, given your last three issues.
However, I got 2.12 today, and my head spun around and snapped back so hard that I had to reconsider canceling my subscription. There had been a distinct lack of substance, yet 2.12 cured that with a vengeance. Keep this up, and I will be one happy rag-reading camper.
Steve Haynes shaynes@eworld.com
Wired's Revisionist History of Africa I also worked for the Independent Electoral Commission during the South African election, and I'm concerned by your "revisionist history" coverage of the event ("Making Every Vote Count," Wired 2.12, page 68). Yes, there was an interesting "coup d'état" in one directorate during the vote counting, but no computer screw-up, and the Americans did not save the election. A lot of people from many countries helped make it succeed. However, it was mostly the South Africans working for the Independent Electoral Commission (most had never voted before, let alone had any experience running elections) who used their blood, sweat, tears, and dedication to make it work.
Walter Cooke cooke@fox.nstn.ca
The Cloak of a Blatant Disguise Chris Clark ("And Now, a Word for Our Sponsors," Wired 2.12, page 144) manages to make a pun in the title of his piece; then, in the same breath, he unintentionally coins as Orwellian a phrase as has ever graced paper: "...a survey, blatantly disguised as a contest...."
Is the concept of "blatant disguise" limited to the likes of overzealous burger-hawking clowns (presumably not @mcdonalds.com), or can anyone with a telescreen and AOL client-software play?
Thomas Unterburger thomasu@dcg.com
I Ain't Scared ... Yet Hey, you guys left a lot out of your Scared Shitlist ("The Wired Scared Shitlist," Wired 3.01, page 110). To wit, the following were conspicuously absent:
- Windows95
- Mac clones
- Wal-Mart becomes #1 computer retailer
- Whoever replaces Leno
- Myst II
- Madonna - pregnant
- John Sculley's comeback
- Two million Prodigy members on the Internet
- John Perry Barlow testifies before Congress
- First end-of-millenium lists
- Republicans in Iowa
- Barry Diller's next job
- Bill Gates's book
- Software infomercials
- Africa replaces Malaysia, Mexico, and China as top new source of cheap labor for manufacturing
- Buffalo loses 25th straight Super Bowl
- Secretary of State Jimmy Carter
- National Enquirer Online
- Cast of Seinfeld in Kiss makeup on the cover of Rolling Stone
- Barney: The Movie
Chris Clark 71204.1430@compuserve.com
Undo - In our December issue, we neglected to credit the artist of the digital collage printed on page 49. The artist is Antonio Mendoza, http://bazaar.com/Art/mendoza.html. Our apologies, Antonio. € Just another casualty of the phone wars.... Back in our September issue, and our dissing (in the Tired/Wired column) of David Spade's 1-800-COLLECT campaign for AT&T. Er, he led MCI's campaign. MCI's different from AT&T, right? If any readers of the "The Future of CDs" Reality Check are curious, we know of at least three Internet CD stores, all of them telnettable. They are: cdconnection.com, cdnow.com, and cdeurope.com.
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E-mail: rants@wiredmag.com
Snail mail: Wired PO Box 191826 San Francisco, CA 94109-9866
