Rants & Raves
All Juiced Up
Jon Katz would like the media to abandon objectivity and take a more subjective viewpoint ("Guilty," Wired 3.09, page 128)? No thanks!
We're already awash in unconstrained subjectivity - points of view grounded in nothing more substantial than personal wish and tribal myth. Postmodernism teaches us that no one can really know the truth. Multiculturalism instructs us not to challenge the beliefs of others. If the press has lost the will to tell us what it all means, it's merely a reflection of our society, which can't center on an interpretive framework capable of providing shared meaning.
What's missing from public forums isn't subjectivity but a respect for well-considered arguments backed up by facts. With reasoned analysis out of fashion, it's hardly surprising that day-to-day public dialogs have become no more than tribal shouting matches.
Dan McGrath
I couldn't agree more with Jon Katz that many of our national institutions have become irrelevant to daily life. However, I can't accept his assertion that going online can be an answer to society's fragmentation and weakened media. Digital forums already have a higher volume of white noise than traditional media. And the available technology makes it easy for every subculture to publish its own version of the news. Even such quality mainstream efforts as NetNoir on AOL - and yes, Wired - succeed not by bringing people together but by targeting narrow segments of society and reinforcing their specific cultural interests.
George B. Blinzer
Thanks for a cogent analysis of what nobody else in the media is talking about. Of all the essays I've read about the O. J. trial, Jon Katz's story captures exactly the unspoken central issue - the loss of the idea that an objective truth can be reached through rational inquiry. Even scientific truth is now seen as subjective, depending upon the "interpretation" of various experts. The case has become a battle of credentials rather than objective inquiry. And now that race has come out of the closet with the Mark Fuhrman matter, the piece seems even more prophetic.
Fred Moramarco
Jon Katz seems to be guilty of the same soft reporting for which he condemns Time magazine. Quoting one American Bar Association poll, he states that 45 percent of those surveyed (there is no mention of the survey size) said that the O. J. Simpson trial "has caused them to lose respect for the justice system." Katz uses that single poll to make his point, but the result might easily have been obtained by asking 20 people a leading question with which only nine of them agreed. It's this type of misinformation that makes me fear the media.
Raymond Morris
We the (Lazy) People
Jay Kinney's "Anarcho-Emergentist-Republicans" (Wired 3.09, page 90) was right about the average American's attitude toward citizenship: I'm too busy. The politicians running our country have no depth because we demand no depth. Indeed, we welcome bumper-sticker solutions to complex issues.
Technology doesn't help an apathetic public care or make critical decisions objectively. Though it may make access to information easier, that information will also be easier to manipulate and will enable lazy citizens to make uninformed decisions more quickly.
Joe Cadrin
Myhrvold's Slaw
Nathan Myhrvold ("The Physicist," Wired 3.09, page 152) is one smart guy working for another smart guy. But when did these guys lose their sense of perspective?
I had the curious feeling that Wired readers were supposed to be astonished by "Myhrvold's Law" - that at US$99, Windows software is a bargain because it allows the "little guy" access to a $100 million worth of software development! What is so special about that?
After all, a $10 shot of insulin buys access to a $100 million worth of medical research - and unlike Bob's stupid computer tricks, a shot of insulin can save your life.
Myhrvold's Law is merely another instance of economies of scale - the centuries-old realization that once you've set up a kiln to make one pot, it's just as easy to make two.
In Moore's Law, the fundamental driver is not volume but a new technology that simultaneously builds millions of transistors in parallel. Consequently, the cost per transistor drops by 25 percent each year - a real improvement in productivity enabled and predicted by Moore, for which he certainly deserves recognition.
On the other hand, while software manufacturing remains a slow and inefficient process, Microsoft can spread the inefficiencies over a captive base of millions of personal computer users. I'd hate to have a "law" named after me celebrating archaic design foisted on enslaved users.
Greg Blonder
A Modern Education
Regarding "Get a Life?" (Wired 3.09, page 206): Ouch! All the books in the world won't offer the real-time global experience a kid can get on the Net? Nicholas Negroponte is fooling himself if he thinks kids in a chat group are sharing vivid descriptions of local culture. It's far more likely that they're discussing the best pro basketball players or the latest Sylvester Stallone movie.
Take all the chat groups in the world, and they won't offer what books offer in spades. Books - inasmuch as they are reflective, thematic, artistically conceived narratives (forget the delivery medium) - are an extremely effective means to impart an understanding of a different culture.
It is incomprehensible - nearly heretical - that an intentionally provocative columnist could suggest that reading is passive. A well-written column, story, or book forces the reader to imagine different places, to confront personal beliefs, to make judgments. In short, to read is to think - hardly a passive activity.
Cindy Klein
Equifax and Equifiction
Simson Garfinkel's article "Separating Equifax from Fiction" (Wired 3.09, page 96) could not have come at a better time. I am in the process of buying my first home and am under the microscope of you-know-whom. Out of curiosity, I requested a personal credit report from Equifax several months ago. Of course, the report contained several errors, some of which betrayed a surprisingly primitive database. One bank account listed in my file was opened three years before I was born. (I have never had an account with this bank, mind you, either before or after my birth.)
One worrisome fact is that banks, retailers, and other users of these credit reports don't seem to know where their information comes from. Last week, my mortgage loan officer showed me a report obtained during the pre-approval process. Wondering if the information was supplied by Equifax or one of its competitors, I asked where the report had come from. She matter-of-factly replied, "Oh, we get this from a machine."
I am rapidly losing hope.
Richard Trenthem Jr.
Memphis, Tennessee
Free Speech and Worthless Words
Mike Godwin's description of my opinions on free speech ("Net Backlash = Fear of Freedom," Wired 3.08, page 70) is the most bizarre distortion of views I have ever seen in print. At the conference Godwin refers to, I said, "I believe free speech should never be abridged anywhere." (The full text can be found at www.utexas.edu/depts/lbj-school/21cp/faulk.html.) In 20 years of fighting for civil liberties and social justice, this has always been my opinion.
Godwin suggests that I'm part of a "free speech backlash" because I occasionally complain about the content of speech on the Internet. This is false. Nowhere have I ever said, nor do I believe, that speech should be constrained because of being trivial or socially unredeeming.
He also imputes to me a "fear and loathing" of the Internet. Nothing could be more absurd. For many years, I was national executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, an organization that was essentially built on the Internet. I have used the Net for a variety of progressive causes for more than a decade. Currently, I'm working on a project to bring Internet access to low-income residents of Austin, Texas.
Godwin set me up as a straw man, which he then tackled and wrestled into submission. But I simply don't believe what he attributes to me.
Gary Chapman
*Interestingly, I couldn't recall so unqualified a statement as "I believe free speech should never be abridged anywhere" in Chapman's Austin speech. So I turned to the Web page, where I found the full sentence from which Chapman has extracted the quoted clause: "That is, we might have neglected the power of free speech in the real world, where it matters most, in favor of free speech in a virtual world, where it matters least, even though I believe free speech should never be abridged anywhere." What really stood out at the time was Chapman's expressed belief that a virtual world is where free speech matters least.
Chapman also argued that "the most important purpose of a right of free speech in a democracy is to allow people to stimulate collective action, to persuade others to act in concert against some perceived wrong or injustice." And he complained that "it's unsettling and discouraging when we're forced to champion freedom of speech by defending multimillion-dollar advertisers, mercenary spin doctors, pornographers, bigots, companies that market mayhem and gore, or professional boors like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern."
Unlike Chapman, I don't think the value of free speech depends on whether it promotes the right kind of "collective action" in a democracy. I believe it has value in itself. This is why I don't find it "unsettling and discouraging" to champion freedom of speech, even when the words don't fit my own values, or when they don't promote social justice. The First Amendment was created to protect precisely the speech that Chapman and other well-intended persons might find irritating, disturbing, offensive, or just plain worthless.
- Mike Godwin*
She's a She
I wish to voice my displeasure and concern about an advertisement for Sauza tequila (Wired 3.08, page 45) featuring a photograph of the noted transsexual Carolyn Cossey with the caption "She's a he."
While Cossey is not a genetic female, she has had gender reassignment surgery, and to say that she is a "he" is inaccurate. In addition, the ad implies that there is something wrong with finding out that a woman used to be a man.
Michelle Lyn Belanger
How Do You Say Rave in Hawaiian?
I've been buying Wired since the first issue, but have been disappointed lately by the commercial turn the magazine has taken. Your article on the use of computers to help restore the growth of the Hawaiian language ("How Do You Say Computer in Hawaiian?" Wired 3.08, page 90) was both refreshing and heartwarming. Items like this remind me that there are indeed people in front of the screens and that the work we do to forward this industry is not always motivated by profit. Some good may come of it too.
Chris Barker
Justice/Microsoft/Intuit: Wired Blew It
How did your editors allow Fred Davis to offer such mistaken conspiracy theories on the Justice Department's challenge to the Microsoft-Intuit deal? ("Microsoft/Intuit: Justice Blew It," Wired 3.08, page 103.) Justice never claimed Microsoft was monopolizing the computer industry; it claimed that Microsoft posed the only real competition to Quicken, that Intuit and Microsoft were the two most viable competitors in the nascent electronic-banking market, and that the merger would reduce competition.
More astounding is Davis's call for computer lobbyists to counteract the banking lobby's sinister political influence. Most of the pressure for Justice to get tough on Microsoft has come, predictably, from Gates's rivals in the computer industry.
Davis is left with his theory that the savings and loan debacle is evidence of longstanding collusion between banks and the government to bilk consumers. To verify that one, you might want to ask the failed S&Ls' customers (who were paid back by government insurance) or the banks' officers (over half of whom the government is suing for negligence).
Robert Niewijk
Fred Davis's notion that "It's hard to make a case that a company with a small piece of the pie is capable of such egregious violations of antitrust law" is totally naïve. It's not the size, but the significance of influence that makes a difference. Gas accounts for only about 4 percent of a car's weight, but total control over the gasoline industry would be an unacceptable leverage over the automobile industry.
Cole Goeppinger
Lousy Lossy
I would be excited to see Ken Thompson's music distribution system up and running ("Music on Demand," Wired 3.08, page 82). However, I have a serious problem with lossy audio compression. I defy anyone with normal hearing and an interest in music to go to a local high-fidelity audio shop and ask someone there to side-by-side a CD with high-quality vinyl. Although the human ear is limited in the range of pure tone frequencies it can hear, that does not mean that those frequencies can be filtered out with no loss of sound quality. Anyone with a high school-level knowledge of electromagnetic waves will recall the phenomenon of wave interference. Therein lies the answer to why CD audio sounds worse than vinyl and why lossy compression algorithms on digitized music will sound worse still.
In addition, it is almost impossible to use a D/A converter on the same power supply as a disk drive (in your computer) because of electrical interference. Most high-fidelity CD systems have two power supplies, one for the transport and one for the D/A converter. I like the idea of being able to preview, or even listen to, music on demand, but I hope that the noncompressed versions will still be available.
Ryan Haveson
A Dip in the Toxic Swamp
In "While the Left Sleeps" (Wired 3.08, page 103), Phil Agre perpetuates a myth in describing The Free Press as part of the "infrastructure" of the conservative political movement. Granted, we have published leading conservative theorists including Robert Bork, George Will, and Charles Murray. We have also published the work of leading liberals such as Lani Guinier, Andrea Dworkin, and Cass Sunstein. In short, despite appearances, we are not a conservative house, but a self-consciously dialectical one.
Adam Bellow
The Free Press
New York, New York
Well, Wired is finally dabbling its toes in the toxic swamp of partisanship with "While the Left Sleeps."
I don't know whether to congratulate you for your courage or cancel my subscription for presenting such one-sided drivel.
If nothing else, you have certainly succeeded in disturbing me somewhat. Not by the content of this article, but by publishing it at all.
Charles Lewis
Speaker of the Future? Or the Past?
Newt Gingrich's credentials as a futurist are a bit suspect ("Friend and Foe," Wired 3.08, page 106).
For starters, he's promised the National Rifle Association that he will block any and all gun-control legislation in the House of Representatives, thereby ensuring that our streets will continue to be ruled by a 16th-century technology - the handgun.
And his party's idea of political-social progress is to return to the late-19th-century golden age when businesses could function unhindered by government regulations protecting the environment, the health and safety of workers, and the rights of ordinary investors.
Patrick J. Kiger
Takoma Park, Maryland
Unfortunately, the Newt Gingrich interview barely ventured beyond the conventional wisdom of the mainstream. Dyson could have asked Gingrich some tougher questions on his media policy. She might have asked what was discussed at Gingrich's closed-door meetings last January with the CEOs of virtually every leading media and telecommunications company in the country.
The speaker's tireless efforts at deregulation should have prompted Dyson to look into underreported possibilities of conflicts of interest. The Progress and Freedom Foundation underwrites his cable TV show and raises money for his video college course. The foundation, which has collected nearly US$1.7 million, has been supported by such corporations as AT&T, BellSouth, Turner Broadcasting, and Cox Cable Communications - all of whom have an interest in deregulation.
Such pro-corporate zeal has had detrimental effects on media democracy that are already being mirrored in Gingrich's (and Clinton's) Internet policy. Gingrich claims to be for electronic democracy, but won't his work to increase corporate control of the Internet result in commercialization, restricted access, and less diversity online?
Despite the article's title, I saw very little investigation into the extensive "foe" side of Newt Gingrich in Dyson's interview.
Chris Burke
Insane but True
"This Is Not Totally Entertaining. This Is Insane." (Wired 3.08, page 136) is an exceptional work. It allows people all over the world to get a feel for what it's like here in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the digital revolution. Nobody talks to me like Wired! Keep up the good work.
Mikey P. Phyatt
Life Is Just ....
Whenever I find a sentence beginning "Life is just ...," my bullshit detector starts to buzz like a swarm of flies. So it was when I read the article about Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins ("Revolutionary Evolutionist," Wired 3.07, page 120) and came across his statement that "Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information."
At first, I thought he may have been permanently pixelated by spending so much of his professional life watching models of mathematical "life" evolve on his computer screen. I now feel that he has simply become temporarily overawed by his own considerable cleverness.
Perhaps the bodies he calls "survival machines" are mere artifacts of our selfish genes, but the spirits that inhabit these bodies (like tourists in rented cars), the spirits who depart the bodies when they are no longer fit for life (despite the fact that bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information are still intact), the same spirit that enabled Dawkins to experience a "feeling of exultation as [he] first watched these exquisite creatures emerging" will eventually come to his rescue.
In a quiet moment, as he reflects back with justifiable pride on his life of curiosity and contribution to the sum of human knowledge, these spirits will remind him that, really, life is just ... a bowl of cherries.
Peter Evans
Kelowna, British Columbia
Microgripe
You miserable bastards! I just finished reading Microserfs (excerpted as "Microserfs: Transhumanity," Wired 3.07, page 80). Guess what? I already knew the ending. Where the hell do you get off printing the last chapter?!? You ruined the end of a great book!
Brian Sipes
Undo
T-shirt alert! To get your own perl/RSA encryption T-shirt (Electric Word, Wired 3.08, page 38), e-mail netstuff-owner@acpub.duke.edu. The majordomo@acpub.duke.edu address we printed is incorrect.
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