__ Rants & Raves __
__ Debating the New Economy __
John Heilemann's article on the new economy ("It's the New Economy, Stupid," Wired 4.03, page 67) is so rife with misinformation and distortions that some of its underlying truths are almost totally obscured. For starters, to compare tax rates in the US with those in the nowpathetic economies of Europe as evidence that the notion that America is overtaxed is "silly" speaks for itself. Lower taxes generally equal more growth. (Japan's low-tax, zero-growth economy is beset by drastic overregulation, a collapsed real estate market, an appreciated yen, and deflation none of which is a function of taxation levels.)
Additionally, describing Senator Phil Gramm's solution for stagnating wages cutting taxes as "odd" is way out in left field. After-tax income is what really matters, and cutting taxes will result in an increase in that income.
Thirdly, asserting that "a balanced budget is a prerequisite to prosperity in the 21st century," that Clinton's massive "human capital" spending proposals were too modest, and that even greater government "investment" (spending) is necessary, and acknowledging that high tax rates "could severely hobble the new economy" all within two paragraphs is patently absurd. Those three priorities cannot be reconciled, even if the solution of deeply cutting (as opposed to streamlining) the Pentagon budget is implemented.
I agree with Heilemann on several points: Buchananism must be fought vigorously, as should government-imposed censorship of the Net. The overall education level of the public needs to be improved so that more of us can catch the Third Wave. Bill Clinton's proposal to give favored tax status to postsecondary education expenditures an approach that focuses on and encourages individual initiative rather than instituting yet another government program is a great place to start.
What we need is a smaller, less expensive, information-age government that takes less from our pocketbooks, deregulation including of the pseudo-regulations contained in the tax code to help spur innovation (the computer industry is one of the least regulated, and look at its vitality) and the decentralization (netization) of government at all levels.
Heilemann's they're-both-wrong, I'm-above-it-all mentality and a lack of realistic suggestions, coupled with a not-so-thinly disguised leftist economic perspective, ruined a potentially enlightening discussion on how the new economy is going to shape politics and vice versa.
Brad Jacobsmeyer
bradj@eskimo.com
I greatly appreciated John Heilemann's article on presidential politics and the new economy. He highlighted two key causes of the rising inequality the explosion in information technology and increasing globalization of markets and production processes.
Heilemann, however, makes the same mistake as Labor Secretary Robert Reich, arguing that education and an investment in our human resources is the answer to these problems. There's no question that education is important, but research that I've recently completed on Silicon Valley labor markets highlights two fundamental problems that a single-minded focus on education doesn't even begin to address.
First, while the number of knowledge-intensive jobs has exploded in the region in the last 15 years, so has the number of low-skilled, low-wage jobs. A large amount of low-wage computer and electronic assembly work is still done in this country, largely by Asian women working under difficult conditions.
Furthermore, the expansion of high-technology firms in the region has been accompanied by an expansion of low-lying office and manufacturing buildings, with rapid growth in related service industries. The additional mushrooming of suburban development and shopping malls connected with the economic growth of the region has led to the expansion of low-wage retail sales and consumer services. Here in Silicon Valley, the heart of the information economy, the occupations with the greatest job growth include such "low-knowledge" jobs as retail salespeople, receptionists, cashiers, and janitors, right next to the general managers and the computer and electronic engineers. All those low-knowledge jobs are not peripheral jobs that will disappear in the new economy. Education alone does not address the need to upgrade wages and working conditions in these occupations.
Second, the rise in various forms of contingent employment temporary, part-time, contract labor means that even highly skilled workers face economic insecurity and downward pressures on wages. In Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, contingent employment has accounted for all net job growth since 1984. This reflects the corporate trend to decrease the size of the core workforce and turn everyone else into the economic shock absorbers of the highly competitive and volatile global economy. This creates problems for skilled and unskilled workers alike. None of these people has job security, and access to benefits and health care is difficult. Real wages for all occupations in temporary agencies have declined by nearly 15 percent over the last five years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while real wages for technical occupations have declined nearly 28 percent.
The key to economic renewal lies not just in increased public sector investment in education and infrastructure. We also need collective action to ensure that a fair share of the wealth created by the new economy makes its way down to workers. Wages and benefits do not rise just because the government wants them to, they rise when people demand it. Maybe people can address these problems through traditional unions. Maybe people need a hybrid organization a cross between a professional association and a traditional trade union. Or maybe people can come together and organize through cyberspace. But without collective action, we are all at the mercy of the new economy. This may come as anathema to Wired readers who promote theindependent/entrepreneurial/libertarian values of high-tech culture. Yet, this much is certainly true as long as we remain isolated in our cubicles we are going to get stomped like geeks at a grunge show.
Chris Benner
wpusa501c3@aol.com
__ Taking a Stand on Standards __
While the issue of Netscape's commitment to open standards may be open to question (Rants & Raves, Wired 4.03, page 33), the question of an HTML 3.0 "standard" is not: HTML 3.0 has no status whatsoever as a standard, and it disturbs me that Wired is perpetuating this misunderstanding.
Standards are a funny thing; they take time to develop. And along the way they change and mutate, split apart and evolve. The original draft standard of HTML 3.0 expired in September '95, and work on it as a monolithic document has ceased, although work on various sections of it continues. The World Wide Web Consortium maintains a math page at www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Math. Those interested in the path from draft standard to Internet standard should read the Internet Engineering Task Force document "IETF Structure and Internet Standards Process" at www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/structure.html or the "Internet Official Protocol Standards" (aka "STD1") at ds0.internic.net/std/std1.txt.
HTML 2.0 is a proposed standard and may become an Internet standard this November. HTML 3.0 never made it past draft status.
Murray Altheim
murray@spyglass.com
__ Crack This Code __
In "Wisecrackers" (Wired 4.03, page 128), Steven Levy makes a common mistake, claiming that no unbreakable crypto systems exist. During World War II, the US used two: Navajo and one-time pads. Only in wartime would the government come up with a hack like Navajo. But one-time pads have been around for a long time, and are proven unbreakable. Turns out generating a one-time pad is not too hard. A reasonable engineer should be able to put together a reasonable system in a day to a few weeks, depending on the sophistication of the users and the user interface. A nice system would give a choice between a dozen CDs (for bit strings), a dozen random-number generators, and newspapers (for random seeds). You could even bury the magic numbers for each of those in the cyphertext, using several levels of indirection.
bandit
bandit@cruzio.com
__ Turkle Me This __
Shame on the editors of Wired for the sexual hype they used in "selling" Pamela McCorduck's thoughtful, insightful profile of Sherry Turkle ("Sex, Lies, and Avatars," Wired 4.04, page 106). The article was as substantive and provocative as its subject. But the title and the introductory quote (pages 12-15) misrepresent the article's contents and take Turkle's only reference to sexuality completely out of context. The decision to plaster that quote across a two-page spread says worlds about Wired's perception of its audience's interests (not to mention its intelligence and gender).
I often use Wired in my classes as an example of a cutting-edge publication; I'll use this issue to illustrate that some things haven't changed: sex sells even in a cutting-edge magazine with a highly educated, affluent audience. And, if your editorial judgment is to be believed, thoughtful analysis and substantive discussion do not.
Dianne Lynch
Chair, Department of Journalism
St. Michael's College Colchester, Vermont
"Is online sex like having an affair? Is it my business because I'm married to you? Or is it like you're reading pornography and it's none of my business?" Sherry Turkle asks. But perhaps online sex does indeed affect the partner in a marriage even if it is like reading pornography.
I suspect the majority of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists would consider any significant bent toward pornography or online sex within a marriage to be an indication that something is sexually amiss. Will distributed personality lead to virtual polygamy?
William Herrera
wherrera@lookout.com
__ I've Heard That One-to-One Before __
It was amusing to see David Weinberger, a marketing guy, so taken with the "revolution" he erroneously ascribes to Martha Rogers's one-to-one marketing strategies ("One-on-One with One-to-One's Martha Rogers," Wired 4.03, page 152).
These principles have been working just fine for more than 100 years under the more prosaic name of direct marketing, though only in the last several years have software and other high-tech marketers discovered the cost-effective benefits that direct-response media and lead-generation strategies offer.
In 1886 Richard Sears, a railroad telegraph operator, found himself with a supply of undeliverable gold pocket watches. He also had a list of 20,000 station masters, each of whom, he reasoned, would be a logical prospect for an accurate watch. He marketed the watches "one-to-one" to his fellow railroaders.
As direct marketing has blown the doors off mass marketing, a parade of individuals and companies have attempted to divert the stream through their own little marketing mill by renaming it. We've had relationship marketing, target marketing, niche marketing, customer bonding, and, yes, one-to-one marketing, long before Rogers came along.
And before Weinberger becomes too frightened by Rogers's so-called learning brokers, he ought to check out the activities of major list brokers such as Worldata Inc. with its WebConnect link brokerage service and Direct Media's CatalogLink, both of which are designed to facilitate the kind of one-to-one communications Rogers seems to think she discovered.
As for the issue of privacy, the Direct Marketing Association has been addressing that prickly problem, with increasingly better results, for many years. "Junk mail," I often say, "is an offer sent to the wrong person." The DMA and most everyone else in the industry is working hard to make sure we get the right person, the first time.
George Duncan
duncdirect@aol.com
__ Barksdale's Barking __
To quote Jim Barksdale ("Netscape's Secret Weapon," Wired 4.03, page 154): "I don't know of a company that's created a brand quicker than we have. And by the way, over a period of a year and a half we have never run an ad."
Now, I can truly admire the pride he has in Netscape's accomplishments, but he must not have been surfing the Web during that year and a half. If I see that "Download Netscape Now" banner on one more site's ad space I think I'll go looney. Oh, and if he means print ads, please ask him to turn to page 151 of Wired Scenarios 1.01.
Art Thompson
art@sensenet.com
__ Our Hubble Apologies __
Tired: Wired magazine. For not publishing the URL of the Hubble Space Telescope Eagle Nebula pictures ("Crown of Creation," Wired 4.03, page 156). Wired: Natural History magazine. For not only naming the nebula, but giving the URLs of the pictures, Galileo spacecraft developments, and comet spotting info.
Mark S. Tomes
mtomes@oboe.gina.calstate.edu
__ To Spam or Not to Spam __
The four-page article on the self-proclaimed Spam King, Jeff Slaton ("Spam King! Your Source for Spams Netwide!" Wired 4.02, page 84), is such a monument to hypocrisy that I barely know where to begin.
Last year you refused to run a HarperCollins advertisement for the book How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, by Laurence Canter and me. You did this, supposedly, because the contents were at odds with your very high principles. Now you devote a prominent article to the activities of Slaton, who openly cites our book as the basic source of his marketing techniques. Can I presume you finally understand what freedom of speech means spiritually as well as legally? What do you really think is the difference in the ultimate effect of mentioning my book in an article and running a print ad to sell it?
Martha Siegel
msiegel@squeaky.free.org
__ Bangalove __
Thank you, Wired, for your wonderful article "Bangalore" (Wired 4.02, page 110). I first went to India as a young architect in 1969. I drove overland from Europe to Ahmedabad, a city of 4 million in Gujarat state north of Bombay. I fell in love with this gargantuan country.
And I fell in love with the Indian ice cream, especially caju drach and kasar pista (cashew and raisins and pistachio). You could only get ice cream in two places in Ahmedabad in 1969: one was a restaurant in the Law Garden, the other was at night in Manik Chowk, in the center of the old city near the stalls of the gold and cloth merchants. Brass tubes 30 inches long and 8 inches in diameter gleamed from beneath burlap sacking. The tubes were filled with the most delicious ice cream I had ever tasted. It had been made that day, without refrigeration, by surrounding the brass tubes with ice and salt and turning them just like grandma used to.
In the banks, changing money was accompanied by an endless paper trail through a series of oversize ledgers. The lights dimmed, hours went by, and eventually I was given rupees in exchange for the brass numbered token I had been given for my travelers checks. Lots of cows and carts and bullocks and camels and bicycles in the streets. Lots of three-wheeled Vespa taxis and a few old Hindustan cars (1950s Hillmans). Hutments by the riverside with kerosene lanterns twinkling in the night.
In 1983, I returned to the motherland. Things were going a bit faster, though I still could not buy a Time magazine or any other American or British publication. The flow of hard currency out of the country was not permitted. More bikes, more mopeds, more Vespas, more ice cream. Prepackaged ice cream bars and cups and rockets and snow cones were available from many small shops which now had freezers. The lights still dimmed. The ledgers still creaked open.
In 1989, I returned again. I bought a computerized train ticket. Ice cream was everywhere. There was not a place of commerce where you could not get a cone. The hutments boasted rooftop TV aerials. Lots more motor scooters, cars, and trucks; the Japanese had just been granted a license to make something other than a Hindustan.
For 10 or more years, I have been telling friends that India would become the country of invention and wealth of the 21st century. Few of them paid attention, but now it's happening. Bangalore is not a blip on the screen of history it is the start of a surge of industrial and business activity that will make Japan look like the small island that it is. India has as many resources as all of Europe combined, it has English as a common language, and it has a strong democratic foundation on which to grow. It will never become the West. It is too big. It will become a postmodern India, a place of contrast and wealth and limitless potential and possibility. It will define itself between its multicultural religious past and its cellular future.
Whatever isn't wasn't, and whatever wasn't will be, so if you want to sell a billion of something just find a something that every Indian will want like an ice cream cone.
James Weisman
Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts
__ Catching Kevin, Tsutomu, John, and Jon __
My involvement in the Kevin Mitnick saga is considerable and has been covered in TakeDown, by Tsutomu Shimomura with John Markoff (excerpted as "Catching Kevin," Wired 4.02, page 119), and The Fugitive Game, by Jonathan Littman. I am the computer hacker the FBI originally paid to track Kevin.
Here in federal prison, Mitnick and I have become friends of a sort and speak regularly. We both have reviewed the galleys and discussed the validity of these books. We agree that the story as Shimomura tells it is slanted and, in some aspects, clearly erroneous. In addition, it is plausible that Shimomura and Markoff embarked on their pursuit of Mitnick knowing full well that a lucrative book deal would result. And though I don't necessarily agree with all the facts as Littman recounts them, his book takes a much more encompassing look at the story. Unfortunately, he misses the mark in terms of telling the whole story. I feel the book has a very National Enquirer style to it, often leaving out pertinent facts or adding exaggerations and color.
Justin Petersen
asteal@primus.com
__ A Cut-and-Paste Jungle __
Wired is the most aggressively hideous book I have ever seen, reflecting all the worst of DTP: overuse of color, overuse of cutesy-poo borders, page numbers, and ornaments, and a self-conscious design that seeks to draw attention to itself rather than to the ideas contained in the articles.
At the same time, the articles are thought-provoking, insightful, intelligently written, and even witty.
Suggestion: Pass out the DTP software to the writers and let them design their own pages. Then sack the design staff and parse out their former salaries to the writers and editors.
Don Martin
don@balt-rehab.med.va.gov
__ Getting Wired __
In January 1996, you sent Inmate Matthew W. Rosen, Register No. 24165 013, a subscription of the magazine Wired. This magazine was reviewed by appropriate staff at the Federal Prison Camp Nellis, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, in accordance with Bureau of Prisons Program Statement 5266.5.
Bureau policy requires this type of magazine be rejected from admission to a federal penal institution where it would reasonably contribute to the disruption of good order and discipline. The information referenced in this magazine could affect the orderly running of this facility.
In accordance with the above regulation, you may appeal this determination to our Regional Director within 15 days after receipt of this letter. Additionally, Inmate Rosen may appeal our decision throughin-house Administrative Remedy procedures within 15 days of his receipt of a copy of this letter.
L. R. Turner
Warden, Federal Prison Camp Nellis
Las Vegas, Nevada
Matthew Rosen appealed the board's decision and won.
__ Undo __
Alienation: The movie still attributed to Ridley Scott's Alien (page 133 of "Cameron Angle," Wired 4.04) was actually a shot from Jim Cameron's Aliens. A Finicky Virgo: World War II, which began in September 1939, is a Virgo rather than a Sagittarius ("Biorhythm of the Web," Wired 4.04, page 70).
__ Send your Rants & Raves to: __
E-mail: rants@Wired.com
Snail mail: Wired, PO Box 191826
San Francisco, CA 94109-9866
