__ Rants & Raves __
__ Wiped Out __
Thanks a lot for the "The Great Web Wipeout" (Wired 4.04, page 125). Yes, indeed. Thanks to that article, the small, privately owned company that I work for decided to shut down its new interactive division. My co-workers and I all lost our jobs yesterday.
When I arrived home, the answering machine had messages from three of my closest friends. This is unusual because they are usually too busy to call in the middle of the day, let alone to ask if I was free for dinner, which they did, and I was. All three are or, shall I say, were employees of the online divisions of their companies.
In the small, suburban part of Miami where I live, the bars were overflowing with webmasters and webjefes (we are in Miami, after all) and graphics artists. Suddenly, our corporate-owned portable computers had been confiscated, and for the first time in years we were all out wandering the streets, looking at the stars (gee there are lots of them, aren't there). I'm writing this email from an old Apple IIc I found in the closet that can still dial in to the server. They haven't shut it down yet they probably just don't know how.
This morning I got in the car to go to work, but it dawned on me about a mile from home that there was no Web for me to work on. The realization seemed to hit half of the drivers on I-95 at the same time, because suddenly nearly two-thirds of the traffic shifted to the Miami Beach exit. When I arrived, the beach was packed with bespectacled, long-haired, lily white people without bathing suits. We huddled in small groups, bragged about our old systems, and shook sand out of our Birkenstocks.
Now, after my first day of unemployment, I am sitting in front of this old Apple typing my last electronic muttering. Oh, what am I going to do? Here's one last smiley, though I don't really mean it. :-)
William Wetmore
www@creatability.com
I would like to thank Wired for having the balls to write and publish the Web wipeout story. It is a brilliant look into the near future of the Internet.
Just the other day, I received a call from a telemarketing slime-type investment firm offering a chance to invest US$15,000 in the "rapidly growing world of Internet commerce."
Ever since Netscape's golden day on Wall Street, I have played devil's advocate in conversations with my blinded-by-hope fellow Web geeks. For months I have argued that this frenzy of investment will cause the Internet to become the S&L scandal of the '90s.
I have worked with the salespeople who scramble to cash in on the wave, and I have designed sites for companies that have paid them and service providers thousands of dollars for the "privilege" of being on the Web. So far, few have paid off even a fraction of the money invested, and several have already begun packing it in and writing off the Web as a bad investment. How long can it be before they realize that online commerce isn't only dead, it never happened? How long before investors in Internet technology realize this, pull their money out, and go in search of the next Holy Grail?
Bill Schwab
__ A Global Village, Huh? __
Much could be said in response to Nicholas Negroponte's "Pluralistic, Not Imperialistic" (Wired 4.03, page 216), in which the main issue is elegantly avoided. I am talking about the binary representation of the characters I am writing right now the seven-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange, also known as ASCII.
Sending Internet email in Norwegian is like having a speech impediment forced upon oneself. Characters considered "special" by Anglo-Americans are essential to the freedom of expression of non-English-speakers. The telephone system does not require its users to speak only English, nor does the postal system require us to write only English.
Was someone talking about pluralism on the Net?
Tor Galaasen
amk@bbb.no
__ Gilder's Idiotic Crap __
Hmm Š where have I seen Wired 4.03 cover boy's name before? ("George Gilder," Wired 4.03, page 122.) Oh yeah, in Michael Messner's book about sports sociology called Power at Play, according to which Gilder believes "athletic performance, for males, embodies 'an ideal of beauty and truth,' while women's participation represents a 'disgusting perversion.'" Gilder also argues that "the female body Š more closely resembles the body of non-hunting primates. A woman throws, for example, very like a male chimpanzee."
The Reagan administration drew heavily on George Gilder's theories for its anti-feminist family policies. I hope I have the wrong Gilder, 'cause I'd like to think y'all wouldn't put someone squawking such idiotic crap on the cover.
I guess the big money's not in revisionist bio-sociological mumbo jumbo anymore. Now it's in claptrap about gettin' wired.
Matthew Margolin
mattmarg@hotwired.com
__ Loose Spelling __
One pet peeve I have about the Usenet rec.sports newsgroups is the use of the word loose instead of lose. The high school English teacher in me shudders every time I see the mistake.
But now this novel usage of loose has found its way into your edited magazine. In "Whose Status Quo?" (Wired 4.04, page 101) Simpson Garfinkel writes that "law enforcement officials claim they will loose this powerful tool if telephone companies are not forced to build switches that are wiretap-ready."
Instead of cringing, I am starting to wonder if we are experiencing a change in the English language. Imagine looking up the word loose in Webster's Dictionary 100 years from now and reading: Variation of lose. (Origin: Usenet, late 20th century.)
Then again, there are some things a spellchecker won't catch.
Edward Aboufadel
aboufade@gvsu.edu
Thanks, but loose the p in Simson Garfinkel.
__ Tasteless Color __
You might be amused to know that at the Trend Union fashion forecasting seminar this week, Wired magazine was featured in one of the slides as an example of the return of truly tasteless color trends.
I think you should take this as a compliment. If only you could have seen that tired sea of black-clad fashion victims crowding the amphitheater, you would agree.
Heidi S. Everhart
coppelia29@aol.com
__ All the Freedom You Want.... __
Charles Platt's "Americans Are Not as Free as We Think We Are." (Wired 4.04, page 82) exposed only the tip of the iceberg. Things are much, much worse. As the March issue of The Mouse Monitor (scope@mail.britnet.co.uk) revealed, the private company that controls the registration of domain names, Network Solutions Inc., is owned by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The SAIC board of directors reads like the Who's Who of the US intelligence community and is probably an asset of the CIA.
The present board includes Bobby Ray Inman, former director of the NSA and former deputy director of the CIA, and Donald Hicks, former head of R&D at the Pentagon.
In recent years, the board has included John Deutch, current director of the CIA; Anita Jones, director of defense research and engineering; Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under Nixon; William Perry, current secretary of defense; and Maxwell Thurman, who commanded the US invasion of Panama.
Internet advocates are just now experiencing what others have experienced for years. The Unabomber put it nicely: "You can have all the freedom that you want as long as the authorities consider it unimportant." Apparently casual conversation between two or three individuals is OK, but real-time communication among thousands might be dangerous and therefore must be watched and controlled.
You are fighting an uphill battle, and I commend you, but I will applaud and watch you from the sidelines in Costa Rica.
Rolf von Richter
richter@expreso.co.cr
The tip of this iceberg surfaced in late January in Cyber Rights Now (Wired 4.02, page 72).
__ But What Is Freedom, Anyway? __
Tom Jennings is wrong in thinking that the Free Software Foundation's free is free in the sense of no price ("The Anarchist," Wired 4.04, page 120). As Richard Stallman explains in a footnote to the GNU manifesto, "Free software is software that users have the freedom to distribute and change" (www.ifi.uni-klu.ac.at/Manuals/xemacs/xemacs_36.html). And that's a very valuable notion.
Berend de Boer
100120.3121@compuserve.com
__ Bias and Balance __
Bruce Sterling's writing is entertaining and interesting ("Merchants of Venom," Wired 4.05, page 65), but he needs to be a tad more unbiased about his neighbors to the east. Oddly enough, I was less sensitive about Louisiana-bashing before moving to the ostensibly open-minded Northeast, where the surprisingly high amount of "racist, lunatic Southerner" stereotyping I have seen has made me a tad thin-skinned.
Although Louisiana politics has more than its fair share of the deranged, generalizing the whole state as a "lunatic backwater" is unfair. One of the reasons John Heilemann's previous Netizen column ("The GOP Big Tent Is Full of Holes," Wired 4.04, page 63) struck me was that he was the only print journalist to recognize that Louisiana citizens did not elect David Duke because of his racism; they elected him in spite of it. Racism was a part of the package that some Louisiana voters (I was not among them) were prepared to swallow to get the rest of the platform.
You don't have to be in the South to be intolerant. Louisiana and Alabama, and for that matter Texas, do not have a monopoly on either lunatics or rednecks. Pat Buchanan knows this and is therefore confident of having a core constituency wherever he goes.
Todd Belton
tbelton@tiac.net
After spending endless hours watching junk political coverage on CNN (aka the Cable Newt Network) and trying to get real political news out of the local Quayle-family-owned newspaper (The Indianapolis Star) that treated Richard Lugar as if he were a viable candidate, "Merchants of Venom" struck me as a ray of hope that someone out there might actually have an opinion based on facts, which is a scarce commodity in the United States.
Sterling's analysis of each Republican candidate's pitfalls and pratfalls, seen through the unblinking eye of his own TV ads, leads me to believe that he is far more savvy than the photocopy-journalists of Newsweek.
Your article also echoed my own sentiment that, since 1980, it hasn't gotten any better. It's extremely depressing to know that for my entire working life I will never make enough money to buy a house, have children, own a car, or take part in that thing called the American Dream. And it doesn't help to hear 800-year-old Bob Dole telling me what he can't do.
To offset the fact that my vote means nothing, that I'm completely disposable as a worker, and that I seem to earn less and less each year, I'm considering emigrating. I'm looking for a country where no one has ever heard the terms "core competency," "golden parachute," or "outplacing."
So far, Mars looks really good.
Thanks for the great article. You didn't pull any punches or grind any axes, and it solidified the fact that the US is a terrible place for an American to live. Which means you've given me honest political coverage.
Jason Salisbury
jjsalis@aol.com
__ The Bullet Vote __
Although "The GOP Big Tent Is Full of Holes" gave an excellent and reasonably evenhanded assesment of the GOP's problems in maintaining a coalition of widely disparate voter-interest groups, you missed one of the most important facts of life about the 1994 election and the coming 1996 elections. While concentrating on the landmine pro-life issue, the article shortchanged the much greater influence of the bullet vote.
While the Christian Coalition claims 1.6 million card-carrying (and presumably money-contributing) members, the National Rifle Association has double that and is the only effective organization espousing the interests of 60 million gun owners in America.
Thanks to the radical, liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the tireless efforts of mouthpieces like Hillary Clinton, Sarah Brady, and Charlie Schumer, those 60 million potential voters have no doubt whatsoever who their enemy is. The quasi-religious fervor of gun haters has driven a third of the voting public away from whatever the Democratic Party may have to offer, and toward the only alternative, the Republican camp. The leaders of the Republican Party aren't the only ones who, in the words of your author, "just don't get it."
Ed Arnold
fasteddie3@aol.com
__ The Elephants Aren't the Only Asses __
Brock Meeks is right to complain about the rogues who legislated the Communications Decency Act ("The Rogues Gallery," Wired 4.04, page 80). But it was startling that all five of the legislators he criticizes are Democrats.
There is plenty of blame to go around for this debacle, and the Republicans should bear their fair share. Bob Dole and the Christian Coalition worked for the passage of the CDA. Newt Gingrich didn't lift a finger to block it. And it's Democrat Patrick Leahy of Vermont who is currently fighting to repeal it.
Mark Lemley
mlemley@mail.law.utexas.edu
__ The Internationalnet __
From outside the US, it seems that this free speech battle is being fought by people who do not really understand the Internet. Even if most of the Internet traffic is in the US, it is strange to hear advocates of the "universal information system that goes beyond borders" get worried about a law that affects only 4.5 percent of the world population. How could an American law deeply affect the Internet? What can America do to a server in Iraq holding anti-American propaganda except bomb it?
This campaign reflects a narrow, US-centric belief that what happens in the US happens to the world.
Philippe Lê
lephil@worldnet.fr
__ Night Reading __
When I was called by the Israeli army to do a month of night guard duty as part of my reserve service, I decided to take the latest issues of Wired with me. But get this: turns out I can't read in the dark. So every night for the last week I have been trying to fight the cold weather, the desire to sleep, and the fact that, for one reason or another, I can't read in the dark. Could you possibly print the next issues in a glow-in-the-dark format?
Amit Bar-Nir
amit@bayarea.net
__ Freudian Slipup __
Pamela McCorduck is welcome to write what she wants, and Wired is welcome to publish it ("Sex, Lies, and Avatars," Wired 4.04, page 106), but McCorduck's shoddy scholarship and/or lack of cultural insight make this piece suspect if not entirely irrelevant. Introducing Sherry Turkle's intellectual sojourn with sweeping generalizations on Sigmund Freud's influence on French and American culture invites skepticism; enough to make this reader wonder if McCorduck is worth reading.
To be specific, she claims that Freud was dismissed by his French contemporaries and ardently adopted by American ones until the late '60s, when the situation reversed: American interest in Freud waned, and the French interest rose to the point that the neo-Freudian Lacan became a pivotal thinker.
How can McCorduck dismiss the outspoken and high-profile Freudian advocates of the '20s and '30s, the surrealist group? And where were the surrealists centered? Paris. What of the intellectual darling of the late '60s on American campuses, R. D. Laing? Laing, as much a Freudian as anyone, clearly worked in the time frame during which McCorduck claims America had all but forgotten Freud.
I believe that McCorduck is struggling for relevance to support her affection for Lacan, who was only marginally relevant to American thought. That marginal relevance is based on the popularity of his intellectual noodlings and self-absorbed wordplay among college coffee bar types. Many writers want Lacan to be relevant, but for all the fun and charm his triflings offer, in the end they are about as relevant to American thought as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is to Greek politics.
Pat Watson
watsonian@aol.com
__ Pattonly Wrong __
In "Robots with the Right Stuff" (Wired 4.03, page 148), Phil Patton writes that in the Gulf War, "it was made clear how sensitive we have become to any loss of human life."
I read it once, and it didn't make any sense. I read it twice, and I thought that it must be a misprint. Now I'm not sure what it is but I am sure that it made me angry as hell.
After all, tens of thousands of people died in the Gulf War. And I don't remember any signs of sensitivity or regret. Of course most of those victims were members of the Iraqi armed services.
I'm not blaming the US for the war, but I am blaming Patton for denying the humanity of those who were slaughtered by superior technology. Patton's claim would make sense if he had replaced human with American, but maybe Arabs aren't truly human in his eyes. Maybe they are just some kind of biological robots without the right stuff?
Tuomas Kilpi
lyhty@clinet.fi
__ Saint Marshall of the Catchy Phrase __
The ideas that preoccupy our minds are often those we can't fully understand. This is one reason for our fascination with Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of the catchy phrase ("The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool," Wired 4.01, page 122). Our obsession with McLuhan and his ideas also points to a larger issue: the structure of authority in a world dominated by "cool media," to borrow a phrase from Saint M.
In a world where turning every corner, changing every channel, searching every Web page offers new messages, information is accessible to nearly anyone who needs or wants it. And when each info-source represents a Sisyphean hill of tacit knowledge, can any one individual understand all the data from every field with the same clarity as a specialist?
The answer, I believe, can be found in our continued obsession with Marshall McLuhan. We are gripped by McLuhan's ideas because we don't understand them. And we don't understand them because they are metonymous: their parts stand for a whole requiring a mountain of tacit knowledge that we cannot access (perhaps because we don't read McLuhan or perhaps because he wasn't clear in his reasoning). We all understand, in some form or another what a global village is, for example, but is it the same understanding that McLuhan had? Unlikely.
Language, like most people's understanding of McLuhan's phrases, is primarily based on metonymy the gap between object or idea and the word used to describe it. McLuhan's phrases are readily digested, but their meanings are not.
Metonymous leaps will determine who and what is authoritative in a world overflowing with information. With no possible way of understanding or synthesizing all the relevant information available on a particular subject, we must take the representative parts to understand the whole. Authority will be held by those, like McLuhan, who can give us the slogans to hang our ideas on, but who make the reasoning behind those ideas as inaccessible as possible.
Rees Kassen
burj@musicb.mcgill.ca
__ Undo __
Star Log: Our reference to the Paramount-Hilton development in Las Vegas as "the first-ever Star Trek theme-park attraction" (Updata, Wired 4.05, page 80) ignored the old Star Trek Adventure attraction at Universal Studios. Veritas: Nick Arnett works for Verity Inc. and not Open Text, as the article "Bots Are Hot!" (Wired 4.04, page 114) might have suggested. Reshoot: Jim Cameron ("Cameron Angle," Wired 4.04, page 130) filmed part of Titanic off the coast of Saint John's, Newfoundland. Ein Undo: A few URLs mentioned in "Beating the Bavarians" (Wired 4.03, page 46) were incorrect. Find the NewsWatcher for Macs at ftp://monitor.net/pub/mac/NewsWatcher.sit, the list of Usenet sites at dana.ucc.nau.edu/~jwa/, and more details about the case at www.c2.org/~offshore/.
__ Send your Rants & Raves to: __
E-mail: rants@Wired.com
Snail mail: Wired, PO Box 191826
San Francisco, CA 94109-9866
