Rants & Raves
The Burning Issue
While words on a piece of paper cannot do total justice to Burning Man, Bruce Sterling does a fair job ("Greetings from Burning Man!" Wired 4.11, page 196). I'd say a hell of a lot better than SPIN's recent article. I don't know whether to praise Wired for a decently objective article, or curse you for plastering the festival across the cover, thereby letting more clueless, unprepared yahoos (apologies to the Web site) know about this wonderful thing!
Pete Isaacson
penfold_of_terra@prodigy.com
The Burning Man cover caught my attention at once. I've been curious about the event ever since I read about it in High Power Rocketry.
You see, high-power rocketry hobbyists consider Black Rock Desert
an ideal place to launch their creations and hold their big annual shootout, known affectionately as Large and Dangerous Rocket Ships.
By the luck of the draw, one rocketry shootout coincided with Burning Man, and the rocket people returned home with breathless tales of a strange ceremony surrounding the burning of a giant human effigy. It sounded rather cool. After reading Bruce Sterling's report and seeing the photos, I'm a bit disappointed. There's a lot of weirdness and chaos and debauchery, but there doesn't seem to be much point to it. The article overflows with Sterling's admiration of the "hippie tribal thing." But I despise hipness and trendiness and "art" that exists only to freak people. What ever happened to substance? What about the value of rational thought?
It disturbs me that Net culture has come to be associated with that kind of nonsense. I believe in constantly looking toward the future and working toward a better one. Where are we going? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I hope we are not going to a future where we strip naked, wallow in the mud, and prance about like idiots.
Tony Belding
tlbelding@htcomp.net
Better Latency Than Never
I was pleased by the discussion of network latency and interactive response times in "Best Size for a Planet" (Wired 4.10, page 133).
James Martin writes that "a signal can go a distance of 13,020 miles in 70 milliseconds. This is the greatest twitch zone possible. It is just enough. The farthest distance between any two points on Earth happens to be about 13,000 miles. The planet is the perfect size for everyone to communicate with twitch response times."Would that it were true.
Unfortunately, Martin's calculations used the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000 kilometers per second), not the speed of light in glass fiber, which at 200,000 km/s is 33 percent slower. Martin also confused response time with one-way time. So, given that the circumference of Earth is 40,070 kilometers, the total round-trip delay to the far side of the planet and back over fiber-optic wires would be 200 milliseconds.
And there are other problems closer to home. If my next-door neighbor and I are dialed into ISPs using today's conventional 28.8 modems, the current round-trip message time is more than 500 milliseconds. Unless modem makers start caring about latency as well, we're not going to get 200-millisecond response times to the end of the street, never mind to the other side of the planet.
Stuart Cheshire
cheshire@cs.stanford.edu
Web Dreaming
I just read the article on Suck ("Web Dreams," Wired 4.11, page 166) and thought it was damn inspired. I studied cultural anthropology in college but hit a crisis with it: How could I tell someone else's story? How could I understand a worldview separate from my own? Luckily, other anthropologists hit the same crisis, and a new school of thought - called interpretive anthropology, symbolic anthropology, or sometimes postmodern anthropology - was born. The idea is that the participant or observer status is no longer sacred - there is no way to penetrate another culture and describe it justly. The only thing that could be described is the relationship between the ethnographer and the culture studied. Which is exactly what Josh Quittner did in the article, and it was effective.It's a funny thing. When we study relationship, we see both sides of the equation much more clearly. There is no objectivity. But if we dive boldly into subjectivity, we will grasp the heart of the matter.
Cathy Young
cafe@grouchy.com
Bloodsuckers
I understand a magazine like Wired wanting to support the high tech community, but Karen Donovan's article on California's shareholder lawsuit initiative ("Bloodsucking Scumbag," Wired 4.11, page 134) was every bit as biased as a piece of "No on 211" campaign literature. The article continually repeated the assertion that all shareholder lawsuits are "meritless" actions designed to "extort" high tech companies into large settlements to avoid "lengthy litigation."
The truth is that companies often pad forecasts to manipulate stock price, and, in some cases, executives dump shares before the actual earnings drive the stock price down. This is fraud. Under current law, executives who perpetrate this fraud, adding millions to their personal fortunes, can be totally protected from any personal responsibility. The fact that many victims of this fraud are the pension funds of retired persons is not trial-attorney propaganda. There have been dramatic examples - remember Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings? (My spellchecker suggested "cheating" to replace "Keating" - I was tempted.)
As for the threat that legions of high tech board members will "resign the day after 211 passes" - please! The millions that these executives can make is the carrot that drives innovation, but threat of shareholder lawsuits is a necessary stick to prevent the exploitation of innocent shareholders.
Matt Ward
Scotts Valley, California
Addicted to Speed
As I devoured the story on Craig Breedlove ("The Fast American Hero," Wired 4.11, page 184), I was pleasantly struck by the tone of the scribe, David Diamond. For once, a purveyor of unbridled thrust and horsepower such as Breedlove wasn't treated as a quaint freak by some glib journalist. Diamond actually seemed to grok the raw desire that propels visionaries such as Breedlove. The desire to reach Mach 1 on land is bold and outrageous; the related technology is the embodiment of grace and elegance.
But Diamond also grasped that in such speed-demon endeavors things can go horribly wrong: At Mach 1, shock waves almost certainly send the vehicle careening out of control at around 740 mph. The very possibility of failure makes these efforts interesting and provocative. (See Updata, page 94.)
Breedlove's success or failure is kind of a nonissue. Ultimately, the issue is humanity's atavistic quest for speed, speed, and more speed, which has reached a fevered pitch in our collective ID. Breedlove is the sublime manifestation of this.
Cole Coonce
dragusa@earthlink.net
Wealth If Who Wants It
Having experienced both schools of thought described by W. Michael Cox ("Wealth If You Want It," Wired 4.11, page 192), I totally agree that every individual has the ability to create whatever reality he or she wants. For many years I was a drug-addicted criminal, living outside of society. Family, acquaintances, and educators would see my potential and just shake their head in dismay and disgust. But in prison I took a business software class.
The ill-equipped classroom held half as many 8088s as it did minds hungry for knowledge and a break from the daily grind of prison life. To make a long story short, 11 months later I own my own company focused on communications and computing. The quality of my life has improved 1 million percent. Each day I strive to learn more. My success is based on my own efforts (and a few well-placed coincidences). I receive no financial help.
Bruce Q. Burke
memexlocs@aol.com
Exactly whose bootstraps is W. Michael Cox supposed to have pulled himself up by? And who is Kevin Kelly deluding when he writes, "He speaks from personal experience. Cox, 46, began working in his father's bottling plant ... at age 12"? His father's bottling plant? While that's not a Hyannisport upbringing, it's hardly the lap of adversity. Perhaps Cox's essay for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas should have been titled "By Our Own Wingtip Laces."
What really should have clued Kelly in to the man's value as an analyst was Cox's statement regarding work-related injuries: "Why is it that 100 years ago people worked harder but you didn't see a lot of disability? People carried 100 pounds of sugar around all day and they worked without injury for many years." Yeah, right. Histories of the time are filled with accounts of families driven to ruin by the injury of a guy whose only skill was moving heavy crap from one place to another.
Darrel Plant
dplant@moshplant.com
Your interview with W. Michael Cox illustrated a profound and dangerous conflict deep in the Wired CPU - the worship of raw capitalism, corporate power, and getting rich (which Cox claims is what "most of us aspire to"), while simultaneously celebrating the core anarcho-democratic ideals of the Internet and the Web. Hint: The government is exactly what makes capitalism and democracy able to coexist. Capital is not democratic. Capital and its organ-grinder's monkey, advertising, are coercive, manipulative, and solely self-interested. The government, about which Cox has little good to say, is at least elected democratically.
Cox supposedly reads history, but does he remember it? He completely dodges the question of the widening income gap between the rich and the poor by saying: Why attack the rich? Yet history has shown repeatedly that wide gaps between rich and poor lead to instability - exactly the conditions in which capitalism suffers the most. Capitalism needs stability. In the 1890s and 1930s when this country became dangerously unstable, it was the government that stepped in and restored stability.
Wired's cocky, smug good looks and bright colors won't wear so well when the cancerous tumors start to swell under the ozone-depleted, carbon-dioxide sky, as PCB-filled waterways flow past sardine-packed prisons. Capitalism and the market do not provide for all human needs.
Bob Klein
bo9@wwonline-ny.com
The Netizen RIP
When John Heilemann describes himself as "incapable of speech, let alone complex thought" in "Old Politics RIP" (Wired 4.11, page 53), he and the headline writers and editors (if there are any) at Wired also prove themselves incapable of ordinal arithmetic.
The subhead declaims: "This isn't just the last election of the 20th century." This isn't the last election of the 20th century - unless the election in 2000 is canceled due to lack of interest.
The 21st century will begin at exactly 12:00:01 a.m. on January 1, 2001.
Robert Seulowitz
rss2@mail.idt.net
Can it really be a year since I got roped into reading this wretched monthly Netizen column? Here I am reading yet another installment of supposedly cutting-edge political journalism that is more concerned with advertising how cool the journalist is and pretending to be above it all than with truly presenting an unbiased, technologically advanced peek into the political campaigns.
The idea sounded plausible to me at first: be enlightened by the first digital boy on the bus. I was told this was going to be the first wired election. The candidates all seemed to have homepages. Every serious news outlet launched a political Web site.
It seemed obvious that in the annals of journalism history, 1996 would be the year of "This is not political coverage as usual."
As if.
At least any illusions I had were shattered early. What I'm wondering, though, is if any sizable portion of Wired's readership actually agrees with the pretentious pronouncements and prophecies of John Heilemann, or is gullible enough to believe that his deliberations exemplify progressive thought and unbiased reporting.
I should forgive Heilemann, though, because he seems to be surrounded by Wired editors who share the hallucinatory belief that the Internet/the Web/cyberspace represents some huge and meaningful gateway to the inevitably techno-cool future.
The Internet is no more imbued with significance than residential climate control. In no time, it will be treated as just another modern convenience. And the digerati's belief that it is so hip and cool will be akin to an air-conditioning repairman's delusion that he's cornered the market on fresh air.
Keith Martin
mixedbag@mindspring.com
Cyberfantasies
I just read John Perry Barlow and Ann Beeson's contributions to "Cyber Rights in Fantasyland" (Wired 4.11, page 98). While I enjoyed the unintended self-parody, enough is enough.
Barlow wants us as a Net society to "live inside an environment of working anarchy." At least he understands that anarchy requires a great deal more of its citizens than an ordered society. For example, Russia has vast natural resources, a well-educated populace, technological sophistication, a huge market hungry for goods and services, and - since the collapse of its communist dictatorship - near anarchy. The result? Interior minister dismissed for plotting a coup, widespread social unrest, near economic collapse, and a dearth of significant investment from the West. The reason? The demands of anarchy are simply too much for humans to bear, even for Russians who are historically accustomed to bearing heavy loads.
Every healthy society must find a way for its members to cooperate. Mechanisms must exist for organizing and enforcing the relationships between individuals. In a democracy, this mechanism consists, on the smallest scale, of relationships formed through social institutions, primarily the family and the workplace. On a larger scale, these institutions take the form of corporations, school boards, civic organizations, and local and national governments. Our net consists of the thousands of social bonds which join us together as neighborhoods, workplaces, nations, and ultimately a global community.
Barlow would cast that all aside and replace it with anarchy, regulated only by the automated servers, routers, repeaters, hubs, ports, and strands of glass fiber that make up this new "net." It seems he has lost himself in a cold world, where data may travel at the speed of light but relationships - like an ISDN line - end when the power goes down.
Ann Beeson's delusions are less grand, but just as foolish. She would have the federal government preempt any state law regulating conduct on the Internet on the grounds that there are just too many states enacting too many dumb laws and it is just too damn hard for her to go around challenging all of the unconstitutional ones. At the same time, she would like the federal government to make sure that all the other countries in the world conform their laws regarding speech to our First Amendment.
Most important, the states are critical to stimulating the commercial development of the Net. Outside the securities and bankruptcy arenas, almost all commercial relationships in this country are governed by state law. The states have long dealt with problems of multiplicity by codifying standards into uniform laws such as the Uniform Commercial Code. Stripping this long-established and constantly evolving set of interlocking mechanisms for fostering commerce from the Net would be akin to ripping a newborn child from its mother's arms and installing it in a Skinner box with an automated nipple.
It will take a while to work out the various problems of Net regulation. There will be bumps along the road as institutions evolve and change. That is far preferable to clear-cutting the regulatory landscape and leaving the federal government as the sole tender of the new forest.
Craig Jordan
cjordan@applink.net
In Its Image
While the story about Corbis ("In His Image," Wired 4.11, page 172) was accurate and informative overall, there was one incorrect statement about the prices Microsoft pays for images licensed through Corbis. Microsoft pays market rates, the same rates as any other Corbis customer.
Doug Rowan
President and CEO, Corbis
dougr@corbis.com
Richard Rapaport should know that da Vinci did not write his notebooks in a "secret code" - being left-handed, it was easier for him to write backward and pull his pen across the paper (as righties do) than to push the ink onto the page, smearing his writing and obscuring the thoughts and words.
An advantage to being left-handed is that I can read and write backward almost as fast as forward. This skill is very handy in business situations where presentations are made across conference tables and the ability to read your opponent's notes upside down and backward can give you a decided edge.
Dan Cohen
cohendr@aol.com
Who Can You Trust?
I have watched with amusement the threaded discussions (true rants and raves) of Clipper, key escrow, the threat of government access, and the demonizing of Dorothy Denning for abandoning her roots and entertaining the idea that Clipper is good. Most of those who rant and rave assume that we cannot trust our government, that it has some ulterior motive to monitor our communications, and that we netizens must find a better way.
Let's just assume (for the sake of discussion) that we cannot trust our government. What then? Whom do we trust? I saw an interesting page in Wired 4.11 (page 43 - an advertisement, I presumed) offering "Five Percent Wiretap-Free (Guaranteed!)." Indeed. Guaranteed?!? By whom? Who is "cypherpunk John Gilmore"? Why on earth would I trust him? How can I be assured that he has not engineered a trapdoor or Trojan horse and is sitting there monitoring all of our communications?
What if, on the other hand, we assume that there really is a threat from foreigners and criminals. Would we not want and demand that the government offer us a crypto system standard we could trust? Would we not also want them to ensure that criminals cannot use that standard to shield their illegal activities?
This issue transcends current political parties and personalities. At issue is the security of all Americans' personal and commercial communications. And I am willing to place more than my usual trust in the government because I don't see a viable alternative.
Bill Taylor
72056.3130@compuserve.com
Tropical Fever
One week into my 10-day vacation in the Florida Keys, I was beginning to get computer-withdrawal symptoms. By the day of my departure, the anguish was unbearable. The minute I got to the airport, I went into a magazine shop. I looked up and down the magazine racks for some kind of computer magazine. PC World ... no; PC Magazine ... no; ... me; Wired ... hmm.I read the magazine from cover to cover, word by word, and, at last, the trembling finally stopped.
Depak Deo
depak19@starnetinc.com
Undo
Notes from the Deadzone: In "Reclaim the Deadzone" (Wired 4.12, page 206), the sentence "There are three steps advertisers can take ... " should read "There are three steps Web publishers can take...."
n Birdbrained: Our review of the Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail CD-ROM ("Holy Python," Wired 4.11, page 226) mentioned an eagle - the bird was actually a sparrow. n Misstated: The Medford Historical Society is located in Massachusetts, not Oregon ("In His Image," Wired 4.11, page 172). n Twisted Roots: "The Cult at the End of the World" (Wired 4.07, page 134) described Nikola Tesla as Croatian-American. To clarify, Tesla was born in Croatia to Serbian parents.
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