Between campaign finance reform slapstick on C-SPAN and antitrust noncompliance outroar on CNN, the current scandal climate can be read as either late-summer slapstick for cynics or an early winter of our discontent, depending on your moral barometer. For those of us exasperated enough to appreciate people in high places getting the riot act read to them for what may be the wrong reasons, the dual imbroglios offer convergent satisfactions.
It's easy to reflexively deplore monopolistic business practices and illegal fundraising, but both are easier alleged than proven. Just as screenings of tea-party Zapruderology make for little more than amusing Senate pyrotechnics, the accusations now threatening to become US$1 mil/daily billables for Microsoft seem destined to become little more than bad pennies, persistent in their returns but ultimately worthless. In the face of improbable victory, it makes sense to aim for the fattest feral cats in the junkyard. At the very least, it'll be a howler.
Let's face it: Microsoft has never been more right in claiming that IE is integral to its OS. True, it might have passed for a separate application in ye olden days of 3.0, but forget about Win 98; IE 4 is already one great, big blendo. Worse yet, it's immediately clear that seamless Net integration is appropriate, intelligent, and exactly what you'd desire and demand from an OS circa 1997. But it's not what you'd expect.
Weakly conceived products and optimism-engineered functionality are the norm in Internet software development these days. A company as monolithic as Microsoft actually delivering the goods early but not poorly sets off alarms like a five-alarm fire. It's Microsoft's curse: Since the company is already putatively overinfluential, any further expansion it gets right is wrong. If it were Sun rather than Microsoft pushing a fully networked OS, it would be a different story, right?
But as the saying goes, stick your head above the crowd, and someone'll throw a rock at it. Like our current administration, Microsoft is not so much unique in its transgressions as it is uniquely successful at perpetrating them. The Bill in Washington, DC, is also catching fire, though not for breaking new ground, nor necessarily breaking laws, but instead for breaking records in a way that the has-beens and also-rans couldn't quite claim. By pushing the envelope, they manage to reintroduce all the serious questions that should have been asked all along, but simply failed to command the scrutiny. What's the point of an inquiry into the abuses of power, after all, without the power?
Add two more factors, stir, and you, too, can learn to enjoy our current binary spectacle with nary an ethical pause. One: The opponents of the targets in question are loud, vocal, and prone to overheated tenacity. Trapped in their own paroxysms of indignation, the critics are bound to put up a good fight, leaving you ample opportunity to lawn-chair the debate at your leisure. Two: Neither big, bad Bill would have found himself on the mat had "punching bag" not already been in both their job descriptions. Chances are they can take it, but chances are better we have to give it, if only to discover just what "it" is.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
