Thursday, May 6, 2004

The great uncovered

Ruby points to a FAIR report saying the big TV networks did their best to ignore the biggest D.C. demonstration in years.

Meanwhile, we are also reminded that the President (seriously) has a heart (pointer from Andrew Sullivan) and that truth-telling requires distrust and verification (thanks there to Micah Sifry).

Flogrolling

Beyond Horse Races and Boxing Matches is my latest at Linux Journal; while Parallels between IT and Construction and Where does consulting fit? are likewise at IT Garage.

Bonus link: Willy's Sanskrit as an Object Oriented Language, at A42. By the way, Willy recently moved to Panama. Here's the latest from his Hitchhiker's Diary.

Human waste

The phrase "social capital" has done so much more harm than good. Just heard that from Clay Shirky on the phone. I totally agree. In fact, I feel the same way about anything we call "capital" that basically isn't: "intellectual capital" ... "human capital" ... yada yada.

There's a human cost to conceiving human qualities in terms of business quantities. We not only demean innately human values, but we also misplace them in a context that subtracts their power to enlarge themselves, to grow and change, and to act in all kinds of ways — very few of which resemble the other goods we call "capital."

My point here is similar to the one I made the other day on Jeff Jarvis' blog about speech, which is a highly human activity. The First Amendment protects our right to speak freely, yet when we conceive speech as "content" or "material" or a "product" that we "load" into a "channel" or a "network" for "distribution" or "transmission" through a "medium" to "receivers" and "consumers" ... it isn't speech any more. It's just another product transported from producers to consumers and subject to all kinds of laws that have nothing to do with speech. In effect, we waste our own humanity. After all, nothing is more human than our power of speech, no?

When we productize (and regulate) the crap out of our humanity, crap is all we have left to sell.

Bonus link: The Clue Rush, a section of this blog from February 26, 2001.

Bonus laugh: this letter to the FCC.

But it won't happen

This is interesting.

A triumph of French genius over French engineering

That's what my old friend Julius Ruff (a professor of history at Marquette) called Citroën automobiles. This was back in the sixties, when we were both in college. In those days your iconic Citroëns were the 2-cylinder 2cv and the aerodynamic DS. The 2cv had windows with hinges, bug-eye headlights, less curb weight than a large motorcycle and accelleration that Car & Driver called "eventual." The DS had headlights that turned with the steering wheel, a brake that was a button on the floor and a failure-prone hydraulic system that controlled most of the car's fluid systems. Both were distinctive to extremes matched by no other cars, ever.

For some reason I woke up at 3-something this morning, thinking about that quote. I found it nowhere on the Web, so I had to write it down.

[Later...] Merci beaucoup for the blogback from mediaTIC blog. I should add that the 2cv and the DS were two of the most long-lived automobiles of all time. The 2cv lasted 50 years and the DS lasted for 20.

Of course, individual Citroëns, especially the highly complex and hard-to-fix DS, were another case. I know one guy who owned several just so he could keep one of them on the road.