Technologists Unite/Ignore

Hi Larry,

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to speak with you at the LCS talk. 
Interestingly, when I was in Asia at the beginning of the month, I thought I 
heard you'd be in the area, and when I was in Berlin last week, I heard the 
same, so perhaps were following the same paths but out of synch.

I've been meaning to comment on the substance of your presentation but I've 
prolonged it sufficiently that I've probably lost the thread. In fact, a 
colleague noted it sounded like the same talk you gave at WWW9, so it's 
really been a year some ideas have been bouncing around. So I'll give it a 
quickie attempt.

One of the things I've been meaning to write is why I'm not doing much 
policy anymore -- "comparative media analysis" is the new frontier! <smile/> 
Like any geek, I most enjoy analysis and learning, and policy/law was novel 
and rich with good interdisciplinary nutrients. However, there's a number of 
characteristics related to policy that are particularly frustrating:

Each of these are a qualifier of  an issue/argument:
o Rat holes: not likely to resolve so that one feels a sense of reward or 
closure.
o Religious: where discourse fails to acknowledge the differing first 
principles/assumptions upon which the argument forever dances.
o Political:  stated intentions of an argument are not true.

These can characterize discussion in the technical domain as well. In fact, 
I only realized I wanted to define these things after bandying these terms 
around in that domain for so long that one day I asked myself, "what exactly 
do we mean?" However, they are endemic to the policy/legal domain. Those in 
"DC" are motivated by power and money: clearly political. Additionally, 
positions differ because of differing assumptions regardless of all the 
verbiage. And no matter how successful you are in a court decision or law, 
it can always be reversed: you have to be ever vigilant and become corrupt 
or bitter in the process. Compare this to the technical domain where if you 
write a spec or implement it, it's done and always will be done. Other 
things can come, but they don't really negate what you've done. The 
formal/explicit methods of technologists alleviate problems arising from 
obfuscated assumptions and intent.

In your talk you ask technologists to be more active in the policy domain. 
And I can understand why many choose not. They can choose a domain of deceit 
and incompletion or live in a world with a sense of community, integrity, 
and satisfaction.

You also mention that early architecture promoted freedom, but I sometimes 
wonder to what degree this was a fortuitous accident: grey beards might take 
too much credit. Freedom easily derived from end-to-end, decentralized, and 
simple architectures, but had freedom required *hard* work to happen, then 
we wouldn't have had it. In fact, when we look at the possibility of widely 
deployed crypto (complex), the point is proven. Principles of simple design 
and freedom conveniently occupied the same space.

But the world is what we make it and monied interests are making much of the 
on-line world now and be it simple or complex, they fashion it to suit their 
own interests, and as I state in my anarchist paper, pithy maxims can not 
stand in the face of architecture and rule. I think we agree on this. But 
whether technologists should be repeating those maxims (and I actually think 
we have) to the policy makers, it's somewhat moot. I don't mean to say 
culture is unimportant, it's critical, but legal culture trumps in the legal 
domain -- and while I hope we preserve geek/freedom culture in the techie 
domain, I doubt it's efficacy elsewhere. They were novel when the Net was 
new, but now they can be brushed aside. Think of these maxims as memes and 
consider that power and money can coerce the memes of "thou shall not kill" 
into "kill them all, and let God sort them out" or "freedom and justice for 
all" into Kissinger's "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a 
country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." 
On-line, Rotenberg et al were right to point out privacy is only a 
"preference" but IPR is a "right." DCMA focused on prohibiting technology 
that might be used to copy, but consider the alternative of prohibiting 
technology that might prevent fair-use!

So, I'm still informally active in politics/policy because I still enjoy the 
visceral pleasure of interdisciplinarism, and I enjoy flipping the system 
the bird. And I'm pessimistic like you, most of my early 90 cypher punk 
expectations never panned out and open source and free software is one of 
the few good things to happen. However, I do question the efficacy of 
advocating technologists spending their time quoting pithy maxims against 
monied interests when the could be writing code -- because their corporate 
colleagues (or with their own jobbing hat on) are now out-coding them in 
their own domain. In the great tradition of civil disobedience we should 
each simply ignore, break, and flow around what those in DC do, and build 
what makes us happy. We should keep our culture strong, and code like the 
wind. And a few with strong stomachs and great patience might engage the 
lawyers, and they're invaluable and brave souls for it, but I don't see that 
as the solution.

--
Regards,          http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle     E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
MIT LCS Research Engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium.

* This email is from an independent academic account and is
not necessarily representative of my affiliations.

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2001 21:30:17 UTC