This was the first article written under the title of The View From The Third Edge. A sage once said, "Understanding is a three-edged sword. The three edges are your side, my side, and the truth in between." Sides are everywhere today. It is all about the Republicans vs. the Democrats, Britney vs. Christina, the Atkins diet vs. the Zone, CNN vs. FoxNews, Hindus vs. Muslims vs. Christians vs. Jews vs. blacks vs. the KKK vs. everybody else. All of this while the truth resides completely outside the camps, and what needs to be done is neglected. Aye, I recognize that humans are more prone to prejudice than to reason and that I will never be a fully independent observer of my world. Yet, it is the sheer inability to see a matter from all sides that governs the chaos of our planet. I've got no room or time for that - I evoke reason over faith and force, and offer different perspectives. Hence, the view from the third edge.
===
A response I wrote in early 2003 to the Hindu-American clamor over American Eagle Outfitters' sale of flip-flop sandals with an outline of the elephant-headed god, Ganesha, printed on the soles. As J-Lo gear, Ten Commandments granite blocks, DeBeers diamond engagement rings, threats of nuclear war, and general identity crises abound, I find these words more apt than ever:
Ganesha's silhouette on a flip-flop. This got me thinking about the growing importance of simulacra within almost all modern cultures. Icons, idols, flags, and other emblems of identity reign supreme, while the concept or value of what they stand for falls noiselessly to the wayside. While we are horrified that American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (AEO) sells flip-flops with the image of Ganesha imprinted directly on the soles, we must stop to remember that this is a country where people wear American-flag thong bikinis and shout their patriotism from lapel pins. And that India, too, is a country where a mad appropriation of the form has superceded understanding and reverence for the meaning behind the representation. Is that not trampling on our deity? Where is the outrage for that great loss?
I, too, and repulsed by the underfoot Ganesha. Never do I hinder myself from asking people not to step on books or other media. However, the reason for my request is the book is a source of knowledge, which I respect deeply, and not because it is the goddess Saraswati who must not be treaded on. Saraswati is merely a manifestation of the value that is to be held sacred. Similarly, while we bomb AEO with protest emails, let us remember that what we ought to be supporting is not the self-righteousness and the power of the symbol that come with modern Hindu identity, but the fact that there is an important and beautiful meaning behind the symbol - something which popular consumer culture has not picked up on in its mass feeding frenzy. And sadly, a value which is also fading in modern Hindu reality. It's not what we are doing that I question, but the why.
Americans protest the burning of the American flag, while it is worn as underwear and hood ornaments, and global atrocities are committed in its name. (Reminds me of a line in a recent Non Sequitur by Wiley: "It's quite simple, really. You just wrap yourself in a flag and say everything with bombastic piety. If people dare to criticize you, their patriotism will be questioned, thus nullifying their scrutiny!") Akin to that hypocrisy, our protest of the underfoot Ganesha is sanctimonious drumbeating unless we value the gods of the Hindu pantheon for their meaning and their meaning alone, and not the icons and rituals of identity that they provide.
Why single out AEO? Here in New Orleans, there are at least three Govindas and Ramaswamis in the French Quarter who wear kumkum on their foreheads and will happily sell you Lakshmi-print sarongs, Siva lunchboxes, liquor, prophylactics, drug paraphernalia, and t-shirts with profanity on them - to make money. Do we see picket signs outside their shops? Diamonds adorn the fingers of women seeking a status symbol, while the arms of the frightened peasants that tilled these baubles out of the ground are lopped off and lie to rot in the hot Angolan sun. These hands will never see jewelry, they will never enjoy status. Does Hindu dharma not apply to these people?
Self-righteousness and swift offense-taking against obvious targets are the first steps to conservatism. While I laud the effort of AHAD in launching a campaign against AEO, I propose that it is done with calm minds and meditated actions, rather than with irrational and moralistic piety. The Hindu community does not require an apology; that is mere show and accomplishes nothing of lasting value. What AEO can give the Hindu community is an effort to understand and respect world culture enough not to paste meaningful icons onto objects of popular fashion.
And as long as you are taking the trouble and if you are interested, be good Hindus and Americans by dropping your congressperson a note that you do not appreciate your flag being taken in vain either. Happy protesting.
Copyright © 2003 Maitri V-R All Rights Reserved for a rainy day
An interesting article authored by one of my computational visualization profs, a frequent contributor to the VisFiles Column in the SIGGRAPH newsletter. A really nice guy and smart, too. Funny that I found this article at VisAD's website after talking with a colleague about online copyright and working for Shell.
Maitri
---
Reprinted from http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/roads.html
Hibbard, W. Should Standard Oil Own the Roads? Computer Graphics 37(1), 5-6. 2003.
Should Standard Oil Own the Roads?
Bill Hibbard
University of Wisconsin - Madison
For the past few years my favorite activity at the Siggraph conferences has been the public policy courses and BOFs organized by Bob Ellis. Despite the bursting of the Internet bubble, information technology is the dominant force shaping the future. Because so much of the information flowing over the Internet is visual, Siggraph members have an important role to play in the ways that evolving technology will affect human society. This column is my take on current public policy issues, ending with a short discussion of what will be the most important public policy issue of the future.
Practical Freedom of Speech
In liberal democracies you can say pretty much anything you like. In particular, you can criticize government policy and political leaders. The problem has been that few people could hear what you said unless you had access to mass media like newspapers, radio and TV. Now, the cost efficiency of computers and the Internet is changing that by enabling almost anybody to broadcast their ideas to masses of people. Information technology has created a new practical freedom of speech.
As I described in a Siggraph 2000 panel on free software organized by Bill Lorensen, the practical freedom of speech offered by the Internet was essential for saving my career at one stage. The place where I work was founded by a fine human being named Verner Suomi. As he passed from the scene, we evolved into a mini repressive state. Making Vis5D, Cave5D and VisAD freely available over the Internet gave me direct relations with users and a way to bypass my would-be repressors. And I think Vis5D gave me the distinction of producing the first freeware visualization system.
On a larger scale, information technology has helped people in actual repressive states, by giving them a way to coordinate their actions and by exposing their problems to the world. Ultimately, it is an impossible challenge for repressive leaders to promote the technology necessary for economic progress but still control information flow. In both democracies and non-democracies, the new practical freedom of speech is changing power and property relations, threatening those with power and creating opportunities for those without power.
Intellectual Property versus Freedom of Speech
Nearly universal access to mass publishing capabilities is threatening intellectual property rights and profits. In the past, individuals could make small numbers of copies of music, movies and books using analog technologies like tape recorders and photocopiers. Making copies was expensive, time consuming, and quality decreased with copy generations (i.e., copies of copies). Now, digital media can be copied cheaply, quickly and with no loss of quality. Thus Napster enabled a network of millions of people to make illegal copies of copyrighted music.
Music and movie companies have responded by getting the U.S. Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it illegal to circumvent technological copy protections. This includes making it illegal to publish algorithms for decoding copy protection encodings, even when those algorithms are pretty simple. As I write this I am wearing a t-shirt with the algorithm for decoding DVDs written on the back, and the money I paid for the shirt included $4 to a legal fund to overturn the DMCA. Outlawing publication of decoding algorithms is a new exception to first amendment free speech rights, solely to make it easier to enforce copyrights. This law enforcement convenience, where property but not lives or even health are at stake, should be nowhere near compelling enough for a new free speech exception.
The European Union has its own version of the DMCA, the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD). The DMCA and EUCD are disturbing because they exist in liberal democracies. Outside of these democracies, where there are no traditions of free speech, the situation is of course much worse. At one time China programmed its Internet services to prevent citizens from accessing the Google search engine, and Saudi Arabia recently outlawed cell phones with built-in cameras to stop men from using them to take pictures of women.
A well publicized effort to prosecute copyright violations will discourage almost everyone from doing it. Ordinary citizens won't risk conviction and possible jail terms simply to save a few dollars. For example, during the past decade the University of Wisconsin has been proactive in detecting and eliminating illegal copies of software on all of its thousands of computers, and the same thing is happening in all universities and corporations. For rational individuals and institutions alike, the risks of copyright violation outweigh the rewards. There are concerns about copyright violations in developing countries. But they desperately need World Trade Organization (WTO) membership, and that requires them to enforce intellectual property rights.
Illegal copies of intellectual property may reduce profits of copyright holders. But most people won't take the risk if they see a good enforcement effort, so profits should still be healthy. However, this is not enough to satisfy corporate copyright holders. You don't get to be the CEO of a major media company without being utterly ruthless in maximizing profits.
The Chip in Everyone's Head
A chip implanted in everyone's head is a standard plot device of the science fiction fascism genre. Any politician in a democracy advocating such chip implants would be voted out of office quickly. However, if social interaction is increasingly mediated by technology, it would be almost as effective and more politically acceptable to implant the government chips in everyone's information access devices (e.g., phones, TVs and computers) rather than directly in their heads. Hence the Trusted Computing Platform Architecture (TCPA).
Of course, the TCPA is not motivated by a desire to control what you say or hear. It is intended to prevent you from violating intellectual property rights. But because of the power and flexibility of information technology, the only way to ensure that you cannot make illegal copies is to control everything that you say and hear on-line. Ross Anderson provides a great analysis of TCPA at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html, including a link to Lucky Green's DEFCON talk at http://www.cypherpunks.to/.
The basic problem is that information technology is so empowering for individuals. Controlling how individuals can use it requires increasingly radical limitations of the technology. But these limitations on individuals give institutions much greater control. The TCPA will enable the owners of software to mark files produced by their software so that competing software cannot access them. For example, word processors, spread sheets and other office tools can prevent competing software from accessing the files they produce. This will enhance the power of monopolies to exclude competition. And while computers and the Internet make it increasingly cheap and easy for artists to bypass large music and movie companies to do their own production, the TCPA will enhance the power of those companies to effectively prevent artists from distributing their productions.
As outlined by Ross Anderson and Lucky Green, the DMCA and TCPA challenge the viability of the free software movement, by requiring TCPA certification fees every time software is modified. Public statements by the operating system monopoly make it clear that it is trying to destroy the free software movement, and the TCPA will be a powerful new tool for achieving that destruction. The approximately half million software developers registered on SourceForge are a powerful force that could challenge the monopoly.
Where is Teddy Roosevelt When You Really Need Him?
If the behavior of Standard Oil had not been restricted by antitrust prosecution at the beginning of the twentieth century, it could have extended its oil monopoly to a monopoly over all auto manufacturing by simply refusing to sell gas and oil to anyone driving a car they had not manufactured. Ultimately, they could have extended their control to the entire U.S. economy.
More recently, we have seen the operating system monopoly drive others out of the web browser business and become the browser monopoly. The U.S. Department of Justice in the new administration doesn't see anything wrong with this. In the future, the TCPA will greatly increase the power of the operating system monopoly to extend its monopoly to other markets. They will be able to extend their control to the Internet, and even to the entire economy. Except of course at some point the public will get fed up and elect a government that will enforce the antitrust laws. It also appears that countries and emerging industries are shunning the operating system monopoly out of fear of being controlled.
Monopolies do more harm than simply raising prices. As long as companies have real competition, the best technology decisions are the best business decisions. But once a monopoly is established, the best business decision is often to suppress the best technology decision. For example, just as the world needs formats for text, image and sound information that can be exchanged between all computers, it needs a format for exchanging programs. That's what Java is. But a format for exchanging programs threatens the operating system monopoly. So they are promoting their own system, technically very similar to Java but without the clause in the license requiring all implementations to maintain compatibility.
Infinity = 20 + 20 + 20 + . . .
In 1897 a bill was passed in the Indiana House, but not the Senate, to set pi to several implied rational values including 3.2 but not the often quoted 3. The current U.S. Congress has demonstrated a much greater mathematical sophistication, having grasped the meaning of Peano's Postulates. While the U.S. Constitution says that copyrights must have limited terms, the congress has learned that they can create an unlimited term simply by increasing the term by 20 years once every 20 years. This approach has the advantage of keeping the movie and music industries on the hook for campaign contributions for an unlimited term.
The latest extension, passed in 1998, is being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court, but the court is likely to uphold the extension. There is little doubt that the congress will continue to extend the copyright term to keep most music and movies of the twentieth century out of the public domain. But some time before the year 2398, when the term is due to be extended to 495 years, the court or the voters will finally stop it.
The Future, When Things Really Get Interesting
Long before the year 2398, information technology will confront society with its most important policy issue: the development of machine intelligence. First we must recognize that intelligent machines will exist. Neuroscience is discovering all sorts of detailed explanations of mental behaviors in terms of physical brain functions, leaving no doubt that eventually all mental behaviors will have physical explanations. They will just be very complex explanations, because of the large numbers of neurons (100 billion) and synapses (100 trillion) in the human brain. And then our advancing technology will build machines with minds, quickly advancing to machines with minds much more intelligent than human minds (in part because machine minds will contribute to their own development).
The Internet is upsetting power and property relations in human society, but this is nothing compared to the way machine intelligence will upset those relations. Despite our prejudices, brains are actually very democratically distributed among humans. The highest IQ in history is only about twice the average, while the largest trucks, buildings and computers are thousands of times larger than their averages. Machines will ultimately have much greater intelligence than humans. Upsetting the rough equality of intelligence among minds will reverse the long-term trend toward human social equality, unless the public becomes active in understanding the issues and determining policies to protect their interests. The debate will be over whose interests are served by intelligent machines. Given the dominant power of superior intelligence, this debate will determine whether the world continues its evolution toward increasing democracy or whether it reverts toward totalitarian rule by a few. The issues of machine intelligence are discussed in greater detail in my new book, Super-Intelligent Machines, at http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~billh/super.html.