Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

This is a very elegantly written posting.

Most people are not aware of the depths of the argument that between the fine craft establishment and the dominate fine art elite.  I used to think about that debate more; but I’m pleased to note something about it.

Fine art is at it’s core about scarcity; fine craft is much less so; and what has come to be called crafting hardly at all.  The fine craft movement, which weaves it’s way back through all of history and all nations, in it’s modern manifestation, I’m surprised to note, a lot like open source.

I hate to play that card.  The term open source has almost fallen dead for me.  So many people play that card in an attempt to grab a bit of legitimacy for what every scheme they are executing that involves sucking talent out of the vast pool of people on the other side of the internet; and don’t get me started on the neologism ‘democratizing.’

What is going on in the modern crafting movement, as manifested in the web, is the thing I think is coolest about the Internet.  First off it has a pool of people of common interest finding each other, like a giant pot luck dinner or a stone soup.  They are creating energy and knowledge that wasn’t there before; in an commons.  Secondly the energy of this movement comes from the periphery; the respect of the participants faces toward the periphery.

When this works you get the opposite of scarcity based activities.  In fine arts the entire community is polarized by the pervasive question of who’s at the top, who can command the premium prices, who’s hot, who’s not.  In a periphery facing community the tension, the anxiety if you wish, is where on the vast periphery the next insight will emerge, the next cool trick of the trade, the next breath taking bit of design.

One of the seeming puzzles about identity is how tags placed upon people don’t work as one might hope. For example if I tag somebody as “short,” the act can be many things: accurate, insulting, invasive, diagnostic, etc. You can’t treat the act of tagging independent from the context. You need to know a lot about the actor who generated the tag and your likely to need to know the conversational context the tagging took place in.

This problem is particularly subtle when the tag assigns a person to a group, i.e. when it ascribes group membership. It’s more fraught in that scenario because the boundaries of groups are always disputed territory. In some situations the boundaries are only marginally disputed, such as in the case of short people; but even then there are people who care deeply about the boundary and what it’s functional purposes are.

The problem becomes more acute when there is polarization being engineered on the boundary. When two groups are in dispute, when the rights of the group members are in play, when states are at war, etc. These cases are not rare, both because you can get two groups into opposition at any scale (marketing v.s. sales, offense v.s. defensive squad, freshman v.s. sophmores, etc. etc.) but also because there are numerous benefits that agents in these games can harvest from playing with these boundaries (hightened common cause, humor, separation of concerns, etc.).

So I’m amazed that Google has decided that one, just one, such case deserves a bit of special handling. This is the fundamental problem of a system like Google’s. All words are tags, all search terms have contextual meanings. I like that they have tried to do something. I hope they find a way to make it scale.

I recall reading a paper, probably a tech report, from the Rand corporation in the mid 1970s about a little AI program they had written which would watch a user interact with a time sharing system and then attempt to extract a script to automate that interaction.  Later in that decade I used Interlisp who Read-Eval-Print command loop, or repl, included a feature known as DWIM, or do what I mean.  DWIM was yet another primitive AI, it would look over your shoulder as you worked and try to help.  It was amusing, though in the end there was a consensus reached that it was more party trick than useful.

A while later, on unix, a serious problem emerged.  A delightful game, Rogue, appeared which we all played far too much.  When Rogue would fire up it would randomly setup a game for you to play, and some of these were better than others.  This gave rise to a serious need; i.e. automation to find good games.  So people wrote programs to do that.

When Mac came out countless hours were wasted complaining about how it lacked a command line.  Interestingly one of the things it included, right from the start, was a record/playback mechanism.  Developers used this automate testing.  (I should note here that the Mac has 128K bytes of ram.)

All these systems are a work around for a general problem.  Given a interface designed to target human users what can we do to bring computers into that interface.  We have this problem writ large these days, since most of the content on the web is targeted at humans it is continually frustrating how hard it is to get the websites to interact with the computers.

It’s a bit of a who do you love question.  Unsurprisingly most website designers love the human users.  They labor to serve them well.  That crowds out efforts to serve the computers well; which has a perverse side effect of making it hard for the computers to help the humans.  This in turn, of course, plays into issues like RSS, XML, RDF, Rest, etc.
Interfaces designed for humans are, unsurprisingly, different from those designed for computers.  A good list of what separates these two would be a extremely useful!  For example human interface is likely to be more visual, more asynchronist, more multi-threaded, more decorative.  That list would be useful because we build lots of tools to bridge the difference.  Web spiders are one example.  Screen scrapers are another.  Automated testing tools are a third.
All this was triggered by my delight at discovering that my Mac, which has the unix tool set installed, has bundled in a program called ‘expect’.  Expect is a tool for just this kind of bridging.  It is the direct decedent of the tool written to get you a good game of Rogue; in fact it’s examples include a script to do just that.  Expect is designed for writing scripts to manipulate command line interfaces which were designed for humans.  The examples include all kinds of slightly perverse things.  Editing a config files on N machines simultaneously, for example.  It’s a hoot.

It seems to me that there are powerful reasons why the dynamic that leads to tools like these spans so many decades.  For lots of reasons implementers love humans more than computers.  In some cases implementors hate the computers, while wanting to reach the humans.  Because of this the human facing APIs will always be richer than the computer facing ones; and we will forever be writing tools to bridge the gap.

Cool, the Finns have progressive traffic fines; i.e. the fine is proportional to your income. I’d love to see more examples of that!

The Robinhood question has been the fundamental dialectic in politics. The power of government can be used to make the lives of small economic actors better, or it can be used to make life easier for large economic actors. There are of course plenty of other disputes going on at the same time, i.e. the power can take sides between subgroups of the large players or subpopulations of the small ones. Those disputes provide a bit of color to what is otherwise pretty black and white.

At the heart of the progressive movement was a choice to weigh in on the side of small economic actors. This was a direct fall out of the shocking discovery of just how much wealth and power the large actors had accumulated during the industrial revolution. Marx, in particular, was so shocked by the distribution of wealth that he presumed the small actors would rise up and institute forms of government to look out for their interests. That coordination problem is a lot harder than he thought.

The progressive project has lead to a vast array of programs that aid the small actors with funds taken from the large actors. We have a broad program of cutting the little guys some slack which unsurprisingly large actors sometimes abuse. What the Finns are doing is an example of how you can refine the system to work around that.

In the US in the late 1950 through about 1975 we had a strong consensus that the progressive movement had won. The political debate became much more colorful, less black and white. That’s over. In the last few decades the economic right has broken away from that consensus. They can’t win elections without votes so they formed an alliance with a TV watching evangelical segment of the population. These alliances are all fake, since the right’s actual allegiance is to large economic actors. The so-called rightwing cabal hides behind propaganda necessary to keep their voting electorate polarized. This is populism of the worst kind.

Taking for granted that there is a consensus around the progressive movement is now dangerous. One of the two parties no longer accepts that consensus. A friend pointed out how Lawrence Lessing has decided that his time would spent to the issue of corruption in politics rather than IP rights and their relationship to the commons. I don’t disagree in that switch of emphisis, but I think he somewhat misunderstands what the problem is; what he has been working on is a natural subplot of the progressive movement. I.e. the presumption that giving the vast population of smaller economic actors access to ideas is a good thing. What he has discovered is that there ain’t any consensus about the advantages of that sharing in our political house at this point. Large economic actors want their property rights.

This entire rant was triggered by this posting by Chandler Howell musing about how these issues arise around the management of security and risk; with his particular examples being the Finnish parking tickets and an emerging trend that allows prisoners to purchase better accommodations. Talk about a throw back to pre-progressive times! He starts out by mentioning a principle, i.e. equality before the law. My reaction to that was, no. No, governments work by deciding how to balance the inequality that exists. That’s what politics is about. The default state is extremely unequal and you can assemble governments that accelerate or temper that.

During the Civil War, before the progressive era, it was common for well-off young men who were drafted to hire somebody else to fill their place in the Army.  It’s delightful that the Finnish system creates an incentive for the wealthy to hire somebody else to drive for them.

Mr. Rytsola, who was issued the $71,400 speeding ticket in October and another $44,100 ticket in August for zigzagging in downtown Helsinki, says he supports income-based penalties, but with a cap on traffic fines. Under the present system, he says, “if you earn enough you shouldn’t even touch a car,” noting that accidentally driving too fast could cost the richest Finns hundreds of thousands of dollars.

From one of the blogs I’m currently sampling.