Some Big Thinking in admirable rough draft form is goin’ on over at Norlin’s place. He’s working through an argument that’s important if right.

Point #6 is crucial: The Internet is economically destructive because it’s hard to make money when so much stuff is entering the commons.

Eric gets there via a pivot point (#3) that he notes he needs to clarify: the lack of scarcity on the Net drives things towards the public domain. That seems intuitively right. But the question is: what on the Net is in such abundance that it drives goods thusly? It’s not the abundance of goods but the abundance of access to goods: you don’t need a lot of capital to create and/or distribute digital stuff. (BTW, in such an environment, what is the remaining virtue of capitalism?)

Then Eric raises a fascinating idea (#7): “Digital identity is a (somewhat subconscious attempt) to solve the lack of scarcity.” How? “[Y]ou’re able to rebuild some of the channels and points of distribution.” That is, if you can be put in jail for getting a copy of Eminem’s latest via Kazaa, then the recording industry can re-establish its chokehold. (My loaded language isn’t Eric’s.)

Why does Eric see “the lack of scarcity” as a problem to be “solved” (#7)? Because it drives down prices and thus drives businesses into the dirt. But there are at least two types of business here. There are those whose value has been nullified by the ease with which digits can be manufactured and distributed; there’s no good economic reason to prop them up (sez I). Then, there are companies that provide real value in a digital world that may not be able to make enough money to survive if their products become free. In the first category is the recording industry. In the second are recording artists and newspapers. I don’t know how the second category will survive, but I’d rather let the market innovate than impose artificial scarcity. We’re still at the beginning of this journey. I hope and believe that the solution will not be to re-centralize control and introduce artificial chokepoints. That’s not what drives an economy of abundance.

So, I don’t yet agree with Eric when he says “the internet is *truly* economically destructive…” (#6). Destructive of what? Businesses that no longer provide value, sure. But even if bsinesses that do provide value make less money (assuming they make enough to survive, which I admit is still at issue) then we also have to factor in the enrichment those creative goods provide to you, me and everyone else in the market. Overall, the Internet could turn out to be tremendously economically constructive.

(Eric, thank you for having the guts to post your ideas in rough form so that we can all chew on them.)

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John Husband in an email points to an article in the NY Times yesterday:

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

A group of prominent scientists is challenging the leading scientific journals with the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals this week….

The way the Web has broken the lock between perfection and eternality is quite remarkable. We can go public with work in progress and not have to wait for the Wite-out to dry on our masterpiece before we acknowledge its existence.

And all of this is made possible through the magic of metadata: so long as we know that it’s a draft, we’re willing to make allowances and read it for what it is. (And the great virtue of blogs is that they’re understood to be perpetual rough drafts.)

So, let’s get syllogistical. Metadata allows for imperfection. Imperfection hastens time. Haste leaves little time to erect defenses. Therefore, metadata lets us be who we are. QED.

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A white paper on Open Spectrum I wrote with a lot of help from Jock Gill, David Reed and Dewayne Hendricks, is now posted on the Web. Here’s how it begins:

We are not in the age of Information. We are not in the age of the Internet.

We are in the Age of Connection.

Being connected is at the heart of our democracy and our economy. The more and better those connections, the stronger are our government, businesses, science, culture, education…

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized control points that have been the gatekeepers of our economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve office, you had to be one of the few with access to corporate coffers and national media.

But we are on the verge of being able to connect to anyone and everyone, whenever and however we want. No gatekeepers. Ubiquitous connection. Connectedness that’s always there and always on.

This isn’t about getting more TV channels. Change the way we’re connected and you’ve changed everything, from the economy to governance. This is how fundamental transformation occurs.

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Today is a travel day, which means I’m depressed. I’m looking forward to being at Kevin Werbach’s Supernova Conference, from which I’ll be blogging, but as usual I’m unhappy about the prospect of leaving home. Couldn’t they have had the consideration to hold the conference in my house?

Since I’ll get to the hotel tonight around 4:30am east coast time (1:30 AM local time), expect me to be a bit crabby tomorrow. In fact, I’m feeling preemptively crabby right now.

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A comment by Peter Kaminski (from a mailing list I’m on) about the announcement of Cometa, supposedly a joint venture by Intel, IBM and AT&T that will provide Wifi service in 50 cities:

To me it looks even simpler than that, a couple guys trying to make a small deal look big. Why else would they call Intel Capital “Intel”, and IBM Global Services “IBM”? Why are there no quotes from ATT, Intel and IBM in the release? Why don’t they post the size of the deal, instead of the scope of their goals? Why is their entire physical contact info “866-266-3823”? Why is Steve Harris, VP Corporate Affairs, listed as the sole press contact on the copy of the release on att.com? Etc.

Peter is wise in the way of press releases.

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Jock Gill points us to GNU Radio, and, in particular, to Eric Blossom’s work. (He’s been slashdotted here.) GNU Radio is a software-defined radio. Unlike regular radios that are hard-wired about what they do with the information they receive, software-defined radio can do anything it’s programmed to do… including simultaneously receiving two broadcast FM stations from a single input. (Say wha’?)

In fact, the GNU Radio — which may be your computer with a little hardware added — doesn’t have to assume the inputs are sounds at all. Although I’m only following this topic by the skin of my teeth, it seems to me that this is where the real promise lies.

(As with all GNU Brand^TM; products, GNU Radio is a public and free software project.)

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AKMA recounts his decision not to engage Derrida in conversation. It’s towards the end of his amusing-frustrated recounting of how hard it is to do simple computer things sometimes.

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Stephen Talbot writes an astonishing piece about an interview he conducted with Henry Kissinger. (It’s in Salon’s for-subscribers section. Pay ’em the money already!)

Here’s the jaw-dropping ending:

As we packed up our gear, I asked Kissinger one last question. Something I really wanted to know. “What if the United States had allowed Vietnam to go communist after World War II?”

“Wouldn’t have mattered very much,” Kissinger muttered. Lights off. No camera recording what he was saying. “If the Vietnam domino had fallen then, no great loss.”

Talbot writes vividly about this disgraceful, banal man.

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According to an article at the BBC site (pointed out by Greg “L-Man” Cavanagh), if you want to hack the online game, Everquest, all you have to do is get a Linux box, network it to your PC, and set up some special packet sniffing software called ShowEQ that decrypts the hidden information about where the monsters and other characters are. It’s just that simple! (I myself prefer the single-player Quake technique of typing tilde to pull down the console and then entering the phrase, lemme think, oh yeah, “god” to make yourself invulnerable.)

According to the article:

The fact that ShowEQ sits on a separate computer has made it impossible to detect. Sony has tried to stop it in other ways by improving the encryption used to make the packets of data unreadable.

However, it took only a week for the ShowEQ programmers to get round this improved encryption.

The programmers found that the new encryption was easier to break than the old one and meant that ShowEQ worked faster than before.

This is very cool. Unless, of course, you’re one of the players who doesn’t have a spare Linux box sitting around on her network.

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According to Masha Geller‘s daily send:

According to eMarketer projections, 2003 spending will rise slightly to $6.70 billion, up from $6.38 billion this year. The expected bounce-back is due to a combination of factors, researchers say, including traditional marketers devoting larger slices of their ad budgets to online advertising as well as a general easing of the economic recession. By 2005, online ad expenditures will hit $8.10 billion…

I guess I should be happy about this.

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