Entries Tagged 'Rantery' ↓

If there’s any silver lining to the outrageous FISA bill that the Democrats rammed through congress today, it’s this: we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government doesn’t give a shit about our privacy. That doesn’t go for everyone in government, of course¹, but the don’t-give-a-shit contingent is almost always larger than the give-a-shits, and they almost always win.

The bad guys here are split into two basic camps: (1) the ones who consider the right to free, unmonitored communications a fairly trifling thing, easily sacrificed on the altar of political expediency; and (2) the ones who consider that right an existential threat that must be suppressed at all costs.

We saw both of those forces at work today, I think: thuggish Bush/Cheney sycophants deathly afraid of the notion of free, unfettered networks, and craven opportunists who don’t much care either way, but will happily throw our rights overboard in exchange for perceived political safety (I’m looking at you, Stenny). Either way, the effect is the same. A network that grows more regulated, and less free, every year. The original, anarchic promise of the internet stillborn. It’s depressing as hell.

But at least we know. The only way we get a free internet is if we wrest it from the hands of the government that regulates it, and the corporations that run it². This country was founded on a fundamental mistrust of power, and a clear-eyed understanding of the monster that power will always become if it’s left to its own devices. The system the founders put in place to keep that monster at bay seems to be unraveling, though, with its three co-equal branches often acting more like chummy old golf buddies than the checks and balances they’re supposed to be.

So, basically, the network needs to be a force of nature — an irreducible, uncontrollable constant, like gravity. It’s possible to use gravity to do bad things, of course — drop pianos on people, say, or throw them off of buildings — but you can’t control it. You can’t suspend gravity, you can’t bend it to your will. And that’s the key. A free internet will still be subject to many of the same outrages that we see today — the RIAA monitoring P2P networks and issuing automated lawsuits against hapless grandmothers; criminals sniffing packets off of wireless streams; corporations spying on employee email — but it won’t be vulnerable to the ultimate outrage, total control. It won’t be possible to install snoops in data centers that filter all incoming traffic, or shut down access to sites that your ideology rejects, or build a surveillance wall around an entire country.

I don’t know if it’s possible to create a free network — and, if it is, whether it’s at all feasible any more. But one thing is abundantly clear — without it, the entire notion of privacy is a farce.

One of the reasons I find the Adam and Eve myth so odious is the role to which it implicitly consigns women: second-fiddle organisms made out of the master sex’s cast-off rib parts. That’s one interpretation, anyway — but, given the way that women are treated in the rest of the Bible, it’s almost certainly the intended one.

However, there is another way to look at this. When you study the male form — with its various unsightly protuberances, its poor attention to design, its pitiless sublimation of form to function — it becomes clear that men were basically a little bit of divine throat-clearing before the main event. Which is to say: if you interpret the arrival of womankind as the introduction of Homo sapiens 2.0, with the worst design decisions corrected, and the unsightliest bugs excised — then the myth becomes a little more palatable, and a lot more accurate.

More bad news on the iPhone front today. Lord Jobs unveiled the latest iteration yesterday, faster and thinner and, if possible, even purdier than before. It remains one of the loveliest consumer devices ever to grace our narrow visual spectrum, but its unholy coupling with AT&T has just become more bindingly unholy. They now require you to register with AT&T when you buy the phone, so there’s no longer any easy way to take it home and exorcise its demons.

I’ve already ranted, at some length, about the problems that Apple is bringing on itself by hitching its wagon to AT&T, so I won’t go into all that again. But I will say this — they’ve just added to another level on inconvenience and crappitude to the buying experience, forcing you to spend a quarter of an hour signing your life away to a service that is guaranteed to sell you out to the first government agency that decides to turn its lidless eye in your direction. Seriously, Apple, what the hell? You put together this beautiful bouquet, sunflowers and roses and daffodils, as lovely as it is thoughtful, and then send it to us in a box made out of dogshit and pureed cockroaches.

Meanwhile, Starbucks, my home away from home, creeps inexorably toward its vile accommodation with AT&T, slowly pushing T-Mobile¹ out of the picture entirely. I guess sometimes the bad guys win.

When I first started working in DC, one of the first things I noticed was how nasty your average Starbucks customer is down here. You see it over and over again: the guy who stands in line oozing impatience, ostentatiously checking his watch, sighing loudly, staring daggers at helpless barristas. I was saddened by it. I was appalled. I was outraged.

Well, I have become that person.

Maybe it’s a desire to fit in. Maybe it’s the toxic effects of the hurly-burly atmosphere down here. Or maybe there’s been a latent Starbucks Asshole in me all along, just waiting to someone to come along and unlock it. Whatever the reason — I have zero patience for even the slightest delay these days.

One of the things I’ve discovered since my transition into Asshole is that there is a certain type of Starbucks patron who will always trigger one’s worst impulses. I call this person WPSP: Worst Possible Starbucks Patron. You know who I’m talking about. That glacial dawdling figure in line in front of you, sucking up vast acreages of time for absolutely no good reason.

You can spot a WPSP a mile away, and you will do everything in your power to get in line in front of them, knocking over old ladies and baby carriages and baby seals in the process. You will always fail, though. The cosmos does not favor Starbucks Assholes.

Here’s a profile of your typical WPSP:

General Characteristics

Usually a middle-aged woman with a fresh countenance, a kindly, open demeanor and a slightly ditsy, friendly, abstracted laugh. The kind of person who’d you love to meet outside the context of the line you’re standing in — but who, in that context, is the purest possible distillation of evil.

Drink Selection Methodology

Not so much a methodology as a kind of drawn-out exploration of options by committee — where the members of said committee consist entirely of the warring factions of indecision inside her head.

Worst Possible Starbucks Patron could be standing in line for an hour, with the drink menu in plain sight, possibly even talking over drink options with her friend (there’s always a friend). It doesn’t matter. Upon arriving at the register and being asked for her order, her eyes will widen in shock, and she will say something like: “Order? Me?” As if the whole notion of ordering a drink at an establishment whose sole purpose is to sell you a drink is so completely alien as to bewilder the entire field of human endeavor.

And then she will step back, and, with her hand resting lightly on her chest, stare up at the very large menu. She will say things like: “Oh, goodness! There’s so much to choose from!”, and “I wonder what a latte is?” and “Oh, I love cinnamon” and so on. These are delaying tactics. She is marking time until the decision engine in her brain chugs lugubriously to life, and begins the long winnowing process.

Pastry-Selection Methodology

This one is a killer, because, generally-speaking, WPSP wasn’t even thinking pastries when he walked in. At least with the drinks there was a vague background notion that a drink would be nice, so we weren’t starting from zero. But pastries … well, that’s a different world. A yummy world. In a display case. This is the point at which the demeanor of the Starbucks Asshole slips from annoyance into anguish.

Obliviousness

Another mark of the WPSP is her complete unawareness of the inconvenience she is causing you. The line could be stretching out the door and into the street. Three women could be giving birth behind her while a death metal Mariachi band plays Metallica/Sinatra mashups and soldiers exchange mortar fire with pan-dimensional hyper-intelligent Cthulu abominations. She is aware of none of it. Her entire attention is focused on the challenge of reducing the vast panoply of drink options available to her into that single, perfect choice that will bring total happiness and contentment to her corner of the universe.

Payment Method

This is perhaps the cruelest stage of all. WPSP has finally settled on a drink. WPSP has made his pastry selection. WPSP has completed the ordering process. You breathe a sigh of relief. You will soon be able to step up to the register and conduct the 15 second transaction you have spent the last quarter hour waiting for. He still hasn’t paid, of course - but, really, how hard can that be?

Well, all kinds of hard. There are three, and only three, scenarios here:

1. WPSP pulls out a swollen change purse from his bag and begins to laboriously count out the $6.32 he owes. He will have to sift through buttons and charm bracelets and old pictures and tiny desiccated rodent-balls to arrive at exact change. But he will arrive at exact change, by god.
2. WPSP pulls out a two thousand dollar bill and hands it sheepishly to the barrista. And then sheepishly asks for his change in ones, pennies, and deutchmarks.
3. WPSP pulls out a handful of half-used gift cards, and loudly announces how completely unaware he is of how much each one holds. So we’ll have to go through all of them, ha ha. Inevitably, twenty gift cards later, there is still a balance remaining, at which point WPSP will move on to option (1) or (2), above.

The WPSP experience is an exhausting time for Starbucks Assholes. I had one just this morning, and I’m still recovering. It’s enough to make one wonder whether life might be better for everyone if one would just stop being an asshole.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. My hard drive just crashed.

But not just crashed. Crashed and took two weeks of data with it. Including my taxes (unsent, of course) and a story I was actually managing to make some progress on, a rare thing in these fallow post-Clarion days.

And the killer is, I could have stopped it. Not the hard drive crash, which is an unavoidable hazard of the trade (although this is the second catastrophic failure in the last three months, god damn it Apple), but the data loss. Over the past year, I’ve cobbled together a backup strategy that seemed, to me, pathologically anal. It includes:

1. Full, bootable backups to two separate hard drives.
2. Incremental backups to a Time Machine drive.
3. A remote subversion repository for the stories
4. A remote IMAP respository for my email

And yet I still lost data. Why? Because I — idiotically — haven’t actually used any of these lovely mechanisms for a long time. Haven’t done a full backup for a month. Haven’t plugged in for a Time Machine backup in two weeks. Haven’t been checking my stuff into subversion. About the only thing I have been doing is using my IMAP store, and that’s only because there’s nothing to actually do there. The protocol does it all for you, automatically.

I guess that’s the problem here. It’s not that my backup strategy is insufficiently anal: it’s insufficiently automated. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 37 years on earth, it’s that it never pays to count on me. I have this habit of letting me down.

So how to automate? Here’s what I’m thinking:

1. Get that new Time Capsule router, which does incremental backups over your home network network, automatically and wirelessly.
2. Bite the bullet and subscribe to .Mac. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about its hyper-shitty WebDAV-based filesystem, but it does give you automated remote backups wherever you are, and it integrates effortlessly with Leopard. Also, it’s perdy.
3. Make TextMate automatically commit to Subversion when you close a file. Not sure how to do this, but TextMate seems infinitely customizable. There has to be a way.
4. Burn CD backups of static, archival data — old stories, financial data, etc.
5. Set up repeating alarms that prompt me to do full weekly backups, with SuperDuper¹. This is the weakest link in the strategy, as it requires me to actually do something — but I tend to respond to alarms.

Anything I’m missing? That seems like it should cover it, as long as I’m at least occasionally plugged into a network. It has to, really. Hard drives expire with alarming regularity in our household, and every iota of lost data is just searingly painful. I love my data.

I went to the Apple Store this morning to see if they could fix my damaged iPhone, and was rebuffed — but not for the reasons I expected.

So I got home, brooded a bit, then wrote a letter to Steve Jobs, bitching about the whole experience. Which is mildly ridiculous, of course. In the larger context of Bad Things That Can Happen, this is microscopically small potatoes. And the phone still works fine. And really I’m incredibly lucky to have one at all. So I have no reason to bitch.

But I’m bitching anyway. This really rankles, and it rankles at a level that transcends the experience itself. So I wrote the letter.

Now I just need to get up the nerve to send it. One does not anger Lord Jobs lightly.

Anyway. Here it is:

Dear Mr Jobs:

I have been a wild-eyed Apple enthusiast since around 2001, when I got my first Mac — a Titanium Powerbook — and fell instantly, ardently in love. And that love hasn’t waned in the past seven years. Really, it hasn’t had a chance to. Every time I think you guys can’t possibly do anything cooler, you do — tiny Nanos, perfect Macbooks, beautiful Airs, paradigm-changing iPhones — all rolling out of Cupertino in a steady stream of unadulterated awesomeness.

So I feel kind of bad that my first letter to you ever is a complaint, and such a minor complaint at that. But it is, I’m afraid.

A couple of months ago I came into possession of a beautiful iPhone. I’ve been slobbering over this lovely piece of machinery since you first announced it, early last year, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Beautiful, elegant, effortless. Everything a revelation, everything a delight. It still takes my breath away, every time I pull it out of my pocket.

And then, last week, I dropped it. My heart stopped. I took a moment to curse the gods for their cruelty, and then myself, and then the concrete floor for not getting the hell out of the way when it saw the phone coming. And then I picked it up — and, found it, miraculously, undamaged. Not a scratch. Everything working perfectly.

And so I breathed a sigh of relief, quickly apologized to all the gods I’d cursed — no hard feelings, ok deities? — and went about my business.

Three days later, a crack developed on the screen.

I wept, re-cursed the gods, then went into my local Apple Store, hangdog, and asked how much it would cost to repair the damage.

The Genius I spoke with — friendly, pleasant, competent — said that they would replace it, for free, since there wasn’t any apparent damage to the rest of the phone. I exulted, uncursed the gods, and went off to my corner to wait for him to process the transaction.

But then he called me back, and apologetically told me that he couldn’t replace it after all. I’m not using AT&T — I’m a T-Mobile customer — and so he couldn’t, as a matter of policy, do anything with the phone. I offered to pay for the repair, but he shook his head. Unless there’s an AT&T account attached, Apple can’t help me.

I walked out of the store as I’d walked in — hangdog, crack intact, with absolutely no recourse.

Apple’s insistence that everyone use AT&T with the iPhone has always bewildered me. There’s nothing about the device that should pin it to one carrier, and the notion of inextricably tying hardware to online services is a terrible, terrible policy that the carriers have used to their advantage — and the consumer’s detriment — for far too long. Think about the world that would have been if the same ruinous policy had been foisted on us early in the history of the computer industry — we’d all be buying computers that forced us to use Compuserve, or Prodigy, or MSN, or — god help us — AOL.

The iPhone is a paradigm-changer — the very first usable smartphone. And more than usable. It’s an absolute revolution. It’s what we’ve been waiting for for years. So why not extend the revolution to actual policy, as well? Why not break the shackles that have held us these corrupt carriers for so long?

But leaving all that aside for a moment — of all the carriers to tie the iPhone to, AT&T is the worst that Apple could have picked. It’s not just their substandard service — that I could live with. What I can’t live with is AT&T’s cavalier surrender of their customer’s privacy to to government and industry. From NSA bugs implanted directly into switching stations, to proposals to monitor every packet that passes through their lines at the behest of the entertainment industry, they have demonstrated an unparalleled eagerness to betray their customers’ trust, at every turn.

I understand that many people don’t care about this, or don’t care about it enough to deter them from going with AT&T. Fair enough. But many people do — I do. And I can’t stomach the thought of giving that company any of my money, much less committing my data to their compromised pipes. Not even for an iPhone.

So, after I got my phone, I unlocked it, and started using it with T-Mobile. This is my great sin — wanting to use this beautiful piece of hardware with a service that I can believe in, and trust. And for this sin, I’m relegated to second-class status. My phone is an untouchable now, stranded in this nether-world between what’s allowed and what’s reasonable.

The obvious answer here, then, is DON’T BUY AN IPHONE, DUDE! And that’s right, of course. I am under no obligation to purchase this miraculous piece of hardware, and Apple is under no obligation to support me if I choose to use it in ways it deems inappropriate.

Fine. But not the point, I’d argue.

I think the reason that I — and people like me — are so zealously attached to Apple isn’t because you guys make beautiful machines, or write lovely software, or have miraculously good customer service. It’s all that, of course. But, fundamentally, it’s the aesthetic that attracts me — this manic devotion to the user, to providing a satisfying experience on every conceivable dimension.

But that’s not quite it either. Apple is doing more than trying to please its customers — it’s working toward some inchoate ideal of perfection, a kind of shadowy Platonic form, and is unwilling to compromise anything to get there.

Ok, a little overboard, maybe — but that’s more or less how I feel. Apple appeals to the bits of my lizard brain that respond to that kind of passion and purity. But when Apple does something like this — turning its backs on legitimate customers who have done nothing worse than go the extra mile to use their products — it subverts the whole thing. It’s not just that it’s screwing us over. It’s worse than that. It’s poisoning the beautiful ideal, in a fundamental way.

So that’s my beef. Take it as you will. My addiction to all things Apple continues unabated. I’ve already begun to feel the unmistakable heartpangs of pure love whenever I see an Air, so I’m clearly just as smitten as ever. But there’s a fly in the ointment now. It doesn’t make me angry, or irate, or even annoyed. This is, after all, a very minor thing. But it does make me sad.

Anyway. I hope you guys are planning to drop this exclusivity thing, and soon. It just doesn’t belong.

Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s kind of fun to say. But it’s occurred to me recently that someone might ask me what exactly I mean when I say fascist, and I’d have to stammer something like: “You know … fascist! It’s sort of like an asshole, but meaner.” And that would be super embarrassing. So I decided to look it up:

Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers the individual subordinate to the interests of the state, party or society as a whole. Fascists seek to forge a type of national unity, usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, racial, religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: patriotism, nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, corporatism, populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to political and economic liberalism.

What the fuck. No wonder I’m confused. Fascism seems like an umbrella term for every species of government-fomented evil, ridiculously broad-ranging in its scope. There are lots of governments around that satisfy some of these criteria, but there can’t be one that satisfies all of them, can there? Because, seriously, where would you look to find a group of people who use a particularly pernicious form of faux-populism to whip up nationalist feelings in order to justify their impulses toward militaristic totalitarianism and anti-individualistic corporatism? Who will use all statist/autocratic means at their disposal to quash any efforts toward liberalism and sanity?

Hmmm. Let’s see. Think think think.

Oh, that’s right:

These guys have done more to wreck our democracy than anyone in recent memory. But whenever you tick down the list of outrages, they invoke the judgment of “history”. Bush in particular. Truman left office with a 24% approval rating, he says, and now he’s one of the most respected statesmen in the 20th century. That’s me, he says. I’m basically a brush-clearing version of Truman.

Unless history develops a pretty severe case of amnesia, this is doubtful. Here’s what it’s going to look back on:

1. A fruitless and unnecessary war that plunged a country into chaos, killed a hundred thousand Iraqis and over 3000 Americans (so far), cost us a trillion dollars — all in pursuit of an objective that turned out to be completely illusory.
2. An economy in shambles, the result of ill-advised tax cuts (that chiefly benefited very rich people) and out-of-control spending.
3. The elimination of many of the civil liberties that made us the beacon of freedom that Bush still talks about. It is now possible for the federal government to incarcerate American citizens for any reason, hold them indefinitely without charge, and torture them.
4. The establishment of an entrenched surveillance society. It’s a matter of record, now, that the government has used its ties with the telecom community to monitor our phone calls, our email, our browsing habits. They’ve used National Security Letters to peruse the books we’ve checked out of the library. They’re stealthily building a national database that aggregates all of the details of our lives in one place.
5. The merging of government and corporate interests. Installing corporate lobbyists in government agencies that are supposed to monitor their former clients, bringing in a rogues gallery of serial polluters to vet energy bills, enshrining legal immunities into law to protect their corporate allies from being sued for spying on their customers.

I don’t mean to say that we live under the thumb of fascism right now. But most of the new elements that these guys have introduced into our government and our lives are the ingredients for the formation of a fascist state. If history looks at all this and still comes to the conclusion that Bushco did a bang-up job, then history’s an idiot.

My guess is that, in thirty years or so, the textbooks will say something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked a low point in American history. President Bush and his neo-conservative allies ushered in a series of changes that were designed to enshrine the executive branch as kind of oligarchical dictatorship, answerable to no one but their corporate partners and the bankrupt ideology that drove them.

Mr Bush used the time-honored method of fear and endless war to cow the American populace into allowing many of their rights to be taken away, in the interests of defending the nation against “evil-doers” in an ongoing, and never-ending, “war on terror”. It is a matter of considerable debate among historians whether the trajectory that the neo-conservative agenda placed the country on would have eventually resulted in the establishment of a de-facto Fascist state, in which the Executive “branch” became the sole wielder of power, with the legislative and judicial reduced to nothing more than puppets.

Thankfully, this is all speculation. President Obama’s first acts in office were to turn back most of the Bush Administration’s more egregious policies. Civil liberties regained their place of primacy, signing statement were banned, corporate influence waned, and the balance of powers that had sustained the country since the Revolution was restored.

If that last bit seems a little strained, it’s because it’s me being optimistic. I’m not very good at optimistic. But without that paragraph, things become pretty much unthinkable — the same passage, for example, would look something like this:

The Bush Era (2000-2008) marked [ REDACTED FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY ]

Maybe that’s why Bush keeps insisting that history will judge him favorably — because he knows that his ideological descendants are going to make sure it does.

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is a nasty blight on the English language, and the former excludes half our user base. So that’s not cool.

Yes, I know that “he” is generally supposed to apply to both sexes, and when I’m in my more combative moods I’ll use it with a feigned lack of compunction. But really I always feel bad about it. I read a book once where this race of beings did have such a pronoun, aer, but I think they had elements of both male and female in them, or something, so it doesn’t work for us. Also I object on principal to words that start with two vowels.

Sometimes I wish you could upgrade languages like you upgrade software. And that I was in charge of the process: the cranky Torvalds of the English language. I’d add the new pronoun, but I’d also immediately deprecate such horrors as “incentivize” and “retort”. All of the ugly constructs creeping inexorably into the language — like “step foot” or “could care less” or “irregardless” — would throw runtime exceptions as soon as they’re used, and take down the entire surrounding sentence. Exclamation points would be limited to one per ten thousand words.

I’d probably also introduce a debugger to diagnose writing failures — I have a whole hard drive full of stories that are badly in need of debugging.

English 2.0 — now with gender-neutral pronouns. Upgrade today!

Last.fm, a “social music” site, has started streaming full tracks, from thousands of artists, for free. I’m listening to Springsteen’s new album right now. So happy.

Incidentally … is it me, or is “social” the new “i”? For a while there, back in the mid-late 90s, every other mildly internet-related product had a little “e” tacked onto the beginning of its name. Then Apple ushered in the era of the “i”, setting off a mini-apocalypse of i-products and — even worse — endless i-puns. That seems to have petered out, thank god, but now the success of MySpace and FaceBook has given us a stultifying cavalcade of “social something” sites. Hey guys! Bandwagon much?

My work computer decided to freeze up and eat itself last night, and this morning it wouldn’t boot. I pawed ineffectually at it for a while, then broke down and called IT. I haven’t had to do that in a while, so it took me some time to track down their contact info. It turned out to be an 800 number. This was immediately troubling, but I dialed anyway, and sure enough … it was a call center.

We’d outsourced our own tech support.

I sighed, and resigned myself to the inevitable. Five hours and two calls later, my computer still isn’t working. But at least my ticket has moved down the chain to someone I actually share a goddam building with.

I was bitching about this to my brother, who wondered when corporations would start outsourcing their bathrooms facilities. It really isn’t all that far-fetched.