Where the Wild Things Are

Last week, I saw the new movie Where the Wild Things Are. This is a movie for adults who remember Sendak's book from their childhood; it is not for their children. It's a terrifying, sad, wonderful movie.

At first, it had me thinking of Fight Club -- not because of any particular similarity in story or storytelling between the two films, but because each tells a kind of coming-of-age story about a powerless male in a world without masculine role models. But while Tyler/The Narrator of Fight Club descends into nihilism, Max among his Wild Things seems to achieve a degree of understanding, at least subconsciously, of how he fits into his family.

Update: Terry Gross has a retrospective of some very interesting past interviews with Maurice Sendak. He comes across as a wise and interesting man, and the new film feels very aligned with the vision he describes for the book.

The Computer for the 21st Century

A coworker recently sent around a copy of Mark Weiser's The Computer for the 21st Century. I remember reading it in college, and it was originally published much earlier: 1991. But the vision it presents is still compelling -- and is (disappointingly) still not reality, (much) more than a decade later.

Even for the non-nerds reading this post, I recommend reading Weiser's article (linked above). But if you don't, here's the first couple of paragraphs by way of summary:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Consider writing, perhaps the first information technology. The ability to represent spoken language symbolically for long-term storage freed information from the limits of individual memory. Today this technology is ubiquitous in industrialized countries. Not only do books, magazines and newspapers convey written information, but so do street signs, billboards, shop signs and even graffiti. Candy wrappers are covered in writing. The constant background presence of these products of “literacy technology” does not require active attention, but the information to be transmitted is ready for use at a glance. It is difficult to imagine modern life otherwise.

Silicon-based information technology, in contrast, is far from having become part of the environment. More than 50 million personal computers have been sold, and the computer nonetheless remains largely in a world of its own. It is approachable only through complex jargon that has nothing to do with the tasks for which people use computers. The state of the art is perhaps analogous to the period when scribes had to know as much about making ink or baking clay as they did about writing.

Today, we have fast low-power processors, small devices, and powerful networks. But we still spend our days working, browsing the web, and reading email on devices that look and act like computers, which is a problem. Weiser also looked forward to a data-centric world, in which our information is pervasively available but devices are not valuable, not personalized, and not generally noticeable. In contrast, we still very much live in a device-centric world and are transitioning to a network service-centric world. The transition from explicit network services to decentralized pervasive computing is still science fiction, unfortunately.

Here's what I think is the gap between today's technology and Weiser's vision:

1. Pervasive interoperability based on open standards. We still have to think far too much about what format our data is packaged in and what protocol it's traveling in. It's not effortless to connect an arbitrary device to an arbitrary network.
2. Pervasive data authorization control. Weiser emphasizes this at the end of his piece: if every device knows where it is, where we are, what we're doing with it -- and is permanently connected to a global network -- we need ironclad privacy controls.
3. Truly distributed data storage. Right now, I have two extreme choices: keep my data on a particular device that I own or contract the storage to a service vendor (e.g. Google) that will allow me to access the data from multiple devices. The former gives me control but no flexibility. The latter gives me flexibility but no control: If I lose connectivity, I lose access to my data. If I sever relations with my service provider, I either lose my data or I have to download it all to a particular device -- at which point getting it back into the cloud will be very painful if not impossible.
4. Ubiquitous inexpensive hardware. I should be able to walk up to a digital whiteboard in any room and be able to call up my data, or I should be able to grab a computer from the company supply cabinet like I would a pad of paper. The idea that my computer was lost or damaged and therefore a lifetime's worth of data has disappeared is a big problem.
5. User interfaces that are as easy on the senses as physical objects. That means electronic paper-like screens and touch input, for example.

I'd like to say all of these things are right around the corner, but I give it another ten years. That Weiser guy was a smart man.

Corporate Culture

Would you like to work for a company with a culture like this?

Forget Pictures; Give Me a Thousand Words

I happened to be listening to a radio program about Google Books this afternoon, and I ended up down a rabbit hole -- a rabbit hole filled with ebooks.

Here's the thing about ebooks: they are inevitable. There is no point in having one set of technologies for transmitting lots of words infrequently, another for fewer words more frequently, a third for audio, a fourth for video, and something else entirely for combinations of words and audio and video. That latter one can do just fine for all the others, thank you, and soon will. Within a few years (or a couple decades), we will drop the "e" from "ebook" as we have dropped the "digital" that used to precede "camera"; all books will be ebooks.

The recent scandal surrounding the Kindle, though, has reminded us of the things that can go wrong when you keep your books where people more powerful than you can get to them. Granted, the Nazis didn't apologize afterwards, they didn't offer anyone their money back, and they ran a government, not a business. (That latter bit makes the 1984 thing more scary, by the way, not less.) But they also had to work a lot hard than did Amazon to get at those books. If all books are ebooks, and the arbiters of reading technology can purge certain titles from that technology by flicking a switch, they can delete every copy of any book (that post-dates that technology) that has ever existed.

Let me not get into whether "that could happen here." Let me instead point out a couple of things:

1. It already has. We just didn't notice, because not many people have Kindles, and we didn't care, because lots of us have paper copies of 1984. Neither of these things will continue to be the case for long; see above.
2. Governments are panicky, corporations are pushovers when it comes to the rights of their customers, and they will work together to shield each other from accountability.
3. You think only people who live in countries with sound governments read books? Cast yourself 30 years into the future. (...And pretend that all countries and companies are exactly as they are today. In fact, never mind: just cast yourself into a situation in which all books are digital.) The Chinese government will pick a book it doesn't like and tell Amazon, and Sony, and other companies to delete it from all of the book readers in their country. They will do so.

We can enjoy the benefits of digital delivery while protecting ourselves from these risks. We need:

• Open, DRM-free formats for digital books. No one should be able to decide that we aren't entitled to read our books anymore, and no one should be able to force us to read those books on a certain device. Fortunately, these exist.
• Multiple devices to choose from that support these formats, and the ability to move titles between these devices without help or consent from any central authority. The point is to prevent others from deleting your books remotely, so it's important that these devices can be disconnected from public networks and that they do not provide remote read or write access without authorization. This requirement is harder to meet today.
• The ability to generate a physical, non-digital copy. You can leave paper in a damp cave for two thousand years and still read it. You can't do that with an ebook reader.

...Which brings me back to the excitement that led me to post in the first place. I now have a copy of Stanza for my iPod Touch. Not only is the app free, but it has a built-in online catalog browser; many of those books are free too. Titles by authors from Austen to Verne are available for near-instantaneous download -- suck on that, Sonny Bono. I celebrated by reading The Reluctant Dragon and The Art of War.

It's not perfect. The iPhone isn't free of remote exploits (re: the link: yes, that's an "exploit"). I can share books between my iPod and my computer only -- as far as I can tell -- if they originate on the latter. And of course, the iPod doesn't have an electronic paper screen, which hurts readability. But the books are plain text- or EPUB-formatted, which I like, and the iPod is not a dedicated ebook device, which I also like; it makes it harder for The Man to find my books.

If the music industry is any guide, the future will look something like this: someone will finally release a killer device; we will all buy it. Ebooks will become ubiquitous. But lock-in and draconian tactics will piss us off, and we will work hard to circumvent and defeat The aforementioned Man. The Man will eventually give up. I'm optimistic.

Obama Wins Nobel for Being a Great Guy

The Nobel Committee announced this morning that American President Barack Obama has won the Nobel Prize in a new category: Being a Great Guy. The new prize will be awarded henceforth to those who show tremendous promise for positive transformative action in the future, but who have not actually accomplished any such things yet.

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Seriously, I like President Obama. I voted for him, and I think he's started some positive initiatives that could prove very important if they bear fruit. They haven't done so yet. Awarding such a prestigious prize for "creating a positive atmosphere" is outrageous and undermines the credibility of the prize and of the Nobel Committee. As for nuclear disarmament, there has been aspirational rhetoric and the beginning of a political process, but that hardly warrants the award. Reagan and Gorbachev reduced the size of nuclear arsenals; Obama is so far just talking about it. (Gorbachev previously won the prize himself.)

Furthermore, I find it incredibly inappropriate for the Committee to award such a prize to a sitting world leader. (Though they have done it before.) No national leader is a humanitarian advocate for peace; national leaders advocate for their people, which may require peace or, from time to time, the use of arms. President Obama is the head of the world's largest armed force, a force that is currently effectively occupying two foreign countries. Suppose another 9/11-like event were to occur, and this Nobel Peace laureate were to send troops into Yemen, or North Korea, or Waziristan?

Let's be honest about what this is really about: Europeans love America, and they hated President George W. Bush. That contradiction created cognitive dissonance for them and made them feel bad. (This American relates to the feeling.) The Committee is so happy that they no longer have to compromise their positive feelings for American ideals and opportunities that it has effectively awarded the prize to the American people for electing someone else. Good for us.

To John, Michael, Eric, Terry, Terry, and especially Graham

Good work, gentlemen. Very good work indeed.