This is self satire as well as satire of the practice of editorializing with pictures. It outs by exaggeration. Well, gross exaggeration and is made funnier, at least for me, by all the recent publicity the use of drones in the Tribal Territories of Pakistan against al Qaeda has gotten in the press. As Marshal McLuhan would point out:  when new forms emerge we see them through the lens of existing forms. In this case the new form has been around long enough that we are seeing the old form through the eyes of the new.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once described Poland as a “geopolitical spa,” a place he liked to go to get away from the unrelenting anti-American bitchfest in Western Europe after the terrorist attacks on September 11. He just as easily could have been describing Romania or almost anywhere else in Eastern Europe other than Serbia.

“People here liked President Bush more than people in other places,” Voinescu said, “but they now love President Obama. Romanians are ready to embrace any U.S. president. There is a certain kind of emotional attachment to whatever the Americans decide about their own country. I think people liked President Bush because they liked his toughness on certain issues. You know that in this part of Europe, after the whole communist era, you need sometimes a stronger approach when you talk about various issues. On the other hand, they like Obama because, you know, his charm is seductive everywhere.”

I don’t know if President Barack Obama reciprocates that feeling of affection, but I think Vice President Joe Biden probably does. He visited Bucharest at the same time I did to discuss a missile shield the administration hoped to install there instead of in Poland. He and the Romanian president addressed local journalists at a press conference which I also attended. What he said might read like diplomatic boilerplate, but I was barely twenty feet from him when he spoke, and judging by his body language and the tone of his voice, he’s either an exceptionally skilled political actor or he’s absolutely sincere.

Vice President Joe Biden in Bucharest, Romania“We serve together in Afghanistan,” he said, “in the western Balkans, and in Iraq. And I feel obliged to tell the Romanian people how grateful President Obama and I and the American people are for the Romanian troops that are in Afghanistan. Our troops—and I mean this sincerely, my son just got back from Iraq after a year as a captain in the United States Army—our troops are proud to serve next to Romanian troops because you are incredibly competent. Your kids—I wish you could all see, as I got to see, just how incredibly competent they are. You should be proud. And to all the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives of those 1100 Romanians that are stationed in Afghanistan, I mean this sincerely, as a parent, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

This is the same Joe Biden who is usually depicted  as the Democrat’s  version of Dan Quayle – known for his verbal maladroitness. So established is this meme that a sharp opposition columnist like Jonah Goldberg could play off Biden’s recent overreach in giving  Obama credit for the outcome in Iraq by claiming it didn’t really count until another administration spokesperson defended the assertion.

Initially, I ignored Biden’s comment because, well, he’s Joe Biden. As critical as I may be of the Obama administration, holding it accountable for Biden’s mouth seems grotesquely unfair.

Both Biden’s assertion and the journalistic response is business as usual – political and journalistic. Totten’s description of Biden in a moment of sincerity is different and refreshing. Not only does Totten break the ‘mouth meme’, he breaks the taboo against inserting himself directly into the story. But it is exactly his personal reading of Biden that shows how overly institutionalized professional journalism has become and a key strength of independent journalism.  I hasten to add that this is independent journalism at its best, not its worst, and that Michael J Totten is also an educated professional journalist with a keen and discriminating eye for when he can break the established conventions. Bottom line:  I read Michael J Totten because he has a knack for finding both major stories that the fall below the MSM radar (Lebanon, Ukraine, Romania and others) as well as little details that smack of authenticity precisely because they give relief from the meme ridden mainstream product.

The figures are undeniable – Fox is doing well – and I think there are two factors ( no pun intended) driving their outstanding numbers. First they are delivering a right of center view to a right of center country in a market left wide open to them by a left of center media industry. Second, they are getting a significant bump from an electorate who is suffering buyer’s remorse from electing a president and congress well to the left of it own center of gravity. The recent election of Republican Brown in Massachusetts in what is arguably the safest Democratic senate seat in the nation is clearly connected  to some of FNC’s increased popularity.

As a student of the media I am not sure how far the demise of TV will go. I think dead tree print media are probably toast, but I think as a culture we are addicted to  TV news as entertainment because it is so easy to consume passively. Put simply, it’s fun particularly if it reinforces our political views.  The problem is that it is much less about news than any print medium (on paper or the net)and much more a form of drama. Each TV story is a scripted, edited, and heavily produced bit of theater. In that sense FNC has always been fully in the MSM mold from the beginning. Watch CSPAN for 10 minutes then watch Obermann  or Beck and see how they are all about a high octane mix of opinion and emotion. Watch an event on CSPAN that gets reported by the MSM and see how they pull out the dramatic (sound bite journalism) and edit the story to suit their ideological purposes. I thoroughly enjoy watching the dinosaurs of the industrial age media go broke, but I think TV news will continue to live on as an emotional parasite on our collective need for vicarious drama.

Because I live in Australia and only get back to the US every couple of years I hadn’t realized how much market share Fox had gained. I used to think that because the US moved right during the Reagan years, and the MSM hadn’t, Murdoch had simply moved into the available market share that wasn’t being served. But it is clear now that it is more complex than that – Fox is doing something well enough so that even Democrats are watching.

I have reached no firm conclusion, but watching the Ft Hood coverage I could see clearly – indeed count on Fox – to not try to hurriedly explain away or rationalize Hassan’s actions. PTSD, workplace harassment….sure those factors might have been present but they were not the elephant in the room. It was clear from the beginning that because of the nature of the attack and the Muslim name that there might well be a totalitarian Muslim aspect to the attack. Fox’s efforts to see if there was an such an angle immediately paid off in an interview with a recently retired coworker. I watched CNN and MSNBC continue to try to frame the attack as simply another workplace shooting, but was surprised and wryly amused when CNN beat everyone else to some convenience store footage of Hassan in impeccable Middle Eastern dress on the morning of the shootings. Looping that over and over finished the ‘just another stress related workplace shooting’ line. Pictures can create the lasting impression – much like showing burning US tanks for minutes at time did in 2004. (Just to make it clear – the convenience store footage gives the lasting impression of a radical Islamist, the burning tank footage gives the lasting  impression of American defeat without actually proving much about either.) Fox continued to dig as did CNN and apparently  MSNBC was forced to go along as the evidence of the Islamist nature of the attack mounted. What hadn’t occurred to me before was that Fox was forcing the hands of the other cable networks – but at 60% market share that is not at all daft. If CNN had 60% or more, as they once did, I think they would have stuck with the softer line – and had the power to do so.

So is Fox controlling the TV news ‘narrative’? Perhaps – I don’t know, but I do know that things are changing. I was surprised to discover on a visit Barnes and Noble recently  the extent to which the words New York Times Bestseller dominated the book trade. I found dozens of books touting some connection to the Times and exactly one with the words “National Best Seller”.  My thought was that in the industrial age world of print the Times has come to dominate even more than I had realized. Theoretically, according to McLuhan, TV is a combination of the centralized control typical of the industrial age and the simultaneous awareness that typifies the electronic age. Today on the Internet we see the hierarchical replaced by the networked.  Or to use Eric Raymond’s metaphor The Cathedral and the Bizarre.

So what is happening? I think the industrial age is not over and that TV, with it its ‘one to many’ industrial model, will continue to try to control the narrative. Fox’s opponents may or may not regain the upper hand, but my long term expectation would be that other news-gathering and dissemination models will emerge on the Internet that will eventually  change or replace the older industrial model. Given my view of human nature I don’t expect the struggle to control the narrative will go away – just become more difficult in the more fragmented electronic space that McLuhan predicted.  A few weeks ago on Leo LaPorte’s podcast This Week in Google  Jeff Jarvis made a remark to the effect that conventional reporters  still think of themselves as preparing material for an audience, and don’t realize they are just another node on the network.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Its a pretty savvy article recognizing that financial papers like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal or Australia’s Financial Review have an advantage over general newspapers, and that mediocre papers are in the most danger of failing. Barber believes that general  papers offering unique content like the Guardian or the NY Times  have the best chance of survival. I’m tempted to agree – it seems a reasonable argument – but I think the problem is larger than adapting the old business model to the new media environment. Barber continues: “Many news organisations are following suit in charging, latterly the New York Times which had previously come down in favour of free access to its own content.” Indeed the Times is currently considering a  subscription fee, but for the second time. Mr. Barber rather too delicately alludes to Times Select, the subscription model the paper tried from  2005 to 2007. They discovered that the effect was to remove themselves from the Internet conversation and decided they needed to offer free subscriptions to academics and other opinion makers shortly before giving up the idea altogether.  Clay Shirky, the NYU media academic, in this trenchant analysis of the dilemma newspapers face argues that the problem is more fundamental than can be addressed with a change of business model and that the solutions proposed currently are the same as those put forward since the 90s.

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

The unthinkable, not so obviously,  is that the institution of the newspaper itself  is finished not simply because it is based on an expensive and obsolete technology but because new technologies have swept away the very structures that make newspapers viable in the first place.  For example, Shirky points out that the old model enabled  newspapers to use advertising revenues from companies with no interest in subsidizing journalistic activity to fund expensive  projects like their ‘Baghdad bureau’. His entire argument is rich and compelling and should be read in its entirety but his remorseless  conclusion is worth repeating here:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Shirky goes on to argue that while we no longer need newspapers,  we do need journalism. He also expresses the idea that we don’t know how it will work out and that, based on historical experience of previous technological revolutions,  we are in for a period of chaos before the new forms emerge. It is in this area of uncertainty that I believe many contemporary press people – both journalists and business people – like Lionel Barber have difficulty seeing that the implications of the technological revolution  effect both the business side and craft or practice side of journalism. Here is Plunkett again quoting Barber:

Barber made a distinction between “crafted” journalism and blogs “largely based on opinion rather than established fact [and] becoming increasingly influential in setting the news agenda”. “Bloggers have broken important stories and will continue to do so,” he said.

But he said they “do not operate according to the same standards as those who aspire to and practise crafted journalism. They are often happy to report rumour as fact, arguing that readers or fellow networkers can step in to correct those “facts” if they turn out to be wrong. They are rarely engaged in the pursuit of original news: their bread and butter is opinion and comment.”

“I do not wish to sound precious. British journalism has always put a premium on the scoop and it has long blurred the distinction between news and comment,” said Barber.

While the newspaper business side had been obviously sinking,  journalists have argued that their professional qualifications and standards set them apart and will allow them to maintain the status quo.  They fail to appreciate that their training and assumptions suit them – to paraphrase Shirky -  for dominance in structures optimized for mass media. The structure of mass media is characterized by a few communicating with many and describes radio and TV as well as newspapers. The Internet involves many to many communication – which is a different structure with different dynamics. What is already obvious is that both established journalists and outsiders can gain prominence in the new media environment.  Newspapers have been  impacted  first financially because they carry the extra economic burden  of paper, ink and physical delivery costs. The many to many structure of the Internet breaks both  critical monopolies historically enjoyed by mass media in general and newspapers in particular:

1. Business: control of the means of publication – presses, TV and radio stations
2. Craft: control of content – what stories will be told – the narrative

There is a tendency for those in the established journalism industry to confuse the two and to assume that even if the former breaks the latter will persist. On the business side the ability to avoid going broke is the determinant of survival. Right now it is clear that many newspapers have insurmountable business problems. Radio and TV, much less.  On the reporting or craft side the case is not so clear cut. What we have now is a much freer market where access is difficult or impossible to control.  Some independent journalists actually raise the standard of reporting – bloggers regularly catch the MSM misreporting, distorting and leaving things out as well as catching each other out. That is just the way it is  in the many to many environment. Others manage to gain a following that will pay to keep them reporting from distant places. Michael Yon and Michael J Totten come to mind. Personally, in following the Iraq war in 2003 I found the MSM superficial – tending to report causalities and tactical level incidents like the destruction of vehicles in a disconnected fashion.  Iraqi bloggers, active duty soldiers and ex servicemen turned reporters gave both better information and better insight. Significantly, I found one MSM reporter early on – John Burns of the NY Times Baghdad Bureau – who consistently dug beneath the surface in Iraq and produced superior reporting. However, when he disappeared behind the Times Select firewall in 2005 I had so many other excellent sources of information from Iraq that his reporting was no longer indispensable. In the short term I think some of the most ‘indispensable’ newspapers will survive in some form for a time but eventually ‘new structures optimized for digital data’ will emerge. One emergent category is  group blogs defined by ideological stance – much like newspapers or broadcasting groups. For example, Pajamas Media on the right and Huffington Post on the left. While I find individual posts on these sites worthwhile I feel uncomfortable knowing that I am reading inside an ideological walled garden for the same reasons I am uncomfortable with similar ideologically controlled environments in the mass media. So far I find I am most comfortable when ideology takes a back seat to transparency – but that is  a subject for another post. At this stage I don’t feel confident predicting that newspapers will disappear quickly unless the economic situation remains bad and accelerates their demise. We might  see the general city papers that take their lead from papers like the NY Times and Washington Post in national and international news retreat to smaller local papers. The Washington Post has shown the way in this area by having a strong local tradition.

Another trend that is emerging is hyperlocal blogging which is intensive old style reporting about a single area of a city or other small locality. According to Jeff Jarvis (of Buzz Machine in this post) and in a recent episode of Leo Laporte’s new podcast This Week in Google  such bloggers are able to earn from $200,000 to $300,000 a year – enough so that a talented blogger can share the income with another local individual who is good at selling the advertising that is the source of the income. To me hyperlocal blogging is a perfect example of  what Clay Shirky means when he talks about “new structures optimized for digital data.”

Movie Poster courtesy of Wikipedia

The story is presented as true and for the most part it is – there is climactic war scene in which the partisans defeat a German unit that did not happen that is inserted for dramatic purposes (according to the Wikipedia article), but the full impact of the story comes after the end of the film’s action when the fate of the three brothers is documented. One was killed in battle fighting for the Red Army. The other two survived and made their way to New York and started a business, as did so many other Holocaust survivors. The Bielski’s story had not been told before, perhaps for the very good reason it was like so many other stories of survival by Jews and others from that time. The New York of my youth was full of Holocaust survivors and their stories. Personally I was born in Upstate NY during the time the action of the film takes place. In the course of growing up  I met many young Jewish people my own age who had been born amidst the systematic genocide and whose parents had somehow gotten them safely to America. There are many Nazi and death defying tales, like the Beilski’s worthy of retelling. The one that stands out for me was of a young man with whom I became friends in the late 50s who’s mother, separated from her husband by the war and alone with a young baby, took it upon herself to bleach her hair, and that of her young son, blond and walk out of Eastern Europe with him in her arms. She has always been for me a personal example that heroism is not just something that exists in the movies or in the past but something that life may require of us at any time.  Discussing Defiance with my sister on the phone we tried Googling my old friend. In the end my sister found him in the US Social Security death register. He had died in his 50s. His mother a few weeks later.

As I thought about these two movies and my own experience of Holocaust survivors I encountered an essay entitled What Is To Be Done? by Eve Garrard on Normblog. Both Norm Geras and Eve Garrard are English and Jewish and self describe as belonging to the political left. The essay discusses what I would agree is a reemergence of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere and explores what today’s European Jews might do in response. Here is Eve Garrard’s  opening:

Anti-Semitism appears to be returning to Europe, including to the UK. (Yes, I know that implies that it went away for a time, which may not really be true. But it was certainly a lot less noticeable from the 1950s to the 1980s.) Certain very traditional anti-Semitic tropes – Jews as a sinister force shaping world events in their own interests; Jews as exploitative and bloodthirsty towards others, particularly towards the children of others; and Jews as constantly whining about their mistreatment for ulterior purposes – have been resurrected and are now quite widely deployed, though largely under the cloak of anti-Zionism. But the grubby underwear constantly shows beneath the hem of that cloak….

I first noticed the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the 80s here in Western Australia when I saw pro Palestinian posters that were anti Zionist in just the way Eve Garrard describes. At the time, I thought a Jewish friend was over reacting to them while at the same time seeing that they went further than necessary to support their cause and seemed, I had to admit at the time, unconcerned about distancing themselves from  anti-Semitism.

If anti-Semitism is really on the march again, then this is a seriously worrying development. Already Jews are beginning to feel that the environment in which they live has become more hostile and alien (and hence of course more alienating). Many of us used to think that the terrible precedent of the Nazi genocide would itself prevent any recurrence of Jew-hatred, since the contemplation of what anti-Semitism had led to was and is so appalling. But if in spite of that history Jew-hatred is once more on the rise, then we simply can’t tell whether people will continue to see, or even care about, where it might lead.

And that, I believe,  is the problem that these two films are trying to address by using cinema to remind the Western world that it is again falling into one of its oldest and most dishonorable forms of prejudice. Specifically,  I would speculate that the Jewish community in Hollywood has decided to act by making films about the Holocaust. Good tries with irony to shake us awake while Defiance reminds us how many Jews fought and survived in conditions that most in the West believe they will not have to face again. I have seen a third Holocaust film since I began this essay – The Boy in Striped Pajamas.  It is yet another response to the question: What is to be done?  In my next post on this theme, I hope to be able to explore in a bit more depth why, as someone who is not Jewish,  I think the resurgence of Western anti-Semitism is so powerful.

Jodie Whittaker and Viggo Mortensen in Good

I saw the film Good a couple of nights ago which deals with denial in Germany in the thirties as a way of talking about how easy it is to fool ourselves ‘anywhere and everywhere’ – as Scottish Jew C.P Taylor,  the author of the play on which the film is based,  put it. The method of the film is to portray the Nazis as perfectly ordinary – no harsh German accents, but rather cultured English ones – and then follow the development of the main character – Professor John Halder a liberal college professor played by Viggo Mortensen  – in a downward spiral to hell that he only comprehends at the end. The film uses heavy irony. For example, at one point our professor’s wide eyed mistress asks him, “Anything that makes people happy can’t be bad can it?”.  In the background we hear the sounds of a Nazi rally while sun drenched little girls in summer frocks skip across the screen  clutching gladiolas to wave at Der Fuhrer.  It is like the film is reaching out of the screen trying to shake the contemporary audience awake. Reading some reviews after seeing the film I discovered that the film’s indirect suggestion that denial and self delusion can occur ‘anyplace and everywhere’ had resulted in  quite mixed reactions.  An interview with Jason Isaacs, who plays the professor’s ill-fated Jewish friend,  in the LA Times proposes an explanation:

“It’s amazing the different reception this film has had when shown to different audiences,” said Isaacs, months later, by phone from Israel, where “Good,” starring Viggo Mortensen, had just played at the Jerusalem Film Festival. “For people like me, Western liberals, it takes imaginative effort to see themselves in Viggo’s part because we all like to think we’d hide people in our attic, you know, join the partisans and protest these civil rights abuses right under our nose. They recognize the perils of not raising our voices when the Geneva Conventions are thrown aside.

“But when you show it to people who lived under Communist rule in Eastern Europe, they don’t expect him for a second to do anything. They know what powerlessness feels like. So they’re watching a different story, about lack of hope and about pragmatism.”

I can say truthfully that I have been a liberal college professor who has experienced powerlessness sufficiently to know that moral decisions made in the abstract are a lot easier than those made under duress particularly where self interest is involved.  I was therefore genuinely surprised at Steven Holden’s review in the New York Times entitled Aligning with Nazis, Blindfold Tightly in Place. As the title implies, he pans Good from the outset, and  wonders how “a liberal, mild-mannered college professor” could become a Nazi.

How and why this could be is never satisfactorily addressed, unless you accept that he’s a moral vacuum, in which case why write a play about such a nonentity? The movie dances as skittishly around its subject as its protagonist blindly ignores portents of the impending Holocaust.

Although he makes reference to the production of C.P. Taylor’s play elsewhere in the review Holden seem determined not to see the obvious intent of both the play and the film  – that denial and moral failure are to be found in all times and in all places including, most especially, in ourselves. I have not seen the play, but the film never lets up even crediting the Hear No Evil Sound Studios in the closing titles.  But Holden makes it absolutely clear that he can not make the small step the film asks us to take to be alert to similar dangers in the present. To paraphrase Mr. Holden, unless you accept that a film critic for America’s  leading newspaper could miss the film’s obvious  irony, you have to wonder if he pans the film because he does not like its discomforting message. He has to keep the film in the past and ignore that today’s world contains many of the same potentials – internal and external, individual and collective – that are explored in the film.

Halder views Nazism as a distasteful phenomenon, not to be taken seriously, that will soon play itself out. Even when a book burning takes place outside his window, he finds a positive side to it. At every turn he appears to be either so naïve or so stupid that even after the transport of Jews is well under way he remains in near-total denial.

Keith Curtis’s After the Software Wars is self published. It is available from  Lulu in paper for $13.95 or a downloadable PDF for free.  Notice the recent revision date on the cover. The moment you decouple the familiar book from the printing press it changes.  It becomes more fluid and the gatekeeper role of publishers is eroded.  Keith Curtis is aware his book would be different if it had gone through the conventional editing and publishing process, but because he understands the  rules of the post industrial world of computers he has taken full advantage of the new media environment. Just as thousands of bloggers  do every day.

Economic crises stress everything: people, institutions, accepted ways of doing things – even the categories we use to label and think about our world. In such times it is useful to scan the situation for what philosopher Robert Pirsig called a platypus – something that doesn’t fit. As Pirsig tells the story when scientists were classifying animals they defined reptiles as those that laid eggs and mammals as those that fed their young with milk. It was simple and it worked, until it was discovered that all along the platypus had been reproducing by laying eggs and feeding it young with milk.  The scientists solved the problem with a kludge – they just made a separate category for the platypus and a few other similar animals. That is what most of us do when we encounter something that doesn’t fit – we just put it in the too hard basket.

Right now I think we are seeing an economic crisis accelerate the transition from the industrial age to a post industrial age that will in part operate by different rules and assumptions. Hard times force us to take many things out of the too hard basket and reconsider them. The existence of free software is one of them. It is a platypus of the first order that has been dismissed as an interesting side issue for too long. According to the industrial model it should not exist. There is no parallel market in automobiles or graphic cards or even cornflakes where you can go get a free one any time you like. Linux or Open Office or hundreds of other viable free software programs could not exist if they were simply industrial products.  After the Software Wars goes directly at trying to understand the problem. Keith Curtis argues that software is a form of science and that it works best when it is allowed to operate in an open environment like the free exchange of ideas in a university setting.

After the Software Wars is hard to put down because it makes a passionate and compelling case for free software and upsets our industrial age assumptions with new understanding. Many, including myself, would point out that the the demise of proprietary software is not a done deal and would argue that software, like any good platypus, is a combination of freely exchanged science and proprietary applied science.  But Curtis’s argument is based in experience and like a good lawyer arguing one side of a case he forces us to consider the merit of his argument.  After eleven years inside Microsoft he convincingly peels  back the layers of the software development process so that we can  see the strengths of free software (and the weaknesses of proprietary software) more clearly. This illustration of the over complexity of propriety code sums up his position eloquently:

During his time at Microsoft Curtis saw Windows struggle with the expensive limitations of the closed industrial model while its free rival – Linux – consistently improved relative to Windows to the point where he is now quite happy to use only Linux. (I have used it as my main operating system for over a year and agree it compares favorable to Windows in most ways). The book is timely because it asks us to take seriously a clearly less expensive and arguably better approach to software development at a time when economic stress makers it particularly relevant to do so.

The Linux phenomena tells us that the assumptions of the industrial age don’t work for software, but it doesn’t tell us where the open model is most important or essential to progress. Linux may or may not go on to ‘world domination’ as Curtis puts it – Microsoft is making a serious comeback just now with Windows 7 and remains dominant with over 90% of the world’s desktops despite shooting itself in the foot with Vista.  However, it is in the second half of After the Software Wars when Curtis turns his attention to programming languages, that he  shows us where the proprietary model may well be holding us back in a more fundamental and critical way.  He makes the case that the dominant C and C++ programming languages are obsolete and worse – disastrously  inefficient. For example, he explains how they suffer from serious limitations such as failure to clean up memory after use (programmers call it garbage collection) which in turn is a major source of bugs requiring endless further work. However, in terms of the free versus propriety dilemma I think his most telling  argument is his account of how Sun and Microsoft fought to control Java and ruined its chances of becoming a more efficient replacement for the older languages. The implication is clear – developing an up to date, open source, programming language may be more urgent and necessary than the adoption of Linux.

More broadly as an observer of the interaction of society and technology in the McLuhan tradition I see the free software platypus as indicating a change in  how we divide what is held in common and what is proprietary.  Just as the movable type contained a core idea of the industrial revolution – interchangeable parts -  I think that free software will compel a new understanding of what divides common from private property.

Addendum:

I heard from Keith Curtis very quickly after making this post (Ok so I emailed him) and here are his additions and corrections:

 A quick clarification, in the latest version on lulu.com, I now propose that perhaps Python should take over. It has some challenges, but it has a nice worldwide community of programmers working on many aspects of software, like this amazing list: http://www.scipy.org/Topical_Software. In other words, the replacement for Java already exists, but more need to know about it. In fact, Python is so under the radar that I didn’t really understand it until after I finished my book which is why I’ve only recently made changes to remove my Java++ section.

Also, C is not a proprietary language but it is holding us back. In essence it is a big side note. But a very important one. And my argument is this: we need GC [GC= Garbage Collection ed] for reliability, but we want GC for maintainability. Programmers using C are cavemen, fashioning their world with stone tools. I love that line

I was aware that C++ came free with Linux distros, but wasn’t sure if actual programming operations like Microsoft’s were using a non proprietary language. I had heard about Python mostly from Eric Raymond’s account of his discovery of it as more powerful than Pearl in 2000. What I didn’t know – again because I lack first hand programming experience – is the great news that Python has grown to the point where it is a  possible successor to both C++ and Java. Here is Keith’s comment:

I read that. [Raymond's Python article ed.] My issue with his article (comparing to Perl) is that there are many good programming languages, Python, C#, Ruby, etc. At some point, languages become good enough, and the need for a complete set of libraries becomes important, and I think Python has reached critical mass. Like with English, I’m sure we could tweak the shape of the letters to make it “better” to make it for example easier to distinguish the letters, or remove some unnecessary ones, but it doesn’t matter anymore. I feel the same way with programming languages now.

However, for me the biggest point Keith Curtis made was that I got it right that maybe free programming languages are even more important that free operating systems. I really went out on a limb with that idea based on  the general notion derived from Marshall McLuhan that when technologies change the social structures and rules about how we get things done change. Keth writes:

BTW, while reading your review again, I just noticed your comment that a free programming language is more important than the Linux kernel and I think that is true! It is a big idea I hadn’t considered and I will put it into a future revision of the book. I’m working on one now.

and

I added this point to the latest edition of my book. (Right now it is only on my computer, but I will upload it to lulu and amazon in some days.)

Which, if nothing else, shows how the Internet enhances the exchange of ideas and speeds it up too. Personally it confirms  my sense of excitement at the possible connection between hard core technology concerns and McLuhan’s literary and social thinking.  Which raises a question for another post: How do we find good self published material on the Internet? NYU media professor Clay Shirky touches on the problem of how we filter for quality on the Internet in the absence of editors and publishers, the traditional gatekeepers,  in this video from the WEB 2.0 conference. Fair warning, it is 23 minutes long.

Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls “the landscape of the temporary”: a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.

Digital rights management (DRM), which Kindle uses to lock in its library, raises critical questions about the nature of property and identity in digital culture. Culture plays a large role – in some ways, larger than government – in shaping who we are as individuals in a society. The First Amendment protects our right to participate in the production of that culture. The widespread commodification of access is shaping nearly every aspect of modern citizenship. There are benefits, to be sure, but this transformation also poses a big-time threat to free expression and assembly.

This view seems too narrow to me. I think the Kindle is best understood as an attempt to resist a broad structural change brought about by the ability to cheaply digitize print.  It is an example of what is called a  walled garden. That is, the attempt to surround digitized content with artificial barriers such as DRM and/or limiting it to tightly controlled devices such as the Kindle (or particular set top boxes, cell phones etc)  so as to create a monopoly market. Technologically, the Kindle is  a very creditable attempt to deliver a book like reading experience while attempting to preserve the effective near monopoly over distribution inherent in a printed book. (Sharing printed books personally or by the mechanism  of a library does not reduce total sales of a book sufficiently to make book publishing unprofitable.) However, if the experience of the music industry is any guide, the inbuilt ease of copying digital files – be they songs or books – militates strongly against attempts to construct walled gardens of any permanence.

Personally I am ambivalent about the Kindle. I might buy one if I lived in the US but I would be resistant because I wouldn’t want access to my library dependent on a single expensive device. If I accumulate 50 books at $10 each and then drop my Kindle I have to pony nearly $400 to regain access to my books. I think Walshe nails that disadvantage of the Kindle correctly, but I don’t think consumers will overlook that problem for long.  Like most consumers I want  to do with e-books  exactly what I do with music – buy the CD and freely create as many digital files as I need to play them on various devices over time. I want to own the original and be able to go back and re copy the file if the one in my car gets ruined or rip it to a file format suitable for a particular device. Similarly, I want books in a digital form that I can keep and back up and reformat to suit whatever reader currently has the best feature set for me. In short I don’t like the walled garden that Walshie is unhappy with any more than she does. That is why I am not very concerned that readers will accept Amazon’s proprietary paradise  for long.  Someone will make more open hardware and open file formats will coalesce around that hardware. One possibility might not even be an e-ink reader at all – but a tablet netbook.  Because a netbook is a real computer it is a very open system limited only by the operating system it is running – including Linux or Android. I use the first netbook – the 7 inch Asus eeePC – as a reader. (Asus and other vendors now seem to have settled on 9 to 10 inch screen as standard.)  My eeePC  is not very good as a reader at that size, but is usable. I’ve been experimenting recently with Pokat PDF reader for Windows which creates an e-book like experience on a computer screen with big forward and back buttons and an animated page flip complete with sound effects. I’m having my sister test it on her 10 inch HP Mini 1000 netbook – more when I know more.

That said, I’d like an e-ink based e-book reader  that didn’t lock me into a particular vendor and made it easy for me to build an e-book library that I really owned from a variety of sources. So far the Kindle’s competition seems too limited or too expensive. In short, I don’t think the e-book market has matured. While the Kindle is perhaps the best single e-ink device on the market today, its limitations – US only, DRM, walled garden marketing – and even its initial success create a market for a device with a more open combination of hardware and software.