Chris Green is living in Washington, DC and writing a political mystery that’s supposed to be at least somewhat fictional, though as he notes it’s hard to beat reality for sheer freakiness.
Archive for May, 2007
Chris Green update
Thursday, May 31st, 2007Web 2.0 and the Master Science of Philosophy
Monday, May 14th, 2007Jakob Nielsen (and you should listen to this man) tore Web 2.0 a new one today, pointing out that the glam and flash of nifty interfaces has obscured the honest truth: that people using the web don’t use it for its own sake, but use it as a tool for some other purpose, absent that relatively small but vociferous group of basement-dwellers who inhabit the web like an identity.
I’ve been saying this since 1994 or so, and it has helped me advise clients and friends well. You want to make something people can use for a function you have to offer. If you have no function, either invent one (put out content germaine to your topic) or keep your web presence at the level of a muted hybrid between advertising and a phone book listing. Some people have initially resisted this and later found it meaningful.
This brings us to the question of philosophy in the indefinite sense, meaning philosophy as a language in the usage that gives us the idea of “a philosophy of” each topic. Is there a philosophy of the web? Well, first there is a language for discussing the web in the sense that philosophy excels at, which is describing the invisible but structural connections between ideas. Anyone can describe a widget. A theory of widgets that connects use to design? Rare.
After we stumble around with more verbiage about whether a philosophy is the philosophy, and the many types of philosophy and their possible appeals, we come to an end of the line of thinking, as must always happen when we leave our minds to make things work in whatever shadow of The Real World we manage to inhabit. The web is made to be used. Similarly, in my view, philosophy peaked with the ancient Greeks because all of their theory aimed toward what we might idealize as “common sense,” but really was plain arguments for making life better through systems of thought.
There will undoubtedly be a seesawing argument over Web 2.0 in the coming days, in which one side will say Web 2.0 is style over substance, and the other side will claim it is the second coming of Christ. All I can say is that for me, what matters is connecting a target audience to a function that makes their lives better. If Web 2.0 helps, as it does with Gmail, I’m all for it. But if an earlier technology works better, I won’t shirk from that either.
Recently I switched back to 1970s technologies for email. I use Mutt on a UNIX box, without the benefits of GUI or really any extended function, and I like it because it requires deliberate usage. Keeping track of friend’s emails and aliasing them is an active process. Sending an email requires thinking about each step deliberately. And there’s no glam and flash in the background. Like design itself, usage must match form and function some master science of philosophy that describes the context of usage itself — a thing often known as “life.”
When Microsoft Word ruled the world…
Wednesday, May 9th, 2007It is the year 2010.
A grey haze covers the landscape of shattered buildings and battered industrial wreckage. Distant
gunfire can be heard with the erratic cadence of chirping birds, which are now extinct.
It started so innocently.
The dominant word processing program of the day, Microsoft Word, had always been accused of “feature creep.” Each time a new paradigm or trend made the rounds at the Microsoft coffee bar, it got added to Word. It was innocent at first, with HTML and e-mail functions and some formatting, but eventually it got out of control.
Word became a structured documentation single sourcing authoring tool (sdssat) and then expanded into CAD, social networking, and TCP/IP diagnostics. At this point, it commanded seventy percent of the worldwide market… and it kept growing. Soon it had a 3D
shooter, a database engine, and became a full development environment. Shortly after that, video and still image editing. Within two years, all software as we know it ceased to exist. Every function of a computer was a plug-in to Microsoft Word, even the operating system, code-named Microsoft Genghis.
Software developers were known to suicide when their Word licenses expired, knowing that they could not work until they spent 72 hours on hold with the Microsoft helpline. As Word expanded into tax preparation software, personal budgeting and stock management, they would lose their life’s savings in an afternoon if the license key expired or a pirate copy of Word (now totalling 16 TB of data) was found in the neighborhood. People stopped watching television and spent their time with the Live Channel content in Microsoft Word.
As the situation got worse, government first became helpless, and then was simply swallowed as it became another Word plug-in (MS Total Control). From space, it seemed a grey cancer had reached out with its tendrils and infiltrated every continent, every single aspect of life on earth. The parking meters ran on Microsoft Word. The Space Shuttle was controlled by the Word spellchecker. The President was created by Word’s 3D character animator. All human life was
enslaved.
Unit TD321-M, stumbling over the broken concrete of a radioactive wasteland, took a momentary pause. “Base Camp, this is TD321-M, taking aspiration break.” The smoothly synthesized voice responded in even cadence: “You have 21 seconds… 20… 19…”
TD321-M was a Word technician, like every other employee on the planet, but he was only a Word technician level seven, which meant he was qualified only to sort through debris for metal that could be recycled to feed the MS Word war machine (Word had, a year previous, declared war against Asia and the Middle East simultaneously, since it was more efficient to fight a two-front war if one considered the office supplies costs). “My life is just about over,” grumbled the despondent TD321-M, kicking a large chunk of concrete with a booted foot.
As the rumble of its rolling exit faded out, he turned around to seek his next target, when the barrel of a rifle blocked his path. “Terrorebels!” he gasped. He seized his radio, “BaseCamp, I–” but was cut off in a blast of gunfire. TD321-M looked down to see his radio in pieces.
“Come with us, or you’re doomed,” said one of the outlandish figures before him. Dressed in a camouflage of rags and discarded Apple equipment, the terrorebel like his cohorts was filthy and heavily armed. These dissidents camped at the fringes of modern society and struck violently against the dominion of Microsoft Word. Years of warfare had conditioned them to be heartless, and the rumors flying around Microsoft Word of Warcraft had them executing prisoners.
“I can’t,” said TD321-M. “I’ve got Microsoft Word Media Player implanted in my ear. If I leave the Word empire, I will be remote-detonated.”
“It’s OK,” said the second terrorebel. “We can install Linux on it, and you will be free from remote
detonation, unless you get pwned.” He waved to the rear of what TDM321-M now saw was a line of terrorebels. “Hey Gary, we need an installation here.”
He picked up his rifle. “So long and good luck.”
“But… where are you going?”
The terrorebel turned with a smirk. “The great weakness of Word is that it is backward-compatible. We found a wrecked ship on the coast of Indiana, and it had a 1996 computer… with the first known Word macro virus. We’ve found a back way in through the ventilation shafts and we’re going to blow this Word into oblivion.”
“But when you format the great Word hard disk, what will be left of our society?”
“Who cares?” said the terrorebel. “I’m so bored with this I could go for living in caves and eating roast sabertooth.” A shout of assent came from the line.
Gary, a short rotund man who was sweating profusely, had attached two leads to the implanted protrusion in TD321-M’s ear. “All we need to do is TFTP over the new ROM image, and we can bootstrap a LILO hybrid, and you’ll be good as new…”
It seemed to TD321-M that he had been there for hours. “Oh, please hurry,” he said. “They detonate after two hours of no signal!”
“That’s probably one hour,” Gary grumbled. “Daylight savings happens at Christmas this year.”
Suddenly the first terrorebel came running back. “We’ve got the virus in, and Word has fallen! That’s the good news… the bad news is that now spammers are ruling our new technocracy, and we’re late for our required 18 hours of porn watching and Viagra-buying.”
“Snap out of it man,” screamed another terrorebel. “Can’t you see it’s just a new guise of Word… or whatever evil was Word… that controlled Bill Gates… could it be Satan?”
“Uh oh,” said Gary.
“What?” said TD321-M and the terrorebels in unison.
“Your remote detonator is older Dell hardware. Linux can’t find a driver,” said Gary, putting earplugs in his ears. “There’s nothing I can do until someone codes one up, which isn’t likely since this is an older model. Good luck pal.”
“Bomb!” howled the terrorebels, taking cover. As TD321-M staggered back over the rocks, he heard a voice in his ear, counting down the seconds of his life, while images of genital extensions, making money fast and discount OEM software scrolled across the
grey, forbidding sky.