(no subject)

[trochee]

Notes today, ordered from most personal to most geeky:

• I am visiting a therapist [DH] this afternoon tomorrow afternoon (he cancelled for an emergency) for the first time. This is an initial (mutual) interview to see if we work with each other.
• imtboo leaves for NYC tomorrow. Her elbow looks much better today (I helped her change the bandages this morning).
• Thanks to imtboo, I have started using Google Calendar. It is what I wanted a calendar to be. Google rather disturbingly keeps doing the Thing I Want perhaps a few months after I've decided I Really Need It (decent mail program, RSS reader, now calendar).
• I am reading more Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas. Actually, I think that Banks' "Culture" was probably founded from Google. Both:
  • keep giving their citizens and contacts Things They Want
  • are apparently semi-democratic
  • are heavily technophilic
  • are firmly rooted in the belief that their organization itself is a Good Thing
  • seem to want nothing but loyalty in return
  • may have an unsettling blackops "Special Circumstances" division.
• I just discovered gtkpod and I am very very impressed. I went from no knowledge to a downloaded, installed, working iPod setup on Ubuntu in about an hour, including the research. Next tasks -- podcast catching (gpodder? anybody have other Ubuntu suggestions for podcast catching?), and get the gtkpod to synchronize with my Google Calendar. Mwahaha.

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Just remember that calendar stuff in the nano takes up a lot of space. so you might want to just keep the room for music.
I love you.

[mythalethe.livejournal.com]

Google is amazing at providing OS-independent useful well-designed services. The company does scare me a bit with the subpoeanable personally identified information that they admit they log on every account and store forever...

[solri.livejournal.com]

I've always thought Google provided a valuable service to humanity. But there again, there was once a time when I though that about Microsoft!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Glad to see you're enjoying Consider Phlebas. It's the odd one out of the Culture books, since it looks at the Culture from the outside. If you haven't already read it, I suggest you read The Player of Games next. In addition to being the next one Banks wrote, it gives the best picture of the Culture, and in particular of Marain (no juicy linguistic details, but a lot on the ideology behind the language - Banks is an unabashed Whorfian). The non-Culture culture portrayed there is also good fun, in a thorooughly evil and depraved kind of a way.

[mythalethe.livejournal.com]

Corporations traded on the stock market must pursue profits (over people) by the structure of their corporate charter. This directly contradicts "Don't be evil." Google has provided messages from a Gmail account to the DOJ that had been deleted by the owner but were still archived on Google's servers to be used in prosecution. Google admits they keep this personally identified information indefinitely! Why not have a built in purge after 1 year, as that should be plenty of data to derive targeted Ads from, but would also protect the long term privacy of individuals?

I use gmail myself because it really is the best webmail out there, but I feel that Google needs to radically look at their model from a civil and human rights perspective. Given the fascist tendencies of human government, this sort of long-term info gathering is pretty scary. I think Google could have their information and delete it too...

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I agree that the privacy implications of webmail are real.

I don't think this problem is unique to Google, though.

One might wonder how Google can be traded on the stock market and still preserve its fundamental "don't be evil".

Banks' Culture might (it's not clear) pursue things above & beyond profit -- it is certainly not organized as a corporation -- but like most anarchosocialist ideas, one has to wonder how that could emerge out of where we are now. What's the map from here to there? It's all good to imagine how things might work once running, but most programmers (and I imagine psychiatrists too) know that bootstrapping is the hardest part of a lot of problems, and the easiest to get wrong.

Is it possible that a culture of Don't Be Evil could emerge from a corporate/capitalist substrate? If so, how? If not, is there any hope for our current situation?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

In the US those books have only recently been reprinted, and in the annoying "oh this is good so we must make the trades expensive" tall format, instead of the usual $US7 mass-market forms. I was lucky and found Consider Phlebas in a used bookstore but I will keep my eyes open for others.

I need a notes file for authors-to-look-for in bookstores...

I am unhealthily interested in the Culture -- it may be a bit of a Rorschach anthropology, but I see in it an idea of some kind of technophilic anarchosocialism. I just can't be sure I'm not also seeing a kind of Omelas -- who suffers for the Culture to exist? If Look to Windward is an example, it's the bigots and violent paranoid xenophobes -- but is even that okay?

interesting questions are posed. And not answered, which I like.

[solri.livejournal.com]

You hit the nail on the head there. I still can't understand why they floated Google anyway. Sure, it provided a useful influx of capital, but Google was doing fine as it was. Given the "Don't be evil" motto, the logical step would have been to make it a foundation.

[solri.livejournal.com]

but is even that okay?

It's okay by me!

As for anarcho-socialism, that is Iain Banks' philosophy in a nutshell.

BTW, his non-Culture books are worth reading too (with the possible exception of a few that are just too weird to be enjoyable). They are all very different, to the extent that they look like they're written by different people, but they all share a similar outlook on life and society. You might also enjoy A Few Notes on the Culture

[solri.livejournal.com]

how that could emerge out of where we are now

Banks argues that the social and economic patterns of the Culture are the result of interstellar travel and strong AI. This is not very encouraging, considering how far off both of these seem to be. Here and now, the best we can is to encourage the growth of co-opertaives, foundations and, of course, the ethic of free sharing exemplified by OSS.

[mythalethe.livejournal.com]

I think the single best first step forward involves re-writing the legislation regarding corporate charters (and corporate person-hood protections). A corporation should strive to maximize corporate profits, but never at the expense of ecological sustainability or human rights. Corporations that repeatedly violate these maxims would be subject to having their charter revoked. All shareholders would lose their investments, and the capital would be auctioned off by government with the proceeds going to rectify the transgressions. With this policy in place, shareholders would take an ACTIVE role in policing corporate behaviors!