Stilgherrian » History

I came for the gin, I stayed for the social revolution

Stilgherrian — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:23:41 +0000

“Television, the drug of the nation / Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation,” rapped American poet and musician Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of ~~Hipocrisy~~ Hiphoprisy”, now of Spearhead. Could this literally be true?

I’ve just read the most amazing speech, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Sharky, which you can also watch on Blip.tv. It begins:

A British historian [argued] that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing — there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders — a lot of things we like — didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

Sharky goes on to argue that when WWII ended, we suddenly had to cope with another social surplus: all that leisure time thanks to a 5-day working week and all those new-fangled gadgets which made household chores a breeze. So what did we do? We slothed in front of the TV. For a generation.

As we turn off our TVs and connect to each other, this cognitive surplus is creating things like Wikipedia. An estimated 100 million hours of work has gone into it. Yet this is but a drop in the ocean…

How much time do we spend watching TV?

Two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the US, we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads… People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is.”

Back in 1992, David Gelernter asked, in his book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox… How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, where the great public institutions of the information age were. Where were the equivalents of the great cathedrals? The grand Victorian railway stations and bridges?

Obviously Gelernter asked that before the web, and before Wikipedia and Google and YouTube and Facebook and… and… OK, some of those are commercial projects. But as Sharky points out, we could have 2000 new Wikipedia-sized projects every year.

The information revolution has only just begun…

I do recommend you check out the entire speech. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball via Garth Roxburgh-Kidd.

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My Lai Massacre 40th anniversary

Stilgherrian — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:47:16 +0000

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, one of the most appalling episodes of the US Army’s involvement in the Vietnam war. You might also want to read the Wikipedia article.

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Telecom’s vision of 1996 from 1992

Stilgherrian — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:21:52 +0000

Here’s how “Telecom Australia” (now Telstra) in 1992 envisioned the broadband revolution of far-future 1996. Have you watched this, Senator Conroy? Why doesn’t my laptop make those noises?

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Iron Curtain turns 62

Stilgherrian — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:10:12 +0000

On this day in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech. Hat-tip to Memex 1.1.

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Odd obituary for Heath Ledger

Stilgherrian — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:05:30 +0000

Who’d have thought? An obituary for Heath Ledger in Middle English! Well, for a character he played. Doffing the hat to Quatrefoil, who writes, “Whoever writes this blog is frequently side-splittingly funny, but he or she can write (and knows their Middle English passing well). I am filled with wonder and envy.”

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Obsolete Skills

Stilgherrian — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 23:26:30 +0000

Brad Kellett has started a website documenting Obsolete Skills. Things like “interpolating logarithms” and “carving a nib into a quill”. The list currently over-emphasises the interests of urban computer geeks, who seem to forget that 96% of the planet does not live in a high-tech apartment, but there are still gems to be found. “Caulking your wagon to ford the river,” anyone?

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Australia, let the Enlightenment begin!

Stilgherrian — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 06:00:27 +0000

If History is the set of stories we tell ourselves to explain the Past, then I guess Society comprises the stories we tell ourselves about the Present — plus the conversations which create our Future. I suspect that’s why certain people seem to be excited by the Australia 2020 Summit: Australia does seem to be starting a new conversation about its own identity.

The other day I quoted an historian who said that the Prussian enlightenment [of the 18th century] was about conversation. “It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects,” he said. So I’ll be so bold as to suggest this new conversation will lead to the Australian Enlightenment.

Yesterday I read two pieces which reinforce this idea of a new conversation. The first was Maxine McKew’s First Speech to federal parliament as the Member for Bennelong.

Let me extract (some might say “butcher”) just one thread from a speech that deserves to be read in full, and add my own emphasis:

The seat of Bennelong… provides a near perfect snapshot of how the country is changing. Join the throng on the weekend in the Eastwood mall and you will find that Rowe Street is both a modern-day Babel and a dynamic part of cosmopolitan Sydney…

For some, these changes are unsettling. But there is a younger generation that is entirely at ease with who we are and what we are becoming. Exceptionally well educated, many have secured a second degree from an international university and are multilingual. Some will be in mixed-race marriages. What they all have in common is that they will see their professional lives as crossing borders. They will be citizens of the world, trained here initially but orbiting around the world and working and playing in those places that will enrich them.

They will still call Australia home, but when they are in Delhi, Hong Kong or London, what story will they be telling about home? How do we want the Australian story to look for the coming generation? …

What we need is a new imagining, a revived sense of what is possible. The negativity and the tedium of the culture wars will not get us there.

But look at our history with all its warts and all its failures and you will still find plenty to inspire wonder, hope and optimism. You will also find that, if there is a common animating principle in Australia, it is that we look forwards, not back…

What people want now, I think, is an intelligent national conversation.

The prevailing orthodoxy, to this point, has been that, because we are enjoying such bounty, we are indifferent, to the point of being somnolent, about the bigger societal questions. Well, I happen to think that 2007 demolished that idea. Most of the commentators missed the mood shift. But it is there. It is real. All sorts of people know that politics and policymaking matter. Our national spirit matters. The lesson for me from the past year is that there is a great reservoir of goodwill that lies untapped beneath the surface of our national life, and smart governments will find ways to liberate and direct it.

And behold! Chairman Rudd has proclaimed the Australia 2002 Summit. With hopes in many quarters that it won’t be 1000 of “the usual suspects”, maybe that new conversation can begin.

However the second piece, Mark Pesce’s article How to listen to 21 million voices, reminds us that we need a truly national conversation — all 21 million of us, not just The Chosen 1000 at the summit.

In 1962, T.S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [claimed that] the greatest revolutions in science happen when ‘outsiders’ enter an established field, seeing it with new eyes.

These outsiders make observations which the boffins have simply ignored or discounted, because they disagree with the orthodox consensus. Over time, outsider observations become the new orthodoxy, which is itself overturned when another outsider enters the field. Funeral by funeral, science inches forward.

The Prime Minister has created something of a paradoxical situation: he’s reaching beyond the comfortable bounds of the government bureaucracy with the 2020 Summit, searching for new ideas, yet, because of the nature of the boffin universe, the most revolutionary and far-sighted of these new ideas would be anathema to those same boffins.

The summit is far more likely to confirm conventional wisdom than challenge it.

Mark suggests we could use Wikipedia-like tools to create this national conversation.

The Prime Minister must make clear that the 2020 Summit is simply the tip of the iceberg — that the boffins are only the most visible example of the expertise available to solve the nation’s long-term problems and invite the rest of the nation to participate in a broad sharing of ideas and expertise.

Rudd should promise that the 2020 Summit itself will be captured in video and audio recordings, with photographs and documentation that will all be placed online, in real-time, as the summit is taking place.

He can ask Australians to create blogs which track the progress of the event, noting everything as it happens.

Australians should be invited to use instant messaging, bulletin boards and other systems so that their own questions, reflections and comments could be incorporated into the summit.

The other day I said I’d be setting up the Topic 9 blog to cover one area of the discussion — and that will finally be happening on Friday. But it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the rest — blogs, wikis, whatever tools are most appropriate.

We shouldn’t wait for The Guv’mint to do it, either. Anyone can get the process going. GetUp is a fine example of people who’ve managed to Make A Difference without being “official”.

I supposed I should start talking to people, eh?

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Enlightenment is about Conversation

Stilgherrian — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:46:17 +0000

“Dare to Know!” is the title of chapter 8 of Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. And the opening words will bring a wriggle of delight to social media evangelists everywhere. (Hi, Laurel!)

The Prussian enlightenment [of the 18th century] was about conversation. It was about a critical, respectful, open-ended dialogue between free and autonomous subjects. Conversation was important because it permitted the sharpening and refinement of judgement. In a famous essay on the nature of enlightenment, the Königsberg philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that:

Enlightenment refers to man’s departure from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage means the inability to make use of one’s own reason without the guidance of another. This tutelage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in an intellectual insufficiency, but in a lack of will and courage… Dare to know! [Semper aude!] Have the courage to use your own reason! This is the motto of the Enlightenment!

[...] In the percolation through society of this spirit of critical, confident independence, conversation played an indispensable role. It flourished in the clubs and societies that proliferated in the Prussian lands…

The conversation… also took place in print. One of the distinctive features of the periodical literature of this era was its discursive, dialogical character. Many of the articles printed in the Berlin Monthly (Berlinische Monatsschrift), for example, were in fact letters to the editor from members of the public… The Berlin Monthly was thus above all a forum in print that… was not conceived as fodder for an essentially passive constituency of cultural consumers. It aimed to provide the public with the means of reflecting upon itself and its foremost preoccupations.

In other words, the strength and integrity of the Prussian state came not from the King or the bureaucrats telling everyone how things worked, but from people engaging in an on-going conversation about their own society.

In the age of “emerging social media”, this sounds very familiar…

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“The great personal computer con” (1984)

Stilgherrian — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 01:23:41 +0000

I just stumbled across a great article from the November 1984 edition of Creative Computing magazine where Tim Hartnell claims “those who market personal computers have been conning us for years.”

There are two main approaches they use. The first one runs like this: “Buy a computer or your child will be hopelessly left behind at school and will be handicapped for life.” I reject these claims absolutely because (a) they attempt to arouse parental guilt and feelings of inadequacy; and (b) because they are just plain lies. This direction can hardly, to my mind, be one in which the answer to “what do you need a personal computer for?” can be found.

The second main way to sell personal computers seems to be the “use the computer as a Gee Whiz Aid around the house.” Balance your checkbook on it, store recipes on it, catalog your books.

It’s a hoot.

But I particularly like his final point, ‘cos it follows on from my comment about appropriate tools.

We are still at the horse and buggy stage of computing. At present, computers are pretty dumb and in need of constant direction… I believe that fairly soon (within six years) computers will be much like present day telephones.

You don’t need an instruction book or a four-week course to use the telephone. You see someone do it or you have 12 seconds of instruction and you can use a phone for life.

This will happen with computers. And when it does, when you can just get one, talk to it and get it to talk back to you and do what you want it to do without hassle or misunderstanding, the personal computer will really have arrived.

6 years, eh? [smirks] What’s actually happened, of course, is that the telephone has become like the computer. My Nokia N80 has a 128-page user’s guide and needs software updates!

[Photo: Olivetti M24 personal computer, 1994. Hat-tip to Frontier Electronics.]

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Remembering Winston Churchill

Stilgherrian — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:10:33 +0000

“On this day in 1965, Winston Churchill died at the ripe old age of 90. He drank a bottle of champagne at lunch every day, took a proper nap in the afternoon, smoked huge cigars incessantly, ate a hearty dinner with wine every evening and finished off each day with copious quantities of brandy. Truly, an example to us all.” Indeed. Hat-tip to Memex 1.1.

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Hitler not such a monster after all?

Stilgherrian — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:26:12 +0000

What do you think of Daniel Eatock’s “modern” version of Adolf Hitler (pictured)? He actually looks quite striking, does he not? Follow the link and you’ll see a similar treatment of Winston Churchill too.

Whenever we see Hitler on TV, he’s rendered in slow motion and we hear the droning, threatening music. The message is extremely unsubtle: This Man Is A Monster.

I think it’s dangerous to depict Hitler that way.

Yes, of course Hitler was a monster. But if we ever need to deal with another charismatic, psychotic, genocidal maniac there won’t be some invisible orchestra playing the theme from Jaws so we can spot him. We’ll have to figure it out for ourselves.

That’ll be tough. Just as Hitler and his mates used the best media technology and techniques of their age to craft their public image, any new Hitler-esque politician will do the same. Their PR agency will craft an image we can relate to. If they’re a Rising Star of politics, the magazines will commission photo shoots — and it’ll all look something like this photo.

Remember, Hitler was Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938. In 1942 it was Joseph Stalin. History has since decided they were probably not the best of people.

(In Time’s defence, I should point out that their Person of the Year, as they call it now, is for the man, woman, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that “for better or for worse… has done the most to influence the events of the year.” Certainly Hitler influenced the events of 1938!)

While Hitler did personally order one of the greatest genocides in history, he was also legally elected Chancellor of Germany by ordinary people who, presumably, were not monsters. As I said in a previous post:

It’s easy to forget that Hitler was head of the National Socialist Party from 1921, fully 12 years before he became Chancellor in 1933. And it was another 6 years before WWII officially kicked off with the invasion of Poland…

My guess is that for the vast majority of people the rise of Hitler had very little impact on day-to-day life — just as today the distant wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have virtually no discernible impact on my life in Sydney. Nor do the many minor changes to our laws which increase the powers of central government without any balancing increases in our own ability to hold that government accountable.

In the summer of 1932, a few politically-aware people sitting in sunny cafés might have discussed that odd Mr Hitler’s failed run for the presidency, but I doubt anyone would have seen it as heralding global war.

Sixty years on from WWII, we know the symbols of storm troopers and swastikas mean “bad”. I suppose that’s why I keep banging on about human rights. We won’t know what the new symbols of evil will be until it’s too late. We need to be alert to the actions, and nip the problem in the bud.

[Hat tip to Memex 1.1. And yes, the title of the article is link bait. Watch them swarm...]

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Bring back real government communication, I say!

Stilgherrian — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:42:00 +0000

I’m sick of the dull, bureaucratic PR-speak that most politicians use. I’d like to see Chairman Rudd use some direct, more colourful language — not just mentioning Iced VoVos from time to time.

I’m currently reading Iron Kingdom: the rise and downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. There’s some fine examples of what I mean in these marginal notes written by King Frederick William I in government papers from the 1730s (p.78):

Responding to a proposal that von Holtzendorf be sent to Denmark (presumably as an ambassador): “To gallows with Hotzedorff [sic] how dare you sujest me this rogue but as he’s a curr he’s good enough for the gallows go tell hym that.”
Noting a report from Kuhlwein: “Kuhlwein is an idiott he can kis my arss.”

Now how should Kevin Rudd respond to some of the questions being asked of him in the media this week?

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Nixon & Kissinger on Reagan: “His brains are negligible”

Stilgherrian — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 12:22:35 +0000

Richard Nixon’s White House tapes continue to amuse. Here’s an exchange between him and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

President Nixon: What’s your evaluation of Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he’s a… actually I think he’s a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains

Kissinger: Well, his brains, are negligible. I…

President Nixon: He’s really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He’s shallow. He’s got no… he’s an actor. He… When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” [Chuckles.] That’s really an actor’s approach to foreign policy.

Hat tip to Marc Andreessen. I’ve cleaned up the punctuation a bit.

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Colossus reborn! And the race is on…

Stilgherrian — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:48:33 +0000

Colossus, the world’s first programmable digital computer that Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park used to crack the German Enigma code in WWII, is being rebuilt.

And what’s even more cool, it’s going to be used in a race against a modern PC to crack codes!

Tony Sale and his team of British vintage computer enthusiasts have a job a head of them, as the original Colossus machines were destroyed at the end of WWII. However the surviving Colossus engineers have been found, and they’re on the case.

Hat tip to Boing Boing.

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The Space Age is Dead

Stilgherrian — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:46:31 +0000

What has happened to our sense of adventure? 50 years ago today that Russian metal thing (left) went “Beep, beep, beep” and we were thrust into the Space Age. But now the Space Age is dead.

On 4 October 1957, it was a beach ball with a beeper inside. A month later, 3 November, it was a differently-shaped Russian metal thing with a dog inside.

“Jay-zus,” thought America, collectively. “Those goddam Commies have gotten into space! And they’ve got The Bomb.” They called it “the Sputnik Crisis” and the US created ARPA (which eventually developed the Internet) and New Math (which created a huge market in hula hoops for primary schools).

The first human in space was in 1961. And only eight years later people were walking on the moon.

But now, in 2007, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been to the moon. Indeed, it’s been 35 years since anyone’s been more than 480km from Earth.

I could write an essay on the death of the Space Age — but amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson has already done it. His impassioned plea for space makes the point that it’ll be the commercial mavericks who create our future in space, not the slow-moving international “cooperation” which created the lame ISS — and certainly not boring old farts like NASA.

What the hell were we thinking? No, seriously, what the hell were we thinking? We had a beach-head in space; we’d stepped off the Earth and started to become a multi-planet species, a species capable of surviving an asteroid impact, or a nuclear war, or population crises. We’d just started to Think Big, to dare to dream, to look beyond our own close horizon to the world beyond, and we turned away from it all. We ran back from the Moon with our tail between our legs, whimpering, cowering from the darkness, frightened by its immensity.

Watching shuddery footage of Neil Armstrong descending Eagle’s ladder, and of Dave Scott standing wide-eyed with wonder on the edge of Hadley Rille, the historians of the future, sitting around their holographic displays in the grand museums and universities of the worlds circling 51 Pegasi and other exotic star systems will shake their heads in disbelief and pity and contempt at what we did after Apollo. They’ll think us timid at best, cowards at worst, for how we fled from the future. They’ll debate endlessly the reasons why, instead of keeping going, instead of settling the Moon, reaching out for Mars and spreading across the solar system as is our destiny we came home, shut the door, turned off all the lights and went to bed, pulling the covers over our heads so we wouldn’t have to see the Moon and planets and stars shining seductively through the window.

God, if we’d just kept going… don’t you ever wonder what it would be like now? What kind of world we would be living in?

…

It makes me want to scream at the sky “I’m sorry! We were stupid! Forgive us!” and hope my words reach the citizens of the future.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

I agree with Stuart’s point. Indeed, I’ve written before about the glory of Mars and why the US space program is shite. But where is that sense of adventure?