Essay – Page 37 – Stilgherrian

18 August 200726 August 2020

The Core: “The KLF: Genius or Gibberish?”

Cover of The Core magazine number 6, 27 November 1991

It’s two weeks since I posted the last thing from my deep past, the Script Challenge, and no-one’s solved it yet. So I’ll post something less cryptic, a little less demanding — an extract from The Core magazine, which I worked on back during the brief period when I was cool.

Plus it gives me a chance to reminisce about The KLF.

The Core dates from a fantastic period of my life. I’d been working for ABC Radio for a few years, and along with club promoter Scott Thompson — does anyone know where he is now? — I presented Club Escape, a dance music program on Triple J created by John Thompson-Mills that aired in Adelaide in 1990-91.

Club Escape was hot. We had 11% of the total radio audience on a Saturday night, which means we probably blitzed the 15-25yo demographic. Nightclub owners told us their venues were deserted until the clock struck midnight and we were off the air.

It Was So Much Fun.

But I was getting tired of the ABC.

Dance music enthusiast Acb Tyson griped that there wasn’t a local magazine about dance music, and The Core was born. The first issue hit the streets on Wednesday 23 October 1991, and I left the ABC in February ’92 to concentrate on it full time.

I’ll write more about The Core another time. I’m even tempted to put all of the content online, since it chronicles an important period in the evolution of dance music in Australia. But for now, here’s an article from The Core number 6, published 27 November 1991. Enjoy!

Continue reading “The Core: “The KLF: Genius or Gibberish?””

05 August 200726 August 2020

Saturday Night at The Duke

Close-up photograph of fabric pattern on flannelette shirt It’s 8am, a crisp winter morning. 11C outside. I drag a battered flannelette shirt over my t-shirt — a shirt that’s now 12 years old, I remember.

I bought it at Gowings when I first came to Sydney, and it’s still wearable, more or less. Where will I buy everyday clothes now that Gowings is gone?

The shirt smells of smoke. Why is that?

It’s not the acrid stench of cigarette smoke, but the dusty odour of burnt wood. Eucalyptus. A bushfire? Ah, no, I remember now. Sitting by the open fireplace at The Duke Hotel… red wine… the memories flood back as the coffee kicks in…

Continue reading “Saturday Night at The Duke”

02 August 200726 August 2020

iYomu: “Social Networking for Grown Ups”?

“Every single person working in the media today who experienced the dot-com bubble in 1999 to 2000 believes that we are going through the exact same process and can expect the exact same results — a bust. It’s dÃ©jÃ vu all over again. And since this moment in time is only the beginning of the cycle, the best nuttiness has yet to emerge.”

It’s ironic reading those words by John C Dvorak the very day after seeing last night’s demo of iYomu, the “Social Networking for Grown Ups” website to be launched on 13 August. It’s also rather nostalgic.

iYomu is entering an over-hyped marketplace. MySpace is the biggest of the social media websites — pig-ugly and (last time I bothered with it) a tad unreliable. But it’s got 201 million users. If MySpace were a country, it’d be 5th-largest. Facebook is flavour of the month, “only” 11 million users but growing fast. Photo-sharing site Flickr gets 3000 new images uploaded every minute. They’re worth squillions. In theory.

Yet the vast majority of Internet users wouldn’t know what “social networking websites” are — indeed they can barely use email. And for all the success stories, there’s dozens of failures.

So as sharp-dressed Frances Valintine and a relaxed David Wolf-Rooney, both New Zealanders, presented their Vision to a small collection of eminent bloggers (plus me), I couldn’t help but wonder…

Will they become millionaires, or will it all crash and burn?

I also wondered how many times Frances would use the word space. I stopped counting at 15.

I’ll explore iYomu and report daily as it moves from beta to launch and beyond. I think it’ll make an excellent case study. If you’d like to join me and be eligible for the US$5000 prize draw, let me know and I’ll send you an invitation — though I’ll demand that you post at least one useful comment back and, if you win, buy me dinner.

(There’s also a Big Global Incentive to join once the site launches officially, and you’d be in that draw too, but that’s still a secret.)

There’s still one thing bothering me from last night, though. If iYomu is for “grown ups”, why doesn’t it have a grown-up name?

[Update: Check out this more detailed description from one of last night’s attendees. Saves me having to repeat the feature list. And also read my thoughts on why Facebook will beat both iYomyu and MySpace.]

22 July 200726 August 2020

Leader of the (digital) Pack

Today I answered a survey question which reminded me that so many organisations still don’t “get” the Internet. Or is it only a reminder that I’m one of the digital elite?

In total, about how often do you access the internet across all locations at home, work, and elsewhere?

The most frequent option listed was “daily”.

Daily? I “access the Internet” many, many times a day. So often, in fact, that I think of the Internet as “always there”. Just like I think about electricity. Or running water. Or air. When I think about it at all, that is. These are all things I take for granted.

In total, about how often do you use electricity across all locations at home, work, and elsewhere?

Electricity is always there, keeping my home warm, my vegetables cool. Those wires bring me a constant supply of energy. And those other wires bring me a constant supply of information — and pipe information back to the world too.

That survey question is stuck in the past, where “the Internet” was a special place that you “logged on to”. That attitude is reflected in another survey question:

What do you mainly use the Internet for (choose one)?
Email
Software downloads
Travel information and bookings
Downloading videos
Weather
Web surfing & Experimenting
Adult entertaintment
Banking/Financial services
Business and business research
Blogging
Chat
Community forums and discussion groups
Dating
Health information
Instant messaging
Information search
News and reference
Self education (independent of schooling)
Shopping
Researching product information

Well, I don’t know. Try this question instead.

What do you mainly use electricity for (choose one)?
Lighting
Heating
Refrigeration
Cooking
Computing
Health Care
Entertainment
Communication
Security
Home maintenance

How on earth do you compare the relative importance of these things?

OK, perhaps I’m being harsh. It would seem that for most people the Internet is still a “special activity”, somehow different from the rest of their life.

That’s continually reflected in research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Just recently they pointed out that while 47% of American households have broadband, 15% still don’t have any Internet access or mobile phones at all. In Pew’s classification, I’m an omnivore, a group which represents the “top” 8% of Americans — and presumably about the same proportion of Australians.

Omnivores embrace all this connectivity, feeling confident in how they manage information and their many devices. This puts information technology at the centre of how they express themselves, do their jobs, and connect to their friends.

At the other end are those who are “off the network”:

Some 15% of Americans have neither a cell phone nor internet access. They tend to be in their mid-60s, nearly three-fifths are women, and they have low levels of income and education. Although a few have computers or digital cameras, these items seem to be about moving digital information within the household — for example, using the computer to display digital photos that they take or others physically bring into the house.

I don’t have ADSL2+ yet, nor a 24-inch monitor, so it’s easy to forget that I’m in the elite. It’s easy to forget that 70% of the people on Planet Earth have never made a telephone call, let alone sent an email or created Facebook pages.

21 July 200726 August 2020

Oops, there goes privacy! So now what?

Most of the more enthusiastic web developers worry me. In their wild-eyed enthusiasm for the latest, coolest technology they seem almost oblivious to wider or longer-term implications. Nick Bradbury, creator of FeedDemon, a popular RSS reader for Windows, had an interesting take on this recently.

Back in 2004, I asked: “What are we actually building here? A lot of people in my profession wear rose-colored glasses and believe we’re helping to make information free to the world, but some of the early proponents of television believed the same thing. Are we really just building the next version of TV, one even more powerful because it knows your name and shopping habits?”

I thought I was being cynical then, but now I’m not so sure. Google continues to carve out a huge share of the Internet advertising market, in large part by figuring out what we’re paying attention to. The quality of the content doesn’t really matter to them — only the number of eyeballs they can advertise to does. Sounds a lot like commercial TV, doesn’t it?

So far, has the Web been better than TV, or just more targeted? And is it really worth giving up so much privacy in order to get it?

One of the biggest changes facing society right now is a massive loss of individual privacy. And one of the best introductions to the issues is Simson Garfinkel’s book Database Nation.

Garfinkel is a leading researcher in computer forensics, so he’s well aware that “privacy on the Internet” isn’t really about your email address being used to send you spam — despite that being the focus of most website privacy statements.

As he says in Database Nation:

To understand privacy in [the 21st century] we need to rethink what privacy really means today:

It’s not about the man who wants to watch pornography in complete anonymity over the Internet. It’s about the woman who’s afraid to use the Internet to organise her community against a proposed toxic dump — afraid because the dump’s investors are sure to dig through her past if she becomes too much of a nuisance.

It’s not about people speeding on the nation’s highways who get automatically generated tickets mailed to them thanks to a computerised speed trap. It’s about lovers who will take less joy in walking around city streets or visiting stores because they know they’re being photographed by surveillance cameras everywhere they step.

It’s not about the special prosecutors who leave no stone unturned in their search for corruption of political misdeeds. It’s about the good, upstanding citizens who are now refusing to enter public service because they don’t want a bloodthirsty press rummaging through their old school reports, computerised medical records and email.

It’s not about the searches, metal detectors and inquisitions that have become a routine part of our daily lives at airports, schools and federal buildings. It’s about a society that views law-abiding citizens as potential terrorists, yet does little to effectively protect its citizens from real threats to their safety.

Actually, you could argue that privacy has already been lost — we just don’t realise it yet.

It’s now impossible to drive anonymously across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Every mobile phone is a tracking device. Every web page you look at is logged by your Internet service provider. And a generation is recording every little detail of their lives in LiveJournal or MySpace or Facebook or whatever social media website will make all those look so last week.

My take on this?

Society will have to come to terms with the fact that everyone has skeletons in the cupboard — that joint they smoked, for instance. Roughly 1 in 7 of the men listed on birth certificates isn’t actually the father — but now routine DNA screening for diseases is uncovering uncomfortable bedroom secrets.

Many “bad” things are really quite common — they’re just not talked about. Our private worlds remain private. Or at least they used to.

We’ll have to get used to the idea that politicians, teachers, bus drivers — whoever! — are all flawed humans. We can’t ban those who smoked a joint or has “a history of mental illness” (depression affects 800,000 Australian adults a year) or committed a crime (copyright infringement is now a crime, you know) or there’ll be no-one left!

So long-term we might get a more tolerant society, with a more reality-based view of the world.

However in the shorter term I can see a decrease in tolerance. As new technologies reveal more of our hidden private worlds, people will be shocked to discover “all these criminals” and so on, and there’ll be a crackdown.

It could be an uncomfortable few decades.

15 July 200726 August 2020

The Internet, 1994

“A global electronic mall is under construction,” enthuses this wonderful promotional video from 1994 extolling the virtues of the Internet.

“Come, take a look at the future we can build together,” says Digital Equipment Corporation, once one of the world’s most important computer companies.

Here [on the Internet], the smallest of companies can search and shop on a global scale for the best resources and products at the best prices. Here those same small companies can market their own abilities and products in a global marketplace. This means a new array of risks and opportunities. In the future you’ll be forced to compete with distant companies you’ve never encountered before. And you’ll be able to expand to new markets at low cost.

Only 13 years on, watching this video is already a retro experience. The grey pages of the Mosaic web browser were state of the art in 1994 — pictures as well as text! 1994 is still a year before the Internet exploded into popular awareness. A year before Netscape and Yahoo! and Amazon.com and Windows 95. A year before I was headhunted to move to Sydney to play in the dot.com boom.

DEC logo

For me, there’s two levels of nostalgia in his video — nostalgia for the Internet before it really did become that “shopping mall”, and nostalgia for Digital.

Digital Equipment Corporation made the most popular scientific computers from the late 1960s. The PDP-10 mainframe (later DECsystem-10) was at the heart of every decent computing science department in the 70s.

But what every programmer wanted was the coolest toy of all, the PDP-11 minicomputer. From a programmers point of view it was well-engineered, it was designed for mass production — and it just looked so goddam cool.

I never encountered a PDP-11 in real life, so I never saw those glorious purple buttons with my own eyes. But at university I did play with its successor, the VAX-11 — essentially a souped-up PDP-11 with integrated circuits instead of transistors — and soon understood why programmers thought it was so good. It just worked.

The BSD Unix operating system which underpinned the Internet and which inspired Linux was first written for PDP-11s and Vaxen (the accepted plural of “VAX”). They inspired the design of Motorola’s microprocessors — clean and simple to program — which were used by Apple’s early machines right through to only two years ago. Much cleaner and more logical than the clunky Intel processors which powered IBM’s PC and its clones.

Digital made computers designed by programmers for programmers — it was as simple as that.

“Digital is here already as a leader in the field,” boasts the video. But alas Digital is no more. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” said Digital’s founder, Ken Olsen. But he was wrong. The minicomputer market disappeared as the PC revolution took hold. Digital was bought out by Compaq, who in turn were bought out by HP.

Look at that video a couple of times. Remember, that’s only 13 years ago. Now look at the Internet available right in front of you now — and try to imagine what it’ll all be like in another 13 years.

Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer and further observations.