How to answer questions ineffectively
I’m subscribed to a feed containing the various political interviews on Radio 4’s Today programme.
Here is exactly how the typical interview seems to go.
Presenter: This morning we have Jane Bland from Thisandthat Regulatory Executive Board. Mrs. Bland, good morning.
Bland: Good morning.
Presenter: There have been so many calls to reform the running of Thisandthat Regulatory Executive Board - what are you planning to do?
Bland: Well, we are planning a comprehensive consultation where the community and the community leaders can come together and express their communal opinions on what we are talking about - we can then find out the underlying social causes for the problems expressed by people in this community.
Presenter: What’s that exactly?
Bland: We want to help empower the community around us, so they can excel at what they are doing as a community of people. We want to support this community through our regulatory executive power over Thisandthat.
Presenter: Go on.
Bland: Well, we are regulated under the statutory requirements of Suchandsuch Act, and so we are obligated to talk to this community about it’s problems, and through this we can excel at delivering change - and get the word out to the wider community.
Presenter: Thank you.
At this point, the audience sits back in it’s collective chair and says “WTF?”
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I got an email today from someone called Dave asking for my (now offline) transcripts of Richard Stallman’s talk at Ravensbourne College back on the 20th May, 2004. I’ve republished it here. I’ll be sorting through all my old text files soon and republishing them, since many of them have got lost in the ether. I’ve also republished Cory Doctorow’s talk. The “warts and all” versions will be reposted later.
Cory Doctorow talk at Ravensbourne College
Cory Doctorow is the Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Internet civil liberties nonprofit organization based in San Francisco. He is also a weblogger on boingboing.net and a science fiction author - his novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” which he released under a Creative Commons licence.
Privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association, cryptography and copyright law.
Copyright law is irrational. Copyfights have exited since Gutenberg.
Mathematicians threatened with prison time. Sklyraov - Russian equivalent of the State department - if you go to American shores, you might find it difficult.
New technology democratises distribution - usually at the ‘object’ quality than it’s previously produced. Gutenberg Bible - the simple principle is that there are more of it. Beautiful vs. prolific - prolific usually wins.
New media bootstraps itself in to popularity with the old. The player piano ripped off the original piano music. VCR put Hollywood and porno movies on to tape - no special VCR movies. The incumbents of traditional (‘old’) media, drip in to hysterics and predict the end of the world.
Player piano was the earliest form of digital piracy. Wouldn’t compensate the original.
“These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development… Today you’ll hear these infernal machines… The vocal cord will develop away” - John Philip Susan(?)
A thousand times more music hit a thousand more people and benefitted a thousand more artists and made thousands more dollars. If you pay them to keep on producing, they’ll keep on producing. Give them 2ยข per piano roll.
100% control to 0% control overnight - Vaudeville artists went nuts. We want a blanket licence - any radio station can play the blanket fee.
(Talk) radio was created through copyright fights.
The right to control copying - Betamax/VCR - going to destroy the American film industry. SCOTUS said that you’re right in copyright may or may not have existed - these devices are too useful for you to restrict. Substantial non-infringing use - timeshifting fair use. The film industry (Jack Valenti, 1982, the VCR - Boston Strangler) did not get destroyed - they made thousands time more money. Lower barrier of entry in to the movie industry - you can release on VHS. Laudable pirates.
American film was created by pirates of Thomas Edison.
Today is different.
The Internet. Peer-to-peer. General-purpose computers.
Loss of retail experience getting MP3’s. Digital has it’s own values: slicing and dicing, moving things around.
Incumbents don’t want to play. Napster offered millions, billions etc. Music/movie industries don’t want to play.
95% of music is available peer-to-peer - just accept that these libraries will burn down. Timeshifting PVR will be end of the world (ebooks will kill writing - SF, Walt Disney World said that TV remote controls would kill TV, music industries).
Digital rights management - an idea that offends reason. Information secuirty comes from Alan Turing et al. Channel security was enciphered. Really good codes - secret - scramble text, key etc. DRM is a magical form of technology - you have all three pieces. Anti-circumvention laws (DMCA etc.) make it against the law to break a code - it doesn’t matter if you actually break copyright.
Actual property (a DVD or computer) is yours. DRM lets moviemakers make their own copyright laws. Johanssen - hacked his own computer. Breaking in to your own house. DRM - subpoena powers (DMCA - hiss!) let a copyright holder assert. EUIPED allows a representative of a rights holder go to an ISP and steal them for 31 days. In the US corporations have had no scruples in this kind of actions - inkjet printer code is code, putting new ink in is a circumvention.
These sorts of things have nothing to do with traditional rights holders.
Super-anti-circumvention: trusted circumvention (“treacherous computing” - RMS) allows other people control how you use your computer. Anti-competitive applications. Reverse engineer your own documents (.doc files, for eg.), and if you break the TC work, DRM context. Owner override is a button that you push, push the button (why do you hate DRM so much? But it’s not for DRM!).
Retrospective extension of copyright: utilitarian balance of copyright. Maybe Ernest Hemingway would write another book if we gave him more work. But he’s dead! And he managed to write the book with the old copyright law!
Works will just disappear - 98% of works will disappear before the copyrights - it’s a library burning down.
Artists getting ripped off:
Moral rights law.
Ripping them off.
BURNING THEIR BOOKS - they disappear
Moral rights law.
Ripping them off.
BURNING THEIR BOOKS - they disappear
The last one dooms them to obscurity.
Vivendi/Universal sued Napster’s investors! Risk assesment litigation - Sony fighted for VCR. MP3 is scary. Sony Music Clip - looked cool but astonishing failure.
Big IT companies are no longer proxy - acquired by and partnered with the entertainment industries.
Broadcast flags. Data havens - hard to create. Bizarre dictatorships.
Internet casinos illegal in the United States, Antigua set it all up except bandwidth and electricity. Havens are overrated. When something happens at WIPO, it happens everywhere the Internet is.
WIPO says: The rights of people who transmit information are more important than that of the public. If you GPL’d software: 50-year monopoly of some software. PD work (before 1928) that belong to all of us. Download a PG text, the person who sent you that file will have a copyright interest in that file for 50-years.
How could it be?
Voluntary licencing
Compulsory licencing
Voluntary licencing
Compulsory licencing
Whatever happens, eventually the US Gov will realise that turning 70 million otherwise law-abiding citizens in to criminals is not a smart move.
Eventually, the companies will just fail to adapt to the changing times.
Doctorow asks whether DRM can ever solve problems? The claim made is that it ‘keeps honest users honest’. He illustrates with the Toy Story 2 story, about the woman who bought said DVD and tried to copy it on to VHS so she could put the video in the kids room without the disc being turned in to a coaster in five minutes. She was essentially honest, but the technology prevented her from doing what she wanted with it.
This lead to the point about how DRM affects only honest users. People intent on breaking it will - whether it be technologically advanced geeks who want to be able to listen to a DRM-ed CD on their computer or a professional pirate who is knocking out 5,000 illegal DVD’s for the black market. It only affects honest users doing honest things.
DRM and free software have completely different aims. DRM is security through obscurity (and threats) and makes criminals out of honest people. Free software, where you can inspect the source is truly secure - it’s really secure because people look at it and know it’s secure.
What can you do?
Join/take part in the FIPR and CDR
Use CC licences
Use GPL and other copyleft/free software licences
Campaign the BBC - push for them to adopt the Creative Archive
Campaign MEP’s and MP’s.
For those at university/college: push the faculty to remove packetsniffers, let people be free to take part in academic inquiry etc.
Join/take part in the FIPR and CDR
Use CC licences
Use GPL and other copyleft/free software licences
Campaign the BBC - push for them to adopt the Creative Archive
Campaign MEP’s and MP’s.
For those at university/college: push the faculty to remove packetsniffers, let people be free to take part in academic inquiry etc.
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What follows are republications of some notes I made at Ravensbourne College’s “Copyright v. Community”. Also speaking was a guy called Fravia who runs Web Searchlores - but who I missed due to (what a guess) our unreliable railway network. This was really the first real geeky event that I attended - afterwards was NOTCON ‘04.
It’s Sunday Monday Tuesday - and you know what that means: GILLMOR GANG! It sounds like they’ve been having daylight savings time problems. So have I. I’m all fixed up until the next time the DST’s change.
Another month, another rumour of Peter Vardy starting up Christian academies. Whoop-de-fucking-woo. “And then, kids, God piled all the animals inside the ark. He even sent magic helpers who cleared all the shit out so Noah could relax up on the executive deck drinking rum’n’coke and enjoying ‘flood life’.” Yes, that is what is being taught as science…
Oedipal Spam
Just sorting through my spam folder and I found a spam entitled “Your mother would love it”. Unsurprisingly there was a Viagra advert inside. Give me an ‘F’ for ‘Freud’!
Wow, and like this won’t infringe on people’s right to free speech: the Parents’ Empowerment Act will allow “Think for the Children”-ists to sue anybody who produces ‘obscene’ work (and we know what a flexible, essentially political, notion that is). Anyone want a bet that the people behind this are crazy Christian Reconstructionists? Actually, that reminds me - perhaps if this law passes, you’ll be able to prosecute Bible salesmen because you bought the book thinking it would contain nice stories about Jesus with a few nice moral codes. You open it and there’s so much violence and sex, it makes that German cannibal guy seem pleasantly harmless. (via)
New version of SubEthaEdit! Yay! Look at all the pretty new features: regex, autocompletion and IPv6 support. Shame that it isn’t compatible with 1.x clients. The enhancements will be good for single editors and it looks like we’ll just have to have 1.x clients kicking around for conferences (or just badger people to upgrade to 10.3 and experience the ‘joy’).
New version of SubEthaEdit! Yay! Look at all the pretty new features: regex, autocompletion and IPv6 support. Shame that it isn’t compatible with 1.x clients. The enhancements will be good for single editors and it looks like we’ll just have to have 1.x clients kicking around for conferences (or just badger people to upgrade to 10.3 and experience the ‘joy’).
On Xingtone and the bizarre twisted minds of record companies
Record companies are worried about Xingtone - a piece of software which allows you to take music you have, possibly, already bought and transfer it on to your mobile phone as a ringtone because they would rather charge you for the music you already own. While I deplore the idea of mobile phone ringtones, I deplore record companies attempts to infringe copyright law’s right to fair use even more. Presumably, the writs will start flowing when they find out a twelve year old girl has used her own intuition and skill to programme her phone with a Britney Spears melody. Does this mean the Old Motorola I have kicking around somewhere might have ‘infringing uses’?
There’s only one way of remedying this… order lots of copies of the EUCD and the new EUIPED (that’s the law that lets someone who thinks you might have infringed their copyright to nick your computer for thirty days… yes, it’s as insane as it sounds) laws in dead tree format, defecate on them and send them to our MEP’s in protest. Why? Well, it’ll be a laugh. And it’ll be about as effective as sending them a letter. (via plasticbag)
Blogging 101 is a good guide to how and why to blog.
This Register correspondent gets it bang on. And, for once, it’s one of those times when I can just about agree with Kim Howell’s stance. New Labour: New Nannystate. Yes, it is through concern for our health that our personal responsibility and choices in life get destroyed. Which affirms the need we have for a true libertarian alternative to Labour’s authoritarian regulation of every part of our lives.
On a related note, Blunkett is considering lie detector tests for sex offenders. Does anyone want to tell him that lie detectors are useless? So says Wired. So does the Washington Post. More and more and more and yet more. Am I surprised? Of course not. Blunkett has never let the facts get in his way of policy making.
Not that useful for me (I eschew all forms of Flash), but somebody might find this ActionScript language file for SubEthaEdit useful.
Who can resist reading about Francis Wheen crushing the anti-Enlightenment-ists? Not me! Spiked have a good article called “A brief history of bollocks”. (Via Gullibility isn’t in the dictionary)
Simpy seems like a nice serendipitious way of finding more links. (Mmm. Links. Yummy.)
The morality fascists have already got their filthy censoring hands on movies and computer games. In the US, they are currently pushing for the right to mess up television. Perhaps art is only one step away…
Unix philosophy. Definitely ‘w00t’ material.
Mail.app plugins and suggestions, found via Justin Blanton who has written this list of required OS X software including Mail.appetizer - a piece of software that will automatically show your incoming mail in a hovering semi-transparent window. Nice…
Dance Dance Resurrection - Jesus is coming to a games arcade near you! (via Boing Boing)
You know, if you stick to opinions and links, you’re far less open to accusations like this one. Stop all this “big headline” crap and blog properly and there won’t be a problem.
I’ve found a superb Google Maps mashup - TubeJP. It’s a map of London with the Tube map plotted on top, and with access to Tube and bus data. Blows London Transport’s Journey Planner out of the water.
“That Old Time Religion” is a set of photos by Jacob Krejci on religion in America.
God is a delusion, and the critics demonstrate it
One of the reactions to Professor Dawkins’ latest book, “The God Delusion”, beyond all the standard liberal huffing and sighing, has been the accusation that Dawkins is unqualified to discuss religion to the length of a book. The criticism goes “he doesn’t know much about theology, so he ought to stick to biology, which he seems to know best”. (Of course, this is usually coming from a journalist who, as Bierce puts it, “guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words”). One such critic has been the “literary theorist” (see Bierce’s definition of a reporter and double it), Terry Eagleton. One of his main criticisms of Dawkins is that he is not well-versed in the ins and outs of theology.
Having spent the last two years in university studying philosophy and religion (mostly Christian religion), I have to say that Dawkins has not missed very much at all. In his latest tome, he writes of Arianism - the heretical belief that Christ was not consubstantial with God: “What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What ‘substance’? What exactly do you mean by ‘essence’? ‘Very little’ seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’s book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology” (p. 33).
If Dawkins wishes to study theology, I invite him down to London for a day, and I will show him a whole library full of equally unintelligible nonsense (my favourite section of the library has to be the small collection of books written by people who believe themselves to be God). Though I’m not disposed to Marxist theorising, one could almost see that there is a negative disincentive to be lucid in theology, just as there is in other “theory” disciplines - when people see the storm that theologians are brewing inside the religious teacup, only fancy words can save them from the inevitable humour of the whole situation.
Dawkins’ reaction to the theology of, say, St. Gregory (on p. 34) seems to be applicable to all forms of religious fluff, whatever the brand. And it definitely applies to modern day religious fluff - such as Scientology. If I were to tell you that you have inside you an immortal and God-like spirit which you can access to make the lives of both yourself and others better by revealing to me your hidden psychological traumas hidden inside your 75 million year old spirit which lives inside a volcano which had been blown up with a hydrogen bomb (I apologise if I’ve got one of the details wrong - though I’m pretty sure it’s not possible to make it sound any more insane than it actually is), you’d surely look at me a little askance. The question has to be: if the belief I just explained to you is reality-deprived, why are the beliefs about monotheism any less reality-deprived? You don’t have to read the whole canon of L. Ron Hubbard’s nutty beliefs about alien spirits and pop psychology to dismiss them as obviously false. The argument that Dawkins needs to read all these esoteric„ waffly theologians in order to point out the falsity of their beliefs is, in my mind, no different (although L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology writings are probably lowest on the “comprehensibility” rank of religious texts).
It is standard operating procedure among all the theologians I know to dismiss Dawkins - usually in the same huffy tone as Dawkins’ liberal critics have (often peppered with the frequent pejorative use of the word “reductionist”). And that is because Dawkins is infuriatingly correct in his criticisms of religion.
The fact is that science and religion are not compatible. Both make claims about reality - but if you line up the results of the predictions made by the two, you’ll find that science is consistently adapting it’s beliefs to the results that reality provides it with, meanwhile religion is always trying to adapt reality to it’s beliefs - and then, under the duress of well-reasoned laughter, eliminating the more ridiculous beliefs they hold (and the many libraries of theology are testament to this effort).
Those who claim that religion and science are compatible are either missing the point or engaging in a theological sophistry. The theologian and physicist, Ian G. Barbour describes a four-layer approach to the interaction of science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. Upon closer investigation of the “dialogue” and “integration” models, they are either false (natural theology or Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” model where religion confines itself to questions of morality, ethics and ‘meaning’) or true but uncontroversially obvious (ie. that religious language, following Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, serves a different function to scientific language). Alternatively, you get bizarre claims that God acts “through the laws of nature”. How exactly? How is the law of gravity different with the added God factor to the law of gravity sans God? No doubt theologians will disagree, and cite some meaningless line of Scripture to ‘prove’ the contrary, but the answer is simple: if God works through the law of nature, God is then unnecessary.
This is exactly the point that one needs to make when confronted with the idea of, say, “Augustinian science” (a proposal by Alvin Plantinga to extending science’s boundaries to include “what we know as Christians”) - that it is absolutely ridiculous. The woman who believes that God has appeared to her in a cheese sandwich (who then subsequently put it up on eBay) is ridiculous to the vast majority of people, and it won’t be long until other “divine proofs” come to seem just as silly.
If religion had better evidence for it’s central claims, then “dialogue” or “integration” between science and religion wouldn’t be so desirable for the theologians who are pushing for it. They’d be content in presenting the evidence and watching the flock come trampling back in to church. The validity of science as a way of knowing is exactly why theologians want to have “dialogue” with it. The ‘compatibilists’ aren’t so eager to have “dialogue” between Christianity and astrology, because the latter is ridiculous.
A lot of the examples which writers like Barbour present to suggest dialogue are actually outside the realm of factual/metaphysical enquiry and are in the realm of aesthetic or ethical thought, or on what can be thought of as “cultural foundationalism” - usually taking the form of a post-hoc justification for Christianity by saying that without it modern science would not have come to be - perhaps, in the next sentence, the compatibilist can argue, as theologians are wont to do, that HIV and AIDS are fine, because they’ve provided the opportunity for modern science to step up to the plate and invent antiretrovirals (of course, if AIDS didn’t exist then HIV deniers’ children wouldn’t be dying of it).
If the criticism of Dawkins is that he hasn’t read enough theology (or rather, he hasn’t wittily demonstrated his reading of theology), then why is the same criticism not true of religious authors like Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, John Hick, Gerald Hughes et al. They have all, like Dawkins, argued in the realm of philosophy of religion. Plumbing the
The God that Swinburne tries to prove is the God that Dawkins argues against. If Dawkins is misconceiving God, so is Swinburne. If, on the basis of this book, Dawkins is not spending enough time reading Aquinas, Karl Rahner or Duns Scotus, then Swinburne is as guilty.
The existence of theological ‘tools’ like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral - whereby Scripture is viewed through tradition, reason and experience to form theological ethics - proves Dawkins’ point when he objects to the use of Scripture for moral guidance (“if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straigt for the moral choice without the religion?” - p. 57). Isn’t the point that Outler is making in summing up Wesley’s view as being Scripture viewed through the lens of the other three components of the Quadrilateral exactly the point that Dawkins is making?
The theology which sits in libraries like the one at my university is ridiculous but harmless - it sits there nicely, occasionally disturbed by a trainee priest who picked out the wrong book, but it is, to use a phrase from Adams, mostly harmless. Whether it’s this musty, unread fluff or the mind-numbing idea from Swinburne that human suffering exists so that humans can prove their courage can only have one response - laughter. To say that the sort of religion that Dawkins writes about doesn’t exist is to make a mockery of the lives of the people who died on September the 11th or whose bodies were forcibly cremated in the tube trains the July before last. If only the nutcases with bombs believed in the same God as the guilt-inhabited guys in dog-collars.
With the exception of some of the material derived from modern evolutionary theory, there is little new in Dawkins’ volume. One can find similar thoughts in thinkers like Bertrand Russell when he writes about how creeds, the Church and personal moral codes are all necessary in the makeup of a religious belief - and that “a purely personal religion, so long as it is content to avoid assertions which science can disprove, may survive undisturbed in the most scientific age” (Religion and Science, p. 9). In this, there is also the condemnation of charlatanism hidden beneath it - religion without creeds is not really religion at all (which is, of course, why the postmodern theological crowd that inhabit all but the most evangelical of theology departments, rather like it).
Dawkins is repeating old themes. But they need repeating more than ever. Russell’s little book on religion and science also includes this description of a BBC broadcast on Science and Religion on the radio in 1930: “Outspoken ponents of religion were, of course, not included, since (to mention no other argument) they would have pained the more orthodox among the listeners”. What we see when Eagleton et al. respond to Dawkins is a true intellectual pomposity - whereby one throws out all the intellectual toys one has in order to put people off the scent of actually thinking about the topic in hand. God is what theologians and theorists think about - not something that ordinary people can discuss and debate and voraciously disagree with one another, you know. In this stale climate, Dawkins’ book is an extremely well-written critique. And it’s doing it’s best to rile up exactly the people who deserve it.
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