Reason Magazine - Topics > Technology

Lights Out at Guerilla Radio

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:14:00 EDT

Russ Mitchell at Portfolio.com blogs about the impending close of the greatest Internet radio service in the history of Internet radio services—Pandora.com:

The [record] labels are intent on charging so a high price for streaming royalties that Pandora and its even-weaker peers would be forced out of business. That appears to be exactly what the labels want, despite the fact that research shows these kind of services actually increase record sales, as listeners discover new music and reconnect with old favorites.

Pandora and others are willing to pay royalties but need rates low enough to make enough profit to keep the service going. Such royalties historically have been set by government. Pandora is trying to get the attention of Congress, while making clear that Pandora's demise would cause internet radio to be dominated by the likes of Clear Channel. In other words, a faceless company's idea of mass hit entertainment shoved down our earholes.

I agree with Mitchell that the average big name record company can't tell its ass from a hole in the ground (Record company visits Grand Canyon, wonders, "Why is everyone taking pictures of my ass?"), but I'd rather see Pandora crash and burn than condone continued government interference in a rates dispute.

What do you think, H&R pundits?

Brian Doherty wrote here on Radiohead and the future of music without record companies.

Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Oxford, England—"The good news is that no existential catastrophe has happened," declared Nick Bostrom. "Not one. Yet." Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute opened what he thinks might be the first ever conference to comprehensively consider the gamut of Global Catastrophic Risks. By existential catastrophes Bostrom means that humanity has survived extinction so far. However, he quickly pointed out 99.9 percent of all species are extinct. Bostrom cited the Toba super-eruption 73,000 years ago which may have produced a global winter that reduced the population of human ancestors to fewer than 500 fertile women (though some disagree). Our Neanderthal relatives died out between 33,000 and 24,000 years ago. In Our Final Hour, Lord Martin Rees predicted that there was only a 50 percent chance that our civilization would survive to 2100.

Bostrom justified the broad topic of global catastrophic risks by pointing to common causal links, e.g., super-volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and nuclear wars all have the potential to produce disastrous global cooling. Catastrophic scenarios also present common methodological, analytical, and cultural challenges. And, argues Bostrom, a wider view of potential catastrophes is necessary for the adoption of proper policies and informed prioritization. To assist in this effort, the conference is launching the eponymous volume, Global Catastrophic Risks.

Bostrom did note that people today are safer from small to medium threats than ever before. As evidence he cites increased life expectancy from 18 years in the Bronze Age to 64 years today (the World Health Organizations thinks it's 66 years). And he urged the audience not to let future existential risks occlude our view of current disasters, such as 15 million people dying of infectious diseases every year, 3 million from HIV/AIDS, 18 million from cardiovascular diseases, and 8 million per year from cancer. Bostrom did note that, "All of the biggest risks, the existential risks are seen to be anthropogenic, that is, they originate from human beings." The biggest risks include nuclear war, biotech plagues, and nanotechnology arms races. The good news is that the biggest existential risks are probably decades away, which means we have time to analyze them and develop countermeasures.

A small, and rather dapper audience gathered in the Rhodes Trust Lecture theatre at the Said Business School in Oxford to listen to Bostrom and keynote speaker, Sir Crispin Tickell, expound on the end of the world. Tickell, it turns out, is mostly an old-fashioned Green catastrophist. The main problems he sees are overpopulation and dwindling resources, with climate change thrown in for good measure. As far as I could tell, Tickell thinks that everything started going downhill with the invention of farming, and forget about the horror of the Industrial Revolution! Doom lurks in six big issues for Tickell: overpopulation, land degradation, freshwater shortages, climate change, fossil fuel energy generation, and biodevastation of species. He later mentioned a seventh factor, the curse of dangerous new technologies.

I won't deal here with all of Tickell's challenges, but it is interesting that he did admit that fertility rates are falling around the world. In addition, he claimed that since we are "close to running out of freshwater," that water wars could dominate the 21st century. Thus Tickell propagated the stale water wars meme that most empirical evidence has shown to be false. Transboundary water cooperation rather than conflict is the norm. "The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," Aaron Wolf, the Oregon State University professor who heads up the Program in Water Conflict Management, told Reuters.

While a massive reduction in biodiversity would be a tragedy, at least some researchers don't believe that biodiversity losses pose an existential threat to humanity. For example, Martin Jenkins from the United Nations Environment Program argues that even if the dire projections of extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct, they "will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." He adds, "In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms].... Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local."

Tickell indulged in the conceit of looking back 100 years to see how the world got to its happy state in 2100. By then, he foresees a more globalized world linked by instantaneous communications networks, where human numbers in cities will be reduced, not least because human population will have fallen to 2.5 billion. Communities will be more dispersed, agriculture will be more local, energy and transport will be decentralized. Quite idyllic. Except for the communications networks, Tickell's world in 2100 sounds a lot like 1950 when world population was 2.5 billion and Sir Crispin was a green youth of twenty. Nostalgia?

During the question period, Tickell owned up to being something of a neo-Malthusian and was eagerly looking forward to reading Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new book, The Dominant Animal. Tickell reported that he had heard that Ehrlich writes in this new book that he got his timing wrong on when the "population bomb" would finally explode. Later over a glass of wine, I pointed out to Tickell that this is exactly what Ehrlich told me when I interviewed for him for an article in Forbes magazine back 1990. I'm sure that he was sincere when he said that he was sorry, but he had suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere. About Ehrlich's new book, Crispin admitted, "I thought to myself, 'Ho, ho, the Neo-Malthusians rise again.'" Alas, they always do.

Tomorrow, the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks will have more edifying (and frightening?) presentations on proposals for recovering from social collapses occasioned by catastrophes; how to rationally consider the end of the world; how to avoid Millennialist cognitive biases; how to insure against catastrophes; how ecological diversity could affect human prospects; and the tragedy of the uncommons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

"Don't Forget the Children"

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:08:00 EDT

Flickr, the popular photo sharing site owned by Yahoo, took down Dutch photographer Maarten Dors’ pictures of a Romanian teenage boy smoking a cigarette, arguing that it broke the site’s rules for appropriate photos. Dors says he didn’t intend to glorify smoking, but to document the living conditions in one of Eastern Europe’s less prosperous countries. Someone from Yahoo put the photo back on Dors’ profile, but another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down a few months later. Someone else later put the picture back up, and it's still there, for now.

Dors’ story is a reminder that ever-increasing usability has been accompanied by the de-liberalizing of user rights. Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, warns against Internet users relying too heavily on applications and software over which they have little or no control.

Tony Curzon Price at Open Democracy sums up Zittrain’s position below:

JZ's impassioned cry in the face of all these attempts to move problems into the realm of authority is to “give communities a chance.”….If at every turn we acquiesce and allow the top-down “solution'', the Internet will have demonstrated its “self-closing'' property: the open system that shut itself down.

But what if Zittrain’s community model still allowed for censoring under the guise of “filtering,” and corporations assimilated the language of communitarianism? Below is Yahoo's response to the Dors case:

While mindful of free speech and other rights, Yahoo and other companies say they must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities—ones where minors may be roaming.

Guidelines help "engender a positive community experience," one to which users will want to return, said Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president for policy.

And below is an excerpt from the Flickr Community Guidelines:

Don't forget the children

Take the opportunity to filter your content responsibly. If you would hesitate to show your photos or videos to a child, your mum, or Uncle Bob, that means it needs to be filtered. So, ask yourself that question as you upload your content and moderate accordingly. If you don’t, it’s likely that one of two things will happen. Your account will be reviewed then either moderated or terminated by Flickr staff.

Also worth mentioning is that Flickr’s guidelines, full of community references, seem flexible and open compared to those of another popular photo sharing site, Photobucket:

Prohibited Content includes, but is not limited to, Content that, in the sole discretion of Photobucket:

is patently offensive or promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any group or individual;

harasses or advocates harassment of another person;

exploits people in a sexual or violent manner;

contains nudity, excessive violence, or offensive subject matter or contains a link to an adult website;

constitutes or promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous

Is Flickr, with its relatively mild restrictions, an example of a Zittrain-style community, in which users abide by a set of shared values? Or do these standards represent the “closing” of the Internet simply because the community is owned by a larger corporation?

Jacob Sullum wrote about Yahoo and censorship here.

Set a Camera to Catch a Thief

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:11:00 EDT

A rematch in the citizens-with-YouTube versus law enforcement wars:

Dave Johnson's motorbike was stolen. He wasn't lucky enough to catch the thieves in the act, but he posted a note on Craigslist to keep his neighbors informed. Turns out that one of his neighbors caught the troublemakers on camera attempting another bike heist. They posted the video, which shows the car and faces of the culprits, on YouTube.

The Sacramento sherrif's office is ticked off at engaged citizens for stealing their thunder using basic online tools. A spokesman offers a strange hodgepodge of reasons why the video shouldn't have been posted:

Sgt. Tim Curran of the Sacramento Sheriff's Department said releasing possible evidence in any case can damage the chances of getting a conviction in court.

"It pollutes the jury pool, if you will," he said. "A lot of times, things can come out from that video that the suspect can use in their defense."

But Dave thinks using YouTube may help get his bike back. "Any place that shows their picture is a good idea to me," he said.

The Sheriff's Department says that victims should turn over video evidence to their local law enforcement agency and let them decide if it should be released.

To review: Potential jurors shouldn't see all the evidence, lest they be "polluted"; the accused shouldn't get to use exonerating evidence in their defense; and law enforcement arrogates all judgement calls about evidence to itself.

More on citizen law enforcement via YouTube here, and me on NPR talking about the upsides of living in a surveillance society here.

Via Fark

"Almost, Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Tea"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:48:00 EDT

This month in retro-futurist news: The sad death of David Caminer, who "found the earliest ways to use a computer for business purposes, including standardizing flavorful, cost-effective cups of tea."

Caminer worked for a huge tea-cookies-meat pies-and-other-Britishy-things company called Lyons. The company needed faster clerical work to handle the math required to figure out efficiency stats and employee wages at its growing empire. In 1951, years before similarly useful* IBM computers were a twinkle in an American eye, they had a usable business computer up and running.

To help us laymen comprehend this development, New Scientist made this comparison: “In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet.”

All this brings to mind the greatest instance of automated tea in all of fiction: Arthur Dent's noble, computer-handicapping struggle to get a decent cuppa after the Earth is destroyed. The ship's computer eventually manages to produce a substance "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea."

I've never tasted the fruits of Caminer's labors, but I believe he managed to do slightly better by not asking the computers to make the tea directly.

More delicious retro futurism here.

*Updated: IBM had, of course, been around forever, puttering around with big clunky mainframes.

ICANN Embraces Censorship

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:34:00 EDT

The voting members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided yesterday to expand the number of top-level domains (TLD), or ends of web addresses (.com, .org, .net). In anticipation of the vote, I argued that more domain names would be a good thing, for the reasons listed by Jesse Walker, and also on principle: More choice is better than less choice.

But ICANN dropped the ball:

New names won't start appearing for at least several months, and ICANN won't be deciding on specific ones quite yet. The organization still must work out many of the details, including fees for obtaining new names, expected to exceed $100,000 apiece to help ICANN cover up to $20 million in costs....
The streamlined guidelines call for all applicants to go through an initial review phase during which anyone may raise an objection on such grounds as racism, trademark conflicts and similarity to an existing suffix. If no objection is raised, approval would come quickly.

So, what some people initially thought was going to be good for everyone is going to end up being good mostly for the special interest groups that have ICANN's ear. Not one to let the organization's history of bureaucratic failures get him down, tech guru Brad Templeton suggests someone break up ICANN:

In effect, allow a moderate to large number of largely autonomous, competing name managers. Each could have its own system, its own rules, its own prices and its own dispute resolution policy. Each would innovate and price to attract users and win the competitive battle. Some might be almost identical in function, others might be quite radical. Each would have its own brand—as a top level domain, and be fairly free about what was done below it.
The stripped down remains of ICANN would be a trans-national organization, beyond the power of any single national government, which would exist only to maintain the root servers and to assure that the competing name companies remain on a level playing field.

Thanks to Patrick Melody for the Templeton link.

"But the really new thing is that the authorities are coming to our attention."

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:30:00 EDT

The science fiction blog io9 has a great interview up with cyber/steam/techno-punk novelist William Gibson, touching on everything from the surveillance state to Godzilla. Here's Gibson's response to being dubbed a "dystopian" writer:

None of us ever live in dystopia. That's an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don't seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.

Whole thing here. reason's legendary look at the upside of "zero privacy" here.

"I Have All the Music from 1950-2010. Do You Want a Copy?"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:51:00 EDT

A fantastic, subtle essay at Cato Unbound on copyright from Rasmus Fleischer, Swedish historian and impresario of sharing site The Pirate Bay. If you're like me, you really don't know what to think about copyright law. It's obviously broken, but is there anything about it that can be salvaged for the digital realm?

Fleischer reconfigures the issue thusly:

The real dispute is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don't believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation.

One more reason the believers can't ever win: Remember that old bit of jargon, the sneakernet? You're part of the sneakernet (a subset of the darknet[PDF]) when you store stuff on a CD or a flash drive and then put it in your pocket and walk it over to a friend. Portable storage capacity is booming, which leads to this question, from Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson: "When music fans can say, 'I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?', [something they will probably be able to do in a scant few years] what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?"

It's dense, but worth it. Read the whole thing.

Energy Wedgists versus Technology Breakthroughists

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

This week the U.S. Senate is debating the Climate Security Act, a piece of legislation which would require the country to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent in 2012, 19 percent in 2020, and 71 percent in 2050 below what they were in 2005. The act rations the emission of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels by issuing an ever declining supply of emissions allowances. Emitters such as electric power generators, coal, oil and natural gas companies, and energy intensive industries like steel and cement manufacturers will be able to buy and sell the government-issued permits. This trading puts a price on greenhouse gases. The idea is that as energy produced from climate-damaging fossil fuels becomes increasingly expensive, industries, researchers and entrepreneurs will be encouraged to develop new climate-friendly, low-carbon and no-carbon energy technologies. But will this happen?

First, let's consider just how big a technological challenge it will be to cut greenhouse gases by 70 percent. Former General Electric executive Don Dears provides some sense of the size of the challenge when he points out that an 80 percent cut means reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from about 6 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) today to 1 gigaton by 2050. One gigaton is the amount the U.S. emitted around 1920, when there were just 100 million Americans.

Now let's widen the focus to include cuts that the whole world will need to make in order to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Currently, the world emits about 26 gigatons of carbon dioxide. In 2007, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that by 2030 carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 57 percent to 42 gigatons per year. Climate researchers estimate that in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million (ppm) (where there's a good chance that average temperatures would increase by less than 2 degrees Celsius) emissions must be cut by 80 percent from current levels by 2050. This means that the world will have to produce considerably more energy while emitting only 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. If IEA estimates of future energy demand are accurate, this implies that the world would have to find the equivalent of 37 gigatons of carbon-free energy by 2030.

So just how big is a gigaton? Cutting a gigaton of carbon dioxide is equivalent to replacing 1,000 conventional 500-megawatt coal-fired electric generation plants with zero-emission plants. Zero-emission might mean coal-fired plants using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, perhaps costing as much as $80 per ton. By some estimates, CCS would increase the cost of producing electricity by 25 to 40 percent. Cutting another gigaton would be equal to building 500 one-gigawatt nuclear power plants. The world currently has 439 nuclear plants in operation. One gigaton more would require increasing the number of windmills operating in the U.S. by 150-fold, or increasing solar photovoltaics by 10,000-fold. It would take farming an area 15-times the size of Iowa to produce the biomass to replace 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions.

The energy technology debate among those who are concerned about the dangers of man-made global warming divides into two camps—wedgists and breakthroughists. Wedgists are deploying the concept of "stabilization wedges" devised by Princeton University researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. They define a stabilization wedge as the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon per year by mid-century (1 billion tons of carbon is equivalent to 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide). In their analysis, each wedge of reductions is achieved using already commercialized technology, generally at much larger scale than today. The goal is for the world to emit no more greenhouse gases than we do today by mid-century and then steeply cut emissions to near zero in the last half of the 21st century.

Some proposed stabilization wedges include increasing the fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon (mpg); decreasing car travel for 2 billion 30-mpg cars from 10,000 to 5000 miles per year; deploying 2 million one-megawatt windmills occupying 74 million acres; building 700 one-gigawatt nuclear power plants; installing 2000 gigawatts of photovoltaic power on 5 million acres; and planting more than 600 million acres with biofuel crops.

Breakthroughists argue that the wedgist approach is a technical and political non-starter. In 2002, a number of leading energy researchers argued in Science that current on-the-shelf technologies cannot supply low-carbon energy at an acceptable cost. One of the co-authors, MIT engineer Howard Herzog, declared, "To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our energy systems while maintaining energy prices at comparable levels to today will take revolutionary change as opposed to evolutionary change."

More recently, passionate breakthroughists like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger claim that studies show that carbon dioxide emissions would have to be priced at around $100 per ton between 2010 and 2030, rising to $160-200 per ton between 2030 and 2050, to achieve deep cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Thus they argue that the wedgists are framing the energy challenge "as a forced choice between poverty and environmental ruin. With a choice like that, it is no surprise that the world has failed to make real strides towards a cleaner energy future." They add, "If policymakers limit greenhouse gases too quickly, the price of electricity and gasoline will rise abruptly, triggering a political backlash from both consumers and industry."

Breakthroughists point out that polls regularly find that people around the world are unwilling to pay much more for green energy. In addition, higher energy prices would mean that more than a billion poor people in developing countries will have to wait even longer to gain access to modern fuels.

So breakthroughists Nordhaus and Shellenberger are proposing "a ten-year, $300 billion public investment into accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy. The goal of the program is to bring the price of clean energy down to the price of coal and natural gas as quickly as possible." Even breakthroughists agree that the price of energy produced using fossil fuels must increase at least somewhat in order to encourage energy suppliers to switch to whatever new breakthrough technologies are developed. Wedgists like Climate Progress editor Joseph Romm dismiss such breakhthroughist proposals as wishful thinking. Romm asserts that ramping up energy supply breakthroughs would take decades and that the climate change problem is too urgent to wait for such breakthroughs to emerge.

Although the Climate Security Act does direct some spending towards low-carbon energy research, it is basically a wedgist scheme. If something like it is adopted by the next presidential administration, we will find out which side is right. If the wedgists are correct, cutting carbon dioxide emissions will produce a modest increase in energy prices resulting in the deployment of a wide variety of readily available low-carbon energy sources over the coming decades. If the breakthroughists are right, energy prices will soar provoking a political backlash. In which case, perhaps one need only peer across the Atlantic to the spreading protests against higher fuel prices in Europe to see the future.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

The Golden Collapse

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Where were you when the bubble burst, Daddy?

No, not the housing bubble (see Paul Thornton’s “The War on Renters,” page 19) and the ensuing wipeout at the exotic edges of the credit market, a contraction so grave that it has jeopardized such nonsubprime economies as Iceland’s. Nor am I referring to the severe early-’00s overvaluation of the U.S. dollar, a now-forgotten artifact of irrational exuberance that was nonetheless obvious enough back in 2001 that even a nonanalyst like me was urging Americans to enjoy those cheap European vacations “before the currency bubble bursts.” (The greenback has almost halved its value against the euro since then.)

I’m talking instead about one of the most beautiful and under-appreciated collapses in modern financial history: the great dot-com crash of 2000, when NASDAQ lost 10 percent of its value in just one day, Pets.com went from $1.2 million Super Bowl commercials to $82.5 million initial public offerings to full liquidation within 11 short months, and the nation’s professional chin strokers transformed themselves from envious and befuddled New Economy spectators to world-weary bringers of harsh business truths. The air was thick with a vindictive Schadenfreude directed at those Generation Xers who had the bad manners to make fortunes (or just an interesting living) while experimenting with new technology during what until recently had been called the Long Boom.

“One minute you’ve got zip-drive techies pulling all-nighters amid their look-at-me-I’m-wacky workstations, and the next moment—poof—it seems so stale,” New York Times pop sociologist David Brooks wrote in May 2001. “Suddenly, it doesn’t really matter much if the speed of microprocessors doubles with the square root of every lunar eclipse (or whatever Moore’s Law was).”

Late-breaking Old Media gold diggers like Space.com co-founder Lou Dobbs woke up the morning after, presumably feeling a bit ridiculous, while analog-world moguls like Pop.com’s Steven Spielberg and David Geffen quietly folded shop before the ice was sculptured for the launch party. Retirement-age investors who saw their NASDAQ-heavy 401(k)s cut in half seemingly overnight were derided as “greater fools” who got what they deserved for buying into the 21st-century equivalent of tulip mania. Even some of the tech industry’s long-toiling observers took vicious aim at the bubble blowers. In April 2000, longtime PC Magazine grump John C. Dvorak warned darkly (and inaccurately) of “a depression that will rival 1929.” Newly popular sites such as Net Slaves and Fucked Company reveled in the spectacular—and occasionally criminal—flameouts of such buzzword-slinging, broadband-dependent money burners as the Internet Entertainment Group (IEG) and the Digital Entertainment Network (DEN).

I was a gleeful participant both in the last great days of the dot-com boom (when I worked briefly at the aforementioned DEN) and the first grim days of the bust. Despite the considerable hit that the wave of tech publication closures had on the pocketbooks of freelancers like me, it was terrific fun to have post-crash sport at the expense of jargon-addicted IPO charlatans and Koolaid-drinking late adopters, and there was a hope in those days that the post-crash Web would revert to the individual, low-budget level of wacky experimentation and cheap humor. That hope, we have seen, has turned out well.

But what turned out best of all, and what has the most relevance to today’s various economic busts, was the regulatory response to the technology crash: a grand, collective shrug.

Like the subprime collapse of 2008, the dot-com bust of 2000 took place during a heated presidential campaign. Yet the tech bubble didn’t merit a single mention in any of the presidential or vice presidential debates that fall. The Federal Reserve responded to the 2000 contraction by using the main mechanism at its disposal: repeatedly slashing interest rates (a move, many say, that helped inflate the next bubble). The Fed is responding to 2008, on the other hand, by proposing vast new mechanisms for itself, including regulatory oversight of investment banks, new rules for credit rating agencies, and authority over such far-flung sectors as insurance and commodities trading.

Even the villains of the dot-com collapse mostly came out smelling like roses. Remember Mary Meeker? She was the “Queen of the Net,” a Morgan Stanley analyst who midwifed Netscape’s IPO and championed scores of others, including eventual busts like Drugstore.com. After the dot-com crash she was crucified as a walking conflict of interest, investigated for fraud, and quickly forgotten as a pop culture figure. Now? She’s still a managing director at Morgan Stanley, still championing the technology boom (this time, in China), and has long been cleared of all charges. Meeker’s colleague Henry Blodget, after paying a $2 million settlement on a securities fraud charge levied by then–New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, left Wall Street and founded the thriving tech blog Silicon Valley Insider. Even that stock-picking loudmouth James Cramer, who was temporarily disgraced for having said in February 2000 that Internet stocks “are the only ones worth owning right now,” was quickly rehabilitated as the ubiquitous host of CNBC’s Mad Money.

The only substantial “reform” that came in the wake of that crash was the disastrous Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, a make-work program for accountants that was more a reaction to the shoddy internal reporting of Enron, Adelphia, and WorldCom than it was to the fantasy-based price/earnings ratios of fill-in-the-blank.com.

What were the nefarious effects of the surprisingly laissez-faire attitude toward tech stock de-listings and baby boomer NASDAQ wipeouts? The Dow Jones recovered its 2000 highs by 2006, and even tech-heavy NASDAQ has more than doubled its value since post-crash lows in October 2002. The United States, led by the ongoing information revolution, has continued to innovate and thrive, with only a few minor macroeconomic hiccups in 15 years of robust growth. The broadband dream that seemed so far off in 2000 has long since become a reality: It’s YouTube’s world; we just live in it.

Eight years ago, as the freelance contracts dried up and the nation knuckled down for a presidential race that turned out even more tedious than predicted, my sympathies were with Tim Cavanaugh, then of Suck.com, now a freshly minted reason columnist (see “Classical Gasbags,” page 62), who wrote: “It was a wild ride, and now it’s over. The spectacle of an industry in full retreat might be good for a few chortles, but it’s the kind of laughter you try to choke back at a funeral. We remember the whole story; we know it was a golden age; and we know better than to join in the exultation of dot-com backlashers, old economy scolds, or now-jobless economic naïfs still excited over the prospect that San Francisco housing rates might fall.”

In fact, the dot-com collapse was better in retrospect than we could have ever predicted in its wake. By becoming associated in the popular imagination with the kind of loathsome young techno-weenies immortalized in such films as Office Space and Startup.com, by headquartering itself in the always loathable (and self-loathing) San Francisco, and by spawning an entire self-caricaturizing literature of New Economy boosterism, the Internet bubble was allowed to inflate and burst the old-fashioned way—privately, as the result of transactions between consenting adults.

So add another arrow to the quiver of nostalgia for the 1990s. We will tell our disbelieving grandchildren that there once was a time when you could board an airplane without removing your shoes, travel all over the Western Hemisphere without flashing a passport or submitting to an eyeball scan, and engage in risky, exciting economic behavior knowing full well that you’d actually have to pay the consequences. (Well, unless you’re James Cramer.) Say what you will about Generation X, but we were never too big to fail.

Matt Welch is reason’s editor in chief.

I Cannot Live Without Books

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:01:00 EDT

Writing from the annual publishing industry brouhaha BookExpo America, which is being held this year in Los Angeles, New York Times reporter Edward Wyatt chronicles the fear and resentment sparked by electronic reading gadgets such as Amazon's Kindle. Have e-book buyers forsaken the physical originals? "We don't see people buying both versions," one publishing executive told Wyatt. "I think there is almost a one-to-one cannibalization."

For a more optimistic, or at least more idiosyncratic case for the printed word, the great urban historian Luc Sante offers this gem at the end of a long, discursive Wall Street Journal essay on the endless book collecting that has shaped and dominated his life:

I would very much miss books as material objects were they to disappear. The tactility of books assists my memory, for one thing. I can't remember the quote I'm searching for, or maybe even the title of the work that contains it, but I can remember that the book is green, that the margins are unusually wide, and that the quote lies two-thirds of the way down a right-hand page. If books all appear as nearly identical digital readouts, my memory will be impoverished.

The Birth of the Nuppie

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

At 31 inches long and 48 inches wide, weighing approximately 300 pounds, Casulo may be the largest, heaviest gadget in the history of gee-whiz technology. And yet for a few days in February, as news of its existence traveled from one trend-spotting blog to the next, the bulky rectangular box captivated the attention of those normally preoccupied by much tinier fare.

Created by two German designers, Casulo is an almost magically compact trunk crammed with enough stylish furniture to outfit a studio apartment. The pieces include a slatted bed frame and a twin mattress, a sizable armoire, a desk with a four-drawer cabinet, a six-shelf bookcase, one height-adjustable stool, and two square seating cubes that moonlight as additional storage space. Its footprint matches that of a standard European pallet, making it easy to ship and store. Its contents can be unpacked and assembled in approximately 10 minutes, no tools required.

Casulo’s streamlined surfaces are devoid of any non-functional ornamentation—the mood the system projects is one of clean, efficient, and fairly institutional playfulness. If there were a high-security prison for criminal Playmobil figures, it would be equipped with this stuff. But if whatever comfort Casulo’s spartan furniture offers the body remains largely untested—so far, only a prototype exists—the comfort it affords restless souls is obvious.

Thanks to an ever-expanding array of wireless technologies, we can now fit our jobs, our record collections, and our five favorite friends into our pockets. But even our most state-of-the-art futons and entertainment centers remain hopelessly immobile, their practical range limited to one side of the room or the other. Products like Casulo attempt to remedy that: Any day now, they promise, our physical property will be just as portable as our intellectual property.

No doubt old Tom Joad would be surprised by our kinetic aspirations. On one hand, mobility in the service of leisure is a hallmark of the richest among us—these days, you can easily spend more than $1 million on a luxury RV, and if you have a spare $100 million, Space Adventures, Ltd. will be more than happy to send you to the moon next year. On the other hand, mobility yoked to domesticity, mobility as an economic strategy, have traditionally been hallmarks of the underclass.

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, what the historian Carlos Schwantes has dubbed a “wageworkers’ frontier” existed in the American West and Canada. Millions of migrant laborers provided temporary manpower for the fisheries, mines, lumber operations, farms, canneries, cattle ranches, and construction companies operating in the new territories, and mobility was the key to their livelihood. As soon as one job ended, they hit the rails or the highways looking for the next. “There are 300,000 hobos in the country, and we want good roads so it will be easier for us to find work,” exclaimed Jeff Davis, the self-proclaimed “King of Hobos,” at a 1913 meeting of automotive industry executives in Detroit.

But however important this just-in-time army of human labor may have been to the region’s economic development, the hobos (whom Davis always took care to distinguish from “tramps” because of their desire to work) weren’t particularly respectable. Without families to support or mortgages to pay, these highly mobile workers, most of whom were young men, spent their money in saloons, gambling dens, and brothels.

In the 1920s, John Grissim explains in The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land, a nationwide craze for family camping inspired some car owners to build trailers comprised of “little more than folding canvas tents on a wooden platform mounted on a single axle.” Eventually, commercial vendors began producing trailers too; when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s and people started moving west in search of better prospects, they often turned their erstwhile leisure vehicles into home sweet home when they got there. “It wasn’t long before campgrounds that accepted these semi-permanent tenants were dubbed trailer parks,” Grissim writes.

Citizens with more permanent roots dubbed these parks “trailer slums,” and mobile living became the province of the poor—and, to a lesser extent, plucky retirees piloting Winnebagos across the country at a pace that would make even Jack Kerouac weary. But why let the oldsters have all the fun? Why should rock stars and power forwards have a monopoly on traveling from urban playground to urban playground in pursuit of new customers for their services?

In the current bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, the 29-year-old slackerpreneur and self-improvement guru Tim Ferriss insists that the greatest assets of the “New Rich”—and the keys to creating “luxury lifestyles”—are “time and mobility” rather than huge bank balances. To put it another way: That homeless guy sleeping in his own urine in your building’s doorway? He isn’t as poor as he looks!

Ferriss, a self-described tango champion and online dietary supplement tycoon, disdains the notion of slaving away in white-collar serfdom for the deferred promise of geriatric adventure. Instead, he preaches the virtues of economic autonomy, extended travel, and “mini-retirements” that last months or years instead of weeks. And thus Tom Joad’s nightmare becomes today’s white-collar dream. What is Casulo but the creative class’s version of a homeless guy’s shopping cart? And what are vehicles like the Design Within Reach Airstream Trailer or the GMC Pad but more elaborate and mobile versions of Casulo?

Introduced last year, the $50,000 DWR Trailer updates Airstream’s iconic, aluminum-shelled asphalt dinghy with an interior suitable for a Dwell centerfold. The GMC Pad, so speculative it doesn’t even exist as a prototype, is a concept for something General Motors describes as a “mobile urban loft” for modern city dwellers who’ve been “priced out of Southern California’s escalating housing market.”

Along with side panels decorated with graffiti murals, it includes all of the touches that deliver the “cultural & geographic freedom” that today’s migrant copywriters demand—Thermador kitchen appliances, a personal spa designed in collaboration with Kohler, satellite TV. “Whether located in walking distance from your job @ TBWAChiatDay, spending a couple evenings along PCH, or wintering at Mammoth, with the GMC PAD, home is where you want it,” General Motors advises. “And commuting is what other people do.”

No doubt it’s easy to mock the idea of, say, rebel handbag designers lighting out for the territories in their DWR Airstreams, mad to live, mad to be saved, mad to admire the matte ebony finish of their eco-friendly flooring and burn, burn, burn like recessed halogen lighting tastefully exploding across the laminate doors of the roomy cabin’s overhead lockers.

But it’s a seductive vision too. Ever since Huck Finn decided to go downriver on a raft for no other reason than to escape the bounds of sivilization, hyper-mobility has stood as one of the purest expressions of American liberty. Now, as gas prices and gridlock threaten to constrain us, as Minutemen and TSA officials do their best to keep the flow of human beings in check, it’s no wonder products like Casulo and the GMC Pad are so appealing. Shouldn’t we be able to move around the planet at least as freely as our credit histories and embarrassing party photos do?

And must we really sacrifice comfort and style just because we want to live the itinerant life? In On the Road, Sal and Dean remain so committed to constant movement, one suspects, in part because the accommodations are so squalid whenever they actually arrive anywhere. In 2008 shouldn’t you be able to consort with winos and hookers all day and then, after managing your online dietary supplement business via your on-board WiFi connection, fall asleep on pin-tucked Baltic flax linens?

Today’s merry entrepreneurs and migrant knowledge workers can combine the liberating mobility of the Beats with the liberating autonomy of having a simple, Walden-like shelter even Martha Stewart might envy. The dream doesn’t get any more American than that.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

50 Years of DARPA: GPS, Telepathic Spies, and Bionic Arms

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:22:00 EDT

Whatever qualms one might have about a semi-super secret defense agency with a mandate to invent "surprising" military technologies, you have to give the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) some credit. It's not like with the space program: All they can claim to have contributed to civilian life is Velcro and Tang (and even those claims are disputed). DARPA has given us the Internet, GPS, and faster wireless communications. They failed to give us telepathic spies.

New Scientist looks back at 50 years of DARPA, and comes up with a list of the good, the bad, and the promising. Of course, we'll probably never know about the really good stuff DARPA has managed to come up with.

Great success!:

GPS: We would be quite literally lost without today's global positioning system (GPS). But long before the current NAVSTAR GPS satellites were launched, came a constellation of just five DARPA satellites called Transit. First operational in 1960, they gave US Navy ships hourly location fixes as accurate as 200 metres.

Total failure (but awesome, and immortalized in science fiction):

Orion: Set in motion shortly after DARPA was created, Project Orion aimed to drive an interplanetary spacecraft by periodically dropping nuclear bombs out of its rear end.
The entire craft was designed like a giant shock absorber with the back covered in thick shielding to protect human passengers. Concerns about nuclear fallout and the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty ended the project in the early 1960s.

Promising:

Bionic Limbs: DARPA wants prosthetic limbs that are "fully functional, neurologically controlled and have normal sensory capabilities" and is funding scientists who are making serious progress.
For example, Video of a bionic arm built by the creator of the Segway shows impressive dexterity, while other teams have built prototype prosthetics controlled by thought alone.

Not mentioned, but something I'm pretty pumped about: A nasal spray that dramatically reduces the need for sleep.

More DARPA here. And Best. Logo. Ever. (above).

'Technology Is at the Center'

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Bionic Woman Tanks, Bionic Eye Succeeds!

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:43:00 EDT

The Bionic Woman television series failed fairly spectacularly, but the prospects for the bionic eye look good:

Bionic eyes that return sight to the blind might not be as far off as previously thought, with researchers in London carrying out the first treatment on a pair of patients in a study of a new technology.
The new bionic eyes are connected to a camera on a pair of glasses, so they aren't the all-in-one models you're envisioning. And if successful, they'll really only allow patients to see light and dark outlines rather than full sight. But still, to someone who has no vision at all, this is still pretty great news. And if they're working on it in this state now, you know that they'll have the camera in the eye itself and the vision improved as the years go on.

Via Gizmodo

Phone Power to the People

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:05:00 EDT

There are, roughly speaking, three broad approaches to Third World development. There are those who would preserve poverty by keeping development itself at a minimum. There are those who would modernize poverty by imposing coercive, centralized systems on indigenous societies. And there are those who want to make more tools available to Third World people themselves, to accept or reject as they see fit, to discover their own uses for the technologies, to adapt them to their own evolving ways of life.

One potential tool for autonomy, resting at the intersection between high tech and the human scale, is the cell phone. Sara Crobett writes in The New York Times:

Something that's mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal -- land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars -- can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information. A "just in time" moment afforded by a cellphone looks a lot different to a mother in Uganda who needs to carry a child with malaria three hours to visit the nearest doctor but who would like to know first whether that doctor is even in town. It looks different, too, to the rural Ugandan doctor who, faced with an emergency, is able to request information via text message from a hospital in Kampala.

[Anthropologist] Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone's ability to increase people's productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There's the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people's loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. Having a call-back number, Chipchase likes to say, is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move -- displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies -- can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool. Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

It may sound like corporate jingoism, but this sort of economic promise has also caught the eye of development specialists and business scholars around the world. Robert Jensen, an economics professor at Harvard University, tracked fishermen off the coast of Kerala in southern India, finding that when they invested in cellphones and started using them to call around to prospective buyers before they’d even got their catch to shore, their profits went up by an average of 8 percent while consumer prices in the local marketplace went down by 4 percent. A 2005 London Business School study extrapolated the effect even further, concluding that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people, a country’s G.D.P. rises 0.5 percent.

One unexpected outcome: a burgeoning alternative banking system.

It's also the precursor to a potentially widespread formalized system of mobile banking. Already companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their phones, they can then make purchases and payments or withdraw cash as needed. [Al] Hammond of the World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor.

"Your Matter Is Our Market! Your DNA Is All We Need!"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:39:00 EDT

Worried about "the elusive dangers of nanotechnology mixed with the recklessness [of] capitalism"?

Have I got the "interactive/walk-through sculpture that educates" with "sensor-equipped sniffing sculptures" for you!

"Inside the Wave" is a showcase of six Tijuana/San Diego artists. One part of the exhibit features disembodied Spanish, English, and German voices saying:

"Your carbon is our lifeblood! Your matter is our market! Your DNA is all we need!"

Whoever wrote up the event for the San Diego Union-Tribune seems as baffled as I am, noting that "It isn't entirely clear what the health effects are of the strangely-named nanoparticles (like carbon buckyballs or halogenated phenoxy)."

Read about what our future with nanotechnology and capitalism will be like in Todd Seavey's "Neither Gods Nor Goo." (Hint: no apocalypse, lots of stain resistant pants.)

Air Force News Flash: "Cold War Has Given Way to Cyberwar."

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:58:00 EST

The Air Force has been feeling neglected lately, since they're not very visible in Iraq and Afghanistan. They faced two options: (1) Do their (important) jobs quietly and be glad they're not getting blown up, or (2) launch a major ad campaign reminding America that they are in charge of Air, Space, and Cyberspace. (No word on whether they had to squabble for jurisdiction with the Department of Transportation over the Information Superhighway.) They chose option (2) for the low, low price of $81 million over the next two years.

I know this, because this morning I was innocently trying to read Slate.com when the screen blacked out. Then a logo appeared. It was Air Force, reminding me that this time it was just my friendly neighborhood Air Force deploying an annoying new kind of pop up ad, but next time it could be a "cyber attack." It was a (very) slow day at Slate (except this excellent piece), so I bailed and clicked through on the Air Force ad.

The centerpiece of the campaign's page is a series of stuttery, balky videos showing about how the Air Force is protecting us in "a changing world": "You used to need an army to wage war. Now all you need in an Internet connection." According to the first video, "the Cold War has given way to cyberwar." Who knew? Note: the visual for "cyberwar" in several of the videos is a newspaper story about an attack on Estonia. But whatever.

I'd post the video here, but the people tasked with defending cyberspace didn't offer me the kind of options that come standard with YouTube. In fact, I can't even link to particular videos directly. Also, anyone who uses the word "cyber" as a prefix this often is probably still hanging out somewhere in the late '90s.

I realize we can't assume that the technological and verbal backwardness of the ad agency in charge of this campaign reflects what's really happening inside the Air Force's "cyber defense" arm. But it's terribly not reassuring about the brass who approved this campaign.

They've mastered the art of the pointless Internet poll, though: A poll on the home page asks "Do you believe cyberwar is a possibility?" At post time, 84 percent of respondents say "Yes." Yikes.

Your Computer Is Smarter Than Your Doctor

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:09:00 EST

Screw Deep Blue, the computer on which you're reading this blog post can diagnose Alzheimer's--better than a doctor.

From a new study in the scientific journal Brain.

Experts taught a standard computer how to diagnose Alzheimer's from brain scans, and got a 96% success rate.
The accuracy of diagnosis from standard scans, blood tests and interviews carried out by a clinician is 85%.

reason pits man vs. machine here and here.

Is Second Life's Libertarian Experiment Over?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:31:00 EST

The virtual world Second Life announced yesterday that certain kinds of billboards will be restricted--those deemed to be "harassing behavior or visual spam." Second Life blogger New World Notes charts the rise and fall of virtual world libertarianism: "Philip Linden has memorably said he's building "a country" in Second Life. That country is beginning to look less like Amsterdam or Las Vegas, and more like Denmark or Singapore."

New World Notes chronicles the world's "experiment with laissez faire society" thusly:

in 2005, when a landowner began peppering the world with ugly billboard towers, Residents protested. However, the Lindens generally refused to intercede. "It's not for us to decide the relative merit of construction in Second Life," Community Manager Daniel Linden told me then. That hands-off stance has apparently changed. The same could be said of other libertarian principles, like legalized gambling, unregulated banking, and permissible sexual extremes.

In 2006, for example, Philip Linden refused to intercede against Ginko, the SL bank with a high rate of return, which many Residents accused of being a Ponzi scheme. That same year, in response to Residents protests against age play (i.e. simulated avatar-based pedophilia), Robin Linden said it would be forbidden "[i]f this activity were in public areas"-- implying that it was still permissible in private. Casinos and other gambling institutions, of course, were rampant over the land.

But then the regulations started kicking in:

The reversals started last year, continuing into this one. Age play and other vaguely defined "broadly offensive" behavior was universally forbidden in May 2007. Gambling was prohibited in July 2007. Unregulated banks were banned this January. This February's prohibition against "ad farms" was preceded by the debut of a Linden Department of Public Works, also overseen by Jack Linden, "all about improving the experience for residents living on or visiting the Linden mainland." Of course, some of these decisions were at least partly motivated by concern over real world laws, but the pattern is still hard to miss. The Lindens are restructuring the mainland into a communitarian society it once was in 2003. Expect more prohibitions to go into effect soon, also aimed at curbing other libertarian externalities-- bot farms, for example, and camping chairs.

Ah well, at least Michael Gerson will be happy.

Team Translation

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:52:00 EST

It was inevitable, but it's still awesome. Someone has set up a page to do a translation of a major work through a wiki. And what an appropriate choice: Check out this effort to translate Bastiat into German.

The idea is that books can be translated by opening up the text to anyone who wants to fiddle with word choice or emphasis. The real question: Who will do the grunt work to get the translation started? I can't read German, so I'm not sure how this one works, but it seems like a Babel Fish or other automated translation might be a good place to start.

What books would you help translate?

More wikilicious fun from reason here.

Via Marginal Revolution

Japanese Mobile Phones Smarter Than Average American

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:59:00 EST

You can't always get what you want.

But the Japanese can.

Check out this list of the five advanced technologies available only in Japan: True mobile digital TV (all the regular terrestrial channels at no cost), connected cars (with a navigation system connected to a cell phone), primary wave earthquake warning systems, and home-help robots.

And my personal favorite is Osaifu keitai--mobile wallets. They put my so-called "smartphone" to shame.

Phones have smart cards embedded inside, and these cards let you add applications like electronic money, your commuter pass, an airline mileage card, or a credit card just by downloading some software.
The strength of Japan's mobile wallet system is that the industry has settled on a single smart card, Sony's Felica. Once a person's phone has this hardware, he or she can add more functionality with software.

As a frequently pocketless woman, I'm looking forward to the era of implantable chips that function as keys, wallet, and ID. But until then, I'd sure take one of these phones.

For more reason on Japan, check out our take on Prince Pickles, the mascot of Japan's armed forces. Or read about sushi's global migration.

Mr. Brin Goes to Washington

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

This is what happens when you set up a Washington office.

One day, you're the victim. The big, bad, established corporations are using their influence with Congress to beat up on you and stall important business deals. All you're trying to do is defend yourself from the onslaught. You bring in a lobbying team to defend your reputation and keep an eye on potential future attacks, and then, the next thing you know, you are the big, bad corporation using your influence on Congress to beat up your competitors. What happened? Let's examine a case study.

In April Google set out to purchase DoubleClick, an online ad network, for $3.1 billion. The deal immediately encountered resistance from privacy advocates who fretted about ever-increasing stores of data in Google's hands, and from competitors and regulators concerned about Google's growing market power. The fear was that Google's already significant share of online advertising would be dramatically increased with the purchase of DoubleClick, leading to concerns about diminished competitiveness in the market for online ads. The prime mover of these objections was Microsoft, which lost out to Google in the bidding for DoubleClick.

After much sturm und drang, Google finally got the OK from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the purchase last month, and is likely to get similar approval in Europe shortly.

In its finding [PDF] about the possible harm to competition resulting from the merger, the FTC noted that "the clear majority of third parties expressing such concerns were Google's current or potential competitors." Surprise!

This is just the most recent chapter in a story that begins way back in 2004, when a few people began grumbling about privacy concerns with Google's email service, Gmail. A couple of legislators stuck their noses into the issue and Google started to feel a chill in the air. It was time, they realized, to set up shop in the Capitol City.

Conventional wisdom says that the most important thing for an up-and-coming corporate powerhouse is not to make The Microsoft Mistake: Bill Gates ignored all things political until he woke up one morning to find that his company was monopolist public enemy number one. Charged with illegal bundling of Internet Explorer into its operating system, it looked like the company might actually be broken up into small fragments, as when AT&T was smashed into the "Baby Bells." The battle that followed between Microsoft and the Department of Justice bloodied the company and locked in Microsoft's reputation as the big-bellied robber baron of the digital age (a reputation reason contested in our November 2001 cover story on antitrust hysteria).

To avoid that pitfall, Google decided to get some loafers on the ground in Washington while people can still remember the company's motto ("Don't be evil") and most congressmen felt rather warm and fuzzy about Google (with an emphasis on the "fuzzy," Congress is not remarkably tech savvy, by and large).

"We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way," said Andrew McLaughlin, Google's director of public policy and government affairs. Adorable. Harmless. A reasonable precaution, nothing more. Riiiiight.

As the DC shop got set up, things looked fine. Google's manifesto for its Washington office is good—really good. They're pro-net neutrality, the dullest important political issue on the table in America today (which is saying something). Reasonable people can disagree on the issue, and reasonable people do—the combination of boring and byzantine makes it hard to build consensus—but the logic of Google's stance is solid, and consistent with the rest of its policy.

Their position on copyright enforcement is moderate and well considered. They seek to maintain the status quo on liability for third party providers online. This is something Google has an obvious stake in, but most reasonable people, including many distinguished judges, agree that no one benefits if someone can sue Facebook because they were offended by party photos posted by a user.

But then, in June 2006, Google co-founder Sergey Brin comes to Washington and has trouble setting up meetings with congressmen. The shop takes things up a notch, hiring another dozen lobbyists and professionalizing the operation.

Last Friday, Microsoft announced a $44.6 billion bid to take over Yahoo!. On Sunday, Google exec David Drummond posted a note on the official Google blog musing aloud about the possibility that Microsoft, were it allowed to bid for Yahoo, would "attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC."

Apparently, Google has decided to take things further by opting for the "do unto others as they have done unto you" strategy.

When a company seeks advantage over its rivals by manipulating the economic and legal environment rather than through open competition, economists call it rent-seeking. It's not a flattering term. The temptation of rent-seek is almost irresistible, especially once you have a lobbying staff in place.

This most recent lashing out at Microsoft isn't the first of its kind. Last summer, Google took on Microsoft's Vista, claiming that the desktop search function discriminated against Google's competing product. Microsoft caved, tweaking Vista to allow Google Desktop. This was a pretty obvious follow-on from the initial antitrust case, and it would have been almost impossible for Google to resist the temptation to take Microsoft down a peg, but it's rent-seeking nonetheless.

Regulatory capture is a related phenomenon. When a company has a longstanding lobbying presence, there's bound to be a certain amount of fraternizing with the enemy. Government agencies often rely on the companies that they are supposed to be monitoring for information about the industry. The tech sector is particularly vulnerable to this problem since entirely new kinds of problems can appear rapidly.

In addition, while it's not technically a manifestation of regulatory capture, the way presidential candidates have been popping in and out of the Googleplex, you'd think it was a diner in Iowa, with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) both visiting early last year.

And naturally, inevitably, as night follows day, congressional anti-trust hearings are set to follow. The House anti-trust task force has hearing scheduled for tomorrow, February 8, with the Senate threatening similar action if Yahoo moves in the direction of Microsoft's offer.

Google can (and does) quite fairly point at Microsoft and say "They started it!" But moms never accept that kind of finger pointing after a playground brawl, and we shouldn't either.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Retro Hello to Tata Nano

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:45:00 EST

As the developing world snaps up tin can cars of the future (like the $2,500 Tata Nano) in ever-increasing numbers at ever-decreasing prices, doomsayers everywhere have jumped in with bleak predictions about pollution, traffic congestion, and the decline of mass transit. As an antidote, enjoy a little 1950s optimism about the glorious transportation future, filled with land-to-water RVs, teletype traffic updates, punch card vacation itineraries, fog "dispelling devices," and in-car radar.

Via Bronwyn Hartung

Cross-posted at reason.tv

MS Yahoo: The Real Deal

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:40:00 EST

I haven't read every single story on Microsoft's $44 billion offer for Yahoo! but the ones that I have fail to emphasize the major factor in Redmond's thinking: Google Desktop.

Forget search engines and queries and ads -- Microsoft really does not care about that. It does care, however, that more and more folks are figuring out that distributed apps can be very handy. That you can do all kinds of things with wikis. That there is no reason to ever run Vista as your OS.

This is not an afterthought for MS, this is the primary play. Microsoft cannot afford to sit by while control of the PC desktop moves elsewhere.