Back when everyone went bonkers over Six Apart’s licensing scheme for Movable Type 3.0 (myself included), it looked like people would be fleeing MT in droves. My worries at the time centered mainly on the fact that as a developer, especially one who tends to take on underfunded projects, I was at the mercy of Six Apart if they started aiming for the corporate market and priced people like me out of using their software. “Geez,” said I, “maybe I’d better just switch over to open source stuff, ’cause then I’ll always be free.”

The lesson of the past five months has essentially been: um nope. Two main reasons for this…

First, I actually tried using WordPress for a freelance blog project, and realized that it was more than worth paying for the polished backend and database schema of MT if I’m designing for less computer-literate users.

Secondly, Six Apart sprang into action like no company I’ve ever seen. I’d mostly just like to echo Brad Choate’s thoughts on the matter:

Say what you will about the whole MT 3.0D licensing debacle, Six Apart is an awesome company.

They’ve really worked hard to resolve the public relations nightmare they found themselves in last month. And they’ve made changes which should appeal to most everyone. Sure, they made some mistakes. What company doesn’t?

What they continue to get right is that they listen and respond. And it perfectly demonstrates the power of the software they produce. Especially when it comes to corporate-to-user communications.

…

I tell you, this is lightning fast response. And unheard-of behavior for a corporation. Typically, a corporation sets pricing for their products and customers just have to deal. The level of outrage from Movable Type users is proof positive that Movable Type is a product that is dear to many. The swift and gracious response on the part of Six Apart shows their commitment to their users and to the MT community.

In the months since, I’ve interacted personally with people on the Six Apart sales team regarding multiple projects, and I’ve been quite impressed with how responsive and willing to work with customers they’ve been. In sum, please consider my “sky is falling” panic retracted, and my faith in Six Apart and their software fully restored.

Now, the true story comes out from the owners of factcheck.com, and it’s a beauty:

The website “factcheck.com” is operated by Name Administration Inc., a privately held company based in the Cayman Islands. Traditionally, internet addresses ending in “.com” have been intended for commercial purposes, while “.org” has been intended for use by non-profit organizations, such as the “factcheck.org” website operated by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Name Administration Inc. is a leading domain name administrator, website developer and internet traffic syndicator. Name Administration Inc. utilizes a portfolio of generic domain names, such as antarctica.com, lipbalm.com, and others as stand alone websites which collectively form an integrated advertising network offering users relevant paid search advertisements and information. “Factcheck.com” was registered by Name Administration long before the U.S. vice presidential debate for use in providing a directory of commercial providers of information resources relevant to the generic term “fact check”.

When Mr. Cheney mis-spoke, viewers heeded his advice and visited factcheck.com in staggeringly large numbers. Name Administration re-directed this traffic for several reasons – to protect our servers from the potential for damage caused by Mr. Cheney’s error, and as a service to our advertisers. Our advertisers intend to pay for potential customers to their websites instead of observers of political current events.

Name Administration re-directed those visitors to a website relevant to U.S. politics. Name Administration chose the website of investor, philanthropist, and political activist Mr. George Soros, because his website is well-funded, does not seek to raise funds from visitors, and had greater capacity to absorb the load of visitors, reaching over 100 visitors per second during peak times after the debate. An administrator for the Annenberg Public Policy Center has since informed us that their web server system would have been severely crippled by the load, had we directed the traffic to them. Contrary to some imaginative rumors spun by some, our action was undertaken on a voluntary and emergency basis, with no prior communication or consultation with the Soros organization. As confirmed by our legal counsel in response to media inquiries, Name Administration Inc. has not been offered, and has not sought, any inducement, compensation, or other consideration from any individual or organization for re-directed the resulting web traffic.

Traffic to factcheck.com has begun to return to normal levels, and Name Administration Inc. has restored the website to its original and intended use. Name Administration Inc. wishes the citizens of the United States well in the selection of their leaders, whose actions can sometimes have unintended consequences beyond the borders of the United States.

The last paragraph just makes me chuckle…

I decided to go (and convinced Jenny to come with me) based on my appreciation for Wallace’s prose – he’s one of my favorite writers, and reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was a revelation to me as I realized that his writing sounded like the inside of my 20 year-old head (an experience that’s only happened a few other times, most notably when I read Douglas Coupland for the first time). In person, he didn’t disappoint, seeming just funny and genuine and like the sort of guy I’d have hung out with a lot in college.

As much as I enjoyed DFW’s end of the conversation, I have to say that George Saunders more than held his own, and I can’t believe that a writer who’s this smart and funny hasn’t crossed my radar. Like, ever. I left with the desire to go buy a few of his books and if he’s anywhere near as engaging in print as he is in person, I’ll be a happy reader.

Their conversation ranged across the landscape of writing, and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice here because I was so enthralled that it didn’t occur to me to take notes until about halfway through, at which point I realized that I didn’t have any paper on me anyways (and wasn’t feeling nearly dorky enough to crack open the laptop and start typing away). One thing that particularly struck me, however, was the fact that both of these guys have teaching gigs, Wallace at Pomona and Saunders at Syracuse, and they kept referring to their students and seminars throughout the two hours. It’s clear that teaching isn’t just a day job to either of them, but at the same time it wasn’t obvious exactly how central being a teacher was to either of their identities. Regardless, I have to admit that I’m thoroughly envious of any student who gets to take a seminar from either writer.

All in all, this was the best Q&A I’ve been to in years, on a par with the
Evening with Kevin Smith that I went to at Cornell. While both events suffered from the unavoidable “poser-who-wants-the-validation-of-the-famous-guy(s)” sort of questions, in both cases the sheer coolness of the people on stage triumphed in the end. Without a doubt, this was the best two hours waiting in line that I’ve spent in some time.²

——
¹ This may be the most hyperlink-rich sentence I’ve ever written.
² Speaking of which, here’s an interesting question – I show up at 5:15 and there’s no line, just a bunch of people milling around in the lobby of the Public Theater. I walk up to the table that’s obviously set up to dispense tickets, and ask the two guys standing in front of it whether they’re in line for the Q&A. “Nope,” one says. Immediately, a woman nearby walks over, asks us if we’re in line. “Sure, why not?” says the other guy. “Yup, we’re the line, I guess,” I add. The woman stands behind us, and within ten seconds, the entire population of the lobby (maybe 30 people or so) has coalesced into a line behind her. Hence the question – at an event like this where free tickets are being given out, how many people does it take to form the nucleus for a line, tipping the crowd from chaos into order?

The speakers were Anil Dash, of Six Apart fame, Michael Weiksner of E the People and Jay Rosen of the NYU Department of Journalism. Jeff Jarvis was on the side of the room and did a good job of blogging the whole thing, so I won’t bother recounting the details (if I’d known that there was a live wifi connection there, I’d have brought my laptop and done the same).

I also managed to get in one of the only questions/comments, about the difficulty doing the day-to-day identity management that’s part and parcel of being an interdisciplinary scholar while maintaining a blog (sort of a variation on the necessity of envisioning your audience and writing for them). Sadly, there was little time whatsoever to actually discuss these and other issues – the speakers ran a good hour and a half, and barely managed to get ideas on the table, much less have a discussion to chew them over. Someday, it’ll be really fascinating to teach a semester-long seminar on blogging (which apparently is happening at NYU in the immediate future).

I walked away with the same thought that seems to pop up whenever there are a bunch of people talking about blogs in one room: everybody seems to agree that blogs are interesting, and most agree that they’re a Big Deal, but the “blog” as a technology seems to mean different things to different people. For Dash, blogs are fundamentally an outgrowth of the personal journal, while for Weiksner they’re a tool to organize activism and for Rosen they’re essentially another medium for thinking and teaching. I’m not saying that these different meanings don’t overlap in all sorts of Venn-diagramy ways, but there’s still an awful lot of interpretive flexibility around the blog as a technology (as opposed to its technical details).

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday rejected efforts by the recording industry to compel the nation’s Internet providers to turn over names of subscribers suspected of illegally swapping music online.

The ruling from a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was a dramatic setback for the industry’s controversial anti-piracy campaign. It overturned the trial judge’s decision to enforce a type of copyright subpoena from a law that predates the music downloading trend.

The appeals court said the 1998 law doesn’t cover the popular file-sharing networks currently used by tens of millions of Americans to download songs.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~thon/SiCAF_Seoul_2003.wmv

(My favorite is “goals“)

If you’re interested, send me an email or instant message (STSJosh via aol) before 3 pm – that’s when we’ll be heading out. Or, you can try my cell phone…the number’s on my cv, linked on the right.

Oh, and the guest seems to be Will Farrell, though I’m not sure if it’s a live or taped interview (we got suckered on that count last week)…

My short take on the movie: liked it quite a bit. I had also really liked the second one (even more than I’d liked the first), so you should probably take my thoughts on the film with a grain of salt.

[spoilers below - if you keep reading, consider yourself warned]

The interesting thing about the film for me is that while it’s not the way I wanted to see the story go, it worked on its own merits, and the brothers W deserve credit for a wholly involving conclusion to their trilogy that treats both the characters and the world they inhabited with respect bordering on reverence.

If you’d asked me after the first Matrix movie what I thought the theme of the film was, I’d have said it was about reality and whether we can trust our senses – the good ol’ Cartesian line. After having seen the entire trilogy, however, I realize that the theme of all three was choice, not reality vs. virtuality. Turns out that the Zion/Matrix schema was a framework laid out in the first movie which was going to allow the thematic exploration of questions about the nature of reality, the importance of faith, and the tension between the natural and the mechanical, but in the end, the question of real vs. virtual was irrelevant.

I hadn’t quite seen this coming. Going in to the third movie, the biggest question for me was how they were going to resolve the fact that Neo seemed able to collapse the boundary between the two worlds of Zion and the Matrix (I’ll refrain from calling one the ‚Äúreal‚Äù world, and more on that later). As I would up arguing in a late-night diner conversation after the movie, Zion and the Matrix had been set up as ontologically distinct spaces, which one could move between through a technological interface. Movements could be in both directions – humans could enter the Matrix, while a copy of Smith could enter the Zion world. However, such movements were always through a specific gateway, a junction of man and machine located right around the pineal gland (where Descartes believed the soul to reside).

This distinction was gradually eroded throughout Revolutions, which opened with Neo having entered the Matrix (or at least some state of limbo associated with it) entirely on his own, without the benefit of the traditional gateway. While his mind returned to the Zion world through the use of a cable plugged into his skull (Trinity uncouples him when he finally wakes up on the ship), it’s clear that the relationship between Zion and the Matrix isn’t quite what we’d thought.

At this point, I was expecting to find out that Zion was another virtual world, which would mean that Neo et al were still in pods somewhere, leaving the story two places to end – either they are revived and end up in the really Real World, or it’s turtles all the way down and they’re forced to come to terms with the fact that they’re ultimately stuck in a world of someone else’s making. That’s where I thought the filmmakers were going, because I was stuck on the reality vs. virtuality angle.

Turns out that the brothers W were agnostic on this point. At the end of Revolutions, we don’t honestly know that the world of Zion isn’t virtually generated, and that there aren’t countless other layers of reality in which they’re nested. It doesn’t matter one bit. That’s not what the trilogy is about, so the question doesn’t need to be resolved.

As I read the film, the ending represents the inability of any one group to entirely dictate the choices of another, be it humans, machines, or Smith. As we learned in the oft-maligned Architect speech (which I totally dug, leaving me massively in the minority, but then again I also laughed at the Baudrillard reference in the first movie), pure determinism is a fallacy – the computer simply couldn’t predict every action of every entity in the Matrix, presumably because both humans and the system more broadly were so massively complex. This isn’t too unlike Stephen Wolfram’s argument in A New Kind of Science that determinism doesn’t necessarily equal predictibility.

In the end, what separates humans from machines is choice – at least, that’s what we’re told. Neo faces down Smith with the final words “Because I choose to‚Äù (keep fighting, that is). The Oracle and the Architect, the avatars for predictability, don’t know what’s coming next, but there’s an interesting slant to their final conversation – the truce between machines and humans will last for at least a while, then it won’t. There isn’t the implication that humans (clearly the agents of disorder in this system) will necessarily be the ones to disrupt things. Maybe the machines are just as likely to act against the humans, even though they’re not the ones with “choice”?

Just as the worlds of Zion and the Matrix are symmetrical if you take away the presumption that one is “real” and the other isn’t, maybe “choice” isn’t necessarily an inherent property of humans, but rather it’s simply an action taken by one party that the other doesn’t seem to understand or have a rational reason for. To programs, the actions of humans seem like choices, and vice versa for humans (think of the father in the station at the beginning who “chose” to send away his daughter for her survival). Maybe Harry Knowles isn’t too far off when he talks about the inhabitants of Zion and the Matrix as different cultures not unlike today’s various regionalisms – you can read these movies in various ways depending on your perspective and prejudices, not unlike contemporary geopolitics.