Author: JP

I couldn’t resist picking up the phone and talking to Doc, especially when he came “back at me” after my Real A-Listers post. Take a look at what he said. More importantly, do comment and suggest the ones you think are Real A-Lister sites.

And while on the subject of Doc. I found out that my recent chat on Cluetrain Plus 10 (at 2gether08) had been placed online, so I asked the authors what they thought, with some trepidation. Here’s what Chris said. [And yes, I am delighted. Now all we have to do is to finish that book. Which we will, one day :-) ]

Censorship is not necessarily something that everyone experiences. Which is why I remember my first experience vividly. It was December 1975, we were fresh out of school and preparing to go to university, discovering new habits and freedoms, experimenting in many ways and places. Heady days.

They were also dangerous days, particularly in a city and state known for its intellectuals and their rebelliousness. I remember a bunch of us, all schoolmates, going to a bar on Park Street for a bottle or beer or three. It was a hot December afternoon, the 29th or 30th I think. We seemed a gregarious group, and a few regulars at the bar joined us. As did a foreign visitor. Who was a journalist. Who told us about this terrible mining disaster he had just come from, at Chas Nala in Dhanbad. Maybe a thousand dead. Very little in the papers.

We were youngsters then, still idealistic, not a shred of cynicism in the lot of us. And while we’d heard rumours about some problems at a mine, while we’d even heard the name Chas Nala, it wouldn’t have occurred to us that this was a censorable incident.

But it set me thinking. It was the first time I had experienced censorship, the first time I’d really understood the concept of a media-generated alternate reality. Until then, I guess I was comfortable with the ideas of poor reporting, poor journalism, errors and omissions, but not explicit censorship, unknowledge as it were.

So I spoke to my father — after all, the family business was journalism — and he told me about how things worked in this regard. I was soon to learn a lot more, given that it was the Emergency. In a matter of weeks, we were publishing magazine issues with “missing” leaders, with intentional blank spaces in articles.

[An aside. One of my favourite apocryphal tales about journalism, handed down to me by my father. The New York Post and the New York Star were at loggerheads, the air was blue with insults afresh. Somewhere in the exchanges, the Post called the Star a “dirty dog”. The next day, the Star’s leading article was brief and to the point: “The New York Post called the New York Star a “dirty dog”. The attitude of the Star to the Post is that of any dog to any post.” That’s all she wrote. Priceless.]

Since then, I’ve always been intrigued by censorship and its implications. As with knowledge, I think there are at least two types of censorship, tacit and explicit. If I know that there has been a filter applied to what I see and read, then I think of it as one form of censorship. Not knowing that what I see and read has been filtered, that’s a different form of censorship altogether.

Which is why I found this article in the latest issue of First Monday very interesting. I went to the site where they discuss the implementation of CenSEARCHip, and tried out their example. Here’s what I saw:

Two different views of one search. One from a US perspective, one from a China perspective. Search term? Tiananmen Square.

We live in a complex age. Airbrushes and Photoshopping. Hollywood-inspired DRM and IPR, ostensibly assuming universal human guilt about all kinds of things.

As the Web becomes more and more central to the way we do things, we face greater and greater risk of tacit censorship. It is up to us to ensure that does not happen. Before we lose the ability to ensure it does not happen.

Growing up in Calcutta during the Sixties and Seventies, I was brought up acutely aware of the role played by energy in my daily life. Load-shedding was a daily occurrence; this, given Calcutta’s average temperatures (27C) and relative humidity (over 90%), ensured that I have a disproportionately high liking for air conditioning and for ice in drinks.

It also meant that a sense of stewardship was instilled in me from an early age, particularly to do with the consumption of any sort of fuel. Even today, when I pass a building festooned with a large number of air-conditioner barnacles, I am overcome with a odd sense of waste.

Over the years, that sense of stewardship has permeated other parts of my life. Take food for example. As a boy I grew up believing the apocryphal tale that the USA throws away enough food to feed Canada. Never bothered to check it out, but had this sense that it may be true.

And then today, catching up on my reading, I came across this:

You can read the whole report here. The figure that most surprised me was this one:

Food waste represents emissions worth 20% of cars on the road? Wow. When you consider that there are some schools of thought that suggest the climate crisis is itself greatly exacerbated by industrialised agriculture, it does make you wonder.

By the time you consider the biofuels argument, it makes you wonder even more.

Rubbish has always been big business. There’s always been “brass” where there’s been “muck”. We need to look at all the ways we can reduce our wastage. Food’s a good place to start.

Gapingvoid tweeted this earlier this morning.

Coming from Hugh, that’s saying something. Even if he has “retired” to Alpine.

So I went and took a look at the story: The Techcrunch Web Tablet project. Which seems to look like this:

Now neither Michael Arrington nor Hugh Macleod needs any link love from me. So why am I writing this?

Because I think it’s the right way to go. We have to keep experimenting with affordable low-power simple-spec sensible-form-factor open portable computing devices, we have to find the ten thousand ways that do not work in order to find the one that does.

A project like this, when centred around a participative architecture and community, reduces the cost of failure, reduces the cost of the ten thousand ways that do not work.

Ubiquitous and affordable and usable connectivity is an imperative for everyone, even more so for the five-sixths of the world that have none of it as yet. On the basis of “a dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid” principle, we should not underestimate the value of providing such power to people, power that will translate itself into affordable food, clothing and shelter, power that will translate itself into health, education and welfare.

Human beings are incredibly creative, incredibly adaptive and are cram-full of potential. Initiatives like this may well help release that potential.

In order to release that potential, we have to change how we think. We have to think of these tablets as mobile phones with the right form factor and functionality, not as computers with the right price and operating systems. For some strange reason, most people are comfortable with the idea that someone in darkest Africa or rural India or China needs a phone; yet the same people look puzzled when you suggest they could do with compute power and connectivity. Whatever. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck….

The headline, by the way, is taken from one of the four hundred odd comments that have been made on the post so far. The commenter was “a bit sceptical” about the chances of TCIT “actually pulling this off” and listed a series of issues, like “no opensource hardware project has really taken off” and “crowdsourcing doesn’t work that well”. And then he ended with “You’re a blog”.

With a little bit of luck and a following wind, we will see a decent open multisided platform approach here, as a result of which we will see what we have failed to see so far: a global opensource project, hardware and software, with local extensions and frills made by a dispersed long-tail community around a common and reusable core. Language and script support based on people everywhere rather than profitable conurbations; applications that have the ability to make that little difference to people’s lives; no sign of lock-in anywhere.

Let’s find that one way that works.