https://wiki.preterhuman.net/index.php?title=The_Community_Machines&feed=atom&action=historyThe Community Machines - Revision history2024-03-28T12:35:20ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.35.0https://wiki.preterhuman.net/index.php?title=The_Community_Machines&diff=28640&oldid=prevNetfreak at 07:25, 24 December 20202020-12-24T07:25:39Z<p></p>
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</table>Netfreakhttps://wiki.preterhuman.net/index.php?title=The_Community_Machines&diff=28639&oldid=prevNetfreak at 07:24, 24 December 20202020-12-24T07:24:56Z<p></p>
<a href="https://wiki.preterhuman.net/index.php?title=The_Community_Machines&diff=28639&oldid=10482">Show changes</a>Netfreakhttps://wiki.preterhuman.net/index.php?title=The_Community_Machines&diff=10482&oldid=prevNetfreak: Created page with "<pre> The Community Machines ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would..."2019-07-24T01:08:14Z<p>Created page with "<pre> The Community Machines ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would..."</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div><pre><br />
The Community Machines<br />
<br />
----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
You may distribute the text of this article freely, but I would<br />
appreciate knowing about anything interesting that you do with them.<br />
<br />
Tom Maddox<br />
tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us<br />
<br />
----------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
<br />
Reports from the Electronic Frontier:<br />
The Community Machines<br />
<br />
Tom Maddox <tmaddox@well.sf.ca.us><br />
<br />
<br />
--A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same<br />
people living in the same place.<br />
--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's<br />
so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place<br />
for the past five years.<br />
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom<br />
and says he, trying to muck out of it<br />
--Or also living in different places.<br />
--That covers my case, says Joe.<br />
<br />
As Leopold Bloom discovers, it is not so<br />
simple to say exactly what we mean when we try to<br />
talk about some of the fundamental ideas that bind<br />
us. Nationality is one issue here, in Ulysses,<br />
but in fact the xenophobic Irishmen of what is<br />
usually called the "Cyclops" episode really want to<br />
deny membership to Jews in general and Leopold<br />
Bloom in particular not only in the Irish nation<br />
but also and more importantly in the Irish<br />
community. <br />
<br />
Which means they're trying to deny to others<br />
an abstract but essential part of our shared<br />
humanity. David W. Minar and Scott Greer say, in<br />
The Concept of Community:<br />
<br />
Community is indivisible from human actions,<br />
purposes, and values. It expresses our vague<br />
yearnings for a commonality of desire, a<br />
communion with those around us, an extension<br />
of the bonds of kin and friend to all those<br />
who share a common fate with us.<br />
<br />
Such a notion of community has become common<br />
coin online lately. People cite approvingly the<br />
creation of new communities through the new<br />
possibilities for communication offered by CMC,<br />
computer-mediated communication. Mitch Kapor,<br />
Lotus 1-2-3 tycoon and co-founder of the Electronic<br />
Frontier Foundation, says:<br />
<br />
New communities are being built today. <br />
You cannot see them, except on a computer<br />
screen. You cannot visit them, except through<br />
your keyboard. Their highways are wires and<br />
optical fibers; their language a series of<br />
ones and zeroes.<br />
Yet these communities of cyberspace are<br />
as real and vibrant as any you could find on a<br />
globe or in an atlas. Those are real people<br />
on the other sides of those monitors. And<br />
freed from physical limitations, these people<br />
are developing new types of cohesive and<br />
effective communities--ones which are defined<br />
more by common interest and purpose than by<br />
an accident of geography, ones on which what<br />
really counts is what you say and think and<br />
feel, not how you look or talk or how old you<br />
are.<br />
Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet (1993,<br />
1994)<br />
<br />
However, there's more at work here than new<br />
technologies. Equally important is the social<br />
context in which the new technologies have come<br />
into play. As numerous social and political<br />
commentators have said at length and in their<br />
various ways, the United States has become a nation<br />
of increasingly more isolated and deracinated<br />
individuals, alienated selves deprived of many of<br />
the comforts and conveniences of traditional<br />
community. And one doesn't have to refer to such<br />
narrowly focused notions as "the lonely crowd" or<br />
"the organization man" to agree that we live in a<br />
world more mobile, fragmented, and uncertain than<br />
our parents and theirs before them. More and more<br />
of us have come to accept as usual a condition in<br />
which most or many of our friends and family live<br />
far away, as we accept that we may have to pick up<br />
our immediate families and move to another city,<br />
state or country to work or get an education. We<br />
have enlarged our individual possibilities but at<br />
the cost of lasting communal ties.<br />
<br />
In addition, many of us find ourselves<br />
alienated from the communities we live in whatever<br />
our length of stay. Our aspirations, interests,<br />
and ambitions can effectively isolate us from the<br />
mainstream life of smaller communities in<br />
particular. The would-be artist, musician or<br />
dancer; the sf fan, nerd, or radical--such folks<br />
and others can find themselves at odds with what<br />
they perceive to be the mores and habits of their<br />
community, and so they seek a spiritual home, a<br />
place of communion with others who share their<br />
anomie and consequent longing.<br />
<br />
As a result, we find community where we can. <br />
Organizations come into being around work and<br />
interest, and they give us things that our daily<br />
lives cannot. SF fans organize and attend<br />
conventions, but so do doctors, lawyers, used car<br />
salesmen, and advocates of sado-masochistic sex. <br />
However, whatever gratification we find at such<br />
gatherings, we quickly become aware of their<br />
fleeting nature. For some small time we've got<br />
coaches and footmen, but all too quickly we're back<br />
to pumpkins and mice. The overall problem remains: <br />
whatever our particular concatenation of<br />
circumstances, many of us live in a condition<br />
somewhat detached from the communities we inhabit--<br />
citizens in economic, political, geographic and<br />
demographic terms, but outlanders of the spirit,<br />
strangers in any given strange land.<br />
<br />
It's in this context that the advent of<br />
widespread computer-medicated communication<br />
(henceforth CMC) has to be understood. We seek our<br />
kind in cyberspace because we find so few of them<br />
in real space and time. This context also explains<br />
some of the quasi-visionary, implicitly or<br />
explicitly utopian tone of the discussions of<br />
online community--Kapor's tone and content are<br />
typical in this regard. With regard to all such<br />
affirmations of the joys of online community,<br />
however, I find myself wondering whether they speak<br />
for a liberating technology, or perhaps for a '90s<br />
version of the "Gernsbach Continuum," the<br />
ubiquitous, bloodless portrait of things to come<br />
offered so often this century by technophiles and<br />
social planners and parodied so nicely by William<br />
Gibson.<br />
<br />
Let me make clear that I do not doubt Kapor's<br />
good intentions, merely the completeness and<br />
accuracy of his vision. Continuing on with his<br />
description of online communities, he says:<br />
<br />
The oldest of these communities is that<br />
of the scientists, which actually predates<br />
computers. Scientists have long seen<br />
themselves as an international community,<br />
where ideas were more important than national<br />
origin. It is not surprising that the<br />
scientists were the first to adopt the new<br />
electronic media as their principal means of<br />
day-to-day communication.<br />
I look forward to a day in which<br />
everybody, not just scientists, can enjoy<br />
similar benefits of a global community.<br />
<br />
As do I. <br />
<br />
However, I remember that the scientists who<br />
first adopted the new electronic media often did so<br />
because they were developing it for the Department<br />
of Defense in one of its many guises. Howard<br />
Rheingold, who believes along with Kapor in the<br />
power and importance of online communities, says,<br />
in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the<br />
Electronic Frontier (Addison--Wesley Publishing<br />
Company, 1993):<br />
<br />
CMC was following the same path of diffusion<br />
that computer technology had followed ten to<br />
twenty years before: first developed as part<br />
of weapons-related research, computers and<br />
networks soon proved valuable and then<br />
affordable first to scientific researchers<br />
outside weapons research, then to big<br />
businesses, then to small businesses, and then<br />
to citizens. <br />
<br />
I am reminded of the adage that when one sups with<br />
the Devil, one should bring a long spoon, and I am<br />
worried at the ease with which many people have sat<br />
down to these particular dinners.<br />
<br />
On this and other matters, Rheingold's book is<br />
of considerable interest. He has been online since<br />
1985, a very long span in the compressed history of<br />
widespread CMC, and he has extensive first-hand<br />
experience with some of the most interesting and<br />
characteristic online cultures, the WELL (Whole<br />
Earth 'Lectronic Link) in particular. I've met him<br />
briefly a couple of times and seen quite a few of<br />
his postings on the WELL, and I can testify that<br />
he's a very nice guy, one temperamentally well--<br />
suited to making friends online and to appreciating<br />
those friendships.<br />
<br />
In fact, his book gives the best taste of life<br />
online of any I have seen. His most intimate<br />
experiences have been with the WELL, but he also<br />
gives adequate histories of the rise of the BBS<br />
community in general and Tom Jennings's FidoNet in<br />
particular, of Usenet, MUDs, MOOs, and MUSEs, of<br />
Dave Hughes's Big Sky Telegraph and the Electronic<br />
Frontier Foundation, of Japan's TWICS and France's<br />
Minitel. Rheingold seems to have been everywhere<br />
and talked to everyone who has moved and shaken the<br />
online communities.<br />
<br />
Also, as editor of the Whole Earth Review and<br />
long-time counterculture citizen, Rheingold is not<br />
just another purveyor of virtual snake oil. He is<br />
concerned about the possibilities of individual<br />
loss of privacy and freedom latent in CMC and<br />
specially concerned about the intrusions of big<br />
government and big business into the net. He says,<br />
<br />
The transition from a government-sponsored,<br />
taxpayer-supported, relatively unrestricted<br />
public forum to a privately owned and provided<br />
medium has accelerated recently, and this<br />
transition might render moot many of the<br />
fantasies of today's true believers in<br />
electronic democracy and global online<br />
culture.<br />
<br />
And he concludes his book with this call to<br />
informed online citizenship:<br />
<br />
Instead of falling under the spell of a sales<br />
pitch, or rejecting new technologies as<br />
instruments of illusion, we need to look more<br />
closely at new technologies and ask how they<br />
can help build stronger, more humane<br />
communities--and ask how they might be<br />
obstacles to that goal. . . .Armed with<br />
knowledge, guided by a clear, human-centered<br />
vision, governed by a commitment to civil<br />
discourse, we the citizens hold the key lever<br />
at a pivotal time. What happens next is<br />
largely up to us.<br />
<br />
How could one possibly object to such an honorable<br />
and good-hearted call?<br />
<br />
Well, alas, I must. By way of focusing my<br />
objections, let me quote Neil Postman, itinerant<br />
anti-technologist, from a speech he gave in 1990 to<br />
the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft Fuer<br />
Informatik) in Stuttgart. He makes the following<br />
ill-tempered comments on the evolution of CMC:<br />
<br />
Through the computer, the heralds say, we will<br />
make education better, religion better,<br />
politics better, our minds better--best of<br />
all, ourselves better. This is, of course,<br />
nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant<br />
or the foolish could believe it. <br />
[. . .]<br />
As things stand now, the geniuses of computer<br />
technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us<br />
that is the answer to nuclear war. They will<br />
give us artificial intelligence, and tell us<br />
that this is the way to self-knowledge. They<br />
will give us instantaneous global<br />
communication and tell us this is the way to<br />
mutual understanding. They will give us<br />
Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer<br />
to spiritual poverty. But that is only the<br />
way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the<br />
information junkie, and the technological<br />
idiot.<br />
<br />
While I'm not convinced by many of Postman's<br />
analyses, which often seem driven by an<br />
unreasonable desire to live in the Middle Ages, I<br />
find this particular line of reasoning convincing. <br />
Over the years the "geniuses of computer<br />
technology" have promised too many things and, as I<br />
mentioned, have sat down at too many dinners with<br />
too many devils for us to trust them. They have<br />
also shown a persistent inability to see what<br />
people will in fact do with their devices--an<br />
inability for which I do not blame them specially,<br />
because other people, such as those in my line of<br />
work, science fiction, didn't do much better. <br />
<br />
Also, in rebuttal to Rheingold's claim that<br />
"what happens next is largely up to us," I have to<br />
say, not really. <br />
<br />
[T]he clock was invented by men who wanted to<br />
devote themselves more rigorously to God; and<br />
it ended as the technology of greatest use to<br />
men who wished to devote themselves to the<br />
accumulation of money. Technology always has<br />
unforeseen consequences, and it its not always<br />
clear, at the beginning, who or what will win,<br />
and who or what will lose.<br />
<br />
Technologies have their own dynamics, and we are<br />
often propelled along by them, will-we nil-we, to<br />
destinations we didn't even know existed. <br />
<br />
Furthermore, we haven't looked at some of the<br />
less attractive qualities of the communities that<br />
are evolving. For instance, online communities<br />
tend to be almost entirely male-dominated. While<br />
I'm reasonably sure that the percentage of women<br />
online has increased in recent years, they remain a<br />
small minority, and their presence in a particular<br />
group almost always highlights how adolescent,<br />
geeky, and masculine online communities remain. To<br />
put the matter shortly, women are routinely<br />
harassed both sexually and otherwise, and generally<br />
made to feel that many of their of their<br />
fundamental concerns are alien. This syndrome does<br />
not hold universally, but it holds generally, and I<br />
see very little evidence online of radical and<br />
widespread change in this matter--which is to say<br />
that now and for the near future, the experience of<br />
virtual communities will be problematic for women.<br />
<br />
More generally, technocratic, elitist, and<br />
sexist behavior characterize life online in<br />
unacknowledged ways, and there's a whole literature<br />
about denial that explains just how harmful <br />
failures to recognize such truths can be. <br />
<br />
But I'm not anti-virtual communities or anti-<br />
CMC or anti-the quasi-utopian efforts of people<br />
like Kapor and Rheingold. Rather I'm convinced by<br />
the history of humankind's relationship to<br />
technology that we must always be aware of our<br />
status as sorcerer's apprentices, always on the<br />
verge of losing control. At the same time, we must<br />
remain aware that vast industries exist whose<br />
purpose is to package our needs and sell us<br />
commodified gratification for them, thus rendering<br />
us emotionally stunted and intellectually<br />
stupefied.<br />
<br />
Online News: <br />
<br />
The United States Senate has established an<br />
online presence in the form of an ftp server on the<br />
Internet, ftp.senate.gov. As is usual with such<br />
sites, you login as anonymous and give your e-mail<br />
address as password. Senators Stevens of Alaska<br />
and Kennedy of Massachusetts have files available<br />
at the present time under the directories<br />
/member/ak and member/ma respectively. I assume<br />
others will follow.<br />
<br />
Bruce Sterling has made available online the<br />
entire text of his last book, The Hacker Crackdown. <br />
It can be downloaded free from the WELL Gopher<br />
(gopher.well.sf.ca.us) and the Electronic Frontier<br />
Foundation ftp site (ftp.eff.org). He has several<br />
other documents there as well, all prefaced by the<br />
following "Acceptable Use Policy," which I believe<br />
is interesting enough to quote at length:<br />
<br />
The documents on this disk are not<br />
commodities. They're not for sale. They are<br />
not part of the "information economy." Some<br />
of them were part of the commercial economy<br />
once, in the sense that I got paid for writing<br />
some of them, but they've since been<br />
liberated. You didn't have to pay any money<br />
to get them. If you did pay anything to see<br />
this stuff, you've been ripped off. If you<br />
didn't get this data for free, send me some e-<br />
mail and tell me about it. Information<br />
*wants* to be free. And I know where you can<br />
get a lot more.<br />
<br />
You can copy them. Copy the hell out of<br />
them, be my guest. You can upload them onto<br />
boards or discussion groups. Go right ahead,<br />
enjoy yourself.<br />
<br />
You can print them out.<br />
<br />
You can photocopy the printouts and hand<br />
them around as long as you don't take any<br />
money for it.<br />
<br />
But they're not public domain. You can't<br />
copyright them. Attempts to pirate this stuff<br />
and make money from it may involve you in a<br />
serious litigative snarl; believe me, for the<br />
pittance you might wring out of such an<br />
action, it's really not worth it. This stuff<br />
don't "belong" to you. A lot of it, like the<br />
Internet electronic zines I've included,<br />
doesn't "belong" to me, either. It belongs to<br />
the emergent realm of alternative information<br />
economics, for whatever *that's* worth. You<br />
don't have any right to make this stuff part<br />
of the conventional flow of commerce. Let<br />
them be part of the flow of knowledge: <br />
there's a difference. Don't sell them. And<br />
don't alter the text, either; that would be a<br />
hopelessly way-dork move. Just make more, and<br />
give them to whoever might want or need them.<br />
<br />
Now have fun.<br />
<br />
So find yourself a gopher connection to the WELL or<br />
an ftp connection to EFF and grab a bunch of<br />
Sterling (as it were) prose. <br />
<br />
Also at EFF, you can find a recent recension<br />
of The Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet, which in<br />
addition to containing the full text of the Kapor<br />
article I quote above, also is one of the better<br />
guides to the Internet available online.<br />
<br />
Consumer News: (This is a spot for notes<br />
about software, hardware, firmware, wetware, or<br />
etceteraware that I've found interesting lately). <br />
<br />
My hunt continues for the perfect database for<br />
freeform data, and I've lately found two<br />
interesting contenders. <br />
<br />
At the simple end of things there's Dyno<br />
Notepad (from Portfolio Software, 10062 Miller<br />
Avenue, Cupertino, CA 95014), a rewritten version<br />
of Acta (later Acta 7), one of the simplest and<br />
best outliners for the Macintosh. Dyno Notepad<br />
came to me on a single disk with no accompanying<br />
documentation, and I found I wasn't missing<br />
anything. The program has two help screens that<br />
effectively summarize not only the program's<br />
commands but also its structuring ideas, the<br />
elements of computer outlining. It is in short a<br />
slick piece of work: cheap, fast, and easy to use.<br />
<br />
And then there's Arrange, a big bucks database<br />
from Common Knowledge, Inc., Palo Alto, CA. It has<br />
extensive online documentation and a good-sized<br />
manual and will do just about anything to any kind<br />
of information that you can imagine--if you can<br />
figure out how to make the program perform. The<br />
program ought to make some sort of big industrial<br />
noise when it loads up to indicate its rather<br />
alarming capabilities. Using it I find myself very<br />
tentatively trying out various ways of structuring<br />
and retrieving data, and sometimes I can make<br />
things happen the way I want them to and sometimes<br />
I can't. So I'll have to get back to you on this<br />
one because I'm not sure that I am willing to put<br />
in the time necessary to learn how to control this<br />
thing.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile I still wish for simple tools for<br />
the Macintosh like a few that exist in the MSDOS<br />
world--for instance, a text reader with the speed<br />
and power of Vernon Buerg's List, a freeform<br />
database with the speed and ease of Tornado Notes.<br />
<br />
E-Mail Address: tmaddox@halcyon.com<br />
<br />
=======================================================================<br />
This document is from the WELL gopher server:<br />
gopher://gopher.well.com<br />
<br />
Questions and comments to: gopher@well.com<br />
</pre><br />
<br />
<br />
[[Category:Essays]]</div>Netfreak