The Austin Business Journal interviewed me for an article on net neutality. "He says broadcast providers with audio-visual content online may receive preferential treatment under a new system. Less flashy Web sites with only text may be relegated to the sidelines." I.e. "he" was saying that one worst case is that the Internet becomes another form of cable, as in cable television. AT&T is already going there.

MySpace, evidently hoping to make some Real Money aside from ad revenues, will sell music, songs from 3 million or so unsigned bands that are hanging out on the system. [NY Times Link]

Songs can be sold on the bands' MySpace pages and on fan pages, in non-copyright-protected MP3 digital file format, which works on most digital players including Apple's market-dominating iPod.

The bands will decide how much to charge per song after including MySpace's distribution fee, said Rusty Rueff, the chief executive of Snocap, which will manage the e-commerce service. Snocap provides digital licensing and copyright management services and was started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

The New York Times on Joe Coleman: "Obsessively depicting a grim moral universe of transgression and retribution, Mr. Coleman paints grotesque images of murderers and victims, freaks and monsters, disease, depravity and perversities of every kind." Art-as-sideshow. Mr. Coleman also markets effectively via his web site (the server for which mysteriously vanished as I was writing this). [Link to Wikipedia article]

A variation on the Frisbee is the latest proposed weapon in the Middle East war. Called Modular Disc-Wing Urban Cruise Munitions, the circular drones, according to their manufacturer, Triton Systems, will be launched "from munitions dispensers or by means of a simple mechanism similar to a shotgun target (skeet) launcher." At that point they'll be operated by remote control, or perhaps autopilot.

I just got a Myspace friend request that was clearly spam - the "friend" is a matchmaker service for "real mature singles" (bad targeting: I'm not all that mature, and I'm taken). What's interesting is the set of comments from "Amber's friends." [Link]

Hello uh thanks for the add but I don't know you and I'm not looking for any mate. Please don't send any unclean adds to my page are I will delete you

Dude yer retarded this is the second Friend request u sent me! f*** off

Nice marketing ploy but if ya check my page, I'm not yer homey little type. Can't wait til this account get's deleted. Cha!

Damn! do I look 50 or over or did you send this becuz my age on myspace is 79 who is this and are you the lady on the picture

WHO DO U THINK U R HOE I DONT KNOW U

etc.

Richard Rush is phenomenal.

Last night Marsha and I caught a screening of Richard Rush's "The Stunt Man" and "Psych-Out" at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, organized by Lars Nilsen, who programs the Alamo's Weird Wednesday series. Though I'd seen some of his earlier exploitation films ("Hell's Angels on Wheels," "The Savage Seven," I became a Richard Rush fan when I saw "Getting Straight" in 1970 - probably the only film to get a handle on the upheaval at the end of the 60s (which seems quaint compared to nastier contemporary upheaval, but I digress). Oddly, there wasn't a single reference to "Getting Straight" in last nights discussions before and after both films - wish they'd included it as a third feature.

We saw Rush's own print of "Stunt Man" - the studio hasn't reprinted it, though it's available on DVD along with his full-lenth documentary, "The Sinister Saga of Making the Stunt Man" – which is about the ten years it took to cut through the politics of the film industry and to get the film made. Rush mentioned how he had to keep revising the script as the Vietnam era faded into the past. The protagonist of the film is a Vietnam vet (Steve Railsback) who stumbles into a brilliant director's location shoot and becomes a stunt man for the film - and more: he becomes the soul of the film, and the key to its purpose. The director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), says at one point that his film is not about fighting wars, it's about fighting windmills. Ultimately both films, Rush's and Cross's, are about paranoia fed by assumption and illusion.

Appearing with Rush: Charles Bail, a stunt man himself, who played stunt coordinator Chuck Barton in the film, and Austin's Gary Kent, who worked with Rush on several films, including "Psych-Out" (where he created the special effects).

I ran into my friend Juliette Kernion, who's behind the terrific Slackerwood blog; looking forward to her post about the screening.

Keith Olbermann's one of the few journalists to challenge the Bush Administration head-on, noting the emperor's profound nakedness. A few minutes ago, I heard him read a powerful 9/11 message on Countdown... read it, preferably more than once.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

I think genius is about more than the pattern of electrical energy in the brain... and I was more fascinated by the revelation that the more intelligent brains are not more activce, just more efficient. [Link]

Tom, Austin Bootstrapper and founder of Stuffopolis, digs OpenID, which is a manifestation of the Identity 2.0 conversation. [Link] (If you're interested in Identity 2.0, a particularly useful link: Kaliya Hamlin's Identity Woman blog).

Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design talks about his pioneering work in "emotional design." [Link] Here's the quote that's sticking in my brain:

... design in the 90’s actually got consumed by the internet-IPO mania, and it turned out to be “the decade of greed and cheat” - and an entire generation of designers were lost. Frog survived and ultimately succeeded but we will never forget the dark times. For this decade, I hope that “Design” will advance, but so far it is “the decade of outsourcing”, and with a very fractured processes driven by naked economics, innovation and human-cultural design is very hard to achieve.

The New York Times has an obit of Ann Richards. She was powerful, she had heart, and she was hilarious, and we could do with a bunch more like her, but no such luck &ndashl; we're cursed with anemic, gutless hacks on the one hand, and a bold set of thieves and liars on the other. I suppose we really lost Ann Richards a long time ago, when she didn't quite manage to beat George W. in that fateful gubernatorial election that set him on the path to the White House. I only wish she could have run again... and again.

A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness. - Miller in "Repo Man"

Thought about this quote after seeing a couple of very similar articles about 9/11 conspiracy theories this week - from Michael Ventura and RU Sirius. Seems they were both having the same thought, dipping into a pervasive cosmic unconsciousness...

Ventura is skeptical of blogs because "they often fail to cite their sources, and there's no way to know if they've confirmed their facts." He's even more skeptical of the 9/11 consipiracy theories, especially the one that says it was an "inside job," that the U.S. government brought down the World Trade Center. I won't say the thought hasn't crossed my own mind – an analysis that asks who benefited most from the attack could point to the Bush Administration, who clearly took full advantage of the post 9/11 senes of national unity and fear of terrorism to further it's own agenda (as Keith Olbermann said earlier this week). However as one who's played (ironically, not seriously) with many conspiracy theories in the past, I've always had a skepticism similar to Ventura's:

The conspiracy usually outlined would require dozens of people to do lots of manual labor for a considerable time with no leak then and no leak since. Perfect secrecy accomplished by, say, a hundred people. As a journalist and student of history, to me that would be strangest of all.

In this week's article he goes on to make a good point:

Even if these conspiracy theorists are right, does it matter? Does it matter which cabal of murderous madmen was responsible? What matters more is that cabals of murderous madmen now set the world's agenda. It's easy to say that, one way or another, it's always been like that, and I would agree that there have always been cabals, and some have been powerful, but what has been more powerful by far is the counterpoint of momentum and inertia of the masses of us, throughout the ages, who want to live our own lives by our own lights and do the best we can. What's changed is that technology has given cabals vastly disproportionate power.....

RUSirius is skeptical of conspiracy theories anti-conspiracy theories... pretty much everybody. He reviews a book from Popular Mechanics called Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts, and attempted an interview with the author, who was evidently reticent because he's been worn down by conspiracy theorists (and probably made the easy but wrong assumption that a guy named RU Sirius is Sirius but not serious). RU concludes saying that "We live, obviously, in paranoid times. People are quick to conclude that the discursive other – the person with the opposite point of view – is 'the enemy.'" This reminds me of Richard Rush's "The Stunt Man", a film that suggests that paranoia is our real enemy... "nothing to fear but fear itself."

It happens sometimes. People just explode . . . natural causes. - Agent Rogersz in "Repo Man."

I chose to miss this year's ACLFest, but at the last minute I had an attack of, er, non-buyer's remorse, realizing this year's fest has a pretty stupendous lineup after all. So I've been griping about my failure to buy passes, and on the verge of grabbing a couple from the various sources (at this late date, some very cheap tickets are appearing on Craig's list). But what saved the day is AT&T's webcast – as I type this I sit comfy and cool in my office, getting work done and digging Gomez via a well-produced webcast with good sound and decent (though small) video. NO, WAIT - I can go full screen with tihs! Far out. Hey, maybe AT&T has chops as a media company, after all...

The feed is here.

Rob Levin, aka Lilo, was instigator and active proponent of the Peer-Directed Projects Center that runs the freenode IRC server that serves so many in the free software community. Rob passed away September 16th following a bicycle accident in Houston on the 12th. [Link]

More information in the discussions at Digg and Slashdot.

I never met him face to face but we had quite a few conversations at freenode. He had a powerful commitment to free and open source software, and it wasn't just talk. He was living it.

Make a donation to PDPC in his behalf.

Psychologists say "hearing voices in your head is so common that it is normal." (But wouldn't that sorta depend on what they have to say?") [Link]

Reuters is funding the first editor for Jay Rosen's citizen media project, NewAssignment.net. [Link]

Yahoo Finance has an overview of the largest Web 2.0 deals. Pretty much all the action is in Silicon Valley. Note: the article doesn't say how they defined "Web 2.0."

Stuff I'm involved with over the next few weeks... tomorrow (Friday) night, celebrating One Web Day at Café Mundi. September 30, Chris Boyd's Midas Networks celebrates its birthday. September 25 the Bootstrap Web Subgroup will talk about search marketing, in a discussion led by Bill Leake. September 26 we're discussing network neutrality at F2CCamp, which is 5-11pm at BD Riley's Pub. October 1 we'll be in Burton for the opening of the Inn at Indian Creek. October 5 is the EFF-Austin general meeting, with a talk by Vickie Karp, co-editor of Hacked! High Tech Election Theft in America (6:30pm at Austin Java, 1608 Barton Springs). October 8 Charrette Austin meets at Austin Java. On October 11, we're planning a Digital Convergence Initiative talk at the MCC Building - Mike Sekora on The Art and Science of the Technology Strategy.

David Isenberg's held two conferences called "Freedom to Connect"; the idea first emerged from a private meeting in 2004 which I attended. Several of us were gathering thoughts on a private wiki, where Martin Geddes posted this:

Freedom to Connect is a thinking tool to enable you to think about the role of networks in the future.

It will give you the questions and the words you will need to participate in the discussions and decision-making about how and where networks are built, who has access to them and under what conditions and how we should be able to use them.

Freecon will lay out the reasoning behind enabling universal public access to these broadband communication networks and the benefits that can flow from that kind of access. It will also provide the case against restricting access, limiting publication or broadcast rights and controlling or prioritising the kinds of traffic that flow through those networks.

Armed with these tools you will be able to argue for the best possible communications future, against the constraints that vested interests will want to place on your ability to communicate. ...

We never got real clarify about the "freedom to connect" concept, often addressed since then by the more limited term "net neutrality."

Net neutrality isn't a great label because it doesn't mean anything to most who hear it and to many who say it. It's supposed to suggest a lack of bias in prioritizing data transmission... a small-d democratic Internet, where every packet has the same opportunity to reach its targeted location, so you can expect content you send to get where it's going expeditiously, and you can expect your requests for content to be honored in the same way.

The Internet is build around the end to end principle, which says that the network is relatively "dumb" with "intelligence" - e.g. communications protocols or rules - running at the end points. This "dumb network with smart terminals" that doesn't act on data in transmission any more than is necessary to manage the flow of data and acceptable performance along the routes from end to end. The dumb network is "neutral," it doesn't care what's in the data it's transmitting. It doesn't give priority to, say, streaming video (which is one reason your streaming videos occasionally stop for a few seconds while streaming).

From the perspective of those who operate broadcast or voice networks, the dumb network is a dumb idea. Because they focus on delivery of content that needs sustained flow, they advocate a network that gives priority to some packets over others... for better "quality of service." If you followed their lead to make the Internet more multimedia-friendly, you would change the character of the Internet - and it might be harder to ensure access to, say, Weblogsky with all that video streaming everywhwere. Bad for me, but okay for companies that deliver digital media and voice over IP - especially the former telcos that already dominate the network.

If we had much fatter pipes, more bandwidth, that would also mitigate their delivery problem. Why don't we have more bandwidth? Why is last mile service (to your door) constrained and asymmetrical? In part it's because they don't want a world where anyone and everyone can deliver content and services. A fully two-way symmetrical system threatens distribution systems that are already difficult to control.

I don't pretend to be an expert on networks, but I've learned a lot since I started paying attention. You can learn a lot, too, by joining the discussions at the Freedom to Connect BarCamp tomorrow evening. We've invited experts and hope to hear many sides of the 'neutrality' question. The future of the Internet is clearly a significant public issue, poorly understood by legislators and policy wonks, as well as the general public. There are many calls to action from interest groups coming from different perspectives, and ne telecom legislation that shouldn't be considered or passed until all of us, and especially lawmakers, have a clear understanding of the issues. (At the moment, legislators have a one-sided perspective, because what they hear on the subject comes from telco and cable industry lobbyists).

Suzanne Stefanac's Dispatches from Blogistan will be released any day now. Suzanne interviewed me for the book; the interview's posted at the site.

The Internet’s becoming a massive operating system with all kinds of data accessible everywhere. Consider the evolution: we had machines that weren’t connected, then we connected them, then we created something like ftp to share data, and engines like Archie and Veronica to find what data’s out there… then gopher to index it, and html/http so you could publish and link. Now we have the semantic web and the collaborative approach (under the label “social software” and “Web 2.0”) so that, as you say, the information topography is fluid, spontaneously and socially defined. The best strategy is adapt is probably humility, because there’s so many smart people in the game. The dumbest strategy is greed, and what goes with it – we have people trying to build “Web 2.0” sites without any clear idea what that means, for instance, because that’s the wave and they think they’ll make a million or two riding it. However it’s going to be harder and harder to make big money building any kind of business, and it’s back to what I said before – there’s so many smart people. So many will build compelling operations (maybe for-profit, maybe non-profit). Many of those folks won’t be greedy, they’ll be willing to work for bread on the table and a reasonably good life.

What do pickpockets do when nobody has pockets?

We had a great discussion about Search Marketing and the world according to Google last night at the Bootstrap Web meeting, led by Bill Leake and Brian Combs from Apogee Search. [Link to 81MB MP3 of the talk]

I just posted a response to a message about "machine intelligence" that came over the nettime-l email list. Here's what I posted; feel free to comment:

The concept of AI as "conscious machine" is, in my opinion, bogus. So often we hear terms like "machine intelligence" or "artificial intelligence" where "intelligence" is undefined, and the implication is that somehow machines will become "consious." To me, that's like saying once we have a critical mass of light switches in the world, thrown in just such pattern, the electrical grid will become "conscious."

So the reason machine intelligence is persistently predicted but never quite manifest seems clear to me. You can build the golem and you can assume that the more like a man you make him, the more likely he is to self-animate and do a little dance. However he n ever quite moves, because replication of human form is insufficient... just as machines that mimic intelligence are not truly intelligent, and machines that may seem to be 'conscious' really aren't, unless you redefine consciousness to fit machine reality.

My friends Max More and Natasha Vita-More are more sensible about the singularity - it's not about machines becoming like humans, but about the increasing cyborgization of humans - we become increasingly closer to our machines, and we enhance our capabilities as a result. But we won't become machines and machines won't become human. Our robot fantasies are probably just an indication that we don't quite know what it means to be human.