Invitations and Becomings

It's the curse of the intellectual: the elevation of what JS Mill would call the higher pleasures over the mundane practicalities of life. You can quote eighteenth century idealist texts, but can't remember to pay your bills, or pick up the milk. Despite most memory techniques being more suited to remembering random numbers than the milk, I've recently found reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of improving my memory, and repairing my reputation for absent-mindedness.

I've been reading the Terms & Conditions on the Bright Kite site (yes, I do that sometimes), I came across this pearler:

"What’s yours is yours. You own your User Content, not us. You grant the Company and its affiliates a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display your User Content (in whole or in part) and/or to incorporate such your User Content in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. You also grant each user of the Site the right to access, display, view, store and reproduce such your User Content for personal use. You represent and warrant to the Company that you have the right to grant the licenses stated above."

I can't think of a relevant definition of "mine" that grants you a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license to" do whatever the hell you want with "my" stuff. Wouldn't it have been more accurate to start with: "What's yours is ours"?

On Tuesday, I attended my first UX Bookclub event. (If you've never heard of this bookclub, details are on their wiki.) We discussed Alex Wright's Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, which offers a whirlwind tour through the history of information technologies from ice-age totems via Irish illuminated manuscripts to Linnaeus' classification system and the web.

It's a fascinating book, and I'm sure I'll refer to it here more than once. But today I want to focus on a distinction that comes up in a number of places that sparked considerable discussion by our group. That was the distinction between oral and written cultures.

I have my home mortgage with INGDirect, and their banking interface is a great example of obfuscation mascerading as information. In a previous post, I've complained about this in terms of the mystery of providing an available balance without any scheduled balance. But today, it's something that should be even simpler: expected monthly repayment.

I've been a big advocate of wikis and in particular Wikipedia for a long time now, and during that time, I've always argued that you can't discredit Wikipedia by exposing factual errors, for the simple reason that - with enough contributors - exposing an error is practically equivalent to fixing it. In any case, there's no formal distinction to be made between reading and writing Wikipedia (that's the point!), so you can fairly ask any critic who finds an error, why they didn't just fix it. (Let's call that the well-fix-it-dear-henry argument).

Wanted to mention David Foley's article on the interesting limits to the analogy between classical thermodynamics and the general equilibrium view of economics. I can't do it justice, but I'll try to give you the gist.

Inspired by his comment on this interesting piece by John Quiggin, I've been reading some of Jed Harris' posts on his Anomalous Presumptions blog [1,2] about the significance of the rise of peer production.

Two points stand out:

1. The rise of peer production is the consequence of an historic split between the interests of Capitalists (seeking a return on ownership) and those of Entrepreneurs (seeking to create a self-sufficient entity of some social value - e.g. an institution). This is historic because, while we call our free market economy "capitalism", capital is just one factor of production, and given the financial system collapse, it's becoming much easier to imagine exploring other means of allocating resources other than through capital markets.
2. Peer production becomes inevitable when the cost of coordinated production falls low enough not to require initial capital investment. Harris also points out that, at around this point, the cost of enforcing a particular sort of coordination -  through monetary incentives or contractual arrangements - starts to seem excessive, and a potential impediment to creativity and innovation.

I think I may have found a new tool for developing the idea of an Intranet Sociology that has been floating around with me since April.

The spatialisation of thinking needn't be at the service of its mathematicisation: sometimes it resists it.

Question: is there a one to one mapping of suburbs to postcodes?

Because we can make lists of suburbs and postcodes, it seems as though the question is one of counting. Not the total number of each. Rather, if I have one of these, how many of those do I have? However, it turns out counting is completely the wrong way of thinking about the problem.