Patently Absurd

Google has made a $900 million bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in an effort to build a defensive wall of intellectual property. On the surface, this appears to violate the software giant’s Don’t Be Evil™ mandate, but it’s tempered in a honey-voiced reassurance: “don’t worry, we’re doing this to protect the open source community.”

The nice thing about a motto like Don’t Be Evil™ is that it is entirely open to interpretation. We can all agree that powering your data center off the tears of orphaned kittens is pretty evil. But is bulking up a patent portfolio inherently evil? What if it’s just to defend open source projects against lawsuits from Microsoft? But do we really believe that they won’t turn against the little players they’re claiming to protect?

We must step back for a minute and consider what this move says about the system as a whole. Patent pools inevitably benefit the big players who can afford the required filing costs and attorney’s fees. These behemoths use their portfolios to defend against smaller and more nimble disruptive forces in the market and stabilize an entrenched oligopoly.

Here’s a small thought experiment. One small change might dramatically change the landscape. What would happen if patents were non-transferrable?

Companies could still file and hold patents. Companies could still be bought for their intellectual property (the parent company won’t own the patents directly, but through their new wholly-owned subsidiary). But the key difference is that when a company closes its doors, the patents are released into the public domain.

There are two benefits to this system: one, patent trolls would be unable to speculatively trade patent pools, and two, large companies would no longer have the ability to scoop up a failing company’s patents at bargain-basement prices. Corporations would be forced to tend to their intellectual property instead of letting it languish.

A company with excellent technology but bad management should not be able to cash in on their patent portfolio as a get-out-of-jail-free card. And small innovators, who disrupt established interests and create entirely new markets from thin air and hard work should be protected from the incumbents whose vested interest is in preserving the way things have always been done.

Minify

One of the hardest realizations I’ve come to in the past five years is that we must be ruthless curators of our own lives. I suppose it’s with requisite irony that simplicity, of all things, is hard work.

Our culture is so obsessed with stuff that we’ve become massively efficient at converting all our physical stuff into digital stuff. We’re so enamored by the object that it permeates deeply into the virtual world. We interact with virtual files, windows, folders, mice, buttons, and trash cans. Even programmers can’t escape the noun’s iron grasp. We have built scores of object-oriented programming languages, for crying out loud!

Superstudio. Life Without Objects, 1972.

There’s something horrifyingly disorienting about Superstudio’s concept of life without objects, and yet…

The post-digital world is about striving to have access to everything while being encumbered by nothing. We’re faced with two possible horrors: that on the one hand, the vision presented by the radical futurists will become our reality, or that on the other hand, it won’t. That is to say that we will either impose upon ourselves an ascetic minimalism, denying our innate lust for the new and different, or that the human race will be devoured by our own insatiable appetite for more stuff, consuming all available resources in the process.¹

These concepts are linked with both the current lack of economic growth and our cultural unhappiness. It’s quite possible that Constant’s futuristic vision of a civilization unburdened by physical labor (and thus free to engage in creative endeavors) is more realistically perceived as a civilization that engages in artistic expression out of desperate necessity—for how else do we assert our humanity in a world where machines do all the work?

Constant Nieuwenhuys. New Babylon, 1959-74.

But I digress…

Out of the depths of the economic recession, a new minimalist fad emerged. The Cult of Less was in many senses a reaction to a market collapse that shook the entire world. It was not a way of affixing a fashionable caché to poverty, as the opposite is probably more accurate—only the wealthy can afford to give up the majority of their possessions—it was a way for people to say, “enough is enough.”

I was critical of this movement in the beginning, mostly out of a personal disdain for dogmatic adherence to arbitrary rules; I truly believe the goal of owning fewer than a hundred things is absurd. Which is to say I simply could not fathom giving up any of my (over two hundred at last counting) books. Besides, I usually prefer a more nuanced and pragmatic approach to any philosophy. Lately, however, the Cult of Less intrigues me. I’ve always been a minimalist of sorts, as one pretty much has to be when living in a Manhattan studio apartment. Maybe it’s because I’ve begun to recognize a certain anxiety my stuff instills in me, or maybe it’s because I’m starting to think that having piles of unfinished projects is too much of a distraction.

In any case, the minimal lifestyle is a noble experiment. Formulating of a Philosophy of Less is more interesting to me than counting possessions and blogging lists of the ones to sell. And the philosophy of less certainly needs some restoration. Perhaps the biggest scam of high modernism was the idea that anyone could live in a Corbusier (or Mies or Gropius or whomever) Machine For Living™. What our architectural ancestors failed to instill in our cultural understanding of their movement is that in order to successfully live in a glass house, your life needs to be as well designed as your home.

Alberto Campo Baeza. Guerrero House, 2005.

Hello, Cruel World!

or, the lost art of documentation

Programming languages are the last frontier of user interface design, but developers don’t respond to simplicity the same way grandma does. Software engineers talk about tools that give them “power” and “control.” This is most clearly illustrated in the human interfaces for almost any open source software in existence—interfaces designed by programmers typically have pages and pages of settings offering access to every configurable option imaginable.

While developers are dismissive when novices presented with complicated interfaces complain, there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy at play. Just look at any sufficiently complicated piece of UNIX infrastructure—Kerberos comes to mind—and you will see steep learning curves for even the relatively experienced users.

The truth is that these two demographics are remarkably similar. Developers¹, like grandma, set out with a goal in mind and become frustrated when technology gets in the way.

Read more →

Can a Number Be Illegal?

Robinson in Ruins

Film still from Patrick Kieller’s poignant quasifiction, Robinson in Ruins

There’s not much more to say about this docu-narrative on infrastructure, architecture, landscape, networks, and economic collapse than what Vanessa Redgrave already covered in her narration. Her voice has the calm matter-of-factness of a dispassionate academic as she recounts the wanderings of Robinson, a fictional researcher, an eccentric autodidact with diverse obsessions from botany to network theory.

Kieller’s film is a superposition of serious accounts of marginal spaces and industrial infrastructure with a fabricated personal history of the titular Robinson. It is a genre in and of itself, neither fiction nor documentary, neither history nor fantasy. Its movements across the English landscape reconstruct a journey that never happened. It is pure quasifiction—that growing category of narrative representative of a time when our species’ ability to conceive alternate realities is overshadowed by our ability to actually build them.

Lichen grows on a road sign; a possible “network of non-human intelligences”

Ultimately, this film is not for the impatient. We follow Ms. Redgrave on a casual stroll, waiting for the narrative to unfold, for clues to reveal themselves, and for the growing number of questions to be answered. It is only after a number of changes in the scenery fail to alter the pace that we realize that the narrative is about perpetual unfolding. The invisible hero is eternally sleuthing, pondering, and eventually leaving us with more questions than when we started. It is a bright and meticulous tease.

Technical Narratives

So I’m reading the OAuth 2.0 spec today, because apparently that’s what I do for fun, and I can’t help but notice the barrage of nouns it throws around. Entities like resource owners, authorization servers, clients, user-agents, and resource servers exchange items like client identifiers, authorization codes, access tokens, access grants, client credentials, and refresh tokens in processes with names like authorization requests, implicit grants, access token requests, and authorization responses.

The roles defined are abstract and vague. A resource owner, for example, is an “entity capable of granting access to a protected resource.” But can that be a person? In that case the resource owner is also an end-user. A client is an application acting on behalf of an end-user, so when exactly does the user-agent get involved in this process?

Stylistically, the OAuth spec is written in techno-precise passive voice. An end-user never directs a client to request an access grant, but the client is directed to request an access grant. Cause and effect are decoupled and processes start for no narrative reason at all. This is the kind of writing your fifth form¹ English teacher attacked with red pen.

So this presents a rather obvious, if absurd, question: what would happen if a technical spec followed a narrative arc that describes how to implement the protocol, complete with exposition, climax, and dénouement? What if we saw character development in the relationships between the various actors? The entity-body parameters form a cabal to extort the user-agent, the authorization server seethes in jealousy over the the client’s doting attention to the resource server’s simple-mided follies, the callous and career-oriented access token is overcompensating for his misspent youth, etc.

We’d at least get some fairly interesting genre mashups: network protocol memoirs, bodice-ripper cryptographic specs, magical-realist hardware manuals.