Quality content on the internet is a rounding error when adding the ninety percent utter shit and ten percent malicious fuckery.
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Category: ranting
Random thoughts, frustrations, ideas and opinions. Quality not guaranteed, consume only under adult supervision
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The Great Emu War
Why is there no TV show about The Great Emu War [wikipedia.org]? Or an anime [youtube.com]? Netflix? Amazon? Australia fought a war against emus. And lost! Greatest plot ever for a comedy. You couldn’t make this shit up.
Never before have so many people understood so little about so much.
James Burke, in Connections [wikipedia.org] episode 1 “The Trigger Effect”
James Burke said that in 1979, a year after I was born, in his TV show Connections. As a kid watching reruns of Connections I doubt I understood what he meant. That as society advances people come to use and depend more and more on technology that requires specialized knowledge to understand. We are surrounded by technology that our lives depend on, but few of us understand very much of it at all. Think about all the technology you use every day do you understand it? Even the basics; electricity? The turbines that generate it and the grid that delivers it to you can charge your phone, or laptop, to read this? Forget about the phone or laptop themselves with literally hundreds of components that are each a technical marvel —touch screens, accelerometers, radios for bluetooth, cellular and wifi, and the processor, even the battery. And don’t forget the tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code that make all those physical bits work together so you can look at cat memes on the internet. What about the technology required to grow food on far off farms to feed more than half of the world that lives in cities today? The trains, planes and automobiles that deliver it in an edible state? The list goes on. How many of us could really survive an apocalypse?
The complexity of the world has increased in what feels like an exponential rate over the 40-plus years since Connections was made. Each of us has been reduced from a cog in vast machine to a single tooth on a very small cog in a massive world spanning machine. When I was a kids cars were complex machines but I could learn enough about how they worked, as mechanical things, to understand them. I was far from a gear head but I could even do basic maintenance and little repair. I could change the oil or clean the spark plugs because I could understand what was going on under the hood and apply that knowledge with my hands. Today, the principles haven’t changed (as long as we are talking about internal combustion engines, ignoring hybrid and electric cars for now…) but cars are computers and they require specialized equipment to even diagnose many problems. My car throws an error if you replace the battery without the manufacturer provided software to tell the car what you did. As the world gets more and more advanced we all see less and less of the overall machine and it can be overwhelming. More and more we are surrounded by black boxes we don’t understand. It reminds me of another quote:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke, in Profiles of the Future
Everything around us is magic today, the technology behind you seeing these words on your mobile phone requires armies of people to design, build and manage. You can’t even name or imagine all the people and tasks along the way much less how it works, unless it’s your job to design it or build it or manage it, or to study it. And that would make you what we call an expert. But these days people don’t seem to believe they need to listen to experts about the things they don’t know.
Even the most venerated experts, the canonical example of an expert: doctors, aren’t safe from the disrespect for expertise today. There are many issues with the practice of medicine [ted.com] but when I’m sick I still want an expert to take a look, to diagnose and to treat me. I want someone who trained for years to understand how the human body works, continues to keep up with advances and is certified to apply that knowledge. The human body is magic to me, because I don’t have the knowledge. How is it that people can think a random talking head on the Internet knows better than almost all the trained doctors and medical researchers in the world? People are drinking bleach! Or worse making their autistic kids drink Clorox like Kool Aid in Jonestown.
Do you remember, before the Internet, that it was thought that the cause of collective stupidity was the lack of access to information? Yea… It wasn’t that.
Anonymous meme
I can’t find a source to cite for that, I’ve seen different versions of the theme on the internet many times over the past few years, it seems appropriate. But we did know, or some people knew, that the idea, in the early days of the Internet, that access to information would make everyone smarter, was bullshit. We were warned:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance”, Newsweek (21 January 1980) (more about it on Open Culture [openculture.net])
This thread of anti-intellectualism is the direct parent of the disrespect, and hostility, towards “experts” on display today. And there does seem to be something fundamental about it as it affects people on both sides of the political spectrum, liberal anti-vaxxers and conservative anti-maskers alike, rich hollywood stars and struggling middle class workers, and don’t get me started on flat-earthers. Ignorance, individualism and the internet are a potent brew.
I don’t know where to go from here, I don’t know how it can be fixed but I suspect it will take many experts…
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Broadband for all?
I have been reading the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations in the past couple of days. It’s full of lots of progressive liberal dreams. But I’m a pessimist, I expect most of it cannot get passed Congress in anything like it’s current form but hope springs eternal. I guess. Anyway… I came across this part:
As millions of Americans have stayed at home to prevent the spread of the pandemic, it is plain to see that in the 21st century, the Internet is not optional: It is a vital tool for participating in the economy, and all Americans need access to high-speed, affordable broadband service. Democrats will take action to prevent states from blocking municipalities and rural co-ops from building publicly-owned broadband networks, and increase federal support for municipal broadband. We will increase public investment in rural broadband infrastructure and offer low- income Americans subsidies for accessing high-speed internet through the Lifeline program, so children and families can fully participate in school, work, and life from their homes. And Democrats will restore the FCC’s clear authority to take strong enforcement action against broadband providers who violate net neutrality principles through blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, or other measures that create artificial scarcity and raise consumer prices for this vital service.
I support this, I wholeheartedly support this. The lack of broadband is a detriment to anyone’s participation in the modern economy. As a worker, for more and more jobs, and, increasingly, as a consumer. COVID-19 has shown it’s an even more critical peace of infrastructure than we thought. You can’t have online classes or work from home meetings if people don’t have a good internet connection, and to do both at the same time?
I think the rollout should be pushed by the government as a common good, as centrally planned, funded and managed infrastructure. I’ve written about it before, here [confusion.cc] and even revisited it here [confusion.cc]. When I revisited the lack of broadband coverage, in 2017, I lamented how it seemed nothing had changed since I originally wrote about it in 2010. Well… guess what? It’s still shit.
I live in Singapore where we have a national broadband network, pumping high speed internet into nearly every house and small business. I still buy connectivity from a service provider, but what I’m really buying from them is the connection out to the wider world, the network from my house to the service providers is the same no matter who I purchase from. The idea is that broadband, like roads is a necessary part of the national infrastructure. When I leave my house and drive over the road to a shop or office the road is a common good connecting the two private locations. Good roads are a necessary part of the modern functioning economy. They are expensive and it makes sense that the government funds them centrally to ensure they reach everyone. The same is true of internet; connecting homes is expensive and it makes sense to let the government fund it to ensure it reaches everyone.
One benefit of the government managing the roads is planning. The Singapore government can encourage development in different areas through the management of the roads. Even in a place as small as Singapore you can see the effect of this when new roads are built, or more commonly, existing roads are widened or extended. Given, Singapore is a small place and managing infrastructure on the scale of the US is in a different league, look at roads in the US… but still I think it’s worth government investing in infrastructure for the common good. That includes bettering our investment in roads but also in new infrastructure requirements like broadband.
I should point out that Australia is also building a national broadband network, and it’s not going as swimmingly as it did in Singapore. Australia is much closer to the physical size of the US but only has a fraction of the population. So, yes, I expect it will be a much harder and longer process in the US. Dealing with federal, state and local governments and people and entrenched businesses. But we need to find the way. We got electricity to everyone only with a major governmental push after the private sector reached the point where it was not in business interest to push further. That was a hundred years ago. Broadband is the electricity of this century, and the US is falling behind. It was not until the 1950 after Eisenhower saw the benefit of good roads in Germany that we got the interstate highway system in the US. The same thing needs to happen now; take a look at the success of national broadband networks in places like Singapore and South Korea, and bring it back to the US.
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Broken Links
As of right now there are 173 broken links in the posts on confusion. That’s out of 1888 total links. This is according to the Broken Link Checker [workpress.org] plugin by WPMU DEV. The plugin automatically changes the link color to red with strikethrough text so you will see the broken links.
A blog post that links out the rest of the Internet is a little snapshot of part of the web from when the post was written and while the Internet never forgets [confusion.cc], it’s an ever changing place and many, many sites die all time time. Many personal sites disappear because the owner abandons them, maybe they shut them down purposely or maybe they just stopped paying the bills and moved on. Big sites redesign and move things around, so much for permalinks. I see a bunch of links to still active news sites but it seems the stories are no longer reachable by the link I used ‘back in the day’. Somehow it all reminds me of the way your memories are constantly shifting, adapting each time you remember them, a memory of a memory of a feeling of a time when…
I guess it’s just the inevitable consequence of being around for so long. This blog has been going for nearly 19 years. There are a few links that seem to be broken because of typos or other simple things including, embarrassingly, internal links to other Confusion posts. Those I will try and fix but most of the broken links will just stay there, you can’t change snapshots so why should I change the links?