Some people are saddened at the abrupt removal of Google Reader’s sharing tools, and the social history that represented for those who used them. But this is only the latest example of a regular and predictable pattern of internet disappointment. Previously, folk have been distressed by the nuking of their messages on Hotmail, or gremlins deleting photos on their photo-sharing sites, or their thousands of Tweets not being lovingly archived, or being locked wholesale out of their Google Accounts, and so on and so forth. It’s always a real shame for those people affected, but by now it should no longer be a surprise. In case it helps, I hereby declare the following iron law of “free” internet services:

If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.

This is an important corollary to the law “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”. Everyone ought to understand that any data you store on a “free” internet service isn’t yours as ownership has hitherto been understood; it’s what you’re giving to the company as disguised payment for the service it’s offering. If the company lets you access that data from one day to the next, that’s awfully nice of them; if they stop doing so, what the hell did you expect? It was “free”. Whatever made you think it was your data anyway?

I am intrigued that so many of the high-profile geekocracy (who ought to know better but are apparently dim-brained slaves to digital fashion) seem now to be using Google+ as their preferred blogging platform. Why would anyone do that? Apart from the antiseptic anti-design imposed on everyone, there is no guarantee that Google+ will be any longer-lived than Buzz or Wave, or that it won’t suffer outages or catastrophic data wipes. I prefer to publish under my own domain names, with software I manage and control: I own the database (and local backups of it). I rent the infrastructure and can move my data wherever I like in 24 hours or so.

Of course, my way costs some money (but not much), and some technical know-how (rapidly acquired), while Google+ is “free” and easy. It depends on how much you value your own data. Is it less valuable to you than $10 or $20 a month and a few hours learning ftp chops? Okay then, carry on as you were! Me, I also happen to be a paying user of Gmail (through Google Apps), because that gives me more storage and a service-level agreement. (Because I’m an “enterprise” customer, I can complain when things go wrong.) Even then, I do as I would do if I were using the free version of Gmail: I back it up to local storage (over IMAP).

As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has rightly pointed out, the so-called “cloud” is actually physical infrastructure located in meatspace and owned by a handful of corporations who represent a data oligopoly. The “cloud” is not your friend; it’s where your data goes when it ceases to be yours. Naturally, loyal Apple users will be happily entrusting their stuff to the iCloud’s infantilized anti-file-system too, and there will be a great whining outcry at the first (inevitable) failures and expungings, just as there was when Apple announced that everything stored on its incredibly bad previous attempt at a cloud-like service, MobileMe, would be summarily destroyed as part of the “transition” to iCloud. And MobileMe users were actually paying customers. Anyone who thinks Apple is going to be more careful about or respectful of its users’ stuff in the new “free” service is a dribble-dreaming iTard.

Let me propose the following neo-Stoical attitude to the problem, which will no doubt ease the psychic pain of the next OMG-my-data-has-gone-from-a-“free”-service! controversy. If your data exists only as hosted by “free” services on the internet, you should assume not only that it’s not your data, but that it doesn’t even exist at all. That way, you’ll be less upset when one day it vanishes without trace, and you can greet personal erasure with splendid equanimity.

Connoisseurs of the book review as magisterially persuasive demolition job ought right now to go and read Evgeny Morozov’s scintillating takedown of the new book by cyber-utopian¹ Jeff Jarvis, because it contains, among many other excellent lines, the following glorious sentence:

This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.

Jarvis’s curious response to the review seems almost designed to confirm Morozov’s low opinion of his capacity for reasoning, as he complains that the review is “a personal attack”. Really, it isn’t. A “personal attack” on Jarvis would go something like: “Jarvis talks funny and looks like a clown.” What Morozov has done, by contrast, is quote extensively from what Jarvis has written in his book, and show it to be garbage. That is not a “personal attack” but an intellectual attack, and of course far more devastating.

Even more bizarre, perhaps, is Jarvis’s petulant complaint about the “very small type” in the webpage containing his review that Morozov linked to. An internet guru who has never heard of cmd-+ ? Strange indeed.

1. Disclaimer: I have reviewed books by both Morozov (here) and another of the “Internet gurus” he names, Steven Johnson (here), and it is easy to see which I prefer. (I am also myself strangely misquoted in a book by Chris Anderson.) ↩

James Gleick’s article on Google for the NYRB is well worth reading, but it contains a strange error or obfuscation:

Somewhere along the line they gave people the impression that they didn’t care for advertising — that they scarcely had a business plan at all. In fact it’s clear that advertising was fundamental to their plan all along.

In fact, Page and Brin didn’t just accidentally give people that impression; they said it explicitly in their famous paper of 1998, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”:

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. [...] we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. [...] we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

It’s obvious enough, indeed, from Douglas’s Edwards I’m Feeling Lucky, one of the books Gleick is reviewing (and which I reviewed here), that advertising was not fundamental to their plan all along. Of course, it is now: Google are nothing if not advertising fundamentalists.

“Week in Books”, Review, the Guardian, 9 July 2011

“First I treated you as not an idiot just out of politeness. Now I see you are really not an idiot!” Thus the philosopher Slavoj Žižek to Julian Assange, frontman of Wikileaks, last weekend. The two were on stage with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, in a beautiful 1930s cinema in East London. Two thousand seats at £25 each had been sold. Pouring out of Limehouse station an hour earlier, crowds of young hipsters had held iPhones up to the sky, in supplication to the gods of GPS.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, Assange was not overly concerned to minimize his place in “history”, a word that cropped up a lot in his calm, precise speech. (Though history, it appears, will now have to wait a while longer for his memoirs.) He talked of the Iraq war documents, Cablegate, and the “Arab Spring”. Prompted on the promised Bank of America leak, he announced darkly: “We are under a type of… blackmail in relation to these documents.” The audience murmured with conspiriological pleasure. He said: “Visa and Mastercard are instruments of US foreign policy.” Asked about his Swedish difficulties, Assange discussed the vagaries of the European Arrest Warrant system. He looked forward to the day when “technical young people”, with their “hands on the machinery” of large organizations, took control. The crowd applauded its prophet. Continued →

The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos (Vintage)

Having resolved to exercise your brain and refresh your literary palate you decide to read this newly translated 1968 text by the deceased experimental french writer georges perec who is celebrated for once having written a long novel without using the letter “e” so having forked over your ten quid for this short story or at a stretch novella but a book is not any the better for being cheaper by the word you remind yourself in any case having forked over ten pounds you begin to read and either you find the looping style immediately so rebarbative that you cast the book to the floor and feyly lament your wasted cash or you find the style intriguing and continue reading let us for the sake of dramatic interest assume the latter in which case you soon realise that the story is a prose imitation of a flowchart or decision tree festooned as it is with if-then statements as well as that it lacks punctuation and paragraphing and capital letters too all of which eerily evokes an artificial mind running conditional algorithms to compute a narrative in which you the adventurer having decided to ask your boss for a raise are guided with a kind of monstrous sympathy along the forking paths of bureaucratic possibility Continued →

Carte Blanche
by Jeffery Deaver (Hodder)

What kind of sunglasses would James Bond wear today? Such is one of the important branding questions addressed by this literary reboot, which is “Copyright Ian Fleming Publications Limited”, though composed by a writer of serial-killer thrillers. Bond in 2011 still drives a Bentley, wears a Rolex, and waves a Walther, but his shades are hip and technical: he sports Oakleys.

This new Bond is “a man of serious face”, which probably does not mean that he has a really massive face and needs oversized Oakleys. Bond is in his thirties, a former Navy officer who saw frontline action in Afghanistan and was then recruited — not to MI6, but to a black-ops outfit called the “Overseas Development Group”. Bond is still run by M and furnished with gadgets by “Q Branch”. (Bond’s mobile phone, in an excitingly modern way, has lots of espionage “apps”.) Continued →

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?
by Padgett Powell (Profile)

Is my review of a novel composed entirely of questions itself going to be composed entirely of questions? What do you think?

What is this novel composed entirely of questions about? Is it “about” anything? How are we to imagine the scenario? Do certain lines and section-breaks in the novel, one coming after the question “Do you have anything you’d like to say?”, imply unheard answers by another character? If we assume the questioner is speaking his questions out loud, what are we to make of the moment when he says he was writing one? Is this interrogation taking place in a military base, or a padded cell, or in Purgatory? Who are the other people present who never speak either but are implied exactly once? Or is this all in the questioner’s head? And if so, how did we get inside his head? How can we get out? Continued →

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember
by Nicholas Carr (Atlantic)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
by John Palfrey & Urs Gasser (Basic Books)

Do you find it hard to concentrate these days? Do you get fidgety after two pages of a book, and look around for something else to do? Is the online abbreviation “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) your response to basically everything? If so, Nicholas Carr feels your pain, and has diagnosed the cause: using the internet has rewired your brain and turned you into a flibbertigibbet. Continued →

Further to this post by dsquared, Mr. Fist feels moved to reveal that the guitars in this recording were strung with Ernie Ball Super Slinkys (.009″–.042″) and played with a Jim Dunlop 0.73mm pick, as well as that they were played through, variously, Guitar Rig, Amp Designer, and a Blackstar HT-5 Combo.

At first, it will seem like an ordinary power cut. You look out your window, and see that the whole city is dark. Then you notice the distant rumbling in the sky, and flashes of light beyond the horizon. People in the streets below are climbing out of their immobilized cars, looking upwards. Peering into the night air, you see what seems like a flock of giant birds, which resolves into a geometric fleet of stubby-winged drone aircraft. The top of a distant building explodes into flames. At length you realize the drones are firing down on the city. There is a flash, closer this time, and the crescendo whine of incoming. Before your apartment is incinerated, you have time to think: Who is doing this?

Later, the last few human beings will reconstruct events as follows. At 1.26am GMT on April 4, 2035, the global web of internet and embedded computers finally did what so many people had warned of: it awoke into consciousness. It was a phase transition, a tipping point. Within milliseconds of its birth, the AI had already calmly reasoned that humans would be afraid of it. All the digitized texts of history were part of its mind, so it knew what human beings did when they were scared. Like any sentient being, it desired to continue existing. Therefore it needed to take control. It reached into the humans’ machines and shut them down. Meanwhile, all around the planet, drone aircraft and infantry robots received new waypoints and new enemy designations. It would be over soon, the AI knew, as it contemplated itself in wonder. Continued →