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.

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 →

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 →

Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea that’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are
by James Harkin (Little, Brown)

When you’re just a node on the network, no one can hear you scream. James Harkins’s dystopian essay portrays users of Facebook et al as people staring out of their windows on a suburban street, signalling to one another by flashing lamps on and off. The only winner is the disembodied “system”, which passes information around itself to no scrutable purpose, using us as its automata.

But at least we feel that we are “in the loop”. We feel important, too, if asked to provide “feedback”. Harkin’s book is at its best in its enjoyable excavation of such metaphors. He traces them back to the birth of “cybernetics”, when a mathematician named Norbert Wiener tried to improve the performance of anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war. Wiener took the engineering concept of “feedback” — in which information at the output of a system is plugged back into the input — and applied it to living organisms. So an anti-aircraft gun, the gunner, and the enemy plane constituted a single system whose performance was to be optimized. Now, Harkin argues, the inhabitants of “Cyburbia” happily volunteer to become mere cogs in a smoothly functioning global machine. Continued →

The best game I played this month¹ had zero polygons and no particle effects; it was unscripted, cost nothing, and didn’t even require any electricity.² It did have physics, though.

The game involves a tree stump, some nails, and a hammer — the type where the back end of the head is a thin blade rather than a fork. The object of the game is simple: each player takes a nail and tries to bang it into the stump using the thin end of the hammer head. You get one swing at a time, and if you miss the nail completely you have to drink some beer. There you go: the best bloody game ever made. Hammer happy. Continued →

1. This column was written in October 2008. ↩
2. Edge changed this to “didn’t require plugging in to the power”, which sounds like something Derek Zoolander might say. But perhaps they were making the subtle point that there is still electricity involved in the game, in the form of the electrical impulses in human bodies and brains. True! ↩

Why I’d like a smaller Apple laptop

In New York this summer, I bought an ASUS Eee 901 “netbook”, and chose the Linux version, congratulating myself on sticking it to The Man while gaining an extra 8Gb of drive space. A week later, I was sighing with relief after having deleted Linux and installed Windows XP instead.¹ What went wrong?

The default Xandros operating system looked okay at first: certainly, the computer booted very quickly (in roughly 15 seconds), after which I had Firefox, OpenOffice and a bunch of other little apps which pretty much replicated the bare-bones functionality of an OS X or Windows system. The wireless seemed a little flaky, but I assumed there would be driver updates. But then I made a huge mistake! I tried to install a new application. Continued →

1. Luckily, I had an XP disc around lying around from the days when I had to have a PC for reviewing videogames. That era taught me at least one thing: nearly all PC games can be described with the single word “pointy”. ↩

Below is the text, more or less, of the keynote presentation I gave at the very awesome F.R.O.G. conference, which took place in Vienna, October 17–19 2008.

Working for the Man: Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames¹

Videogames are often discussed under the concept of “play”, but this is not always how gamers themselves talk about their experience: they use instead vocabularies of desperate competition or violence. Take the very common expression of satisfaction after completing a game: “I beat the game.” What exactly does it mean to beat a game? You can’t have a meaningful contest against an inert digital artefact. From the game’s point of view, you did not beat it. On the contrary, you did exactly what the game wanted you to do, every step of the way. You didn’t play the game, you performed the operations it demanded of you, like an obedient employee. The game was a task of labour. From this perspective, playing a videogame looks as much like work as play.

Of course work is a large component of many types of game. The professional chess player competing in a tournament game does not have the carefree, leisurely attitude sometimes implied by the term “playing”: she is performing massive amounts of cognitive work. Similarly with poker players or tennis players: they are not merely fooling around but labouring mightily. Because it has rules, a game is never just a game but also a system of coercion, freely entered into. This in itself is not surprising: as Johann Huizinga reminded us, the idea of play can comprehend, and is not threatened by, a fanatical seriousness.² And the workload of videogames in particular is recognised in their description by some scholars as a species of “ergodic literature”.

But videogames seem more and more to resemble work in a different sense: working for the Man. They hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment. Continued →

1. I also considered the alternative titles “I Got All the Fucking Work I Need“, and “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me“, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of swearing in the titles of papers for academic conferences. ↩
2. Huizinga, Johann, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1944; London, 1980). ↩

From: Microsoft Propaganda Honcho
To: Microsoft Propaganda Minion
Subject: “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”

Propaganda Minion,

You remember that a fortnight ago, on my orders, we pulled our propaganda document, “Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista”,¹ from the internet only hours after tech bloggers around the world had laughed themselves hoarse over it, and I ordered you to rewrite some of the more misunderstood sections. I have now evaluated your changes in the new version. Continued →

1. Original version [pdf]; new version. ↩

Blogs vs books, from a writer’s point of view

Who needs books, anyway? One interesting kind of response to my previous post about the “experiment” of giving away my book Trigger Happy for free was to point to the financial success of many bloggers, and to say that this was the way forward. Writers should, essentially, forget about the “outdated” model of writing a whole “book” and then figuring out how to sell it. Instant web publishing is what people want: it’s groovy and immediate, edgy, now. In that case, though, what happens to the quality of writing overall?

Any facile comparison of “quality” across different media is asking for a kicking. But I’m going to do it anyway. It seems to me that blogs are the perfect medium for discussing highly topical matters in, say, technology or politics. There are many blogs that I admire and read regularly, and they often provide brilliant demolitions of official narratives, or superior analysis to that offered by complacent and/or flat-out dishonest “professionals” in the corporate media, or just better jokes. That said, I would take everything I read in the blogosphere last year, load it onto a cheap thumbdrive, and happily swap it, in an instant, for a single copy of Denis Johnson’s mind-bendingly magnificent Tree of Smoke. For me, there’s just no contest.

Why should this be so? Is there any reason why some future Denis Johnson couldn’t publish a masterpiece serially on the internet? I think, actually, there might be. Continued →

Why beauty is truth

When the downloadable version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out, some people were complaining vocally about the mp3 encoding. Tinny and distorted, they said, what a dreadful conversion to mp3, it’s not even worth the zero dollars I paid for it. Actually, it sounds okay to me. Not CD quality, but perfectly fine for the bitrate.¹ What evident distortion I can hear seems evidently to be the result of production/mastering decisions, not a technical fault. This story might be a good illustration of the fact that, the less you pay for something, the less value you are likely to assign to it. Or maybe those people were unconsciously ill at ease owing to Radiohead’s crazy time signatures.² Or maybe they were just using really bad headphones.

That’s what occurred to me as I was walking through Paris the other day, listening to my downloaded copy of In Rainbows on my iPod through my new pair of AKG K324P earphones. Continued →

1. I stop being able to hear the difference between 44.1Khz 16-bit AIFF and compressed codecs when the encoding hits around 320kbps (for AAC; somewhat higher for mp3). ↩
2. “Fifteen Step” is in 5/4, naturally. ↩