So I recently got this email from CPSR begging me to rejoin. They basically talked about how membership was declining and how they’re essentially dying as an organization. So they’re doing restructuring and trying to figure out what it is they’re all about now. I was a member of CPSR for one year in my idealistic, hippie-computing days a whole 5 years ago. Yeah I remember those days when I tried to use Linux for everything (Remember those days? Umm.. I can’t get drivers for my printer or get my scanner to work, but hey I’m sticking it to the man!). I miss those days in some ways. A whole bunch of people writing software for free to benefit the world and to bring down Microsoft and the other software barons.
Well what happened? The same thing that happened to peace and free-love in the 60’s I guess. People realized all those ideals were nice, but they didn’t feed the kids or actually solve any problems. War, environmental destruction, race and class division all continued to grind on oblivious of the good but misguided intentions.
The CPSR started out with good intentions, but they’ve never left their ivory tower. As far as I can tell, all they do is write policy papers, have conferences, and talk about problems that frankly they can’t do anything about. One of their working groups works on Internet governenance… Please, while we’re at it let’s try to make a perpetual motion machine.
CPSR is simply out of touch with reality and the pace at which technology works itself out. Here’s what’s wrong with CPSR:
- For example the CPSR approach to engaging intellectual property issues is to have a conference about it and work for two years on drafting a policy paper. Oooh, that’ll show everybody. Meanwhile the rest of the world is file sharing using Kazaa or BitTorrent. BT and Kazaa will force the IP rules and content delivery to change on it’s own. They won’t need the CPSR to figure it out.
- Nobody cares what the CPSR has to say. Do you think someone at ICANN is saying “the CPSR wrote this paper and well, we should probably change our ways.” Do you think some corporation is reading a CPSR paper and saying, “hmm… we should be more ethical about our privacy policy because the CPSR wrote this paper.” Of course not. The only way things change is when they’re forced to change. Period. The eToy story is a classic example of how this works.
- In the Internet world, you don’t need an organization to fend for you. Individuals and informal, ephemeral communities are much more capable, flexible, and empowered to bring about change than large organizations. A single person can write a piece of software or lead a hacker revolt that will force the world to change much faster than a stodgy 1970’s old school organization like CPSR.
So is hippie computing dead? Of course not, it’s just grown up and realized it doesn’t need a feel good organization to represent it. Who knows maybe in this era of self-empowerment every person for him/her/itself will lead to the eventual decentralization of every cause/issue. And maybe this is a good thing. With no one in control, movements will be harder to co-opt or undermine. So maybe it’s time for the CPSR dinosaurs to go extinct. The blogosphere era activist vole rats are feeding on the CPSR carcass.
A couple of things I’ve noticed on this trip that might be handy for future travels:
I brought a iBook this time. I never travelled (recreationally) with a laptop in the past, but Internet access is so widespread, that it’s almost foolish not to. I’ve also found it handy to watch movies on the plane, now that they’ve stopped in-flight movies. The laptop is also great for transferring photos off of the camera and doing quick photo editing.
The new Casio Exilim z57 I got is tremendous. It truly has added a whole new dimension to vacationing. The 2.1 inch LCD allows for great instant reviews of snapshots. Usually I’d come back from vacations and maybe take maybe 60 pictures. Now I take about 60 pictures a day. The camera is super small, unobtrusive powers on and takes pictures very quickly. My old Olympus Camedia would start up so slowly that I’d never take spontaneous pictures. Now I can take discreet quick pics anywhere. Also the Casio saved a day of vacation. We were having a terrible day. Nothing was open, and a lot of the places we wanted to visit were lackluster or overrated. However we took pictures of everything and got to laugh about it. We made a game of taking pics of everything we wanted to do that was closed.
Things I didn’t bring but should have:
- Compact binoculars. So many times I wished I had a pair…
- In the future I’d bring blank CD-R’s I’m storing all the photos on the iBook HD. I have over 400MB of photos now. I tried to bzip them and scp them to my server, but it would take me almost 4 hours to upload from the hotel hotspot. So hopefully nothing happens to the iBook hard drive.
I think in the future when wimax takes over, and Internet access is truly omnipresent, mobile devices will be ready for laptop replacement. I’m thinking of a PSP size device I could watch movies on, look up quick info, blog, book tours and accommodations, and upload photos. Well that’ll have to wait for my next vacation to Hawaii.
The one thing that surprised me in the airports was the ubiquity of the Treo. Literally you could not walk four feet without running into someone who was using a Treo. It made me wonder if I was watching a very narrow demographic of users? Had I stumbled across the migration of an endangered species of Palm users? Or is the Treo really more popular than I think. I didn’t see a single person with a pocketPC or windows mobile device. It also surprised me that with all the lousy points of the Treo phones (see any of my previous Treo posts), that Palm is still selling units. I think the big selling points of Treos are:
- The price point. You can get a 600 for around $250-$350. That’s significantly cheaper than a PDA+phone or Windows Mobile device
- The simplicity. Palm is still the best address book, day planner out there. I bet 90% of Treo users just use the date, contact, phone, and solitaire game only.
Palm has enough momentum to make a comeback. But here’s what needs to happen IMHO.
- They need to hire Apple industrial designers and “nano” the Treo. I’d buy one again if they could make it thinner, more durable, and get rid of that antenna stub. There’s no excuse not to shrink the Treo. If Apple can squeeze 4Gb of flash into the nano for $200, than Palm can squeeze 64Mb of flash and the Palm OS into something even smaller.
- They need to make it cheaper and simpler. Palm can’t compete with Windows Mobile head to head. The turbo geeks who want a multi-tasking OS capable of running Mathematica will go for the super Windows phones. The rest of us who just like the Treo for contact management, SMS, and day planner could use a simpler/cheaper device.
This is has been my first domestic flight since the post 9/11 world. However 9/11 has very much receded from our collective consciousness. Indeed, now the TSA, who were created out of our knee-jerk response for air security, have become just an annoyance and a joke. Almost everyone in the almost 100m line at screening just grumbled about how it was such a waste and essentially ineffective government bureacracy. Kudos to the White House. We’ve now managed to make another top-heavy, three-letter bureacracy that essentially does nothing. Even the TSA folks working the screening had that same hollow look that any GS7 and lower has. They hate their jobs just as much as we hate their jobs…
So what’s this have to do with WalMart? Well I’ve been reading The World Is Flat which my library copy is extremely overdue by the way (sorry). I think it should be required reading by everyone. Very rarely do I think a book is that important. In this case I feel it is. In one of the sections he notes that the 20th Century involved the struggle between labor and capital, the backbone of Marxist theory. However the 21st Century is all about the battle between labor and the consumer. Capital is merely the middleman that has no power to regulate pricing. In almost every market the product has been commoditized as consumers have beaten companies into giving them the price they want… at the expense of labor. Why does Dell offer $450 PC’s? Because the consumer forced them to. Almost every market has been driven to razor thin margins.
I’ve noticed this in my plane flight here. In the past airlines had the power to charge pretty much whatever they wanted for a flight, and the public just had to deal with it. Now Delta, Northwest and Unitied are fighting for their lives. All of our flights had no meal service. If I wanted a meal I had to pay $5 for it. Now mind you the $5 box of pre-packaged snack food was actually very good value, even if it had a shelf life of ten years, but that’s how bad things have gotten. I’m at home clicking on Travelocity and Expedia. I can instantly compare the price of any flight to any other flight. I only choose the flight on the top of the list … the cheapest even if it’s cheaper by $1. The consumer never had this level of power before. I no longer need the travel industry to tell me what I can do. I do whatever I please even if the entire food service wing of an airline has to be laid off to make it happen, who cares. I want my $1. - In short the Walmart effect. The problem with this is obvious. However can we go back? If iPods were made in the USA with unionized labor costs, would anyone except the very rich own one? Would I be blogging in Hawaii if in flight meals had not ended? Would United Airlines workers still have their pensions? Should I care? We’re turning into an oroborus feeding on itself. Friedman says this model is sustainable and will benefit everyone in the long run. Of course as the economist Keynes said famously, “in the long run we are all dead.”