If my absence this week from the internets has been stark, it’s for more reasons than just that I’m on vacation at the Delaware water gap. I’ve actually spent quite a few hours sorting out business here in the rec. center over the public wi-fi. If anything, it’s that business that’s inhibiting me. Here’s a quick rundown of the insanity:

Whilst attempting to respond to e-mails and locate the Stafford loan entrance counseling web app for Rensselaer, I discover that I can’t reach Google. Not only Google search, but also gmaps, groups, analytics, syndication ad-infinitum. This nags me when I go to look things up, it prevents me from looking at maps people have sent me, it interferes with RPI’s integrated site search, it borks myspace and it borks planetolin. For a moment, my mind expands, and I recognize the folly in our intense dependence on a single umbrella of services; Google is still a single point of failure, despite its wide geographic dispersion. Then I snap to my senses and get to work.

What the hell is going on? Page loads aren’t timing out, they’re just… running off to infinity. Connections aren’t being reset, or for that matter closed. Ping succeeds, but wget hangs; IE, Firefox and Google Earth login all seem to wait forever. No 200, 400 or 500 error messages. I can only conclude the HTTP requests are being ignored, and a more careful analysis with wget confirms this. Which is weird, because Google, arguably the most successful high-availability network application of all time, isn’t known for being snobbish, much less too busy to service a request.

My next thought, am I being blocked? I already double and triple-checked applicable local filters–IE, Firefox, Windows firewall–but of course, like any sane person, I haven’t blocked Google. And since Kelcy sitting next to me is having no such issue, it can’t be where we’re logged in from. I spend half an hour or so remembering how to convince windows and the local DHCP to change my IP address, but that doesn’t help. I’ve ruled out everything I can think of, other than Windows being its usual irrational broken self. And my ndiswrapper config in Linux is all messed up, so I don’t have much of an alternative. I grunt and go about my business.

So that’s the depressing news on the technical front. On the metaphysical front, I’ve been eying the chatter on randomness with particular interest since Kelcy and I were already in the thick of a discussion of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism. The whole matter bothers me like an itch you’d rather just scratch than actually examine for its cause, but I try to keep an open mind. This leads to an exhaustive conversation about strong copyright, and whether or not objectivists would be aligned with it. I’m skeptical of the familiar “bitches be tryin’ to take what’s mine” mentality, which stinks of paranoid elitism.

But then isn’t this exactly what I’m talking about when I complain about the Big Five and their efforts to simultaneously squelch derivation and disenfranchise their client artists? Or Microsoft brandishing its ludicrous patent portfolio to extort tribute from most successful players in the Linux community? The big, established players can sit on their fat asses while they use their power in the pre-existing market as a weapon to enslave the pioneers trying to expand its borders.

An important point of confusion, for me, is that Rand was for corporations. The whole economic stance is kind of like libertarianism, but then the latter takes a wide left turn and the former goes straight. The comparison can be really odd, because they want largely the same things (freedom, property, capitalism) but libertarianism prides itself in its proximity to anarchy, and admits such things as corporations and regulations as contrived devices for its ideals rather than noble, self-evident products thereof. I’ve tried to understand what seems to present itself as the deep and radical political underpinnings of objectivism, but all I can see is a re-derivation from first principles of the existing law with a strongly neo-conservative bent. Of course, I’ve been reading a lot of secondary sources, so I could be completely off-base.

More on that later I guess.

Update on the intarwebs saga: I’m at home now, and surprise surprise, everything works again. Gave me a moment of panic, though–I left some custom TCP/IP settings in place when I left Shawnee, so when I first booted up everything refused to load, except Google and Wikipedia. Whatever. Show’s over.

(In all seriousness, it is starting to come together now, so don’t panic mom and dad)

Thought I’d sit down and take a breather, not so much from packing but from fretting about not being done packing, which I’m altogether too good at. I’m hoping that in the course of my summer I can learn just a thing or two about the art of living and traveling light from my companion, Kelcy, who, while by no means a neat freak, is rather more experienced with said art. In the next two weeks we’ll be running down to Pennsylvania and Maryland, bouncing back to PA, then upstate NY, then back to Boston. Most of my junk from the dorms will get dumped at the apt. in Newton for now, with a few things possibly landing in Albany.

In a broader sense, this is one of those junctions in life where it is appropriate (and hopefully easier) to select things to keep and things to abandon. Consider the nitpicker’s wet dream that is the resume. As an undergrad, my resume was concerned with things that’d happened since late Junior year of high school. In the next couple years, the remaining bullet points from high school will vanish, and I’ll add more exciting projects and job stories, and have to be pickier about what things from college I include. Out there in the business world, of course, resumes start with the college degree and honors, and move on from there. Everything before that is biography material.

I’m reminded of a spiel that is given to cub scouts as they receive their graduation mark, the arrow of light award, and prepare to join Boy Scouts of America. It goes something like: this award is special for two reasons. Here, now, it symbolizes your demonstrated readiness to move on to bigger things; but in a short while this one award will stand for everything you have accomplished to date. You can’t keep all the badges you’ve earned thus far, and still have room for the many more important ones still to come. Instead you will be given a clean slate, with this one award to represent the doings of the past.

Granted, I never finished scouts, and I’ve watched their PR image waver in the years since with a bit of sadness, but I also remember the sincerity and intelligence of the older scouts who led the troop, who’ve gone on to degrees in teaching and engineering and the like.

The last written deliverable for AHS capstone is a two-part self-assessment of the semester’s activities. Since Caitrin had a number of positive comments regarding mine, I thought I’d share it. Would-be copyright reform activists should definitely take a look, as it talks at length about both the decisions that worked well and the mistakes I wouldn’t want to repeat. And if you still haven’t, definitely take a look at the current DocBook build of the deliverable, “Legislating for Innovation”.

AHS Capstone Self Assessment – DJ Gallagher

I.

Initially, I made my primary goal to weave my subject essays together into a coherent whole where the first page or so explained the problem and the last page or so suggested solutions. As of April 13 I felt I had done this; however Allen expressed concern about the flow of my arguments. In particular the section on ethics seemed to be a hanging tangent. By allowing the writing to meander even a little, I was losing the audience; in retrospect this point is well-taken.

Rather than trying to touch on all my points in a single circuit, he proposed a telescoping structure wherein the first paragraph, the first page and the whole of the paper encompass the same breadth of material, with increasing depth on each pass. I open with a short teaser highlighting the three components of my thesis, followed by a short essay that introduces the problem and gives my complete arguments (without details or substantiating sources), followed by essays explicating and supporting those arguments. The last 1-2 pages are still reserved for action items and concluding thoughts.

The greatest strength of the deliverable is the depth of its roots in the wealth of source material I’ve collected. The paper abounds with examples and quips. It reflects, I hope, the scale of my efforts to understand and weave together a coherent worldview of anti-copyright. While I’d always intended to make use of foundational hacker wisdom (such as Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Stallman’s “GNU Manifesto”), in the end I went much farther, drawing on supreme court case law, the founding fathers, the Olin College core values, ageless aphorisms (“teach a man to fish…”), commercial software management treatises and even the language of the Communist Manifesto. With this rich background I can tell an alternate history of intellectual property, one highly suggestive of man’s ability to do with less of it. As I continue to build on my work in the future, I may draw on additional sources, such as the history of Japanese Dōjinshi art.

Also an important strength has been the recent reorientation of the paper around a central consideration of the Bush administration’s American Competitiveness Initiative. Not only did this locate the debate in a position of relevance to congressional representatives, it provided a handy timetable for my doomsayer’s scenario on copyright. Beyond that, it highlighted the separate issue of developer patronage and substantiated one of my most difficult claims—that we as a nation are at risk of falling behind—allowing me to worry about other things, like arguing that America needs community software. All in all, mentioning the ACI is a credential for the paper’s relevance in much the same way as the description of Olin is a credential for the author.

Unfortunately, the deliverable cannot be considered complete at present. Parts of the last section are still in bulleted format, and I believe I may be missing a citation or two elsewhere. Writing up the policy and legislation items has proven quite a difficult task—partly because it’s hard to thread them together in the narrative, partly because of the immense background research involved in backing my suggestions, and partly because it’s much easier to criticize the status quo than it is to develop a plausible, self-consistent alternative. I am, however, excited at where recent developments seem to be leading. In this section more than any other, my technical problem-solving skills are brought to bear.

Aside from this, I think the biggest problem I’m facing with the deliverable is still readability. In some places it still has the feel of a Discover article—too busy getting the terminology right and understood, and as a result not concise enough. The main body of the paper is still 8 single-spaced pages, longer than a busy politician can be expected to have time for. My temporary solution was to point out in the introduction where the policy suggestions can be found, but ultimately it will be preferable to squeeze much of this material into the body of the paper and/or make everything a bit more succinct.

Because the paper is not complete, a significant part of my revision process has been perfecting the structure of the skeletal parts and grafting on figurative flesh. Traditionally I don’t rely on any complex process for this, I simply start at the beginning of the document and move toward the end, changing things as I see fit.

In this case, I realized that besides needing to complete the last two sections, there was an entire new segment I wanted to insert at the beginning. I’d been unsatisfied by the previous attempt at an introduction, which was too bogged down in describing the ACI to form a complete introduction. So I wrote the new section from scratch, then I merged, then I deleted. What remains is a one-page intro, followed by a paired down version of what used to be the intro, now labeled “American Competitiveness Initiative”. Realizing that the intended Marx-esque opening conflicted with Allen’s suggestion of a summary paragraph, I developed the separate four-sentence teaser that now resides on the title page.

For future revisions, I expect to apply a similar process for this, as there is significant content missing toward the end. I’ve also considered using a wikibook site to solicit help from friends, which is very much in line with my philosophy and the way I generally license content from my website. It might have a side-effect of complicating the author attribution of the document, but that’s not all bad. If the signature of one Olin student carries some credibility, surely the signatures of multiple Olin students carry no less credibility, if not quite a bit more.

Credibility aside, I don’t expect this to change the minds of the majority of current legislators; rather I’d like to compel those who are mildly pro-reform or on the fence to increase their opposition to the demands of publishers’ lobbyists and, arming themselves with the arguments I’ve provided, open a wider dialogue on intellectual property both in congress and in the press. I believe that intellectual property reform has the potential to become a campaign issue by 2012; once that happens, youth-friendly congressional and presidential candidates like Senator Barack Obama will want to adopt reformist stances to firm their voter bases.

Beyond Capitol Hill, it’s my hope that by reading this, people with an active interest in IP law will develop deeper self-awareness and insight into their own reasoning. Hackers have historically viewed their ethical conclusions as self-evident, often not knowing how to justify them when questioned, else replying with opaque technical statements or, worse, moralistic axioms likely to get them branded as myopic techno-hippies. With “Legislating for Innovation”, I am trying to help people see intellectual property as a holistic political issue whose technical, ethical and social aspects are in unity. Perhaps this will help convince Free Software and Open Source Software advocates of the meaninglessness of their schism—both depend on the same licensing models, both are helped or hurt by the same legislative measures, and both are to be important facets of the design philosophy of 21^st-century computing infrastructure.

In terms of the stated discipline of persuasive writing, I’m not sure I could honestly say I’ve contributed much. In the more specific niche of technical advocacy, “Legislating for Innovation” joins a number of recent internal communiqués that point to a millenarian trend in software. As with global warming, the community perceives that the longer it takes to convince America to change its ways, the greater the damage will be. Many see their best hope for change in the ongoing transition to 64-bit hardware, which could significantly disrupt the current balance of commercial software vendors and open the way for community software to gain prominence.

Considering the current state of the deliverable and what I’d hoped to achieve, I rate my work a B-. I think my writing attests that I successfully digested and utilized a large amount of source material, as well as learning quite a bit about advocacy from my mentor and from the readings. I am satisfied with the format, if not exactly with the content, of the deliverable. Completing and revising for publication will require a few more weeks’ worth of effort. The tone of voice, while vastly improved, needs a bit more polishing for consistency (and to ensure it is entirely free of the couched barbs which I, as a hacker addressing “the suits”, was prone to inserting). Concurrently I will be thinking strategically about how to publicize the final result.

II.

In developing “Legislating for Innovation”, I have sought to create something novel and informative; and I have focused on this goal to a greater extent than (and perhaps to the detriment of) the process. Contrary to my original stated intention to release material early and often through my website, I have labored in private. I am not sure why I chose this, although it is in keeping with the “hydraulic principle” of creative writing—the less others know about a work, the greater the motivation to complete and reveal it. The set of essays has not changed significantly since March, except for one new section named in the revised deliverable.

By March I had already written my first two sections, but I was stuck on the remaining essays for nearly a month. I attribute their difficulty partly to the content and partly to not leaving enough work hours after SCOPE and Drawing. I think the distribution of my effort in intense intermittent bursts is somewhat visible in the character of the essays, which occasionally repeat each other’s arguments (though I’ve managed to edit most of this out).

I began with the thesis that America must align its policies with the needs of open development in order to protect its economic future, and a goal of explaining and justifying the needed changes to politicians as a matter of ethics. Looking at what I have now produced, I see that the essence has not changed much, but the phrasing has changed considerably and the idea is much more developed. As my goal was not to write a paper but a letter, there is no thesis statement to speak of; rather it is from the introduction and the teaser on the cover page that I make this conclusion.

One important thing about the thesis did change: the emphasis on ethics has been reduced. I had anticipated challenges in explaining the whole of my message to a non-technical audience; what I had not considered was that my audience might be unmoved by a well-reasoned argument based in mathematics and ethics, unless it included a parallel analysis of the movement of dollars and votes. As a result, I’ve moved (only somewhat consciously) to a threefold argument citing information ethics, voter sentiment and macroeconomics. In developing this, I’m being forced to consider previously overlooked questions, like just how many of us young American copyright reformists might there be? and what is the time value of political capital associated with not getting kicked out of office nine years from now, when the economy goes south?

From this experience I have learned the importance of studying one’s audience. Though I was writing to politicians, most of my source material was addressed to a technical or general audience. Like more interactive products (such as websites), a piece of writing must anticipate and embrace the character of the recipient. But I had convinced myself I had little to learn from actually studying the discipline of rhetoric that couldn’t be learned by studying the writing of other advocates—none of whom was writing to congress. I kicked myself when I realized that.

Even having analyzed the audience, I was occasionally surprised by the difficulty of keeping them in mind when writing. When I post to my weblog about information technology, I’m usually doing it in my opinionated, caustic journaling style, from the point of view of a casual hacker addressing others sympathetic to hacking. It’s been hard to step out of that mentality and adopt a neutral tone; even my professional passion for information technology can get in the way at times, preventing me from seeing what’s wrong with a particular argument or choice of words.

Allen and Gillian were of some help with this, although more than anything I value Allen’s observations about the nature of politicians and how to write for them. They are busy and skeptical men, and while they may sit on committees for technical matters, the subject in which they have the most currency is, of course, politics. This, combined with the revelation that innovation was a buzzword of the current administration and an object of billion-dollar funding, gave me the insight I needed to write what I felt would be a compelling message. I am also beginning to apply this insight in screening the dossiers of potential recipients of “Legislating for Innovation”.

Looking back on the project as a whole, what I take away from it most is the importance of seeing systems problems holistically. I began with an objective of reasoning ethically about technology policy, but I discovered that this was not sufficient. As I continued chipping away at the problem, I did a lot of free writing, and the results brought me further and further from the considerations of pure ethics. The ethical component was tied inseparably to the technical component, the social component and the economic component. To argue effectively, I needed to let these linkages be seen. Eventually I’d stepped back far enough from the canvas that I was able to conceptualize the problem in its broadest terms: information should be free, but people should be compensated for making it free. It was then that I could intelligently revise, and begin developing my section on policy and legislation.

Consider the following series:

Cero, uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, ceis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez, once, doce, trece, catorce, quince.

These are the numbers zero to fifteen (hopefully I haven’t butchered the spelling); they’re also as far as you can count before you run into the standard compound notation for double-digit numbers (in English that’d be 20). What’s so interesting about the numbers zero to fifteen? CS majors should know where I’m going with this.

Cero ==> 0000
Quince ==> 1111

There really is nothing new under the sun. A beautiful story, though, and a point well made I think.