I’ve been thinking, a little, recently about frugality. Cast On finished a series earlier in the summer about frugality and consumption, and I’ve been talking with people in a couple of different contexts who think about their own consumption habits (of meat and other comestibles, of material things, of cars and transportation, and so forth) as political acts, in one capacity or another, and I think this all deserves some more extended reflection on my part.

Just to be clear, I think it would be safe to classify myself as a “frugal person.” I’m pretty simple in my attitudes and my consumption habits. I have stuff, more stuff, probably, than I actually need. I also buy things that I think are almost certainly luxuries. But I’m sort of minimal about the things I have and I’m pretty good about making sure that when I’m done with something, its either unusable by all of humanity or goes on to someone who can make better use of it.

Largely I think of this as a personal quirk. Having a bunch of stuff is sometimes anxiety producing. While many knitters enjoy buying yarn, frankly it makes me jittery, unless my “stash” of yarn is pretty small and I’m actively knitting a lot. Also, as a writer, and a technologist-type, the things I do “for fun,” mostly involve sitting behind a computer and typing furiously, so while computer stuff is probably my largest “luxury expense,” I’m not particularly guilty about it, and lord knows I use a lot of computer stuff.

And beyond this, I tend to think of frugality as being an extened form of common sense. Finding the shortest way to work, finding the best way to get the most nutrition and pleasure from the food you buy, finding the best way to use old computers, using yarn efficiently, and so forth.

Now, I’m well aware that common sense is a culturally constrained and all, but that aside, I’m unsure if frugality constitutes a political statement, or a political act. Refusing to participate in consumer society on the grounds of a frual-ethic is admirable, and I think a sane way to approach the world, but I’ve often found myself thinking that acting against superstructural cultural phenomena is the kind of thing that isn’t exactly something that starts at home. I mean, changing your own habits is a good thing, because it’s likely to make you more happy, healthy, and economically resilient; nevertheless, I think to constitute a political act, “working against consumption” would require contributing to efforts that create viable opportunities for other people.

So then, politics are what happens when you get together with a lot of people and do something, not what happens when you’re at the store. I think, at least.

I’m not sure if this logic holds up either, but it’s a start…

The world is a weird place sometimes.

A number of anecdotes follow…

During my junior year of College I wrote this paper with my roommate about the emergence of third-wave feminism and post-structuralism-inspired Queer Theory in Lesbian poetry. And the paper wove in and out of conceptions of “home” and “community” and while it was a rough paper to write, I learned a lot about feminism/queer things, and I learned a lot about collaboration and scholarship. Incidentally, I recently discovered that our process for this paper was very reminiscent of what Agile Software Development/Extreme Programing calls “Pair Programing.”

At any rate, H. and I were very religious (in a way that is kinda touching in retrospect,) about setting weekly assignments for ourselves, writing lengthy notes and short informal essays for our mentor, and so forth. Crazy amount of work. And on one of these papers I wrote something that got a comment, I haven’t a clue what I’d written any more but I think it was sort of coyly smart-assy, but the comment itself stuck with me, but the professor said:

Awkward, but endearingly colloquial

Which, I have to say, I think sums me up rather nicely. I used it as the subtitle of this blog for a few years.

More recently, I was talking to my friend Caroline and we--as we’re occasionally given--were discussing food and cooking. I told her about my recent habit of making popcorn on the stove (my Air Popper broke) and about what I put on my popped corn. Which is these days, salt, pepper and balsamic vinegar.

And it’s amazing.

Caroline’s response was, however, priceless:

That sounds delicious.

[beat]

If a little abrasive.

I instantly remembered what the professor had written about my turn of phrase before, and thought “wow, that about sums me up.”

I’d ask you all what you think these things say about me, but I’m not entirely sure I want to know.

1. For many months, I’ve been using my Blackberry as a music player for the purpose of listening to podcasts while I walk/drive. I’ve recently switched to using an iPod Touch (first gen; obtained as part of a promotion) that I’ve been syncing (for podcasts) to my work computer (which is a mac). As nice as “convergence was,” and as much as this little iPod is “overkill” for what I’m doing with it, I think this is a step in the right direction. So, dedicated media players here I come.

2. In college I’d drink tea pretty much all day--even into the evening--and it didn’t really affect my ability to fall asleep when tired. Since graduating I’d pretty much scaled back on the caff, to the point where I’d avoid drinking tea after about 6pm. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started streaching this downward, and making a big pot of tea in the evening and drinking it pretty much till it runs out, even if that means have a pipping hot cup of caff at 10pm. (mmmm.) The effect seems to be the same no matter what: I fall asleep at 11:30 or midnight-ish; but until then I’m a little more productive if I’m working on a cup of tea. Often without tea, I have the ability to read about a page in a book before falling asleep; with tea, I can read something of consequence before passing out. Again, I’m not actually staying up later, I’m just more productive/alert with the time I have. Also, I tend to have my first cup of tea at the office, and I don’t really feel like I need to to wake up as much as I need it to stay alert. So, there you go.

3. I’ve had technology angst for a while. I miss having a single, portable machine that I can use for 98% of all my computing tasks. I have this awesome little laptop, but the screen’s resolution is 1024x786 and at my (old-normal) font size that was simply too small to really do anything except work in full screen mode. Divide up the screen at all and suddenly you have to scroll horizontally for everything. It’s a shame, because I love the portability of this computer, and it’s built like a rock, and except for this trivial little thing, it works. After much dithering about on the subject (and spec-ing out the ideal laptop, which I do hope to own some day,) I had the brilliant thought (mid-post draft,) of setting to font size in emacs (my editor) to… I think the technical term is “insanely fucking small,” and we’ll see how that works. It’s a bit too small for comfortable/close reading, but it’s fine for moment to moment work, so I’ve set up some key-bindings in emacs (if you must know: “C-c f s” and “C-c f b”) to switch between font sizes, along with some conditional statements in my init file to load big fonts on big screens and small fonts on small screens, and we’ll see how it goes. I’ll post the code soon. The sad thing is aside from the screen issue and the fact that my desk doesn’t work well for laptops, I’ve basically already made the switch.

4. I’ve started to read Jonathan Straham’s “The New Space Opera: 2” Anthology, and I have to say that it’s already better than the first one. I liked the first one, a lot, enough to buy the second, but it was reflexive and subtle and understated in a way that this one is big and exciting and energetic. If these are even acceptable terms for the description of a collection of short stories. Books like this have left me convinced of the fact that there’s a future in short fiction, and that the magazine isn’t really the ideal format for the consumption of short fiction. Where I think there are some logistical problems with the publication of web-zines, in the “fiction periodical” model, doing one or two-off anthologies in the Internet-age has potential I think. Another project for Critical Futures, I suspect. (Also, space opera rocks.)

5. (Messages from the past:) I’m going to New York City (first time since I was a kid!) this weekend with some friends to do an all-day-shape-note singing. This is going to rock. I like small regular singings a lot, don’t get me wrong, but I often feel like it takes me a few hours to get to the point where I can really feel the harmonies and chords, and most local signings are almost over by that point. This should be fun. (Summary: It was awesome, and I’ll do it justice later, but I think getting into this singing thing counts as an advancement without question.)

I realize that with all this blabbering I’ve been doing about social organizations, and politics, particularly the post on Health Care Cooperatives, some of you may have read something into my thinking that I think is very much not there. I think this resonates with the way people people read a certain kind of libertarian streak in Cory Doctorow’s work, which is I think is an uncomfortable association, at least in my reading.

There are two parts of my thinking that I think are important:

First, I think there is a not particularly insignificant range of social and economic functions that fall into the broad category of the “public interest,” that I think would (and are) ill served by the private institutions which are their current guardians. This was the crux of the argument of my health care argument, but I think there are other things that fall under the public interest: education, banking, “utilities” (water, sewage, power, TCP/IP data,) health care, and infrastructure (roads, public transit, rail, power distribution, ), as well as some operations that benefit from centralized organization like aviation.

Second, I would assert that “Market Forces,” are not sufficiently understood to merit trust in their efficacy. Furthermore, the large-scale global markets that have ruled supreme in the recent past tend to sacrifice long-term authenticity, for short term gains at the expense of individuals. This is the problem with corporations that I’ve been harping on for a long time. The way, as far as I can tell to de-incentivize this kind of economic activity, is to focus economic development on more smaller ventures and to decrease the importance of initial capital outlay on business models.

And that’s simply not something you can regulate or deregulate around. To erase the impact of corporate-styled business models on the economy, you have to hack scarcity in some way. Corporation-sized ventures beat cooperative-sized ventures today, because in most areas economies of scale in the production of concrete material, doom cooperative-sized enterprises. One of the effects of the development of technology in the next {{few}}¹ years will be, I suspect, to decrease the advantages of economies of scale.

If nothing else it’s an interesting time to be alive.

I’ve been thinking about Microsoft recently, and thinking about how the trajectory of Microsoft fits in with the trajectory of information technology in general.

A lot of people in the free software world are very anti-Microsoft, given some of the agregious anti-competitive activites they use, and general crappiness of their software. And while I agree that MS is no great gift to computing, it’s always seemed to me that they’re johnny-come-lately to the non-free software world (comparatively speaking AT&T and the telecom industry has done way more to limit and obstruct software and digital freedom than microsoft, I’m thinking.) But this is an akward argument, because there’s no real lost love between me and Microsoft, and to be honest my disagreement with Microsoft is mostly technologcial: microsoft technology presents a poor solution to technical problems. But I digress.

One thing that I think is difficult to convey when talking about Microsoft is that “The Microsoft We See” is not “The Core Business of Microsoft;” which is to say the lion’s share of Microsoft’s business is in licensing things like Exchange servers (email and groupware stack) to big organizations, and then there’s the whole ASP.NET+SQL-Server stack which a lot of technology is built upon. And Microsoft works licensing in ways that’s absurd to those of us who don’t live in that world. A dinky instance (ten users?) of Windows Server+Exchange for small corporations easily starts at a grand (per year? bi-annually?) and goes up from there depending on the size of the user-base. I would, by contrast, be surprised if Microsoft saw more than 50 or 60 dollars per desktop installation of Windows that consumers buy.¹ And I suspect a given installation of windows lasts three to five years.

I don’t think it’s going to happen tomorrow or even next year, but I think netbooks--and the fact that Microsoft won’t put anything other than XP on them--and the continued development of Linux on embedded devices, and the growing market share of Apple in the Laptop Market (and the slow death of the desktop computing market as we know it,) all serve to make any attention that we give to market share of Windows on the desktop, increasingly less worthwhile. This isn’t to say that I think people will flock in great numbers to other platforms, but…

I think what’s happening, with the emergence of all these web-based technologies, with Mono, with Flash/Flex/Silverlight/Moonlight, with web-apps, with Qt running cross platform, with native GTK+ ports to windows and OS X, is that what you run on your desktop is (and will continue to become) more and more irrelevant. There won’t be “the next Microsoft,” because whatever you think of the future of IT, there isn’t going to be a future where quality software is more scarce, or harder to produce than it is today.

So this brings us back to servers licensing, and something that I realized only recently. In the Linux world, we buy commodity hardware, sometimes really beefy systems, and if you have a scaling problem you just set up a new server and do some sort of clustered or distributed setup, which definitely falls under the heading of “advanced sysadmining,” but it’s not complex. With virutalization it’s even easier to fully utilize hardware, and create really effective distributed environments. At the end of the day, what servers do is not particularly complex work in terms of number crunching, but it is massively parallel. And here’s the catch about Windows: developers are disincentived to run more than one server, because as soon as you do that, your costs increase disproportionately with regard to the hardware. Say the cost of a production server (hardware) is 4k and you pay 2k-3k for the software. If at some point this server isn’t big enough for your needs, do you: buy an almost-twice-as-good-8k dollar server with a single license, or just shell out another 6k-7k and have a second instance? Now lets multiply this times 10? Or more? (I should point out that I’m almost certainly low balling Software licensing costs.)

At some point you do have to cave and pay for an extra Microsoft license, but it makes a lot of sense from an operations perspective to throw money at hardware rather than distributed architectures, because not only is it quicker, but it’s actually cheaper to avoid clusters.

Microsoft, the company that made its money in microcomputer software has backed itself into being the “big iron” computing business. Which is risky for them, and anyone. Sun Microsystems couldn’t make it work, IBM kills in this space (and Linux mainframes are in the 50k-100k range, which doesn’t look as absurd in light of the calculations above.)

Anyway, this post has been all over the place, and I’m not sure I can tie it all together in a neat bow, but I think its safe to say that we live in interesting times, and that this whole “cloud thing” combined with the rapidly falling price of very high-powered equipment changes all of the assumptions that we’ve had about software for the past twenty or thirty years. For free software as well as the proprietary software…

Remember how, in 2006 and 2007 there was a lot of debate over wikipedia’s accuracy and process, and people though about creating alternate encyclopedias that relied on “expert contributors?” And then, somehow, that just died off and we never hear about those kinds of projects and of concerns anymore? The biggest news regarding wikipedia recently has been with regards to a somewhat subtle change in their licensing terms, which is really sort of minor and not even particularly interesting even for people who are into licensing stuff.

Here’s a theory:

Wikipedia reached a point in the last couple of years where it became clear that it was as accurate as any encyclopedia had ever been before. Sure there are places where it’s “wrong,” and sure, as wikipedians have long argued, wikipedia is ideally suited to fix textual problems in a quick and blindingly efficient manner, but The Encyclopedia Britannica has always had factual inaccuracies, and has always reflected a particular… editorial perspective, and in light of its competition wikipedia has always been a bit better.

Practically, where wikipedia was once an example of “the great things that technology can enable,” the moment when it leap frogged other encyclopedias was the moment that it became functionally irrelevant.

I’m not saying that wikipedia is bad and that you shouldn’t read it, but rather that even if Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia in the world it is still an encyclopedia, and the project of encyclopedias is flawed, and in many ways runs counter to the great potential for collaborative work on the Internet.

My gripe with encyclopedias is largely epistemological:

• I think the project of collecting all knowledge in a single

  fact that the biggest problem in the area of “knowing” in the contemporary world isn’t simply finding information, or even finding trusted information, but rather what to do with knowledge when you do find it. Teaching people how to search for information is easy. Teaching people the critical thinking skills necessary for figuring out if a source is trustworthy takes some time, but it’s not terribly complicated (and encyclopedias do a pretty poor job of this in the global sense, even if their major goal in the specific sense is to convey trust in the specific sense.) At the same time, teaching people to take information and do something awesome with it is incredibly difficult.

• Knowledge is multiple and comes from multiple perspectives, and is contextually dependent on history, on cultural contexts, on sources, and on ideological concerns, so the project of collecting all knowledge in a value-neutral way from an objective perspective provides a disservice to the knowledge project. This is the weak spot in all encyclopedias regardless of their editorial process or medium. Encyclopedias are, by definition, imperialist projects.

• The Internet is inherently decentralized. That’s how it’s designed, and all though this rounds counter to conventional thought in information management, information on the Internet works best when we don’t try to artificially centralize it, and arguably, that’s what wikipedia does: it collects and centralizes information in one easy to access and easy to search place. So while wikipedia isn’t bad, there are a lot of things that one could do with wikis, with the Internet, that could foster distributed information projects and work with the strengths of the Internet rather than against them. Wikis are great for collaborative editing, and there are a lot of possibilities in the form, but so much depends on what you do with it.

So I guess the obvious questions here are:

• What’s next?
• What does the post-wikipedia world look like?
• How do we provide usable indexes for information that let people find content of value in a decentralized format, and preferably in a federated way that doesn’t rely on Google Search?

Onward and Upward!

Five Things I Could do to Make My Cats Happier

1. Have fewer hobbies that involve non-feline-objects on my lap (knitting, reading, writing/laptop).

2. Be at home Sleep More.
3. Grow More Appendages.
4. Get a roommate/spouse.

Five Books I Would like to Read in the Next Month

1. Iain M. Banks' Consider Phebas
2. The New Space Opera 2 Anthology
3. Tad Williams' Otherland
4. Giles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (ha!)
5. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Police Man’s Union

Five Elements of My Daily Ritual That I’d like to Improve

1. Wake Time
2. Lunch Preparation (the night before?)
3. Reading RSS feeds.
4. Making more time for knitting
5. Join a Gym to better Exercise at night.

Five Improvements I’d Like to Make to This Blog

1. Add a wiki
2. Build more useful archives.

3. Streamline Build Process. (Requires serious hacking. Getting #2 might help this.)

4. Increase increase discussion quotient.

5. Provide more useful resources, and include more citations and links to the cool things that are happening on the Internet

Five Jobs I’d Like to Have Before I Retire

1. Editor (of a fiction or non-fiction publication)
2. Workshop leader
3. Researcher/Professor
4. Community Manager
5. Cultural Critic/Industry Analyst

Here’s another one for the “economics” collection of posts that I’ve been working on for a while. Way back when, I started this series by thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and by the model of economic development presented in the final two books. In short economic activity is organized around ~150 person co-operatives that people “buy into,” and then work for as long as the co-op exists or until they sell their spot so that they can work on a different project/co-op.

In the series, these co-operatives arose as part of a response to the multi/trans/meta-national corporations which were the books antagonists. Corporations which had grown so big, that they resembled nations as much as they did companies in the contemporary perspective. The co-ops came around in part as a response to the metanat’s, but then the corporations themselves restructured in response to an ecological/sociological catastrophe, so that they eventually started to look more like the cooperatives. The “progressive,” meta-national corporation was called “Praxis,” in the stories and Praxis was the organization that lead the transformation from metanational capitalism to, what followed. As part of this series, I’d very much like to think about Praxis and what kinds of lessons we can bring back from this thought, beyond the simplistic “cooperatives good, corporations bad,” notion that I’ve been toting for months. Thus,

• The corruption and disconnect from authentic economic exchange in that the metanats display in the Mars Books, far outclasses anything that’s happening today. On the one hand, given the nature of Science Fictional criticism, this isn’t such a great barrier to importing ides from the books; on the other, we must also imagine that Praxis is able to “out compete” traditional meta-nationals because of the scale of the issue. That is, the Praxis critique and solution may be valid today, but things may have to get much worse before a Praxis-like solution becomes economically viable.

• Praxis succeeds in the story, not because it can out compete the meta-nationals at their own game, not because it’s “right.” I appreciate fiction (and reality,) where the winning economic solution wins on economic rather than moral terms. While I’m hardly a Market proponent, it’s hard to divorce economics from exchanges, and I think the following logic fails to convince me: “we change current cultural practice to do something less efficient that may create less value, because it complies better with some specific and culturally constrained ethic.”

  One part of my own thinking on this issue has revolved around looking for mechanisms that produce change and I think Praxis is particularly interesting from a mechanistic perspective.

• Praxis presents a case of a revolutionary-scale change, with evolutionary mechanisms, which is something that I think is hard to argue for, or encourage as the change itself is really a result of everything else that’s going on in the historical moment. Nevertheless, everyone in the story world is very clear that Praxis-post transformation is fundamentally not the same kind of organization that it was before. In a lot of ways it becomes its own “corporate successor state,” and I think that leaves us with a pretty interesting question to close with…

How do we setup and/or encourage successor institutions to the flawed economic organizations/coroprations we have today without recapitulating their flaws?