18/10/2017

Dow Day, Every Day

Fifty years ago today, about a hundred yards from my office, police beat & gassed students protesting on-campus recruiting efforts by a company supplying napalm used in the war in Vietnam.

This month the leaders of UW System adopted an anti-protest policy clearly designed to suppress free speech on all UW campuses.

That moment fifty years ago galvanized anti-war protests and decades of student-led political dissent at the University of Wisconsin. There are many admirable chapters in that legacy, with one infamous exception.

UW-Madison’s students were among the first to stand up to Scott Walker’s agenda of evisceration of Wisconsin’s public institutions and civil society. I suspect UW students will continue to demonstrate their understanding that the value of sifting & winnowing is highly dependent on the rigor of the second half of that process.

In the coming fifty years, I hope their actions underscore for history the myopic, reactionary, & contemptible anti-speech position of the UW Board of Regents in 2017.

civil-society UW

17/10/2017

Streaming & Transience

If the utilities providing our water, gas, & electricity suddenly went down without a replacement, we wouldn’t expect to be able to flip a switch or turn the faucet and receive the service. The infrastructure to provide it would be there, at least within our own walls, but nothing useable would be transiting it. Even considering folks preparing for looming natural disasters, for the most part subscribers don’t save much of these utilities’ output for periods of inaccessibility, preferring to rely on bottled water, gas canisters, or batteries & generators purchased from third parties. In the United States, we live in a state of privileged expectation that our water, gas, & electricity will always flow (so long as we pay our bill).

If Cook’s Illustrated hemorrhaged readers and suddenly went under, my boxes of back issues would still exist for as long as I wished to keep them. I could still make my favorite recipes, or even try all the “new” dishes I never made while the magazine was in publication. Although the number of those “new” recipes would dwindle and the favorites would slowly etch themselves into my memory, I wouldn’t lose the insight into a particular technique and the food wouldn’t taste any different simply because the magazine’s staff had dispersed.

It occurs to me that streaming digital media borrows more from the utility subscription model than the magazine model. It does this in a way that analog cable television never could manage with the advent of the VCR. In the old days, a very dedicated fan of an under-appreciated (or wildly popular) television show could tape every episode, assuming they had the financial resource, time, & equipment necessary to the task. When the show went off-air those episodes wouldn’t vanish off the tapes with the change in access to the source material.

Like our utilities, a walled-garden streaming media platform will not provide fresh output when it goes under. Unlike utilities, which charge by rate of consumption, most streaming services charge for access to the pipe, but are agnostic about the amount consumed from it. In this respect, a streaming service is more like a subscription to cable TV or a magazine, where the subscription fee ensures unfettered access to a product for a designated period of tme. Unlike one of these subscriptions, however, nothing produced by the streaming service can be saved for indefinite enjoyment after the service itself goes away.

When I was in high school, I subscribed to the BMG Music Club. I lived a half-hour away from anything approximating a record store, so the appeal of receiving a bunch of CDs every month for a modest outlay of cash was strong, particularly for a music enthusiast. In retrospect, it was mostly a bad idea.

The way the service worked, the subscriber had to decline their subscription’s “featured” albums each month by mail, requiring a first-class stamp and the wherewithal to remember to send the form back to BMG, or be assured of a bill for a CD of a clunker album by a big-name artist or a disc by a new group with one Top 40 hit and a bunch of filler. I was not the most reliable correspondent with BMG, and so paid the price; I’m pretty sure this is how I wound up with Bob Dylan’s MTV Unplugged, rather than World Gone Wrong or Time Out of Mind.

Despite the hassle of declining those otherwise-automatic purchases, I did wind up with some excellent music though my BMG subscription. Two of my all-time favorite albums, Johnny Cash’s career-resurrecting American Recordings & Unchained, came to me via BMG. I’m pretty certain my copy of Fiona Apple’s Tidal is a BMG disc. I didn’t keep every CD I received from BMG, but those I wanted, I still have today. BMG shut down in 2009.

Last weekend Grammofy announced the service will be shut down next month. Many streaming services have extensive classical catalogs, yet manage to do it all wrong. Grammofy is the only platform or streaming service I’ve ever observed that not only understood, but celebrated, classical music. From the beginning, it brought classical musicians, musicologists, music critics & journalists, presenters, programmers, and marketing types together to design the service to the particular needs of classical music and the listening habits of its fans. The catalog is solid, with good depth & surprising variety. The collections — “…we call them collections, because they are worth collecting.” — are delightful, running long enough to enjoy without becoming oversaturated in a theme, era, form, or style. Grammofy licensed technology allowing users to personalize audio for playback. Grammofy’s app is beautiful, immediately intuitive, yet not derivative in any way. Best of all, Grammofy took on streaming classical’s financial problem by paying artists a rate by length of the work, not at a fixed rate per track. Grammofy believes in fair remuneration: it paid 70% of its proceeds to rights-holders. Beyond my selfish enjoyment of its content, Grammofy is one subscription that truly makes me feel like I am doing something good each month. I had hoped a similar service would be developed for jazz, my favorite genre.

Hang around the Internet long enough and you’ll start saying goodbye to things you enjoyed, even loved. Communities dry up & blow away as management shifts revenue models or “evolves” the platform. Blogs drift off into silence, even while remaining online, a ghost town of ideas & aspirations. (I’ve built my own fair share of these ghost towns.) Webcomics, podcasts, whole platforms (we remember, GeoCities), consigned to archive.org if one is lucky, the digital ether if one is not.

On an infinite timescale nothing lasts forever. The toddler who keeps growing, learning, and surprising me with new skills & knowledge is a daily reminder. I’m so proud of her whenever she demonstrates something new, but would be okay if she stayed the way she is just a little longer. I’m hardly the first parent with this lament. She is a reminder that my world is giving way, a little bit every day, to one that is ours (hopefully for many decades), then eventually, just hers. That’s not bad; it just is.

I think many of us still live an existence that remembers saving little bits & pieces of subscription media that made us happy. Whether it was a pirated tape of a favorite episode from a cult TV show, a bootleg of a great concert, or a bunch of back issues of a brilliant-but-doomed comic book or magazine, we could hold on to & savor a piece of the experience of that subscription indefinitely.

When the stream dries up, as Grammofy will in November, what remains for those it nourished? Are the streams that keep flowing actually better, or just more ruthlessly efficient?

music streaming media

21/4/2016

Photos from a Day of Disrupting White Supremacy & Anti-Black Racism @ UW–Madison

Gathering at Bascom Hall, seat of the University’s administration.

Dean of Students Lori Berquam, Provost Sarah Mangelsdorf, and others observe from afar just outside their offices in Bascom Hall.

Students gathered at the Abe Lincoln statue on Bascom Mall listen to one of the organizers of the demonstration.

Student protesters arrive at Helen C. White Hall, home of the Department of Afro-American Studies and College Library, the main undergraduate library.

Students chant outside Helen C. White Hall.

Student protesters occupied Helen C. White Hall, symbolically disrupting studying as a rebuttal to University of Wisconsin Police who removed a Black student from an Afro-American Studies class and arrested him for allegedly authoring anti-racist graffiti on campus buildings.

Making their message heard without saying a word.

This young man was kind enough to grant my request and pose for a photo.

Preparing to march from Helen C. White Hall, down N Park Street, to University Avenue.

Marching down Park Street between Science Hall and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, with Memorial Union and Union Theatre in the background.

Crossing Library Mall and Bascom Mall.

Forward.

education Madison race & ethnic relations University of Wisconsin

11/11/2015

Complicating Veterans Day

I understand some folks — including many of us veterans — are uncomfortable with what has become a day for our society to render unquestioning worship to military service. For those of you with misgivings about today’s holiday, I offer this:

We can celebrate the social advancements that people who served before brought us — things like the Bonus Army; the GI Bill(s); the many men & women who persevered & served with honor & pride in segregated units that signaled they were considered less reliable, valiant, and human than their white counterparts; the men and women of all colors and backgrounds who served with dignity and honor after Executive Order 9981 ended formal segregation, but certainly not oppression; and the men and women who, by their resistance as troops in Vietnam, forced the political class & military brass to abandon that war. Those are all things I think we can celebrate without getting militaristic. They speak to the better things done by people who have worn uniforms. They complicate the image of what a veteran is, and does, and means. We need that complication.

public memory veterans Veterans Day

7/3/2015

Not Again

Photo courtesy Steve Apps, AP

An officer-involved shooting of an unarmed young black man in Madison has made headlines across the globe. “Madison police chief says shooting of unarmed man has similarities to Ferguson,” the headline from The Guardian just hours ago says it all.

Photo courtesy Steve Apps, AP

Madison’s police chief on Saturday acknowledged similarities between the fatal police shooting of Tony Terrell Robinson Jr, an unarmed black teenager, in Wisconsin’s capital on Friday night and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year.
…
“To the extent that you have, again, a person of color, unarmed who subsequently loses his life at the hands of the police, I can’t very well distance myself from that brutal reality,” Madison police chief Mike Koval told reporters on Saturday.

There have been two fatal shootings of unarmed men - one black, one white - in my former neighborhood in fewer than three years. I am profoundly saddened by the deep wound ripped back open for my old neighbors last night. Both men were far too young. Tony Robinson and Paul Heenan should both be alive and walking around Williamson-Marquette today.

Some anecdotal context:

I have criticized the Madison Police Department in the recent past. I have heard Chief Koval speak to the community at my neighborhood police station, interactions with the public he clearly does because he feels it’s important. After one community forum I had a personal — and very personable — in-person conversation with him about the column I wrote. I hope he’ll exhibit the same sort of principled character I’ve observed in each situation. Chief Koval and I don’t agree on some of his department’s policies, and I definitely don’t appreciate the way he’s responded to Young, Gifted and Black in the past.

But Mike Koval has also said some really valuable, powerful things about the city’s desperate need for more mental health/crisis intervention services and his own determination to continue making his department more representative of the community it serves. In a 2009 Isthmus profile, then-Sergeant Koval laid out the policing philosophy he followed as head of MPD’s academy. Koval’s comments then reveal that he believes arrests are only a small part of good police work:

“The law-enforcement part is undoubtedly a lot sexier than going to a neighborhood meeting and talking about quality of life,” he says. “That’s not sexy. And yet the ‘social work’ component is our lifeblood and vital to our success. You’re not going to build trust and partnerships if the only mode of operation you know is law enforcement.”

I ride the bus by the place Paul Heenan was killed every day on my way to work and again on the way home. I maintain high expectations of the way Koval’s department conducts itself, but I know there are good people working at all levels of the MPD, too. I hope our communities and the MPD can have a constructive conversation about disparities in our city and our need to reassess the use of force. I just wish it didn’t take senseless deaths for us to finally make this a top priority in Madison.

Madison police race & ethnic relations

10/3/2014

Leaving Gmail

With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.

— Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman & former CEO

Three weeks ago I did something I had been building toward for nearly a year. I quit using Gmail for my personal correspondence. Below is the message I sent to my family & friends:

Friends,

I started using this Gmail address in April 2005, which today seems like a lifetime ago. (In fact, it is.) In the last couple of months you may have seen me send an occasional email from a new address: [redacted] As of today, that is my permanent email address for personal correspondence. (If you read no further, please update your address books accordingly.)

Moving away from Google’s services has been a personal goal of mine for a good while. Some of you may have been Google Reader users for years until Google decided to pull the plug on that service. I think most of us found new homes for RSS reading after that, but our article-sharing community was lost. Some of you may have enjoyed our circles on Google+ after a migration away from Facebook, only to be dismayed by the way Google seemed intent on leveraging the information we shared there and the G+ service itself to erode our personal privacy.  Marco Arment, a very savvy app developer & tech writer, made some good points three years ago about why trusting Google to continue providing Gmail service — as we know it, or even at all — isn’t a good idea.

The long-term viability of my correspondence with you is something I do care about, because I love sharing our ideas & enthusiasms. But what made going to my own private email host an imperative was simply the fact that Google’s true business isn’t web searches, Android, or Google Docs for large businesses, but selling advertisements based on our personal information — our web searches, our Google+ posts, and especially our private correspondence. Think of it this way — if you give your doctor, lawyer, or trusted confidant your Gmail address, Google’s algorithms can pick apart what you have to say to one another and will target you with advertisements based on the content of your emails. Google filed legal documents last year stating you have no reason to expect privacy if you use Gmail. That’s the price we pay for using Gmail. The aggregate of our private information is worth billions of dollars to Google’s true customers — companies that want to sell you things and would pay someone to read your email to know whether you’re looking for a new car, grief counseling, or a way out of legal trouble. I don’t want to share that information with Google anymore, and I don’t feel right sharing your info — confidential or well-known —  with Google, either. (You can read even more about Google’s privacy issues at the “Criticisms of Google” Wikipedia article.)

Setting up my own email was pretty easy. The new address works on my phone, my tablet, and my laptop just like any other email address. It does cost me a little money — some to keep my domain registered (think of this as Internet property tax), and some to pay the service that runs the server that hosts my email. My total cost to keep our correspondence private (on my end, anyway), while enjoying even more features than Gmail, is just $1.03 per week. Couch cushion money, folks. And because I pay FastMail to host my email, I no longer have to worry about who’s really paying the freight on a “free” service like Gmail. If you find yourself interested in going the same route, let me know — I’ll be happy to help you get started.

So, friends, I look forward to carrying on our conversations in a corner of the Internet a bit more private than Gmail. Look me up; I’ll be there.

Signing off from [redacted]@gmail.com,

W

Shortly after I sent that email, I began to wonder whether my friends would perceive me as a crank. While I still worry a bit about that, for the most part my correspondence has gone on as before. I say “for the most part” because, since I left Gmail I’ve actually found myself writing to friends more frequently and carrying on email conversations much longer than I have in years. My email independence has become an email renaissance. I feel as though I should send Eric Schmidt a Thank You card.

My email independence has brought with it an email renaissance.

I wonder how many people my age will eventually leave “free” email providers like Gmail. My generation came of age using services like Hotmail, and over the years we’ve integrated many new revolutionary technologies — email, the Internet, digital music & video, smartphones, tablets, social media, etc — deep into our daily lives. I suspect many folks of my generation have used Gmail for over a decade. At this point, Google knows a fair bit about our lives, likely more about our adult selves than we’ve shared with our parents or siblings. I think it’s a fair question to ask whether we’re comfortable with an advertising company knowing more about us than our closest relatives.

Let’s think about this for a moment from a different perspective.

Imagine if you went into a coffee shop with a friend. You’ve just found this shop, and the coffee is pretty good and so cheap the owner is practically giving it away! You and your friend sit down and start talking about the new puppy you’re hoping to get soon. You had to put your old dog to sleep a few months ago, and you’ve just now started to feel like you’re ready for a new companion. After a while, the owner of the coffee shop comes up and suggests you buy a puppy from his friend who has a litter due next week. You think he’s little nosy and presumptuous, but hey, who doesn’t like puppies?

You come back to the coffee shop a week later with another friend. Her car was totaled by a guy who was texting while driving, and now she needs to find some new wheels. You discuss the different features she’s looking for over coffee, and after a while the coffee shop owner sidles up again. He tells you and your friend that he has a buddy who owns a dealership that has a great sale on right now. And, since he couldn’t help but overhear, the coffee shop owner asks your friend if she’s considered contacting a personal injury lawyer. He knows a great one who doesn’t charge unless he wins the case (and he always wins, but the defendant will pay…) As you turn to face your friend, you notice the look on her face and wonder if the coffee’s not agreeing with her.

One day you get a call from another friend who has been struggling with depression. He needs someone to talk to, and he trusts you to be discreet. You suggest meeting for coffee. As your friend shares his troubles, the coffee shop owner drifts over and listens. After a few minutes he suggests that your friend visit his buddy, who’s a great psychiatrist. And he has reasonable rates! Your friend’s face reddens with embarrassment and anger.

Would you continue to visit that coffee shop? Sure, the coffee’s cheap and fairly good, but the owner’s a bit of a creep.

Gmail is that coffee shop, and Google is that coffee shop owner. Why should we tolerate online behavior that would seem intrusive and creepy in person? Over the last year I came to decide I wasn’t comfortable bringing friends into that coffee shop anymore. When a friend tells me something in confidence via email I don’t want Google scanning or parsing our conversation, looking for an angle to display an ad for some product or service. After a decade of using Gmail (and social media with similar boundary/privacy issues, like Facebook), I’m not comfortable with that level of intrusion anymore. It made me feel gross. It made me feel like a bad friend because I knew how easy it would be handle my own email.

Three weeks later, handling my own email is exactly as easy as I knew it was, and I’m enjoying corresponding with people more, in part because I don’t feel like a bad friend now.

Am I saying you’re a bad friend if you keep using Gmail? No, I’m not. I just want you to consider the implications of a “free” email service and what that means for your and your friends’ privacy. And I want you to know you have other, easy-to-use options for your email that don’t involve letting an advertising company record your correspondence with your family, your friends, or anyone else.

Google Gmail privacy tech