Content by Cory Doctorow (first e reader txt) 📕

create malware and the medicine to treat it. Today’s software viruses are clever and stealthy and not simpleminded. Very clever.

“But here’s the thing: you don’t see people advocating shutting down the Internet because malware is so destructive. I mean, malware is potentially more than a nuisance — emergency systems, air traffic control, and nuclear reactors all run on vulnerable software. It’s an important issue, but the potential damage is still a tiny fraction of the benefit we get from the Internet.

“I hope it’ll remain that way — that the Internet won’t become a regulated space like medicine. Malware’s not the most important issue facing human society today. Designer bioviruses are. People are concerted about WMDs, but the most daunting WMD would be a designed biological virus. The means exist in college labs to create destructive viruses that erupt and spread silently with long incubation periods.

“Importantly, a would-be bio-terrorist doesn’t have to put malware through the FDA’s regulatory approval process, but scientists working to fix bio-malware do.

“In Huxley’s Brave New World, the rationale for the totalitarian system was that technology was too dangerous and needed to be controlled. But that just pushes technology underground where it becomes less stable. Regulation gives the edge of power to the irresponsible who won’t listen to the regulators anyway.

“The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of Draconian control.

“I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days.

“Think about it. There’s no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates,” — a system to restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard — “is that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers.

“Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation — which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn’t appropriately balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN?

“Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a treatment for one or more years. There’s no political weight at all, people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as we’ve been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than unattributable risks.”

Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both — more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously.

After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what it means to be human.

It’s no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama.

$$$$

Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors

(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005)

“Mostly Harmless” — a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after it. Not that there’s a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, they’re the punchline to a joke that anyone who’s ever written for publication can really get behind.

Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply, “Harmless.”

However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his editors, it is trimmed to fit:

“What? Harmless? Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One

word!”

Ford shrugged. “Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the

Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s

microprocessors,” he said, “and no one knew much about the Earth

of course.”

“Well for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.”

“Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor.

He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.”

“And what does it say now?” asked Arthur.

“Mostly harmless,” admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed

cough.

[fn: My lifestyle is as gypsy and fancy-free as the characters in H2G2, and as a result my copies of the Adams books are thousands of miles away in storages in other countries, and this essay was penned on public transit and cheap hotel rooms in Chile, Boston, London, Geneva, Brussels, Bergen, Geneva (again), Toronto, Edinburgh, and Helsinki. Luckily, I was able to download a dodgy, re-keyed version of the Adams books from a peer-to-peer network, which network I accessed via an open wireless network on a random street-corner in an anonymous city, a fact that I note here as testimony to the power of the Internet to do what the Guide does for Ford and Arthur: put all the information I need at my fingertips, wherever I am. However, these texts are a little on the dodgy side, as noted, so you might want to confirm these quotes before, say, uttering them before an Adams truefan.]

And there’s the humor: every writer knows the pain of laboring over a piece for days, infusing it with diverse interesting factoids and insights, only to have it cut to ribbons by some distant editor (I once wrote thirty drafts of a 5,000-word article for an editor who ended up running it in three paragraphs as accompaniment for what he decided should be a photo essay with minimal verbiage.)

Since the dawn of the Internet, H2G2 geeks have taken it upon themselves to attempt to make a Guide on the Internet. Volunteers wrote and submitted essays on various subjects as would be likely to appear in a good encyclopedia, infusing them with equal measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited together by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects — Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself), and others — are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing together a free and open user-generated encyclopedia.

These encyclopedias have one up on Adams’s Guide: they have no shortage of space on their “microprocessors” (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web — the whole Web, give or take — every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day.

The Archive doesn’t even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven’t changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is — and it is very cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco’s Presidio — there’s no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two “mirror” Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the “repository of all human knowledge” on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!]

So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of “running out of space” is meaningless. But they were trimmed, by editorial cliques, and rewritten for clarity and style. Some entries were rejected as being too thin, while others were sent back to the author for extensive rewrites.

This traditional separation of editor and writer mirrors the creative process itself, in which authors are exhorted to concentrate on either composing or revising, but not both at the same time, for the application of the critical mind to the creative process strangles it. So you write, and then you edit. Even when you write for your own consumption, it seems you have to answer to an editor.

The early experimental days of the Internet saw much experimentation with alternatives to traditional editor/author divisions. Slashdot, a nerdy news-site of surpassing popularity [fn: Having a link to one’s website posted to Slashdot will almost inevitably overwhelm your server with traffic, knocking all but the best-provisioned hosts offline within minutes; this is commonly referred to as “the Slashdot Effect.”], has a baroque system for “community moderation” of the responses to the articles that are posted to its front pages. Readers, chosen at random, are given five “moderator points” that they can use to raise or lower the score of posts on the Slashdot message boards. Subsequent readers can filter their views of these boards to show only highly ranked posts. Other readers are randomly presented with posts and their rankings and are asked to rate the fairness of each moderator’s moderation. Moderators who moderate fairly are given more opportunities to moderate; likewise message-board posters whose messages are consistently highly rated.

It is thought that this system rewards good “citizenship” on the Slashdot boards through checks and balances that reward good messages and fair editorial practices. And in the main, the Slashdot moderation system works [fn: as do variants on it, like the system in place at Kur5hin.org (pronounced “corrosion”)]. If you dial your filter up to show you highly scored messages, you will generally get well-reasoned, or funny, or genuinely useful posts in your browser.

This community moderation scheme and ones like it have been heralded as a good alternative to traditional editorship. The importance of the Internet to “edit itself” is best understood in relation to the old shibboleth, “On the Internet, everyone is a slushreader.” [fn: “Slush” is the term for generally execrable unsolicited manuscripts that fetch up in publishers’ offices — these are typically so bad that the most junior people on staff are drafted into reading (and, usually, rejecting) them]. When the Internet’s radical transformative properties were first bandied about in publishing circles, many reassured themselves that even if printing’s importance was de-emphasized, that good editors would always been needed, and doubly so online, where any mouth-breather with a modem could publish his words. Someone would need to separate the wheat from the chaff and help keep us from drowning in information.

One of the best-capitalized businesses in the history of the world, Yahoo!, went