There's a lot of bad information out there. The recipe for napalm. Grooming techniques. Vomit porn. All things I would rather not know about. Bad might be a characteristic of the information; the info lets you do bad things. Sometimes, bad information is incomplete information. To make an informed decision to buy a house or to send a child to a school or to vote, we need information on the options. If we don't have enough information, we might choose not to choose until a better option comes along.
If bad information is incomplete information, then complete information is good information. Take child sexual abuse, to act on a case of child sexual abuse, you need a sense of the big picture. With enough information, an adult can handle a disclosure from a child. That means, an adult is prepared for a child to speak to him about surviving an incident of sexual abuse. Perhaps we can say that good information is also actionable information, information where it becomes possible to take action.
"I've lived in two countries (Australia and the UK) where porn wasn't banned but regulated, and one country (Malaysia) where it's banned. It's in Malaysia that I've had the most porn, literally, thrust in my face. Primarily by VCD sellers. But before that, by video sellers and distributors. And I'm sure that there were others before my time. In the other countries, I could avoid it, I knew where it was. Or, of course, I could seek it out if I wanted to. In Malaysia, because it's unregulated, I don't really have that choice. And then there's the problems with the definitions of porn. Because the Little Napoleon's that our former PM complained about, take it upon themselves to include books on breast-feeding as porn. And books on mutual sexual satisfaction are often considered pornographic."
What comes across is that taboos that are banned end up getting regulated anyway, and poorly. Or rather, as the economist Nils Gilman observes, in addressing the demand of illicit goods, not the supply, informal regulation springs up. Gilman talks about the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who observed that "societies are to a large extent... made up of and defined by their taboos." "That is, by what they prohibit either morally or in the case of modern societies, legally." That's true, right? The limits of behavior corresponds to what is not permissible. It is OK to buy a car, it is not OK to buy sex. It is OK to talk about Rosmah, it is not OK to talk about Altantuya.
The story of teacher Shamsukal Abu Bakar, who gave a seditious thesis to his students, is informative. The thesis was, "Justice is eroding and lacking in the judiciary system of Malaysia." What if every student in the Form 2 class had disagreed? Would the question have still been seditious? By making a certain reading explicit, it makes other readings implicit. In the Sedition Act itself, it is seditious "to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility" among "different races or classes," but what about within a race or class?
And the Devil finally says to Bobby Gould, "You're a very bad man." And Bobby Gould says, "Nothing's black and white." And the Devil says, "Nothing's black and white, nothing's black and white--what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck! What about a fucking panda!"
Instead, Ferriss decided to look for some data. He took 6 prospective titles that everyone could live with: including ‘Broadband and White Sand’, ‘Millionaire Chameleon’ and ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’ and developed an Google Adwords campaign for each. He bid on keywords related to the book’s content including ‘401k’ and ‘language learning’: when those keywords formed part of someone’s search on Google the prospective title popped up as a headline and the advertisement text would be the subtitle. Ferriss was interested to see which of the sponsored links would be clicked on most, knowing that he needed his title to compete with over 200,000 books published in the US each year. At the end of the week, for less than $200 he knew that “The 4-Hour Workweek” had the best click-through rate by far and he went with that title.
His experimentation didn’t stop there, he decided to test various covers by printing them on high quality paper and placing them on existing similar sized books in the new non-fiction rack at Borders, Palo Alto. He sat with a coffee and observed, learning which cover really was most appealing.
A short study on how the best-selling author Tim Feriss tested out different titles and designs for his book The 4-Hour Workweek. (via Boingboing.net)
My greatest fear is that everything I've accomplished will turn out to be shit.
I imagine I am like King Midas, except everything turns not to gold, but to shit.
King Midas was the Greek king who boasted that he was richer than the gods. The gods cursed Midas to turn to gold everything he touched. At first it wasn't so bad, but then he sits down to eat and the leg of chicken turned to solid gold. He drinks his beer, but it's frozen into gold at the bottom of his tankard. He goes to hug his daughter and she turns to gold too. He begs the gods to lift the curse, he's learned his lesson, which they do.
The story of Midas is instructive. It was gold to demonstrate that material wealth cannot replace simple pleasures. It is the many textures of life, not a scale of comparison, that give it richness.
"Vigi" by Shieko Reto
Law is about sovereignty, not justice.
Again and again, I keep returning to L. Timmel Duchamp's essay on fictionalizing her own detainment.
How to be a theory-based writer?—one question. How to represent my experience as a gay man?—another question just as pressing. These questions lead to readers and communities almost completely ignorant of each other. Too fragmented for a gay audience? Too much sex and "voice" for a literary audience? I embodied these incommensurates so I had to ask this question: How can I convey urgent social meanings while opening or subverting the possibilities of meaning itself?
We often talk about the Internet as the great equalizer, the space where we can be free of all of the weights of inequality. And yet, what we find online is often a reproduction of all of the issues present in everyday life. The Internet does not magically heal old wounds or repair broken bonds between people. More often, it shows just how deep those wounds go and how structurally broken many relationships are.
It's the steady, slow accretion of connection that counts for the most and lasts the longest.
Joshua Corey's report on the first annual Arena Wisconsin Poetry Festival.
But one thing I'm dead certain of is that it is not illegal to discuss a patent's technical workings. The entire point of the patent system is to give a monopoly to an inventor in exchange for full disclosure of the invention so that other inventors may study and learn from it. In other words, the patent system exists to encourage discussion of patented inventions, not to censor them.
Cory Doctorow on the limitations of enforcing a patent.