Ian Bicking: a blog

As of last week, I am now an employee of Mozilla! Thanks to everyone who helped me out during my job search.

I’ll be working both with the Mozilla Web Development (webdev) team, and Mozilla Labs.

The first thing I’ll be working on is deployment. In part because I’ve been thinking about deployment lately, in part because streamlining deployment is just generally enabling of other work (and a personal itch to be scratched), and because I think there is the possibility to fit this work into Mozilla’s general mission, specifically Empowering people to do new and unanticipated things on the web. I think the way I’m approaching deployment has real potential to combine the discipline and benefits of good development practices with an accessible process that is more democratic and less professionalized. This is some of what PHP has provided over the years (and I think it’s been a genuinely positive influence on the web as a result); I’d like to see the same kind of easy entry using other platforms. I’m hoping Silver Lining will fit both Mozilla’s application deployment needs, as well as serving a general purpose.

Once I finish deployment and can move on (oh fuck what am I getting myself into) I’ll also be working with the web development group who has adopted Python for many of their new projects (e.g., Zamboni, a rewrite of the addons.mozilla.org site), and with Mozilla Labs on Weave or some of their other projects.

In addition my own Python open source work is in line with Mozilla’s mission and I will be able to continue spending time on those projects, as well as entirely new projects.

I’m pretty excited about this — it feels like there’s a really good match with Mozilla and what I’m good at, and what I care about, and how I care about it.

After three and a half years at The Open Planning Project, my time there is done.

For a while TOPP has been trying to find itself, to determine what it is that it can do best, and how to do that. I think TOPP has finally started really figuring that out, focusing on civic participation, revisiting "planning", and though it’s not fully developed there seems to be a strong potential for TOPP to serve as a point of collaboration for other more ad hoc open source government efforts: government workers and volunteers can provide substantial and well-informed development efforts, but the long-term shepherding of a project is difficult, and TOPP has the potential to provide that kind of long-term neutral guidance. At the same time, communities of people have been developing around these issues; people have gotten past simply calling for government to be inclusive or transparent and have started to do the real work of making that happen.

But… unfortunately I won’t be able to figure out their next steps with them. Mark Gorton has been very generous in his support of TOPP, and helped us get started. But while he has been patient, and even at times seemingly immune from the economic trends… well, he’s not immune, and he has had to cut back his support for TOPP before we were able to become self-sufficient. And so there have been layoffs, myself among them.

I suspect what I’ll do next will have a very different focus. This feels a bit weird, a kind of lost identity. Overall I’m feeling pretty optimistic about finding something new and interesting to do, but I’m still a bit melancholy about leaving things behind. That TOPP and the people I’ve worked with are far away in New York makes it feel like more of a loss because I don’t know when I’ll be back next. But onward and upward! Now to find out what is next…

A couple posts have got me thinking about cultural imperialism lately: a post by Guido van Rossum about "missionaries" and OLPC not about OLPC at all, a post by Chris Hardie and a speech by Wade Davis.

Some of the questions raised: are we destroying cultures? If so, what can we do about it? Must we be hands off? I will add these questions: is it patronizing to make these choices for other people, no matter how enlightened we try to be? How much change is inevitable? Can we help make the change positive instead of resisting change?

More specifically: what is the effect of OLPC on cultures where it is introduced? Especially small cultures, cultures that have been relatively isolated, cultures that are vulnerable. The internet Quechua community is pretty slim, for example. Introducing the internet into a community will lead the children to favor Spanish more strongly, and identify with that more dominant culture over their family and community culture.

Criticisms like Guido’s are common:

I’m not surprised that the pope is pleased by the OLPC program. The mentality from which it springs is the same mentality which in past centuries created the missionary programs. The idea is that we, the west, know what’s good for the rest of the world, and that we therefore must push our ideas onto the "third world" by means of the most advanced technology available. In past centuries, that was arguably the printing press, so we sent missionaries armed with stacks of bibles. These days, we have computers, so we send modern missionaries (of our western lifestyle, including consumerism, global warming, and credit default swaps) armed with computers.

This kind of criticism is easy, because it doesn’t have any counterproposal. It’s not saying much more than "you all suck" to the people involved.

Cultural imperialism is a genuine phenomena. In an attempt to subjugate or assimilate, the dominant culture may explicitly and cynically enforce its cultural norms, through its religion, requiring all schools to operate in the dominant language, even going as far as suggesting how we arrange ourselves during sex.

But it’s not clear to me that what’s happening now is cultural imperialism. It’s more market-oriented homogenization. Food manufacturers don’t use high-fructose corn syrup because they want to make us fat — they just give us what we want, and they are enabling our latent tendency to become obese. Similarly I think the way culture is spread currently encourages homogeneity, without explicit attempting to destroy culture.

This is where I think a protectionist stance — the idea we should just be hands-off — is patronizing. People aren’t abandoning their cultures because they are stupid and they are being manipulated. People make decisions, what they think is the best decision for themself and their families. These decisions lead them to leave rural areas, learn the dominant language, try to conform through education, and even just lead them to enjoy a dominant culture which is often far more entertaining than a smaller and more traditional culture.

The irony is that once they’ve done this they’ve traded their position for a place in the bottom rung of the dominant society. And it’s true that in many cases they’ve made these decisions because they’ve been forced out of their traditional life by political and legal systems they don’t understand. But to blame it all on oppression is to be blind to the many concrete benefits of our modern world. Corrugated metal roofs are simply superior to thatched roofs, and we can get all romantic about traditional building processes and material independence, but we do so from homes with roofs that don’t leak. Leaking roofs are just objectively unpleasant. And frankly people like TV, you don’t have to tell people to like TV, it just happens.

So I believe that assimilation pressure is natural and inevitable in our times.

What then of technology, of the internet and laptops?

I believe OLPC takes an important stance when it selects open source and open licensing for its content. It is valuing freedom, but more importantly encouraging self-determination, trying to build up a user base that can act as peers in this project, not as simply receivers of first-world largess. But it will be culturally disruptive. And I’m okay with that. In a patriarchal culture, giving girls access to this technology will be destructive to that power structure. Yay! I believe in the moral rightness of that one girl making her own choices, finding her own truths, more than I believe in the validity of the culture she was born into. If you believe people should be able to make their own choices (so long as they are aware of the real consequence of their choices), then you must allow for them to choose to abandon their own cultures for something they find more appealing. They might know better than you if that’s a good choice. I think we all hope that instead they transform their own cultures, but that’s not our choice to make.

What I find unpleasant is if they leave a true identity to find themselves in a place of cultural subservience. If they feel they can’t preserve the part of their culture they most value. Perhaps because of discrimination they feel they must hide their past, or they build up a sense of self-loathing. Perhaps they become isolated, unable to find peers that understand where they come from. And perhaps there is no higher culture at all that they can use to exalt their understanding of the world — do they have a literature? Do they have non-traditional music forms of their own? Do they have a forum where people who share their perspective can have serious discussions? Cultures aren’t destroyed so much as they are starved out of existence.

I think assimilation is inevitable, and can be positive. If we were all able to speak to each other, with some shared second or third language, I think the world would be a better place. I’m not a Christian, but I’m not afraid of anyone knowing The Bible. There’s no piece of culture that I would want to deny from anyone. Each new song, each new book, each new idea… I believe they will all make you a better person, if only in a small way.

And on the internet our culture is cumulative. There’s only so many hours of programming on TV or the radio, only so many pages in a newspaper. On the internet the presence of one kind of culture does not exclude any other. There’s room for a Quechua community as much of any other. But the online Quechua community won’t have exclusive rights to its members like a traditional culture claims — children will live between cultures.

Cumulative culture is not a promise that anyone will care. Languages can still die, cultures can still die, identities become forgotten. If these smaller cultures are going to be preserved, they must adapt to the partially-assimilated status of their members. There must be new art and new ideas and new identities. This is why I believe in the laptop project, because it can enable the creation and sharing of these new ideas. I think it will give smaller cultures a chance to survive — there’s no promises, literature doesn’t write itself, but maybe there is at least a chance.

This is also why I am more skeptical of mobile phones, audio devices, and any device that doesn’t actively enable content creation. Mobile phones are not how culture is made. It let’s people chat, consume information, communicate in a 12-key pidgin. But the mobile phone user is not a peer in a world wide web of information. The mobile phone user lives on a proprietary network, with a proprietary device, and while it perhaps it breaks down some hierarchies through disintermediation, it does so in a transient way. The uptake is certainly faster, but the potential seems so much lower.

I don’t know if OLPC will be successful. That’s as unclear now as ever. But it’s trying to do the right thing, and I think it’s a better chance than most for maintaining or improving the richness of the worlds’ culture.

I’m not a designer, but I spend as much time looking at web pages as the next guy. So I took interest when I came upon this post on font size by Wilson Miner, which in turn is inspired by the 100e2r (100% easy to read) standard by Oliver Reichenstein.

The basic idea is simple: we should have fonts at the "default" size, about 16px, no smaller. This is about the size of text in print, read at a reasonable distance (typically closer up than a screen):

Also it calls out low-contrast color schemes, which I think are mostly passe, and I will not insult you, my reader, by suggesting you don’t entirely agree. Because if you don’t agree, well, I’m afraid I’d have to use some strong words.

I think small fonts, low contrast, huge amounts of whitespace, are a side effect of the audience designers create for.

This makes me think of Modern Architecture:

This is a form of architecture popular for skyscapers and other dramatic structures, with their soaring heights and other such dramatic adjectives. These are buildings designed for someone looking at the building from five hundred feet away. They are not designed for occupants. But that’s okay, because the design isn’t sold to occupants, it is sold to people who look at the sketches and want to feel very dramatic.

Similarly, I think the design pattern of small fonts is something meant to appeal to shallow observation. By deemphasizing the text itself, the design is accentuated. Low-contrast text is even more obviously the domination of design over content. And it may very well look more professional and visually pleasing. But web design isn’t for making sites visually pleasing, it is for making the experience of the content more pleasing. Sites exist for their content, not their design.

In 100e2r he also says let your text breathe. You need whitespace. If you view my site directly, you’ll notice I don’t have big white margins around my text. When you come to my site, it’s to see my words, and that’s what I’m going to give you! When I want to let my text breathe with lots of whitespace this is what I do:

Is a huge block of text hard to read? It is. And yeah, I’ve written articles like that. But the solution?

Similarly, it’s hard to read text if you don’t use paragraphs, but the solution isn’t to increase your line height until every line is like a paragraph of its own.

The solution to the drudgery of large swathes of text is:

1. Make your blocks of text smaller.
2. Use something other than paragraphs of text.

Throw in a list. Do some indentation. Toss in even a stupid picture. Personally I try to throw in code examples, because that’s how we roll on this blog.

That’s good writing, that’s content that is easy to read. It’s not easy to write, and I’m sure I miss the mark more often than not. But you can’t design your way to good content. If you want to write like this, if you want to let the flow of your text reflect the flow of your ideas, you need room. Huge margins don’t give you room. They are a crutch for poor writing, and not even a good crutch.

So in conclusion: modern design be damned!

We had a debate party tonight for the Biden-Palin debate. It’s nice to watch it in a group of like-minded people. Taking the Democrat/Republican debate seriously is a bullshit game and I don’t have any desire to bring this farce into my normal life.

After the debate was over, I wanted to discuss the debate. After all, it’s weird to watch something for an hour and a half and then just ignore that we spent that time watching it. The problem is that I hate the punditry. No one actually said "did Palin do what she had to do?" (I probably would have screamed) but it’s just really hard not to talk about "what will people think of this debate?" And part of that is because we all know what we think. We saw through Palin deliberately ignoring the questions and reading her already-prepared speech. We all had a basic understanding of what is fact and what is a lie or misrepresentation. It’s nice to share little stories (like stories from the article about how McCain is a jerk). But it’s so damn hard not to fall into a discussion about the horserace, about what other people will think. Why is it so hard to talk about what we think? Not what we analyze, but what we actually believe? Instead of predicting something that will come to pass regardless of our predictions, shouldn’t we be developing our own beliefs? That seems far more relevant to our lives.

There’s probably a lot of reasons for that. It’s intimidating to be entirely genuine, to speak without irony. And all the news is about the horserace, so we are all well informed, it makes it easy to talk.

I think a large part of the problem is that the spectrum of opinions is so narrow (even if also bifurcated) that it’s hard to have an interesting discussion of political issues. Lacking anything of real substance to discuss, we discuss the discussion, we make predictions instead of forming real opinions. While I’m willing to blame many things on the Republicans, this is the product of both parties, of the narrow ignorance of "conventional wisdom." For instance, the debate about the economic bailout has been rich with rhetoric but starved of any real ideas. I didn’t even realize how limited the debate was until I listened to this interview where Steve Fraser kind of says, well, we can do whatever we want. That is to say, we can actually make collective decisions about the direction of our economy, instead of the impotent position that is assumed in all current debates, where we can only poke lightly at the economy (and it’s implied anything more would destroy it).

We can’t really talk about what kind of healthcare system we’d like, because the system nearly everyone wants is not an acceptable part of conventional wisdom. Socialized healthcare is the only reasonable option, but of course there’s lots of ways it could work, there’s lots of room for genuine and important discussion. But instead we have a staggeringly horrible proposal, and a merely not quite as bad as the current situation proposal. Given this set of options you can’t have real discussion.

In the end our own happiness is mostly in our own hands. The choices we make for ourselves are more significant than the choices made by the government (the choices we make collectively). But our collective choices do matter. We certainly haven’t figured out happiness. And maybe government does best when it has the least effect on our lives, but while that’s one end of the bifurcated conventional wisdom, as an idea it remains largely uninspected. When I consider many of the pleasant conveniences in my life, government is part of a lot of them. It doesn’t do much to make me more spiritually fulfilled, but the idea that government is a hopeless place to look for our collective happiness is a truism that lacks real consideration.

Political discussion is stuck in a terrible intellectual rut. Blame falls equally on both parties. They hold on greedily to their monopoly of political thought. It’s like religious doctrine, something to which politicians must submit before being allowed to progress, a sign of submission to a larger system of power. I have this hope that Obama is going through the rites with discipline but without true belief, that he is being subversive, diving straight to the belly of the beast. But this is only speculation, perhaps a naive dream, a desire to project my hopes onto a figure of vague and general hope.

I don’t really want to spend too much time discussing all the things that are wrong. This is the depressing comfort zone of the left. I want to talk about how things could be right, about how we can make a world that isn’t just less unjust but a world that is more beautiful, more wonderful, more full of life and freedom and passion. I want to exult in the potential of the future.

Saturday morning my sister, Monica Bicking, and her boyfriend, Eryn Trimmer, were arrested in Minneapolis. Monica was released on Sunday, but Eryn and others are still in custody, and the police will try to keep them detained as long as possible. update: the two of them and six others from the Welcoming Committee are charged with felonies, including "furtherance of terrorism". A website has been set up in support of them, and to keep people informed about ongoing events in the case: rnc8.org

They were arrested for "conspiracy to incite a riot". This is the same charge used against the Chicago 8 (or 7) at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Perhaps the police have a sense of tradition?

But more directly she and Eryn were arrested in an attempt to preemptively suppress the protests at the Republican National Convention. They were both very active with the RNC Welcoming Committee, which is a group coordinating and supporting some of the people coming to the Twin Cities for the convention.

Obviously I’m very concerned by the arrests and charges. But there’s been a huge outpouring of support from the community — both from activist in the Twin Cities, and from their neighbors. In Chicago I’m a little unsure about what to do.

Reading articles about the incidents (Glenn Greenwald’s post on Salon is a good one) I find myself mostly avoiding the comment sections. The comments fall into two categories: mean comments against the protesters, and reactionary comments with no real substance ("this is proof this country is a police state!") Activists generally understand what’s going on, and people of a right-wing/authoritarian bend are hardly going to be convinced of anything, but there’s a lot of progressive people out there who’ve never really been involved in any activism like this. There’s very little explaining the protests, the role of activists like my sister, and the philosophies they hold. Certainly the news makes no attempt, and unfortunately the activists themselves often speak from an unexplained perspective.

So I’d like to use this as an opportunity to explain my understanding of the role of protest, what’s going on at the RNC specifically, and what an "anarchist" really is. At the moment I can’t do a lot to help Eryn and Monica directly, but at least I can talk about her personally instead of another story about a named but otherwise anonymous "protester".

A happy 4th Birthday Emily’s Blog!

I’m going on vacation in a couple weeks to Berlin and Amsterdam, flying to Berlin on August 12, leaving from Amsterdam on August 27, and transitioning between the two sometime in between. Things Emily and I should see or do? Care to meet up? On vacations my evenings tend to be underscheduled.

Do you believe the world is (a) getting better, or (b) getting worse?

Please explain. Please, no more "both/neither" answers: choose just one

Listening to Tavis Smiley’s show tonight, and the segment My America where they talked about gun violence. At one point they quote a man who lost his brother to gun violence:

You can be in a club and bump into somebody on accident, a little of your liquor, a little of your water spill on their coat, now, you go outside, he got five or six people out their because you spilled your damn drink. Which, a person should be able to say, "man, my fault dog, I apologize, you know how it is." You got people that just ain’t gonna be right, man.

Tavis Smiley: So you take that, you put guns into the equation, that changes mediation efforts dramatically.

Several times they talk about how small matters of respect lead to violence. The conclusion is that guns are the problem.

I don’t really know what to do with this. In my life (and I suspect all of your lives) issues of respect do not lead to violence. As a result I have a hard time thinking of this as a gun problem.

OK, so it’s a violence problem. The other thing that gets me is there’s this strong undertone to this conversation that "we aren’t doing enough." This attitude is of course the norm for an NPR show. But it’s not we — I, and everyone I know is not part of this we. My "we" does not resort to violence. My "we" does not project respect into minor social interactions. When I say it’s not "we", I don’t think it’s just that I tuned into the wrong radio show — am I being recruited into this "we"? Do they really think listeners are part of this "we"?

There is no reflection in these shows about why this (whatever the issue of the show) is a general problem. Of course most talk shows tend to generalize wildly, to turn every anecdote into a sign of some change in culture, some disease of our society, something more than just an anecdote. (Though some good NPR shows do not attempt to generalize anecdotes at all.)

There’s a strong attitude, in this show and others, that this is a problem for us all to solve. Why exactly is this a problem for me to solve? Why is this a problem for government to solve? (I’m not a conservative, but I feel it’s unfair that only conservatives seem to be able to ask that question: why should government solve this?)

I don’t ask these questions rhetorically (and maybe that makes me different from the conservatives, who tend to only ask questions rhetorically). There may be a good answer to these questions. But it’s far too easy to say "we must do something about this" without saying who and why. We (especially those of us who listen to NPR) are all far too fatigued with the constant admonitions that not enough is being done, and something has to change. This kind of approach is not an effective call to action.

And it’s yet another thing trying to make me feel bad for something that’s not my fault. And dammit, it really isn’t my fault!