Presidium Podium

I’m more than a little bewildered by all the rumblings in the CLEC/ISP community in the last year or two in favour of IPTV, or IP-based television content delivery.

For those not familiar, it is basically the same service as that of your cable or satellite provider; channels of television content beamed into a set-top box. Except, instead of using the traditional HFC and/or waveguide and QAM transport infrastructure that cable uses, it is prospectively delivered (1) over a variety of last-mile infrastructure in telecom companies’ incumbent plant, such as copper ADSL2 loops, direct fiber to the premise (a la Verizon FiOS), and (2) it comes as an IP-based data stream, leveraging a variety of approaches that seem to suit this aim — e.g. multicasting.

I think that in general, IPTV is a dead-end business model for ISPs and CLECs to pursue.

As is widely acknowledged to happen from time to time, I did not consciously arrive at the conclusion suggested in the title until stumbled into a recent debate on ISP Planet’s isp-clec list about affordable and/or partly open-source driven head-end equipment for IPTV and associated accoutrements for the required network build-out. It’s something that came to fruition as a realisation as I devoured the exchanges about encoding gear, GPON vendors, etc.

Having bared that thesis, I will attempt to indemnify myself with the disclaimer that I am not a full-time market analyst, do not work in the video space, and know relatively little in detail about the technology. Additionally, I do not watch TV. I have not even had cable for many years now. And in general, television, the film industry, and entertainment as a whole are at the absolute dead-bottom of my list of personal or professional interests. So, I cannot possibly claim much credibility or authority here even if I harboured such designs.

It’s just a gut feeling. But gut feelings carry a frequently under-acknowledged significance in the anatomy of business decisions.

The first and most principal problem: TV is obsolete. No, I am not saying that nobody watches TV anymore; that is rather self-evidently not the case, and it seems implausible to even imagine American society without one of the most critical elements of its vitality–if that is the appropriate word to use. Indeed, the seemingly inextricable relationship of television to the basic respiration of American society — at least, on a pedestrian level — is one of the best known things about American society.

What I mean is that the traditional, incumbent nature–and particularly, the format–of broadcast television is on the decline. Television conceptualised hitherto, as a one-to-many broadcast network offering a fixed selection of professionally prefabricated content interspersed with frequent advertising, is not a growth industry.

The leading cable networks’ viewership has been consistently falling for several years now. Hollywood is beset by successive, protracted strikes of the various writers’ and actors’ unions, contributing to a blight of new and original content as well as a commonly acknowledged tendency to recycle, rerun and reuse. New shows are crafted according to predictable and overused formulas to — at least, I think — a previously unseen level, as epitomised by the bromidic “reality” genre. A study released just over a week ago suggested that the median age of habitual American TV viewers is now 50. Advertising revenue has plunged. The news channels part with growing segments of audience as more and more people–most especially the youngest demographics–move to the Internet to get their news.

Of course, this assessment falls short in its failure to consider certain lopsidedness in the trends. Various pay-per-view and on-demand movie channels, and other accessories of the technological upgrades heralded by digital cable, have actually registered modest gains.

All the same, I can’t see how anyone could be moved to suggest that these market conditions are investment-grade. Far as they may be from a proclamation of TV’s imminent demise, the stench of decay and obsolescence seems to be in the air.

That’s not to say that consumption of the essential phenomenon of the moving picture has abetted, although that may be the case with categories of younger viewers who have switched to the textual realm of the Internet to obtain their news–and increasingly from non-traditional media outlets, to boot.

Rather, the medium and the basis of the content has shifted increasingly in favour of online video content such as YouTube. As with the challenge to traditional corporate media posed by blogging, more and more video content that is considered entertaining and defining in popular culture is becoming user-generated and collaborative–”amateur,” if the terminological preference of the incumbents is to be respected. Perhaps more significantly but less overtly, there is a plethora of commercial (and some free) sites offering streaming feature-length movies, comprehensive archives of TV show episodes, and much more. Some of them are probably legal and have content licensing arrangements with the industry. Most, I imagine, are not. I can’t really say, as I am not a consumer thereof.

Even among those whose consumption of the boob tube has not significantly diminished, TiVo appliances have become commonplace. They conveniently defeat intrusive advertising and dutifully record shows to be watched later, according to the viewer’s own schedule and preference.

All this points to the irreversible trend that people are no longer satisfied with bulk, canned streams of content, or anything resembling “channels.” The next generation of video content is something like YouTube, if not necessarily identical. It my involve a marriage of the YouTube paradigm with a number of other presentation formats, technologies and approaches, including ones that may not have been conceived or applied yet. But essentially, something that carries its click-and-pick spirit forward.

It’s no different than where the music industry has been headed, where, aside from the more publicised and prolific lamentations about CD prices and labels screwing artists and so forth, the critical - if understated - key factor is that people want to cherry-pick their songs. Nobody wants to pay $16 for a CD where they won’t like all - maybe even most - tracks. But they are quite happy to pay $.99 for a single track from the iTunes store. It’s because they want that specific track, right here, right now, easily and quickly. And they want to amass it into a large, portable collection on the device of their choice (which, in light of the DRM restrictions, makes market acceptance of the Apple approach somewhat curious, if not necessarily beyond the reach of explanation).

And then, of course, there is the woefully limited landscape of choice offered within the RIAA production and distribution cartel, and the incredibly high financial barriers to entry it carries. How are you going to get your band’s album into the Barnes & Noble music section? Online music distribution democratises the playing field considerably, if not perfectly.

This is where things are headed. Toward openness, clips, bites - all on-demand, and bolstered by the convergence of digital delivery features with the interactive possibilities offered by computer interfaces, fed by the Internet — so much as that remains possible in light of the vicious hostility displayed by the telcos and MSOs alike toward net neutrality and all the issues surrounding that.

(By the way, the cable companies know this. That doesn’t mean they like it. That is why they have lined up to impose bandwidth and data transfer limits on customers once again - once thought to be a tired anachronism of a previous generation of the Internet economy’s evolution. It’s because they assume–not without some justification–that if you’re transferring 60-80 GB/month or more, you are either a prolific BitTorrent pirate or you’re watching a lot of streaming video, which means you’re not watching TV, which is a terrible, terrible thing indeed.)

Rome is burning, and you want to build a telco-cum-cable company providing what can and should be properly called legacy broadcast content in the middle of it? I’m not in MENSA, but if someone tries to take your money to invest in something like that, I’d say don’t fall for that scam. Run for the hills!

The second issue is with the technology, marketing, costs, and competency of the sort of organisation that a telco-land network service provider (CLEC / ISP) is.

Who said the head-end technology available within an independent CLEC’s budget works well, and is reliable or mature? Nobody I’ve spoken to who has tried it. Of course, I could just be speaking to the wrong people.

A friend of mine, who works with MSOs for a large vendor, has informed me that a lot of the gear typically found in major MSOs’ head-ends is overpriced, overrated, and suffers from egregious duplication and wastefulness stemming from lack of interoperability. But, I am not persuaded that anything built out there to replace it for a CLEC’s build-out budget actually works. Mind, this isn’t really my area of technical expertise, so I just don’t know. But nothing I have heard has been particularly encouraging. If anything, it’s been abusive and disdainful of Mickey Mouse solutions.

Who said last-mile broadband delivery infrastructure in the US, particularly copper or hybrid ADSL2, can handle high-definition, full-motion digital video streams with the level of robustness TV viewers take for granted with conventional digital cable, or that the equipment and technology necessary for delivering it over IP has those qualities either?

I know that a lot of the distribution infrastructure feeding the MSO head-ends has been IP-based for a while. But the last-mile portion is done with QAMs and RF. Are you sure you’re going to match that consistency with New Age ADSL2–still a largely uncharted province in terms of its rollout in North American telco plant and all of its idiosyncrasies, most notably a lack of fiber to the premise–and IP-based decoders?

If my experience of the extreme sensitivity of users to the quality of service issues (read: the way it’s inferior to the PSTN experience) in residential VoIP delivery is any indication, the Monday Night Football crowd will probably lynch you. Yes, I know a lot of that has to do with the feebleness of delivering carrier-grade voice over the Internet, which isn’t how IPTV would work at all, but that is not a hinderance to the point.

The network build-out, presumably involving some combination of copper ADSL2, fiber to the premise, and various hybridised transport, is a very capital-intensive undertaking. And as if the regulatory and bureaucratic burden on CLECs isn’t enough already, franchising agreements and content licensing enter the picture as significant CAPEX. I don’t know how much any of that costs, but I have a hard time imagining that an independent CLEC can get it the same breadth of it, on the same terms, as the large cable MSOs.

Third, to harness an insight of Clint’s: video is hard. Let alone to do right. No, it’s not insurmountable, but it is fraught with considerably more technical and logistical complexity than, say, voice or data. As Clint has remarked, it is relatively easy for a cable entity to enter the telephony space, especially as they already do data, making VoIP a logical, ostensible proposition. The synergy in triple-play is there for them. But telcos trying to reform their competency upward from voice/data into the video space is much harder. The synergy in triple-play is there for the MSOs because it’s a downhill battle — they already have the hard part. Telcos, institutionally, would have to fight an uphill competency battle.

But if that’s not discouraging enough, the real question is — where’s the elusive value proposition, the uniting elixir that is going to bring all these customers and the windfall profits for the enterprising CLEC?

What is being sold?

Something that people don’t already have, like … cable TV? Very funny. Perhaps rural areas not covered by cable might be a candidate, as relatively few as they are, but it is a stretch of the imagination to consider that the infrastructure there - i.e. the copper plant - is ready to support a brand new ADSL2 roll-out. Sure, remote DSLAMs with their fiber tails can be intrepidly built, but if the cable company doesn’t think there’s any ROI in building out their plant to the area because of population density or demographics, you must know something they don’t.

You might try for rural areas that have inferior, legacy local-yokel cable with a narrower range of features and content access, but you’ll have to conveniently ignore the existence of satellite–and hope your customers do too.

Aside from that, what’s the value? A little bit of bundled savings on triple play? Using New Age, avant garde technology that is unlikely to work as well as the perfectly good cable TV that is fairly ubiquitous, over experimental delivery mechanisms? And to suppose that your cost structure — and urgent need to recoup the cost of the build-out you just did and that the MSOs already have — is going to allow you to offer that competitively? CLECs/ISPs are often straitjacketed from even offering voice and data competitively with the ILECs unless they’re simply willing to take a margin hit; how did TV get to be the manna from the sky?

Marketing this type of stuff with any significant conversion rate is hard enough as is. It’s going to be even harder if you have nothing superior to offer. This is a good time to brush up on the subjective theory of value: just because television may be a novel, interesting business for a telco doesn’t mean its customers will think — or experience it as — a novel, interesting product. Well, they might think that, but the correlation between thinking certain things and voting with dollars would prove disappointingly low.

Having said all that, there are probably a few niches here and there where going into the TV business might make sense, such as multi-tenant buildings (MDUs). Or maybe if you’re fortunate enough to get a shot at a free and clear monopoly on a small (but growing) rural municipality if you do the trenching. Well, okay. That could work pretty well.  But then the question arises:  Why not do that from the cable side, instead of the telco side, from an infrastructural perspective?  Get stuff that already works well.

In any event, I’m not prepared to condone a business model based on the theoretical possibility of making it work with a set of highly specific, contrived artifices. I’m sure there are circumstances in which there may be an extremely compelling business case to offer janitorial services or lawn care, too — maybe do a deal with Blackwater in Iraq or something. Pockets of the extraordinary notwithstanding, it doesn’t count.

The news is not all bad. As I mentioned above, TV may be dying, but consumption of video content is not. If what you’re interested in is capitalising on the possibility of offering the next generation of computer-convergent set-top boxes with access to all sorts of newfangled content options whose market share and significance is likely to meteorically rise, that’s not such a bad idea.

But in that case, concentrate on rolling out the next generation of high-speed broadband access and customer premise equipment, especially as much of it is likely to be Internet-driven. If it turns out that this is not the case, you can add distribution and plant to drive new content models later. Why on earth would anyone want to get quagmired in the business of television as such? Why the stampede to imitate what the cable companies have been refining for decades, and provide an alternate distribution mechanism for the exact same content?

It’s time CLECs, Wall Street, and vendors got off this insipid IPTV bandwagon. Independent CLECs need to find something better to do.

It’s not often that I say, “oh, to be [some bureaucratic classification or another]” quite with as much conviction as I do today.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to be a US citizen; I’ve been in this country since I was six years old. I’m functionally American in most de facto respects. I have a citizenship application pending. But it would have been particularly handy today.

I’ll give you the straight dope on the bureaucratic aspects of traveling abroad as a foreign national of almost any non-Western country residing in the US. And I’m a relatively privileged one at that, as I am a US Permanent Resident and not here on some sort of student or work visa. I should really count myself among the fortunate in that my readmission back into the country in which I live and work is, by and large, relatively uncontroversial on that account. People here on sundry visas do not have that benefit.

I wanted to take my girlfriend Lisa to Paris for a few days over Valentine’s Day. Although she has spent considerable time in Britain, she has never been to the Continent, and I thought it’d be a wonderful romantic getaway. I have been, and of all the EU countries France strikes me as the one least problematic to visit for a relatively short term due to my relative established acquaintance with the logistics, having been there several times.

Sadly, the logistical preparations did not really materialise until the final days of December, which is an important lesson of what not to do learned unto itself. But from a theoretical standpoint, at least, it was sufficient lead time until mid-February to get everything necessary accomplished.

Americans can travel to a vast plethora of countries for short tourist stays with seldom more whipping out their passport, whose procurement and issuance is a relatively straightforward matter. Western Europeans also have this benefit to a large degree. It suffices to say that American and EU citizens can trot the globe with relative simplicity by the simple virtue of holding a passport.

However, Russian citizens, as well as those of most other countries, must apply to the diplomatic representative agency of the destination country for a visa to gain entry, even for a very short stay. So, that’s what I had to do.

Contrary to widespread belief about how such things are done, this actually cannot universally be done by mail. To obtain a French Schengen¹ visa, a personal appearance at the consular division of the French embassy to the US is required for the appropriate jurisdiction. On previous occasions, my parents and I had to visit the French consulate in Atlanta from Athens to do this.

Fortunately, as it happens, I work in Buckhead at a distance of approximately 0.1 miles from the consulate - I can see my office building from its venue So, I was incredibly lucky in this regard; if you are a resident of some other areas of its far-reaching jurisdiction — which covers Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennesee — you’ll have to make a trip to Atlanta just to physically deliver a bunch of paperwork. Have fun with that.

Furthermore, as of July 2007, you must make an appointment, which can have a lead time of several days to weeks depending on their case load and create unexpected delays if you are on a tight schedule. And if you arrive late for your appointment or fail to show up, you will be refused entry to the office and will have to make another appointment — have fun with that.

Among the requirements for the application include:

• Your passport, which is held for the duration of processing (minimum two weeks).
• Two copies of the application form.
• Two passport-sized photographs taken within the last six months.
• A copy of a greencard (US Permanent Resident Alien registration card, in my case) or other proof of US residency.
• Airline reservation. (In practise, this means having your non-refundable airline tickets purchased in advance prior to the visa application process. At least, that’s what it meant in the time frame in which I was purchasing the tickets. If your application is denied, well, have fun with that.)
• Evidence of medical insurance coverage for situations abroad at a limit of $39,000 or above, or travel insurance (which I had to purchase).
• Proof of employment in the US.
• Two last bank statements to prove sufficient funds to cover the cost of the trip.
• Evidence of hotel reservation in France (and if securing this requires a non-refundable down payment, have fun with that).
• Proof of residence within the consular jurisdiction - copies of a driver’s licence.

If you lead a very busy life, or live in a city where any short errand takes at least a few hours because of traffic, and/or do not have time to prepare such things, have fun with that - no visa. It certainly was a problem for me; when am I going to find time to have passport photos taken? Any such task in Atlanta requires the commitment of a very substantial portion of one’s evening, to the extent that it’s even possible outside of standard business hours. Also, I do not receive paper statements from any of my banks and do everything online, and online banking interfaces do not display my name, as would be necessary to evidence the affiliation of the bank account with my personal identity.

(Note to geeks: Quixotic conceptions of database referential integrity will not save you here! I thought that providing a pay stub that references the same checking account number that appears on my bank statement should provide sufficient — if derivative — proof of the authenticity of my bank account. But consular officials don’t do “foreign keys,” sorry.)

But I took care of the documentation nevertheless and arrived yesterday for my appointment. I appreciate their generosity in reluctantly accommodating my slight tardiness for reasons entirely beyond my control.

My application was looked over and denied on a passport technicality. The Russian Federation passport on which I would be traveling expires a month after my firmly committed date of return to the US. Unbeknownst to me, it is required that my passport be valid for at least 90 days subsequent to my return in order for a visa to be issued.

I was told this is actually a US Customs and Immigration Service (formerly the INS) rule, and that I might have trouble re-entering the US with a passport so near expiration. However, I consider it highly unlikely that I would actually be detained at the Atlanta port-of-entry as a greencard-wielding permanent resident with a valid passport; after all, my passport expires mid-March, does it not? What meaning do expiration dates have if they are not to be taken literally?

I think it is far more likely that they do not wish to assume liability for an extraordinary situation — such as a grave medical emergency — in which I would be stuck in France beyond my passport’s expiration, and then really encounter problems at the American port-of-entry. Most international conventions on this subject stipulate that in this situation, I would be obligated to return to France and deal with the problem there before attempting to return.

Of course, I find all this something of a mystery, given that my Russian passport is just a travel document, principally of interest to other nations admitting me. I am a permanent resident here - I live and work here; should my greencard not be the basis on which I am admitted back into the US? USCIS doesn’t take any interest in my foreign passport any other time, nor should it, inherently.

So, what does one do in this situation, with a month left before the trip?

Well, I suppose I can renew my passport at the Russian consulate in Washington DC. This typically takes 4-6 months, during which one does not have one’s passport in possession and cannot travel. This actually a considerable improvement; in the past, one was required to physically appear at the consulate in Washington to make this happen. I have made that trip twice with my parents, and each time there were some technical difficulties in my case stemming from the need to validate me with the civil registry in Moscow. I do not have an internal Russian passport (the principal form of government-issued personal identification in Russia) nor a Moscow residency and work permit, seeing as I’ve spent only the first six years of my life there. But now, it is actually possible to do this by mail! Hallelujah! Now I can do it without using up the pittance of vacation time I’ve acrued, save on the expense, and other things that are typically an impediment to free-wheeling bureaucratic field trips.

There is no way to expedite the process. For those unfamiliar with the legacy of Soviet bureaucracy, it suffices merely to say that Russian officials are exceptionally hard-nosed, unfriendly, and unyielding in every respect possible. I would take any American federal bureaucracy any day over that. What’s more, the Russian foreign ministry has absolutely no incentive to expediently provide for the travel needs of Russian nationals living abroad; what the hell do they care about my travel wants and needs?

Another option might have been to extend the validity of my passport without actually renewing it, which is a much simpler procedure and can be done by mail also. We called the Russian consulate, and were told this is no longer possible.

In some cases, USCIS can issue permanent residents Form I-151, a travel document that can be used in lieu of a passport. This is typically done in situations in which a person for some reason “cannot” obtain a passport from one’s native government, and my guess is it primarily exists to serve the needs of stateless persons, refugees, or asylum seekers. I am not sure that my situation would accord with whatever statutory notion of “cannot” is operative here.

An immigration lawyer with whom my family is acquainted told me that in any case, the wait time on this travel document is at the very least several months, if not longer. I will try to make an appointment with an information officer at the USCIS field office here in Atlanta to see if it is even possible for me to obtain it, and whether the matter can somehow be expedited, but between those two obstacles the probability is virtually nil.

So, I’m basically out of luck, and am not going to Paris. The bureaucracy has, in effect, told me to see Figure 1.

Now, I am not so far up the demagogical creek that I cannot see the fundamental reasons why these visa regimes exist, or why I ended up in this situation.

I understand that from the point of view of EU and American governments, Russians, unlike nationals of the former jurisdictions, essentially belong to the same category as most Third World immigrants and other sorts of undesirables trying to break down the floodgates into First World nations. In the post-Soviet period, there is indeed a massive exodus of Eastern European immigration to more prosperous parts of the world.

I’m basically the same as a Salvadoran or a Guatemalan or a Mexican or an Angolan. The reasons for the visa application requirements outlined above boil down to the fact that the French government needs assuaging that I am indeed going there for a short jaunt, unlike all those Boat People. Who’s to say I am not some Russian schmuck on an expiring American student visa looking for a one-way trip to France to hole up as an illegal immigrant? They need evidence of my intent, ability and incentive to return to the US, and to know that I am established here and would have no particularly evident reason to do otherwise and stay in France.

They need insurance coverage to make sure that in the event of a catastrophe, I do not pose an undue fiscal burden on the French state, whose expenditures on public services, after all, are not intended for consumption by visiting foreign nationals. This isn’t a concern they have about Americans, of course, ’cause they ain’t po freeloadas like we Eastern European Boat People.

I get it.

But, as for this arcane requirement that my passport be valid for a certain period following my return, I am absolutely mystified. Since when is an expiration date not an expiration date? I can use my credit card on the last day of the month before it expires, right? And why didn’t anyone tell me about this?

So, to the extent that American port-of-entry rules are germane: that’s where I am after sixteen years in this country. I’ve been here since 1992, have spent nearly my whole life here, a good portion of it in conditions of considerable economic hardship well below our level of material subsistence and security in Russia. I grew up here, doing things the right way — the legal way — at every step.

I guess I just get caught in the cracks of policy like everyone else. It’s the same reason all of you have to go through security at the airport.

The airline tickets are valid for about a year after their purchase. The dates on them can be moved to late summer / early fall, and I have every confidence that Lisa and I will take our trip eventually.

But not on Valentine’s Day. All I wanted to do was visit Paris for a few days, leave plenty of tourism money behind, and return to my home in the US, where I am a comfortably established resident and contributor to the economy. And this is what I get.

Not sure what final thought or thematic meta-message I can offer here. Um, “I hate bureaucracy?” What else is new? It’s an awful aspect of life we have to deal with, and which we can do not a damned thing about. Bad publicity on blogs offers no incentives for improvement. Governments care about the 101st Airborne, not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders. Lodge a protest. Sew it on a pillow. Write a letter. Beg. Plead. See Figure 1.

^{1 The Schengen Zone consists of countries party to the Schengen Treaty - a subset of the European Union that has no internal border controls amongst member countries. A Schengen Visa granted to any point of entry into the Zone will allow you to travel freely within it to any other Schengen country.}

Somewhere along the way, I became a relatively heavy user of mobile text messages. The geek factor probably plays a heavy role in this, as does the need to furtively communicate short thoughts while occupied at work. A girlfriend — and some friends — with a proclivity for the epistolary probably doesn’t hurt either.

Even so, I’ve never had a fancy mobile handset with a built-in QWERTY keyboard except for work-related purposes. In various jobs I’ve held, I’ve had a T-Mobile Sidekick II, a Blackberry, etc. For the most part, I’ve had to contend with banging them out on fairly conventional low-end flip phones; the kind that come as a free upgrade on a contract renewal with most major carriers.

Despite the awkward word entry scheme and seeming user interface limitations, I’m actually fairly comfortable with it and have gotten decently efficient at it. My gripe is not with the fundamental paradigm. I know that if I really wanted to type a lot of words into a mobile device, I should just get a PDA or a sophisticated data/voice portable of the variety mentioned above.

Here’s what I’d like to see in the SMS interface implementations in common consumer-grade handsets, in my ideal world:

1. I employ proper capitalisation, punctuation, spelling, grammar and symbols in my messages. The interface should not be designed to discourage that. I want easy access to hyphens, semicolons, percentage signs and ampersands, not to navigate through fifteen menus to introduce them and derail my train of text-thought.
2. If you’re going to make a good predictive dictionary (”T9″/”T9Word”), make a good predictive dictionary. I cannot count the number of things I have to switch to cumbersome manual entry for. Why aren’t most proper nouns, including names of famous people, places, or things, in the dictionary? Countries like Kazakhstan, people like Mobutu Sese Seko or Kim Jong-Il or Jean-Paul Sartre, or trade names like Pyrex? Solid-state memory gets cheaper and cheaper by the day, folks.
3. I do not like how entering a wrong letter that forks off the predictive tree leaves me having to re-enter the entire word as opposed to merely correcting the mishap in the ending, etc. It seems that if I am trying to spell “something” and accidentally enter “somethhg,” I cannot delete three characters and recover the intended ending — even if it is one that would otherwise be a reachable leaf in the predictive tree.
4. Why does the interface fail to make the entirely reasonable assumption that the next character within a word boundary following a period (punctuation symbol: .) ought also to be capitalised? By default, mixed-capital entry mode forces the outcome to “She shells sea shells. by the sea shore.”
5. As a technology professional and a business enthusiast, I employ a lot of acronyms. But you don’t have to live in an acronym-ridden day-to-day world of banality to use them. I don’t expect the dictionary to know acronyms. But please don’t try to squash or mangle them into something other than what they are actually intended to be based on some erroneous assumption that normal people don’t use acronyms. Yes they do.
6. This latest phone I have requires the navigation of far too many menus for the simple purpose of sending a message.
7. Do we really need a 160 character payload limit in the SMS protocol specification? Maybe it’s just that the methodologies of writing for these presidium.org people have slowly rubbed off on me, since they pay me by the word, but there is very little of communicative significance or value that I can say in 160 characters or less.
8. The predictor needs to be a lot better at learning my entry habits, and knowing which word I tend to use most of the time when entering sequences that map to multiple permutations.  95% of the time that I enter 7666, I mean “soon,” not “room.”
9. The predictor needs to meticulously assimilate every new word I manually enter into its dictionary. It should automatically know when I have switched out of predictive and into manual entry mode to compensate for its ignorance and take careful note of what I am proceeding to type. Sometimes it does this, sometimes it doesn’t.
10. The lexicon of the predictive dictionary should be cool, hip, trendy, with-it and modernity-affirming, and come prebuilt with words like “blog.”

That is all. k00l? thx 4 listenin, k… u 2 bye.

I would like to thank you all for gracing this incipient blog of mine with the presence of your readership, and with the quality and robustness of the discussions you have created; it has far, far surpassed the sort of typical expectations one might have about the audience of and its participation in a personal blog, and your unfailingly erudite, thought-provoking comments have provided a lot of stimulating, compelling perspectives for me to consider in detail.

In connection with the immensely fruitful ongoing conversation (amongst myself, Clint, Xon, Andrew, Lisa, etc.) about the relationship between capitalism and the subsistence of humanities and institutions of “high culture” in this article, I have decided to continue it with a separate post in order to better address Xon’s petition to flesh out some of the key differences of opinion and assumption here. I feel this is a sufficiently distinct — yet very compelling — direction to the governing theme that it is structurally appropriate to channel it into a different article.

I think Xon is very correct in saying that the polemic boils down to very fundamental, axiomatic differences between the assumptions about capitalism made by people such as myself, exponents of Marxist intuitions to some extent, and advocates of what he has opted to term the “free market libertarian” (FML) worldview. As he says, “one of us is playing chess, and the other is playing checkers,” because, metaphorically speaking,

“[W]e have taken such different roads so many miles that now we have lived in different countries for three generations, taught all of our kids to speak different languages, read propaganda that caricatures each other without knowing what is true and what isn’t, etc.”

So, I agree that to continue the discussion effectively, the focus has to shift from the symptoms to the core premises; it seems clear enough that apart from any technical disagreements about economics participating in an otherwise shared philosophical space, there are two very disparate schools of thought operative here.

Granted that we have sufficient elucidation and acknowledgment of what I see to be a strict constructionist FML view of academia and the humanities as just another economic decision that is and ought to be governed by the same basic market dynamics, and rendered with the same analytical framework, I think it’s only fitting and proper that the premises of the Marxist account be given some explicit voice in response.

Marxism vs. Socialism vs. Anarchism vs. …

First, however, let me grapple with “Marxism” itself terminologically. For one, I am not a Marxist as such. I used to be, but I’m not. I spoke to this here; it would be profoundly disingenuous for me to don the mantle of Marxism’s complex pedigree as an influential body of knowledge and a system of thought in trying to set anything of this sort forth. I fundamentally support free-market society and agree with Xon’s bedrock opposition to government-orchestrated coercion or other intermediation as a prospective remedy to anything.

Also, the affiliation with Marxism here — and the reason for the very invocation of the word — is limited to certain dimensions of the far-reaching critique of capitalism offered by socialistic currents of thought, as well as the ways in which it is brought to bear on sociology, psychology and anthropology. Underneath this umbrella epithet of “Marxist-affiliated,” I am actually superimposing a vastly plethoric repertoire of socialist thinking, including weighty contributions (especially in the area of industrial psychology) by the likes of anarchists such as Kropotkin and Proudhon — recognisably un-Marxist belief systems to those privy to the esoterica of “leftist” ideologies.

Despite that, there is a uniting elixir — a common thread — running through them that goes beyond just mere opposition to capitalism, or even plain advocacy of social organisation involving collective ownership of means of production and/or government by committee and/or anything like that. For all the eclecticism on a technical level (much as often occurs in abstruse theological disagreements), these currents offer a sufficiently integrated, monolithic perspective on capitalism. There’s not really a lot of controversy with respect to the socioeconomic “incumbency” in the descriptive fabric of anarchism vs. Marxism-Leninism vs. old-guard Western European socialism. The differences arise primarily in the prescriptive parts that deal with revolutionary theory — “what to do about it,” rather than “what the situation looks like.”

While — for that very reason — the feathers of my taxonomic ideological pedanticism are not particularly ruffled by the continued use of “Marxist” as a shorthand, catch-all epithet for all of it, you should know that far from all of it is fundamentally Marxist. The most technically accurate designation to hope for is really “socialist,” “left-libertarian,” or perhaps “Marxian,” even though none of those individually really seize upon the essence of this quilted composition well. Still, in the interest of accuracy, I would favour standardising on “socialist” as the umbrella term for the contraposition here. It’s the line of best fit.

All right, it’s high time I jumped into some substance here. With these presidium.org people paying me by the word, I can comb and braid the “meta-informative” portion of this quaint symposium, define the terms, etc. until the sun comes up. But it’s very late, and I’m just a wee proletarian, so I’ve got to go to work in the morning and do my bidding for The Man, whose appreciation for drowsy, lagging production in telecommunications systems engineering should not be overstated.

“Naked Economics”

It’s got nothing to do with late-night pay-per-view programming.

When I was in Austria with my parents in the summer of 2003 in connection with my dad’s teaching stint on a summer abroad program for American students, I recall at one point sitting on a tour bus in Germany next to a woman reading some book of which either the title or subtitle involved “naked economics.” It wasn’t this one; maybe it was the title of a chapter, now that I think about it? Anyway, the gist of the text’s pretension was to condense the “nonsense” that is overlayed on top of economics by “politics,” governments, constituencies, special interests, “biased media,” etc. and give you the low-down on the real deal, the “objective,” scientific economic facts underlying it all. I can’t remember much from my furtive glances, but a lot of it seemed to dwell extensively on removing the whole, you know, “people factor” so that we can get an “undistorted” view of the economic realities that humans blunder through with such seemingly reckless abandon.

While perhaps a noble aim from an FML vantage point, socialism — and the Marxist strain most emphatically — steadfastly refuses to make this type of distinction.

Rule #0 of the socialist account of reality: Economics and politics are inextricably bound up. They are not separate subject matter and do not benefit from hermetic treatment.

Where FML, as I understand it, would hold that politics and power are all impositions — things that people do with the underlying “raw material” of economic relations — socialism sees certain political realities as fixtures of economic systems. Economic systems create class realities and distribute political power; the relations of production — the manufacture of the social product — and the mechanics of its appropriation are economic projections.

The discipline of political economy, whose origins are formally chalked up to Adam Smith, represents a worldview developed by Marxism. Except where political economy in capitalistic analytical terms amounts to an “interdisciplinary” exploration of the interplay of economics + law + politics + history + geography, etc., Marxism sees these as indivisible elements of a holistic, systemic critique whose broad scope best accords with the requirements of scientific completeness.

Thus, the structure of political institutions under a capitalistic, FML-type system is not just a “cultural” or “social” or “moral” phenomenon that plays out in parallel with the basic laws of the economy’s operation, but is truly part of the same horizontally integrated conceptual space. Politics is not just what people “do” with the economy according to their values; it is an actual facet of the economic system.

In precisely this sense, socialists are not endeared to the view that the power inequalities or injustices that are borne out in economic terms are simply aberrations upon an intrinsically immaculate, morally ambivalent clean slate that can be employed for good or evil, equitably or corruptibly.

I suppose that from an FML perspective critical of this visualisation, one of the possibilities is to accuse Marxism of simplistic economic reductionism that neglects the distinct weight of cultural, personal and moral factors. In fact, Marxism cannot be reasonably accused of ruling too many things outside the purview of economic activity, as though something truly participates in an “extra-economic” kind of way. If anything, the tendency is the very opposite; everything is economic. It’s just that the scope of coverage associated with “economic” is defined far more broadly than is customary or acceptable in FML literature.

The Class Character of Economic Dogma

While truth itself does not literally possess a class character, socialist thought holds that the observational language in which economic relations and their political adjacencies are conveyed issues from very different narratives that correspond to the distinct roles that different positions of privilege and agency play in society. These positions are formed from the economic stratification imposed and perpetuated by capitalism.

The precise nature of these classes, their delineation, and the movement of people through them is a topic of considerable detail and widely varying opinion. What is important for the moment is to acknowledge the existence of classes in principle.

Thus, the sort of sunny, optimistic FML talk that would have everyone conceptualise themselves as an equally empowered agent in the free market is intensely dissonant to the ear of the socialist intuition. As the socialist account would have it, different constituencies in society are able to access very different parts of the economic landscape and relate to them in profoundly different ways.

Seeing life’s possibilities in the rosy light of career advancement, income mobility and personal entrepreneurship is something that only acquires meaning (rather than mere “practicability”) at and above a certain social stratum — the one typically labeled “petit bourgeoisie” in legacy Marxist-speak.

Because the privileged elements of society — and, in this particular stage of history, more significantly, the entire globe — control the society’s means of production, the mythos they author percolates through them to educational and cultural institutions to become dominant and authoritative ideology. This process, notwithstanding straw men that conjure impressions of a sophisticated, intricately diabolical back-room conspiracy of elite propagandists waging deception upon the proletariat-at-large, is rather organic and automatic - simply a logical consequence of their seeing and experiencing their worldview as normative and simultaneously occupying the position to bestow upon it endorsement via the hierarchical means by which knowledge becomes authoritative — another consequence of privilege and stratification. But it does not correspond to the way this reality is experienced by those whose lives do not share their class character.

The take of the InfoShop Anarchist FAQ is helpful and illuminating:

Rather than scientific analysis, economics has always been driven by the demands of the wealthy (”How did [economics] get instituted? As a weapon of class warfare.” [Chomsky, Op. Cit., p. 252]). This works on numerous levels. The most obvious is that most economists take the current class system and wealth/income distribution as granted and generate general “laws” of economics from a specific historical society. […] [T]his inevitably skews the “science” into ideology and apologetics. The analysis is also (almost inevitably) based on individualistic assumptions, ignoring or downplaying the key issues of groups, organisations, class and the economic and social power they generate. Then there are the assumptions used and questions raised. As Herman argues, this has hardly been a neutral process:

Needless to say, economics is a “science” with deep ramifications within society. As a result, it comes under pressure from outside influences and vested interests far more than, say, anthropology or physics. This has meant that the wealthy have always taken a keen interest that the “science” teaches the appropriate lessons. This has resulted in a demand for a “science” which reflects the interests of the few, not the many. Is it really just a co-incidence that the lessons of economics are just what the bosses and the wealthy would like to hear?

It is really surprising that having the wealthy fund (and so control) the development of a “science” has produced a body of theory which so benefits their interests? Or that they would be keen to educate the masses in the lessons of said “science”, lessons which happen to conclude that the best thing workers should do is obey the dictates of the bosses, sorry, the market? It is really just a co-incidence that the repeated use of economics is to spread the message that strikes, unions, resistance and so forth are counter-productive and that the best thing worker can do is simply wait patiently for wealth to trickle down?

Why such rigidity, immutability, and seeming lack of dynamism and fluidity? Because …

Socio-economic determinism

Socialists are steadfastly opposed to the view that objective outcomes in people’s lives are simply the meritocratic outcome of intrinsic choices, and refuse to resign themselves to a compatibilist interpretation that starts with individual choice as a departure point for analysis of socio-economic position in individual situations.

I think what I had to say in this comment basically sums it up:

Many are very dogmatic in their assertion of free-will, and tend to repeatedly assert that qualitatively inferior outcomes in people’s lives (isn’t it all relative, anyway?) are the result of poor choices over which the actor(s) apparently had both complete control and unlimited epistemic privilege. I tend to see it more as, look, if you or I grew up in a crumbling ghetto with extremely lacking to nonexistent parenting, and in general reproduced a certain generalisable pedigree commonly associated with people of that fate, then in all likelyhood we would not be having this conversation–although it’s not logically impossible by any stretch, and there are plenty of anomalies. But in principle it seems rather obvious to me this is unlikely.

Socialism is also acutely attentive and emphatic on the point that poverty — like wealth and privilege in opposition to it — is, in the main, self-perpetuating qualities that are not defeated by spontaneous or intangible means. The sorts of circumstances in which rapid social mobility occurs are of intense interest to socialists for the factors that occur in the background of an individual’s life to bolster that possibility.

FML sees such adherence to social determinism as a negation or trivialisation of the role of institutional freedom of transactional choice. It is a necessary condition of FML reasoning, in my opinion, to adopt an ahistoric posture in which a given scenario’s status quo is the point of departure for empirical analysis. How it is that worker and employer came to the bargaining table in the manner that they did is of negligible interest; the point is, they’re here, so here are their incentives, here is their respective calculus, here is the marginal utility they perceive in each other, here is the demand curve…

FML theorists generally consider all background issues to reside in the realm of — I dunno, some kind of sociology or something [waves hands dismissively]. At any rate, definitely a realm of criticism that cannot be brought to bear on the inherent justice or ethical character of economic activity as such as seen by FML. This account of economics is limited to the technical mechanics of its exchange functions, where power inequalities and issues of social justice participate indirectly, rather than its social basis, where the objective disparities — consequences of class — are of central concern. In other words, FML economists care about the transaction; they do not care about how any social inequality of the involved parties is brought to bear on the transaction, or how they got there. Any compulsions or pressures experienced by the parties that are not of an expressly quantitative character are deemed peripheral to the economic discussion, thus insulating economics itself from any indictment based on the moral ramifications of such exigencies. It may be politics, it may be morality, it may be religion, it may be social status, but whatever it is, it isn’t economics that makes all that other stuff tick at the essence.

Socialists see all these factors as being comingled — yea, bonded — in the overall superstructure of a social order, inasmuch as the interplay of social power and wealth is the narrative of its preoccupation. FML sees all that as needless psychologising that is disingenuously and non sequitur-ially shifting the focus away from the real heart of matters, the “naked economics” playing out in Exhibit A.

To make an analogy with a concept that enjoys greater currency within the discipline of philosophy, FML takes a compatibilist view of economic relationships akin to the Compatibilist view of free will. Compatibilists see the dichotomy between metaphysical free will and hard determinism as unnecessary at best, and utterly contrived at worst. The real issue is not the essence of human volition, but rather whether an abstract container — an encapsulation — of free will can be devised that provides a sufficiently viable concept of “will” at some operative level for government work, including the all-important business of putting people in jail for crimes they committed as a result of deliberate choices for which they can justifiably be held accountable and so on.

Subordination of Economy to the Common Welfare

Socialism affirms the ability of man to transform and manipulate the natural world to suit his needs, from the anthropological beginnings of social division of labour and the movement beyond subsistence farming or hunting and gathering.

As such, it is not especially endeared to the view that “the economy” ought to be some organic “thing” that moves according to the internal incentives its particularities create. This pillar of libertarianism strikes socialists as rather “anarchic.”  The Invisible Hand on its own terms is not good enough;  it has to make sense and do the right things for people.

From the very beginning, “economies” were there to make people’s lives better and maximise expression of human potential. Therefore, economic relations ought to be subordinated to the collective needs of man with a view to welfare, freedom and creativity. To the maximum extent possible, economics should not encumber man.

Economics With a Human Face

Socialism sees the way that production is rendered in FML theory as a simplistic, technocratic reduction that altogether ignores the humanity of the process and contemptuously dismisses industrial psychology as a “normative” question. Socialism sees these issues as the central pillar of ethical validity and (in)justice that characterises an economic system:

As David Lazonick puts it in Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor:

“[N]eoclassical theory of the ‘capitalist’ economy makes no qualitative distinction between the corporate enterprise that employs tens of thousands of people and the small family undertaking that does no employ any wage labour at all. As far as theory is concerned, it is technology and market forces, not structures of social power, that govern the activities of corporate capitalists and petty proprietors alike.”

As the InfoShop.org anarchist FAQ adds:

Production in this schema just happens — inputs go in, outputs go out — and what happens inside is considered irrelevant, a technical issue independent of the social relationships those who do the actual production form between themselves — and the conflicts that ensure.

Humanities

And what bearing does any of this have on the position of academia, humanities, and jobseeking students, again?

Well, for one, it means that the qualitative parameters of the situation cannot be fully described purely in terms of academic supply outstripping academic demand. At least, it cannot be so done in a way that satisfies socialism’s need for a humanistic account.

More concretely, society’s dominant ideologies are subordinated to the imperatives of the owners of its general ways and means. It is not reasonable to expect that in a profit-maximising system that rewards the maximally efficient production of commodity goods and services, the biases of those ideologies should skew in favour of sitting around reading An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding or The Canterbury Tales.

More an identification of the problem from a particular angle than a robust proposal for a brilliant solution, to be sure.  But, I already acknowledged that in my original post.  However, how we perceive the problem has everything to do with how we settle the question of its remedy.

It’s not that I’m feeling like an incendiary post, I’m just constantly moved to wonder…

Why is it that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (”Mormons”) is so frequently characterised as a “cult”?

Of course, the question has a self-evident answer to a degree, rooted in the historical persecution of Mormons for their allegedly unconventional and deviant beliefs. Interdenominational / interfaith religious conflict is a thing only as old as theology itself. It’s also rather tiresome and boring from a secularist’s point of view.

I also recognise that “cult” can just be another pejorative epithet uninsured by any sort of critical thought. Why, I should know, it’s often bandied about by fellow atheists to describe the totality of theology and theological history.

But I don’t feel like the answer begins and ends there. As near as I can tell as an non-ingratiated outsider unschooled in scripture and professing only a very narrow, cursory familiarity with theological doctrine, the incongruities among various other Christian denominations — and indeed, individual professors of any faith — are at least as vast and cavernous.

And commensurately, I see some dismissive derision going on; in Protestant-dominated Middle America, making fun of Catholics seems particularly the fashion. Or maybe I’m just more acutely perceptive of that having grown up in the confines of a Catholic university and proximate to Catholic intellectual tradition through the scholarly work of my mother, and some other avenues.

But the kind of vitriole, the churning bile, the raging contempt that I see toward Mormonism from so many interlocutory angles? I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in the broad daylight of “respectable” society in view of God, although the dark, moldy catacombs of religious extremism and theo-political fanaticism in certain other parts of the world offer enough parallels. Also, I don’t see the representatives of many other er, “dichotomous” Christian denominations, however mutually antagonistic their expressed positions, so thoroughly moved to drown each other in spirited accusations of being “cult”-like, or particularly primed to deploy the caustic discursive power of this C-word at all.

Granted, my theoretical exposure to LDS thought is limited largely to my interaction with a few real, live, practising Mormons, most substantially Clint, along with some kids I went to high school with. But all the same, I simply fail to see whence the applicability of “cult” is derived, along with all the other bitter hatred.

Although I command no expertise in the area whatsoever, I am compelled to say that it seems like a very reasonable, pragmatic, and tolerant theology. On the other hand, being an atheist, and an ill-educated one at that when it comes to these sorts of matters, I also don’t have that part of the brain that scoffs or takes offense at any of the LDS (re)interpretations or revisions to whatever other Christians consider established, uncontested historical, spiritual or exegetical fact. Clean slate here.

Because I’ve mostly engaged LDS theology in the larger context of social, moral, and personal issues (as opposed to, say, deeply esoteric fine points of scripture or doctrine), there is a heavy inflection to the sort of thing that I take away from it.

Four thematically recurring features that stand out to me as an outsider are:

1. Extremely heavy role of community, distributed involvement, lay ministry.
2. Very strong emphasis on human volition, willpower and metaphysical free-will libertarianism. A view of God that presumes the inalienability of uncoerced human choice participating before Him.
3. Importance of character development, decency and qualitatively positive personal featuers on an extrinsic, interpersonal plane.
4. Views on topics of extrinsic, worldly applicability — social issues, moral conduct, law, politics, etc. — tend to be grounded in very accessible, generalisable terms that do not rely dogmatically on the force of scripture nor on fundamental or literal interpretation of scriptural prescriptions. Almost all views I have heard from Mormons on a variety of topics of common social interest — and sometimes accompanied by frequent controversy — have been grounded in basically worldly terms. There is frequent recourse to observations in sociology, psychology, and other areas, whether considered part of established scientific knowledge, or just otherwise inhabiting a shared communicative universe with a non-Mormon. This resonates with me extremely, as it leads to thought-provoking, inspiring, transformative and polemically effective reasoning that I can engage, converse with, and benefit from even as a nonbeliever/secularist. (I don’t really mean to suggest that LDS positions on worldly topics have a wholly secular basis; of course, in the final analysis, they don’t. But that is not the point; the point is that there is very deliberate effort to reconcile those positions with some degree of universalisable empirical reality.)

Seems very pragmatic, tolerant, and reasonable to me as an outsider to Christian faith. Definitely among my top choices of interlocutor in discussions involving topics on which theology has a bearing, although I imagine individual exponents of the faith vary as much as individual exponents of anything in particular and acknowledge the possibility that I may have just had incredibly good opportunity to surround myself with high-quality people.

So, where’s the source of this inference to “cult”? Where is the source of this profound contempt?

Is it because Mormons do seem heavily invested in a unitary conception of doctrine through centralised, intersubjective revelation? How does that differ from Catholics or many others?

Is it because Mormons are characteristically unapologetic about the strength, relevance and primacy of their faith? How does that differ from anyone else of actual religious conviction?

Is it because Mormons have a well-disciplined, structured and effective international church organisation and a very deliberate public outreach strategy that relies on the cultivation of individual relationships, proselytisation, etc? While I’ve seen where people are coming from when they generalise about many Mormon missionaries in “monolithic” and “homogenous” terms, that is neither true nor particular to the LDS.

Is it because they seem to have a very tightly-knit, integrated, and distributed community and form close–dare I even say, sometimes exclusive?–relationships within their localities? How does that differ from many other communities of faith, or shared belief systems of any kind, really? Is it any secret that strong moral convictions shared by a group of people tend to lead to clustering and reticence toward pervasive moral relativism and ideological eclecticism?

Misconceptions about lifestyle choices and/or the role of certain overblown historical relics such as polygamy? Well, I don’t know any polygamous Mormons that belong to the LDS proper. Do you? Besides, if that’s your beef, is it not best directed at secular relativism, “post-modern” sexual politics, and other prime factories of “novel” lifestyle advocacy and “revolutionary” deconstruction of “traditional” morality? And what does this have to do with cultism?

So, what is it? Why did I run across a flyer the other day encouraging me and my fellow churchgoers to come to a seminar about “combating the cult of Mormonism?”

My dad sent me an article about a main job-hunting avenue for thousands of Ph.D. candidates in philosophy in this country.

Must say, it makes for quite a sad read for me. The crux of the sadness seeming to be tied up in:

The competition is so intense that many applicants consider themselves lucky to get any kind of tenure-track job, even if it is a poorly paid job teaching critical thinking to prospective refrigerator repairmen in rural Oklahoma.

In general, compared to almost any other industrialised “Western” nation, the U.S. is abysmally impoverished in its ability, and especially its willingness, to meaningfully support the development of its truly educated — specialists in the arts and humanities.

The U.S. is by far the most illustrative example of an economy and a universe that adheres most closely to Marx’s dictum that cultural life in a society is a rather literal projection of its productive relations — in a word, blind economic imperatives that cater to the lowest common denominator.

There is something about the nature of the relationship between academia/higher education and the hoi polloi that makes the former inordinately sensitive to the vicious hostility of capitalism (and whatever “democratic’ inner compulsions may be ascribed to its marketplace dynamics, the authenticity of which as suchly characterised I am generally moved to question) to the intellectual achievements of world culture, and places it in the precarious position of needing a conscious and concerted subsidy.

I am not, in general, persuaded by counterarguments that don the thin veneer of “democratic” pretensions in their suggestion that the state of affairs for scholars is simply a reflection of a system that elicits the maximum expression of human “freedom” in that it gives people to organically make choices about the appropriation of their share of the social product — for good or ill. And if it’s ill and adversarial to the fruition of intellectual life of the society, the fault lies nowhere but with its own constituents.

As the worldview — which strikes me as incredibly simplistic and overly technocratic — captured by this statement would have it, subsidising scholastic work in a way that makes it tenable to build a career of it is an imposition of an “artificiality” upon the realities of market supply and demand. The claim is that the threadbare “demand” for it indicates its marginal value to the whole of a society, and thus that any attempt to tinker with the results amounts to some form of “coercion,” “liberal elitism,” “big government knows best,” and so on.

The first problem is rather obvious, and I will plead guilty to a certain “liberal elitism” in this area as charged. Most of society — especially inasmuch as a large part of it consists of lazy, narrow-minded and unthinking consumers — is ill-educated and does not have sufficient perspective to make intelligent decisions about the role, and indeed, the indispensability, of higher education to its own well-being.

This is not really spoken from intense contempt for the common man; I am still an optimist about people overall, believe their motives to be basically good, and their collective intelligence quite capable if given the proper resources.

However, the structure of this society, the self-perpetuating socio-economic dynamics present therein, and the power inequalities that obtain widely act strongly to preempt the exercise of that capability, and its provision with what I have chosen to term “proper resources.”

This aside, the more sophisticated and recondite critique is structural, although it is enourmously brought to bear on the significance of the last sentence.

As turning one’s profession into a survival strategy that includes a sustainable compensation plan is concerned, the inner compulsion of capitalism is toward the remuneration of things of relatively simple goods and services that have the immediacy of perceptible commercial or hedonistic-subjective value. Basic economics even accounts for some of this in a variety of mundane areas in its treatment of “negative externalities,” although what is typically underemphasised is that so many of them result from the inherent shortsightedness of the profit motive, strengthened by the nature of competition to drive the long-term sustainability of certain practices down to the lowest common denominator. Oft-invoked examples of this include pollution, unsustainable agricultural practices, the depletion of natural resources, logging, etc.

The appreciation of purely scholastic work and high culture is even more capricious and exacting in this regard — and thus, when unfulfilled, more vulnerable — than the environment, I would venture to say. Much of the “output” of the liberal arts lacks any of the immediacy associated with economically transformative activities in that it cannot be commodified and readily applied or “experienced” as a good and service, and indeed, lacks even the most rudimentarily quantifiable properties of anything persuasively construed as a “good long-term investment” whose immediate benefit is not “readily” obvious.

It is just one of those things that is extremely socially necessary, and indeed foundationally supports much of the development of human society in ways readily evidenced from even a cursory examination of the pedigree of human understanding, but you can’t affix price tags to it, nor show how to a refrigerator repairman in rural Oklahoma its obvious and fathomable “benefits.” Not that there is any shortage of attempts to try to shoehorn it into some sort of economic model, but such misconstructions fundamentally pervert the very fabric of academic work.

In short, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just give the “social benefit” of an English professor or a philosophy student or an artist or a specialist of music theory a “value” and put it on the shelf at Target.

The humanities are not a “market datum.” They do not have verifiable or measurable quantities, they do not send “pricing signals,” they do not earn “investor confidence,” and do not produce “feedback.” It seems to me that it is by an ontological virtue that they participate outside the sphere of market activity; they are not “products.” Yet what we have done, for the most part, is precisely to subordinate them to those metrics, for which they cannot possibly be more ill-suited, and then wave our hands with great pep and vigour and sing encomia to our consummation of “freedom.”

Somewhere, somehow, higher and exclusive wisdom has had to step in to rescue our world from its seemingly suicidal — or at least misanthropic — propensity, however “elegantly organic” or “democratic” the mask you want to paint over the terrifying physiognomy of the process, to descend into the abyss of ignorance and cultural stagnation.

Of course, the process has always been explainable — dare I say justifiable in the eyes of the applicable contemporary proponents — in the terminology, language, and cosmological assumptions of the socioeconomic order fashionable in the time.

You’ll have to forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better. Surely you’ve read about the Dark Ages.

It was a beautiful grey day in Atlanta yesterday, where, for once, I stayed part of the weekend. (Usually, I am in Athens visiting parents and Lisa.) Quite appropriately for the holidays, I opine.

Unfortunately, I do not own a digital camera, so the best I’ve got to offer is shoddy, grainy, low-resolution phone camera pics:

I have always liked dark, grey, cool weather far more than sunny. I suppose it has to do with what one’s formative experiences of the world are, and I come from Moscow, where it is that way as often as not. It was in northern Indiana — where I spent a lot of my childhood — as well, but in an oddly contradictory way where it would often be humid and hot but grey, or below-zero but sunny.

Aside from snow, which I miss far as a persistent presence for several winter months far more than words can express, it’s also something I find psychologically necessary especially in winter. It is a core fibre of my expectations of what winter “feels like.”

I gather I’m rather strange in this regard. So many northerners who live in the Sun Belt express to me how glad they are to be rid of snow as a lifestyle imposition. Everyone seems to love the pervasive and unabating sunniness of this area. I personally can’t stand it; I find sun acceptable in moderation, but for the most part it irritates and blinds me.

I feel much more alert, awake, alive and productive in crisp, chilly, and cloudy weather — no, not “partly cloudy,” but truly, wholesomely cloudy. I gather it’s the exact sort of thing that makes most other people drowsy and unmotivated.

I’m quite partial to rain (indeed, the good Lord knows we need it), but do not find it to be a necessary ingredient for the enjoyment of a nice grey day. It just has to be very cloudy and cool.

I really wish most days of the year were like this.

Also, although I understand being annoyed at construction and utility noise very well, I do not think this is a moral or constructive way to deal with it.

After discussing this with Lisa a little while ago, I wanted to make sure everyone else was just as mystified as to the meaning of “fixed income.”

I cannot count the number of times that I had gotten calls in a technical support capacity (at a certain small Athenian ISP) about billing issues from older, typically more rural customers. They were often frustrated with computer problems — ostensibly outside the scope of the ISP’s control, concern or interest — and demanded to know what we were going to do to fix them.

It was policy then to provide residential consulting services (a ridiculous idea) at a certain hourly rate, which I quoted to these wretched. At times, I was met with considerable indignation — “Young man, I am retired. Us senior citizens live on a fixed income! We can’t just be paying through the nose day after day!”

Now, I understand where they’re coming from. Also, a lot of these people came from areas like Greene County, GA, one of the poorer areas in Georgia with collapsed median incomes and a gradually eviscerated economic base whose legacy is connected with manufacturing. They may not be able to easily afford such professional services. That’s not a problem.

But on a purely semantic level, my insatiable curiosity leaves me with the quibble — what on earth is a “fixed income”?

Are only senior citizens beset with this cruel and unusual impediment?

In their estimate, do I not live on a fixed income too?

Aside from this, I have also seen the term repeatedly associated with people of geriatrically tending demographics in a number of articles dealing with personal finance, and so on. “Older people have trouble stomaching the copayments associated with many coverage plans because they live on a fixed income.”

Pray tell, what is a fixed income?

Of course, I’m being a little pedantic; I think I know what it means. I assume that what it means is that once a person reaches retirement, they are no longer actively generating income for themselves (unless they have made successful investments that continue to pay substantial interest to form the basis of their income). Therefore, their pool of livelyhood is static and depleting, encouraging maximum frugality so that it might last long enough, one might hope.

But that is a “fixed” pool of wealth. That is not a fixed income. A fixed income is simply a quantiatively bounded disbursement collected with some regularity.

Even Donald Trump has a fixed income. Its fixture may just be so large so as to be considered practically inconsequential, as it would not appear to limit most of his conceivable ambitions, up to and including buying small Third World countries.

If any of you really have non-fixed incomes, would you be interested in funding Evariste Systems? Or at least send me the stock ticker symbol of your company and an invitation to the IPO? Will pay for options. Also, please send me your product literature on your Cold Fusion, Red Sea Parting, and Warp Travel offerings?

Or if you would like to pay me an unfixed income, I’ll shoot you my resume.

I want to talk about a particular type of captcha that has earned my contempt on grounds of its utter perversion.

Of all the things I could be moved to rant about from this vantage point (truly, a pool of manifold things), it is not entirely clear to me why I want to talk about this one. Besides, there are enough ridiculous applications of Internet technologies to fill a respectable galaxy in and of themselves, let alone the other things that belong to the genus “ridiculous.”

But wait, that’s what they told me a blog was for! So folks can rant about everything from the texture of their navel hair to their pet hare, and stuff like that. Nothing will stand in the way of my quest to get what I paid for.

Yes, I too hear the bells of irony tolling, in light of the chosen theme of “ridiculous applications of Internet technologies.” It’s an “interesting twist!” Ba-da-dooom! Cue for laughter.

Perhaps it’s because I feel that it blasphemes upon what is otherwise an interesting concept from a theoretical point of view, as far as computer science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence are concerned. Let’s chalk it up to striking a disciplinary nerve.

First, a brief explanation¹ of what a “captcha” is for those in the audience that haven’t picked this up mission-critical, synergistic, high-ROI Web 2.0 cross-platform collaborative content blogosphere term.

You’ve probably run into situations filling out forms online, entering bank information, posting to blogs, signing up for new services, and so on, in which you are required to manually input a series of characters as they appear in an image. This is basically intended to either prevent spam or add an extra layer of security by authenticating that the user is in fact human, thwarting automated processes that can fill out forms mechanically and submit them via a “robotic” HTTP request.

Malicious spammers and fraudsters often use these types of scripts to automatically create thousands of accounts for a particular purpose (to use as spam reflectors?), initiate batched credit card transactions with stolen numbers from a hijacked host in a short time, etc, etc. Fill in the blanks here; I’m so benevolent that I’m obviously hurting for creativity in the area of e-malice. [spreads angel wings]

Among the reasons this technique works are:

• The rendering of characters in an image as opposed to plain text makes it considerably harder to read the character stream; at the very least, it would require grabbing the image and running it through OCR (Optical Character Recognition)² software; all of which would have to somehow be worth the effort to defeat a particular captcha.
• The image is typically complex. The alphabetical characters are usually distorted or warped somehow, or appear with the superimposition or overlay of polychromatic lines or complex visual patterns rather similar to anti-counterfeiting designs that are not easily reproducible in copying. Government treasuries use these types of patterns in their printing processes to confer distinction upon an official, treasury-backed currency note. In this case, this has the effect of confusing OCR software by making it problematic to discern an alphanumeric character from extraneous data.
• Even if such schemes are theoretically defeasible in a programmatic way, the effort to defeat a particular captcha is absolutely not worth it in most cases. It would require very complicated image processing, and good captchas rotate the distortions employed. A spam or fraud effort would have to scale or pay very, very well to go through that kind of rigamarole.

That’s what a captcha is. In fact, many blogs have them to prevent comment spam. Numerous captcha modules are available for WordPress, as comment spam is a very common phenomenon due to the ubiquitous proliferation of WordPress installations.

Spammers have picked up on the fact that all WordPress form interfaces use the same basic form field ID keys and devised elaborate (ro)bot scripts that trawl the Internet in search of unsuspecting WordPress blogs and automatically post comments to them en masse.

If this blog becomes extensively linked on Google, where (ro)bot scripts can learn of the site URL, I very well may have to set one up for commenting as well, unfortunately. But we’ll tackle problems as they come - reactively, not proactively, otherwise I forfeit my admission to slacker heaven.

Anyway, of course folks quickly intuited that alphanumeric characters in captchas a relatively weak way to approach this problem, or at the very least an uninteresting one. Instead, one could design something that places even more complex demands upon a machine, but which would be utterly trivial to human subjectivity, thus highlighting the distinction between the two more acutely.

For instance, one could generate a series of pictures of various animals, and entreat the user to select the kittens of the group. It’s been done.

It would be a very difficult feat of image processing to accurately detect whether a picture contains a kitten. Possible, for sure; in fact, many enterprise content filters used in school systems attempt to do this for porn³. But accurately? Worth the effort? Absolutely not.

In theory, the concept is an interesting one. If nothing else, it’s a succinct statement about a fundamental problem explored in artificial intelligence and cognitive science: how could one make a machine mimick the adaptive subjectivity of the human mind, even with respect to relatively elementary sensory phenomena? Is it even logically possible?

Rather fascinating to think about, although I don’t claim the scholarly credentials to offer anything particularly intelligent or conceptually robust.

And now, we come to HotCaptcha.com, a captcha implementation that relies on the user picking three attractive people of a given gender from a group. The language of its error messages suggests that if you fail to pick the correct “hot” people, you aren’t certifiably human: “Die, bot, die!”

From a technical point of view, it’s actually a rather commendable implementation. It is easy to insert into a web application. It pays excellent homage to what the Web 2.0 lexicon terms mashups by, well, using them. The images are actually syndicated from the swill known as HotOrNot.com and the evaluation is performed based on the three highest-”rated” pictures. It even claims to use a HotOrNot API to do this - good use of web services and libraries.

Yet something about this is very off-putting. I’m not entirely sure what it is.

I suppose I could furnish some rather basic anticipated objections, sound prudish as they might to some of you. The user can only pick pictures of people that they are socially expected to find “hot.” But aside from the obvious reasons why that’s ridiculous, I don’t exactly feel that some jugular vein of sexual politics has just been sliced open.

(I did learn, from trying “switch to men” — out of idle curiosity as to whether the bias toward “mass-culture endorsed attractiveness” was the same — that I was apparently a bot, because I appear to not only lack the anything but the foggiest clue as to what it is that women find attractive about men, but — far more importantly for this exercise — have no expectation whatsoever of what is the “prescribed” social expectation of attractiveness by the masses of plebians submitting HotOrNot.com ratings. I imagine that’s a good thing from a heteronormative standpoint?)

But none of this cuts through to the essence of it.

I think if I had to pin it down to something, it’s probably some form of disgust that humans have once again managed to infuse - yea, pollute - yet another interesting and otherwise inertly formal innovation with sexual evocations, technology aiding and abetting.

At least the site acknowledges some form of that in its subtitle, “Using mashups to reach new heights (or new lows?) in security.”

Lows. Definitely new lows.

But then again, perhaps this objection is metaphysically problematic, rather as if I said that I suffer on behalf of the integrity of the concept of “comparisons” from the invention of beauty pageants.

That’s OK. If I wanted metaphysical coherence — or even to use the term “metaphysical” in a way that is truly correct — I wouldn’t have dropped out of the philosophy program.

You might say I ride the metaphysical short bus. These Presidium.org people are paying me by the word, so, garbage in -> garbage out as far as that goes.

^{1 Those who know me will understandably chuckle at the suggestion of brevity in connection with any explanation I deliver. But little did you know, these Presidium.org people are paying me by the word.}

^{2 The sort of stuff used to automatically turn scanned documents from mere images to editable text by “reading” the printed characters from the raw image.}

^{3 And fail. The only ones reported to work, in my experience, fall back on some sort of flat blacklist in the end.}