So yes, software can be art!
Dave Winer's original post with this title asked if any developers in Silicon Valley are doing it for fun not just money.
His example was Ward Cunningham, originator of the Wiki. But Ward is based in Portland, Oregon and is linked to a company in Denver, Colorado (AboutUs.org)
So I'm following his example and referring to someone who actually lives well outside of Silicon Valley:
Jeremy Ruston
Creator of TiddlyWiki
His bio is in a TiddlyWiki presentation.
While he has made a living in relation to TiddlyWiki, it's clearly a labour of love. He was head of open source innovation at British Telecom/ Osmosoft, but left because he 'couldn't spend much time coding'.
There's a nice background to his computing experience and philosophy and development of TiddlyWiki in a Changelog podcast This is well worth listening too - some great quotes. You'll find it embedded at the top of this post. You have to listen to the end to find out who Jeremy Ruston's programming hero is.
See also:
- TiddlyWiki: A free, open source wiki revisited | Network World
- Why You Should Keep a Personal Wiki for Technical Learning | Trent Cutler | LinkedIn
And the opposite of all this:
- Have Software Developers Given Up? ('a lot of fail for just one month')
Q: What's the difference between 'The Swindle' and the Barclay's Libor trial?
A: One's "a steampunk cybercrime caper about breaking into buildings, hacking their systems, stealing all their cash, and quickly running away again before the police show up." The other is a computer game.
On my 1999.io posts, I didn't realise there would be any comments! I only stumbled upon them by chance, as a result of going back to an individual post and re-reading it. How would I find out someone had posted a comment? The solution, if there is one, is to have a river of comments, I think. Maybe everything should be a river. Like Twitter, like my email inbox, like the TV and radio have always been (just one damned thing after another), certainly like Dave Winer's rivers. His Guardian river uncovers what's really happening with news articles, whereas the main website pretends its all static, like a printed newspaper front page. But it's all very far from static.
πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει
Everything changes; nothing stays still.
- Heraclitus (quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 402a)
I find Facebook overwhelming. Too many 'friends' to reply to. The result is I just look at it twice a year, in case someone posted something earth-shattering. They didn't.
Owning your own words online. It's easier said than done. The existing tools don't make it particularly easy. I'm interested in this from two angles. First, there's the practicality of writing in one place and syndicating to several or many others. It's just easier, at least in principle. And it seems to go with the grain of the Web. That is to say, the Web seems invented to allow one to many distribution, whereas the closed Web of Facebook and others seems to take control over distribution out of the hands of the original author and invoke mysterious algorithms for limited distribution. Second, there's the question of longevity. Not everything has archival value, but it would inspire me to blog more if I thought it would last - at least beyond five years. No one knows if Google Plus, Instagram, Twitter, even Facebook, will last that long. Certainly, link rot sets in well before that and the Wayback Machine is very limited.
It's not that I'm desperate to claim ownership. After all, deep collaboration is also an aspect of the Web, in which it isn't necessarily relevant to know exactly who did what. It's just a hunch that there's no need to relinquish more ownership than strictly necessary at this point.
Owning and sharing your words | Jon Udell
A Domain of One’s Own | WIRED
Connected Copies | Mike Caulfield
Claim Your Domain—And Own Your Online Presence | Solution Tree
Publish (on your) own site, syndicate elsewhere | POSSE
Self-hosting: more control, less connectivity | Jeffrey Kishner
"Australia doesn’t have a piracy problem. Australia has a distribution problem. More specifically: Australia has a Foxtel problem."
Source: I refuse to feel guilty for torrenting Game of Thrones
Well, yes and no. It's deeply ironic that by far the best distribution system for large media files is highly accessible yet effectively outlawed. It's like banning TV so people will keep gathering round the wireless set. I can't believe we've wasted a whole generation arguing about this. Some technology is just too dangerous to develop. Neutron bombs for example. Torrenting really isn't in the same category.
It's been a great week for inventor and entrepreneur James Dyson.
First, a revolutionary new hair dryer is announced.
Then, aligning itself with design innovation, the BBC commissions a revolutionary new Dyson Dalek.
The thing that annoys me most about the closed web (the web imagined into dominance by Facebook especially) is that it reconfigures the geography of the Internet so that wherever people are, they are always 'on Facebook'. It's a kind of colonialism. No, let me restate that: it is colonialism. It seems as though only last year I was in my own territory, sovereign over my own small patch of the universe. This year, without my having moved an inch, I'm within the expansive territory of Facebook, or I'm nowhere. Look at a map of the world in the Nineteenth Century and it's painfully obvious that the colonial world effectively had no outside to it. Where on the entire globe was not carved up and controlled by the European, Japanese and American colonial powers? Thailand? Today, every online sovereign state is under direct threat from colonisation. One of the things Evan Williams, creator of Medium, doesn't quite understand, it seems, is that in attempting to be an alternative space to Facebook, the use of 'closed web' techniques renders resistance futile. These are the exact principles and methods that give Facebook the advantage. Medium risks becoming the Thailand of the Web. It may succeed in holding out, but that's the best it can expect. For what it's worth, my own view , given Williams' past form, is that the game plan is not to consolidate sovereignty but to sell out to a larger player for a lot of money.
When the history is told of colonised people, there is a strong sense that they somehow 'disappeared' from their land. They are not in evidence today, so where did they go? They disappeared, vanished, we are told. And this is what Facebook has done to the web. The bloggers have been colonised. They have not been dispossessed of their territory. No one forced them to stop blogging. They simply disappeared - or so the story goes. And furthermore, this disappearance always has the air of inevitability about it, it's a far more immutable law of history than anything Marx ever dreamed up. History demands that the old will be displaced by the new. Of course it does.
The Scottish poet James Robertson wrote a series of 365 short stories, one for every day of the year, and each story had exactly 365 words. One of these is called 'The news where you are'. It's a masterful satire of the way the British Broadcasting Corporation understands the political geography of the United Kingdom. There's the national TV news - 'the news where we are', as Robertson puts it - and after that, 'the news where you are'. Except on Saturdays, when the scheduling doesn't allow any 'news where you are'. Robertson's satire wryly exposes the view from nowhere imposed by the media. The 'national' news, Robertson implies, happens everywhere in the nation except where everyone lives, which is where the regional and local news happens. All that's needed is to substitute the word 'London' for the word 'national' and it becomes clear how ideological the BBC's concept of national news is.
What Robertson exposes about the BBC is equally true of social media. As Dave Winer says, we're in an era when sources go direct. The latest example is the US President's statement on the death of Prince, put out on Facebook. But as they report directly on their own experience - the news where you are , the sources are increasingly constrained to place it as 'content' in a silo - the news where Facebook is. If you doubt this just take a look at the POTUS Facebook page. Where s the President? In the Whitehouse? No. It's laid out clearly:
President Obama is on Facebook. To connect with President Obama, sign up for Facebook today.
The implication is clear: if you're not on Facebook, where are you?
My hope with the new web authoring tools is that the open web will develop instead of disappearing. Facebook's recent adoption of RSS as a protocol for instant articles also points to a way forward, a chink in the armour of the closed web. To be on Facebook, but to avoid being on Facebook alone. The President may need to be on Facebook, but sometimes also needs to be in the White House. My ideal would be to write in one location (my own private White House?) and publish auto-magically in several, or many places. To write once and publish everywhere. That's the dream, and yet social media keeps breaking it. But the dream is so powerful that not only has it not yet died, it is continually inspiring new technologies. The closed web is always the second best.
See also: The medium is the bias [or Why would the Queen use Twitter when she already has the Royal Mail?]
To tip or not to tip, that is the question currently under scrutiny in New York. A while back I wrote about how to be better at tipping[1] by understanding something of the cultural expectations that tipping offers an opportunity for expression.
I said that tipping is overdetermined. That is to say, it's about a lot more than just the cash: it's about how society is organised and how we find our place in that organisation.
For example, have you noticed that when a waiter is given a gratuity for good service, that's called a tip, but the gratuity a banker gets is called a bonus, and the same thing given to a politician is called a bribe? Context is everything.
Now the debate is heating up. Danny Meyer (Union Square) has been experimenting with banning the tip in his restaurants [2].
This has caused quite a lot of push back from the industry. David Chang of Momofuku is pretty much against ending the gratuity system, as doing so could bring about the extinction of the medium sized restaurant, he thinks [3].
This debate is largely framed around changing minimum wage - the possibility of restructuring wages in the hospitality industry so they produce a reasonable income for workers, while also retaining profitability and enabling expansion. Hillary Clinton has seen tipping in these terms, as something linked to the need for a higher minimum wage [4]. Even the right wing think tanks describe the matter in terms of the flexibility of the labour market, or lack of flexibility.
But Maddie Oatman, writing in Mother Jones, has argued that tipping took off in the Nineteenth Century United States as a way to avoid paying wages to newly emancipated slaves. She further argues that the gratuity system continues to discriminate on the basis of race, as diners tend to pay less in tips to black waiting staff[5].
Oatman interviewed Saru Jayaraman, the author of a new book about the issue: Forked: A New Standard for American Dining.
And here's the podcast.
It's interesting that the debate claims that minimum wages will damage the prospects of the hospitality industry and damage the pay of low paid workers, rather than improve it. But a large test of this claim has already been done: Australia has some quite high minimum wage standards, and yet there are really plenty of restaurants, including Momofuku. It also has a broadly egalitarian culture, which makes tipping a low-key activity [6].
[1]: https://fourcultures.com/2009/11/13/how-to-be-a-better-tipper/
[2]: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160107/BLOGS04/160109935
[3]: http://restaurant-hospitality.com/management-tips/no-tip-restaurants-gaining-few-fans
[4]: http://www.eater.com/2016/3/3/11152642/hillary-clinton-tipping-15-minimum-wage