Brian.Carnell.Com

Why Has Everyone Forgotten the BBS Culture?

Continuing their coverage of the debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Salon.Com’s Scott Rosenberg asks if Gore is really that far off base when he says he took the initiative in creating the Internet, Did Gore invent the Internet?. My take is that if you think that the Internet is just a bunch of mainframes owned by megacorporations and government institutions talking to each other, then yes, Gore did pretty much invent the Internet. On the other hand if you mean a system that empowers individuals and small groups to communicate easily, then no, Gore not only didn’t have much to do with inventing that, but if he’d been able to foresee it there’s a good chance he would have tried to kill it (too much “cultural pollution.”)

The most annoying feature of these “thank the government for the Internet” stories is the incredible ignorance displayed in claims that the Internet would have been impossible without government intervention. Rosenberg writes,

Implicit in their [people who defend Gore’s claim] argument is a broader awareness of what it took to create the Internet. Anything as successful as the Net is not and cannot be successful as technology alone; technology does not exist in a vacuum. And just as the Internet required the services of brains like [Robert] Kahn and [Vint] Cerf and all the others who contributed code to its foundations, it also needed bureaucratic and legislative patrons.

It took social engineers as well as software engineers to build the Net. And that may be why the response to Gore’s original statement was so savage: Not because his claim was a lie, but because it was a truth that a lot of people today are trying to forget or bury.

The Internet didn’t spring full-blown out of some scientists’ heads, nor did it just grow, like some techno-Topsy powered by the mysterious magic of the marketplace. It emerged from the world of government-subsidized university research, and every step of the way along its passage from academic network to global information infrastructure was shepherded by the state. As the Net’s parent, the government didn’t do everything right; but it managed to nurture the network through its youth — then get out of the way once it was mature enough to move out of its parents’ digs and shack up with private industry.

But the truth that seems to be buried and forgotten is that there was a vibrant, cheaply priced online community sustained mainly through market forces back when the Internet access was so expensive it was the province primarily of college kids and academics.

In fact there were literally tens of thousands of BBSes, usually using software running on a single machine in somebody’s bedroom or den, connecting through what seem like incredibly slow speeds (I remember thinking I had died and gone to heaven when I finally latched my hands on a 1200 baud modem). I have always been an e-mail fanatic and save pretty much every message I send and receive, and when I look at messages I sent in the 1980s there are thousands of them, but rather than sent over the Internet they were sent through systems like RIME and its competing standards that let people all over the country and world talk without the extremely high prices that commercial services charged. Surely I’m not the only one who remembers scripting my PC to log into a local BBS at 2 a.m. and download a QWK file of e-mail and newsgroups. All Rosenberg seems to remember are the big online services such as Prodigy, Compuserve, GEnie, and others which didn’t have compatible networks — but were being forced to move in that direction by consumer demand toward the end.

Could that network of BBSes have turned into an Internet-style service? Maybe, but one of the problems was that it was a bit anarchic. Toward the time when the Internet began to pick up steam there were several competing software standards for graphical and visual interfaces. Maybe one of them would have gelled, maybe not. But they were all pretty much blown away by the Web.

And lets face it — that’s what really drove the Internet. Not the standardized protocols, not the government and university help, though those certainly played a key role, but a couple of college kids who wrote a graphical browser and then went on to found Netscape. Rosenberg can claim the credit really goes to the bureaucrats, but before the graphical browser came along, the bureaucrats and computer science folks were pushing such easy-to-use features as Gopher and Archie (I remember one professor I interviewed who was convinced the entire world would eventually be Gopher-ized).

The Internet is not a fairy tale about the wonders of government intervention, but a testament to the ability of a small group of visionaries to change the world, often in ways even the visionaries can’t predict.

Wired has a couple articles up today about the state of voice recognition software (Voice Recognition: Still Trying and When Your Voice Is All You Have), that reaches pretty much the same conclusion I have from personal experience — today’s software delivers, the problem is getting used to dictation as a way of working.

Several months ago I bought one of those combination headphone/microphone sold by Plantronics and installed the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking on my PC. After about 15 minutes of training the program to recognize my voice I was up and running. I played with it for a few weeks and was very impressed by how accurate the software was. In my opinion the Dragon software is already mature enough right now to be a complete dictating solution for somebody with repetitive stress injuries.

On the other hand, I haven’t used the software at all after the initial few weeks. Why? Because dictating, as opposed to writing or typing, requires a very different mindset that I just don’t have time to adapt to. I’m apparently not alone, as Wired paraphrases computer science professor Ben Schneiderman saying,

Talking at your computer significantly interferes with your thought process, he says, because thinking and speaking are both drains on a person’s short-term and working memory. Physical activity, on the other hand, taxes another area of the brain altogether. That’s why it’s much easier to talk while you walk than it is to speak while you think.

One of the writers profiled by Wired who does use dictation software said it took her several months to get used to dictating as opposed to typing.

It’s good to know that voice recognition technology could replace typing if I suffered from a severe RSI injury, but otherwise the time investment required to get used to dictating is just too high to make the software useful on a regular basis.

In what was widely seen as a rebuke of current South African president Thabo Mbeki, former South African President Nelson Mandela gave an interview to a magazine in which he reiterated that “the dominant opinion which prevails throughout the world” is that HIV causes AIDS, and he would believe that unless someone could show him scientific proof otherwise. Mandela appeared to take a swipe at Mbeki’s position saying, “I would like to be very careful because people in our positions, when you take a stand, you might find that establish principles are undermined, sometimes without scientific backing.”

Mbeki, meanwhile, committed himself further to the view that HIV cannot be responsible for AIDS. An interviewer for Time magazine asked him if he was prepared to acknowledge a link between HIV and AIDS to which Mbeki replied, “This is precisely where the problem starts. No, I am saying that you cannot attribute immune deficiency solely and exclusively to a virus.”

Mbeki says he will only accept the HIV/AIDS connection if a panel he has appointed agrees with that “thesis” (Mbeki’s word), but he has stacked the deck of that panel with fringe skeptics who believe that AIDS is caused by some other mechanism than HIV, usually habitual drug use, as well as conspiracy theorists who think that AIDS was created by Western scientists to reduce Africa’s population.

The only cabinet minister to publicly dissent from this view was Labor Minister Membahtisi Mdladlana, who had the courage to say outright that HIV causes AIDS.

Sources:

Mandela repudiates Mbeki on AIDS stance. Reuters, September 29, 2000.

AIDS: Mandela takes on Mbeki. The BBC, September 29, 2000.

In its latest session the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear quite a few cases that center around Fourth Amendment issues. One of those cases, Ferguson v. City of Charleston, centers around a controversial program at a public hospital in South Carolina that tested pregnant women for the presence of cocaine in their bodies. If the women tested positive, they and the results were turned over to police after giving birth.

Is this reasonable? Justice Antonin Scalia, in questioning at the Court today, provided the basic defense of the testing — if a person shows up at a hospital with a gunshot or stab wound, laws in most state require doctors to notify local police. Unfortunately for Scalia, and hopefully the law, the two situations are no analogous.

In the gunshot case, the information the doctor has is a direct result of his duties to take care of the patient. When it comes to pregnancy, however, a) women are not routinely given tests for narcotic substances, and b) even in the South Carolina hospital the doctors drug tested only those women they suspected of using cocaine. This is not information that arises in the normal process of treating a patient, where the expectation of privacy for information related to a possible crime might be diminished, but rather a public hospital actively seeking to collect evidence.

To make the gun shot example analogous, not only would doctors notify the police but they’d also run a series of drug tests on the victims to see if he’d been committing other crimes.

Aside from the Fourth Amendment, it’s scary to think that doctors are running around performing tests that are medically unnecessary in order to squeal to the state. As more than one critic of the law has noted, far from helping infants of cocaine using mothers, the most likely result of the law is to keep women from seeking prenatal care and other medical attention, and possibly even to avoiding giving birth in a hospital (home birth is a great option for many people, but probably not a great idea for a drug addict).

Sources:

Drug tests on pregnant women unconstitutional, lawyers argue. CNN, October 4, 2000.

Supreme Court to decide on women’s medical privacy. Laurie Asseo, The Associated Press, October 4, 2000.

Policing pregnancy. Rachel Roth, The Nation, October 16, 2000.

The recent FDA approval of the abortion inducing RU-486 became a hot political issue this week as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush tried to dodge statements he made back in January that if he were president he would have serious reservations about the FDA approving the drug, while several politicians chimed in to say they would do all in their power to reverse the FDA’s decision.

Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan reaching deep into his rhetorical bag referred to RU-486 as “a human pesticide,” adding that if he should be elected, “I would use all the power of my office, including appointments at the FDA, to prevent its being put on the market.”

Unlike Buchanan, who has no real chance of winning in November, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, does hold elective office. Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” that there “a lot of questions” about whether or not the drug is safe and hinted that Congress might try to put additional restrictions on the drug. Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okalhoma, said he would introduce legislation that would do just that. Given all of the burdensome restrictions that are already placed on the drug’s use, it’s hard to know what else they want to do.

For a variety of reasons, the Republican position on abortion is not the dominant view of the American people (neither is the pro-choice view, however — most Americans seem to be somewhere in between, wanting abortion to remain legal, but sometimes approving of limited restrictions on its use). Using backdoors like this to try to get their way is a bit unseemly.

On the other hand, if they succeed they’re just beating the feminists at their own game. After all there are any number of feminist tracts likening the birth control to the poisoning of women by patriarchal power brokers (the difference being when Mary Daly attacks birth control, feminists hail her as a genius, whereas were some Republican Senator to do so, he’s immediately pounced upon by feminists).

RU-486 is certainly safe, and since it leads to abortion very early in the first trimester (and by manipulating hormone levels rather than through a surgical procedure), it also meets the objections of a lot of Americans with concerns about late 2nd and even early 3rd trimester abortions. The FDA placed too many restrictions on its use, but overall it did a good thing by finally bringing this drug to market.

Source:

Abortion opponents question safety of new pill. The Associated Press, October 1, 2000.

A pro-animal rights individual on an animal rights e-mail list recently posted an account of a September 27 appearance at Youngstown State University by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. The account claimed Nader was questioned about his views on animal experiments, specifically experiments in primates to better understand HIV. The person reported that Nader replied,

If they keep messing around they are likely to create another virus. You know how AIDS started don’t you?

I don’t take animal rights activists word for much, especially second hand accounts like this, but if anyone runs across any coverage of Nader relating to this visit or that features any of his comments on animal testing, I would greatly appreciate it if you sent it my way (post it here or e-mail it to me at [email protected]). Thank you.