This is incredible stuff, found via boingboing:

“I was at a conference in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday. Participants included some people who are reasonably plugged in to the Washington political process. I was stunned to hear one of these folks sum up the Washington conventional wisdom like this:

“The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.”“

Now, that’s a powerful statement. Mr. Felten, who’s blog this features on, goes on to say, quite rightly I believe:

“If I could take just one concept from computer science and magically implant it into the heads of everybody in Washington — I mean really implant it, so that they understood the idea and its importance in the same way that computer scientists do — it would be the role of the general-purpose computer. I would want them to understand, most of all, why there is no such thing as an almost-general-purpose computer.

If you’re designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There’s no in-between.”

I’ve stumbled around this exact topic here before… and like Mr. Felten, I’m still struggling with how to make tangible and explainable what would be lost to us all if we don’t defend the notion of the universal machine.

When I was a kid in Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-eighties, there was a societal pressure on parents to buy computers, to understand the new technology, for kids to hack and fiddle and type-in pages and pages of BASIC into their machines in the expectation of playing a poorly-rendered Frogger knock-off, only to be frustrated when a syntax error in line 126 scuppered hours of data entry…

This from the excellent ZXGoldenYears on the ‘year zero’ of 1982:

“Regardless of the belief of parents that computers in their homes would be used for educational purposes, the eventual use that nearly all of them were put to was games. Unlike the rigid forms of genre that were found in the arcades, home computers offered an opportunity to experiment with new ideas. There was an ?anything goes? attitude that was exhilarating and liberating.”

Is that climate possible to recapture? These days, computer games are big, technically complex acts of creation and occasionally have as much, if not more riding on them as Hollywood blockbusters. Computers themselves are complex to operate just at an everyday level of working with applications and documents, let alone creating or coding.

To most people, myself included, they’re pretty much unfathomable.

Give us consoles and consumer electronics and they’re more than satified in the main. There’s a yawning chasm between their user-experience of partially-universal machines and universal machines.

Where am I headed? Well – maybe there’s some ways back to making the potential of the universal plain and making people passionate about protecting that. Above and beyond the education and promotion of the concepts through the skills of visual explainers and storytellers, that is.

Some threads:

• Rip,mix,burn: the digital hub concept is something, I would say, anecdotally, that real people are starting to get. That media is mutable and can shift around their envirnoment to meet their wishes and needs.
• Blogging, Journalling and communicating: Steven Johnson (i think quoteing or paraphrasing) said in a speech I heard of his that ‘Technology is whatever was invented after you were 15″. The Under-25s are connecting, communciating and archinving their lives like never before around the globe, using stuff that we think is technology, they think is just ‘stuff’.

So here’s the thing…

• What about harnessing these behaviours trends with a next generation language, allowing people to combine communication, media and automation in unlimited ways, but that easy to get into and understand like Basic or Logo… BLog-O?

Is this just the web? Ach. Time for the pub. Also – I really have to stop using the word ‘redux’ in as the titles to my posts. Lazy git.

» Freedom-to-tinker.com: The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer

This is great – an entire book on trust, cooperation and social systems from the University of Oxford Dept. of Sociology has been made available for download: “Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta.”

“The editor and contributors have decided that the book should be available to download free of charge. One of the original reasons for the volume was to try and understand the difficulties of developing economies, and we therefore feel that the volume should be accessible to scholars and students of less privileged countries. Given that we incurred some cost in producing the digital version, and would like to fund further electronic publishing, we would be grateful if those readers who find the volume of value (and can afford it) would send us a contribution of $10.”

Random, sample chapter headings:

• The Biological Evolution of Cooperation and Trust: Patrick Bateson
• Trust and political agency: John Dunn
• Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives: Niklas Luhmann

You get the picture.

» Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, edited by Diego Gambetta. [thanks Dan!]