Magical Thinking At The New York Times

Steven Johnson's Beyond The Bitcoin Bubble in the New York Times Magazine is a 9000-word explanation of how the blockchain can decentralize the Internet that appeared 5 days after my It Isn't About The Technology. Which is a good thing, because otherwise my post would have had to be much longer to address his tome. Follow me below the fold for the part I would have had to add to it.

Herbert Van de Sompel's Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture

In It Isn't About The Technology, I wrote about my friend Herbert Van de Sompel's richly-deserved Paul Evan Peters award lecture entitled Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct and Decentralize?, but only in the context of the push to "decentralize the Web". I believe Herbert's goal for this lecture was to spark discussion. In that spirit, below the fold, I have some questions about Herbert's vision of a future decentralized system for scholarly communications built on existing Web protocols. They aren't about the technology but about how it would actually operate.

Web Advertising and the Shark, revisited (and updated)

There's a lot to add to Has Web Advertising Jumped The Shark? (which is a violation of  Betteridge's Law). Follow me below the fold for some of it.

Not Really Decentralized After All

Here are two more examples of the phenomenon that I've been writing about ever since Economies of Scale in Peer-to-Peer Networks more than three years ago, centralized systems built on decentralized infrastructure in ways that nullify the advantages of decentralization:

• Khadim Shubber's The bitcoin drugs trade is highly centralised is based on Bitcoin Laundering by Tom Robinson and Yaya Fanusie. Shubber writes:
  

  just three mixers and gambling sites account for 97 per cent of the volume in their categories and 50 per cent of the volume overall.
  
  In short, the illicit bitcoin ecosystem is centered around a small number of services that could be subject to scrutiny, regulation and co-option by law enforcement.

• Nellie Bowles' Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not points out that:
  

  The goal may be decentralization, but the money is extremely concentrated. Coinbase has more than 13 million accounts that own cryptocurrencies. Data suggests that about 94 percent of the Bitcoin wealth is held by men, and some estimate that 95 percent of the wealth is held by 4 percent of the owners.

  Where is the money flowing to the whales coming from? New Survey Reveals Staggering Number Of People Are Buying BitCoin On Their Credit Cards. Poor people's credit cards, that is. Bowles' whole article is very nostalgic for those of us who were in Silicon Valley for the dot-com boom. But this time it's different!

The Internet Society Takes On Digital Preservation

Another worthwhile initiative comes from The Internet Society, through its New York chapter. They are starting an effort to draw attention to the issues around digital presentation. Shuli Hallack has an introductory blog post entitled Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time. They kicked off with a meeting at Google's DC office labeled as being about "The Policy Perspective". It was keynoted by Vint Cerf with respondents Kate Zwaard and Michelle Wu. I watched the livestream. Overall, I thought that the speakers did a good job despite wandering a long way from policies, mostly in response to audience questions.

Vint will also keynote the next event, at Google's NYC office February 5th, 2017, 5:30PM – 7:30PM. It is labeled as being about "Business Models and Financial Motives" and, if that's what it ends up being about it should be very interesting and potentially useful. I hope to catch the livestream.

It Isn't About The Technology

A year and a half ago I attended Brewster Kahle's Decentralized Web Summit and wrote:

I am working on a post about my reactions to the first two days (I couldn't attend the third) but it requires a good deal of thought, so it'll take a while.

As I recall, I came away from the Summit frustrated. I posted the TL;DR version of the reason half a year ago in Why Is The Web "Centralized"? :

What is the centralization that decentralized Web advocates are reacting against? Clearly, it is the domination of the Web by the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and a few other large companies such as the cable oligopoly.

These companies came to dominate the Web for economic not technological reasons.

Yet the decentralized Web advocates persist in believing that the answer is new technologies, which suffer from the same economic problems as the existing decentralized technologies underlying the "centralized" Web we have. A decentralized technology infrastructure is necessary for a decentralized Web but it isn't sufficient. Absent an understanding of how the rest of the solution is going to work, designing the infrastructure is an academic exercise.

It is finally time for the long-delayed long-form post. I should first reiterate that I'm greatly in favor of the idea of a decentralized Web based on decentralized storage. It would be a much better world if it happened. I'm happy to dream along with my friend Herbert Van de Sompel's richly-deserved Paul Evan Peters award lecture entitled Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct and Decentralize?. He describes a potential future decentralized system of scholarly communication built on existing Web protocols. But even he prefaces the dream with a caveat that the future he describes "will most likely never exist".

I agree with Herbert about the desirability of his vision, but I also agree that it is unlikely. Below the fold I summarize Herbert's vision, then go through a long explanation of why I think he's right about the low likelihood of its coming into existence.

The $2B Joke

Source

Everything you need to know about cryptocurrency is in Timothy B. Lee's
Remember Dogecoin? The joke currency soared to $2 billion this weekend:

"Nobody was supposed to take Dogecoin seriously. Back in 2013, a couple of guys created a new cryptocurrency inspired by the "doge" meme, which features a Shiba Inu dog making excited but ungrammatical declarations. ... At the start of 2017, the value of all Dogecoins in circulation was around $20 million. ... Then on Saturday the value hit $2 billion. ... "It says a lot about the state of the cryptocurrency space in general that a currency with a dog on it which hasn't released a software update in over 2 years has a $1B+ market cap," [cofounder] Palmer told Coindesk last week.

So blockchain, such bubble. Up 100x in a year. Are you HODL-ing or getting your money out?

Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values

I'd like to draw your attention to the effort underway by a number of organizations active in digital preservation to agree on a Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values:

The digital preservation landscape is one of a multitude of choices that vary widely in terms of purpose, scale, cost, and complexity. Over the past year a group of collaborating organizations united in the commitment to digital preservation have come together to explore how we can better communicate with each other and assist members of the wider community as they negotiate this complicated landscape.

As an initial effort, the group drafted a Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values that is now being released for community comment. The document is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cL-g_X42J4p7d8H7O9YiuDD4-KCnRUllTC2s...

The comment period will be open until March 1st, 2018. In addition, we welcome suggestions from the community for next steps that would be beneficial as we work together.

The list of shared values (Collaboration, Affordability, Availability, Inclusiveness, Diversity, Portability/Interoperability, Transparency/information sharing, Accountability, Stewardship Continuity, Advocacy, Empowerment) includes several to which adherence in the past hasn't been great.

There are already good comments on the draft. Having more input, and input from a broader range of institutions, would help this potentially important initiative.

Meltdown & Spectre

This hasn't been a good few months for Intel. I wrote in November about the vulnerabilities in their Management Engine. Now they, and other CPU manufacturers are facing Meltdown and Spectre, three major vulnerabilities caused by side-effects of speculative execution. The release of these vulnerabilities was rushed and the initial reaction less than adequate.

The three vulnerabilties are very serious but mitigations are in place and appear to be less costly than reports focused on the worst-case would lead you to believe. Below the fold, I look at the reaction, explain what speculative execution means, and point to the best explanation I've found of where the vulnerabilities come from and what the mitigations do.

The Box Conspiracy

Growing up in London left me with a life-long interest in the theatre (note the spelling).  Although I greatly appreciate polished productions of classics, such as the Royal National Theatre's 2014 King Lear, my particular interests are:

• Long-form theatre, such as Tony Kushner's 7+ hour Angels in America, Ken Campbell's Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool's 9-hour Illuminatus Trilogy, or Taylor Mac's 24-hour A 24-Decade History of Popular Music.
• New plays, for which I support San Francisco's Magic Theatre and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Ground Floor program.
• Plays that experiment with the form of theatre, such as the Royal National Theatre's London Road and Earthquakes in London.

I've been writing recently about Web advertising, reading Tim Wu's book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, and especially watching Dude, You Broke The Future, Charlie Stross' keynote for the 34th Chaos Communications Congress. As I do so, I can't help remembering a show I saw nearly a quarter of a century ago that fit the last of those categories. Below the fold I pay tribute to the prophetic vision of an under-appreciated show and its author.