Long Political Rant. Was: [Re: [9fans] datakit]

[Dave Lukes <davel@anvil.com>]

 > like many successors WS begins to make
Web Services: Ahhh ... I _love_ the smell of meaningless datatypes in
the morning.

 > some of the worst cursed predecessors start to look good:
That is an aspect I personally find scary:
    "Well, LDAP's not all _that_ bad, you know ...".
    "... well, you could use XSLT, since the data's already XML ...".

 > a vast and growing collection of incomplete complexity,

Now that is _definitely_ going in the davel book of quotes.

 > perhaps it's revenge for disdaining PL/1 and JCL.

:-~ ... Yeah ... I can see SOAP&Co. being the PL/I of the next few decades:
no-one knows what it does, but it's ubiquitous.

 > Gods!  A hideous beast, baying is pursuing us!

... I think it's already swallowed us, and we never noticed:
we were too busy Sitting Around In Church Halls Discussing How To Do It
Right.
(And, yes, I still believe in SAICHDHTDIR, I just don't think it'll Save
The World:-).

 > more seriously, i observed the other day to someone that
 > the curious thing about the rise of complexity this time is
 > that as far as i can tell, there seems to be no significant
 > counter-culture to it, as there has been in times past.

I don't think it's the counter-culture that's changed: it's the world.

OK, here's a probably highly coloured and embittered personal analogy ...

People I know have been involved in left-wing/liberal/feminist politics
for a long time
Obligatory liberal street-cred for Guardian readers:
I was taken on a CND march to Aldermaston aged 2 in a pushchair: OK?

While I've always been the apathetic sheep of the family politically,
I've watched it all happening.
In the 60's, a lot of people talked, argued, demonstrated, rioted, and
Made A Difference.
It was the confluence of ALL the factors: place, time, people, politics,
and the size of the problems:
the world was a smaller place: a small group could have a
disproportionate influence compared with now.
Also, because the whole situation was smaller, individuals could SEE
themselves making a difference and (to be vain),
making the news.
Even the peripheral participants felt a real sense of involvement, due
to the small scale.

If you look at the same political landscape today, there are still the
idealists and the rioters (remember G7?),
but the political world has got bigger and fuzzier and more complex and
dangerous,
and a lot of the old idealists have sold out to the Third Way or
whatever, or they've become physically incapable of rioting,
and they sit around bitching and reminiscing about their time at the
burning barricades (sound familiar, 9fans?) ...

AND the world has got tougher: us comfortable western types can't afford
to lie our plump bods in our plump beds
and Think About Interesting Stuff any more.
The world has all this complicated (east/west, north/south, religion,
ethnicity, oil, water, ...) stuff all exploding at once.
So we gotta spend all the big money and effort killing the people
different to ourselves, trashing the ancient world
and locking up people who don't agree with us.

In the same way, Unix occupied a small space in a small landscape and
was created by a handful of lucky people:
right people, right place, right time, right hardware, right size ...
People like me, who weren't real contributors, but who mostly looked on
and admired, felt the sense of involvement,
even if only subconsciously.

I would contend that, today:
* the plan9 community now is, if anything, bigger than the Unix
community was when I started.
* We have a reasonable handful of apparently equally "lucky" people
  (any place is fine given the internet, and you can get whatever you
need in the way of hardware, so what's the problem?)
* If you look at the participants on 9fans, they span all walks of life,
professionally and personally,
  so it ain't a niche system in any sense.

But the IT world has changed:
it's big, it's scary, it's got Bad Shit and Evil Empires and Loony
Factions with Disproportionate amounts of influence.

 > ``where you gonna go?  where you gonna run? ...''
 > i say that in the hopes that someone will say:
 > it's just building up momentum over here ...

Well, maybe it is and we don't know:-~.

I do have one really weird idea (you can tell it's Friday)...
There's no reason, in principle, why you couldn't
steganographise(?word?  Ahhh: the word is "hide":-)
a very-high-bandwidth-very-high-latency HiddenNet in the background
noise of the internet
(http://www.switch.ch/security/services/IBN/), and someone's probably
doing it already.

I don't know about anyone else, but the sort of people who I would want
to share a network with
would sacrifice response time for usability.
Hey, if emails were slower, maybe people would _think_ before sending,
like they used to do with Real Letters?

John Brunner, anyone?:-)

X
    Dave.

P.S. I'm off on a busman's holiday for the next 3 weeks, so will be
reading 9fans irregularly.  Au revoir.