We might want to keep an eye on Evgeny Morozov (T-H-L). Is there an EvgenyMorozov (T-C-L)? I guess not.Evgeny Morozov on Twitter wrote: Evgeny Morozov @evgenymorozov 29 Mar
Very important read: "Big Oil's Wikipedia cleanup: A brand management experiment out of control" http://www.zdnet.com/big-oils-wikipedia ... 000013160/ …
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eva pascoe @EvaPascoe 29 Mar
@evgenymorozov for even more laughs read Gazprom entry on Wiki, pure pr propaganda straight from pravda.ru, Not a word on Arctic rig issues
Vegar K. @v36ar 30 Mar
@evgenymorozov Too many forget that big oil has a influence in modern history that is unsurpassed. That's also why the want to own history.
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company. He is the premier tech publisher for computer, software, networking, open source, UNIX, etc. Of course he's also a chief acolyte for open source software. Tim O'Reilly (T-H-L)DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.
Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so? His reaction is to tweet off an insult, thereby definitely conceding the high ground to Mr. Morozov, which I assume is why Mr. Morozov so gleefully retweeted it.DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.
Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
Try swiveling your head more to the left, Z...?Zoloft wrote:If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company.
Strange, I have a whole bookcase of computer books, but not one is O'Reilly. I'm not sure why that is as if one scans the shelves in any bookshop its row upon row of O'Reilly this and that. At work we have shelves of Wiley publications and two O'Reilly books, one on perl and a slight thing on unix. I don't recall any O'Reilly books amongst the personal books that people keep on their desks either. But as said above I'm really not sure why that is, I know I've spent time scanning through them in the Norrington Room at Blackwell's, but in the end always chosen something else to buy.Zoloft wrote: If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company. He is the premier tech publisher for computer, software, networking, open source, UNIX, etc. Of course he's also a chief acolyte for open source software. Tim O'Reilly (T-H-L)
Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
I've asked Jimbo about it on his talk page on Commons since I can't currently edit the English Wikipedia. If someone is motivated enough about it, I guess they could link to my question on his English Wikipedia talk page.thekohser wrote:Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
Advertising and Wikipedia
Browsing Beyond English
Richard O'Dwyer and the new internet war
Free knowledge requires...
Cla68 wrote:I've asked Jimbo about it on his talk page on Commons since I can't currently edit the English Wikipedia. If someone is motivated enough about it, I guess they could link to my question on his English Wikipedia talk page.thekohser wrote:Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
Advertising and Wikipedia
Browsing Beyond English
Richard O'Dwyer and the new internet war
Free knowledge requires...
I would pay to watch that.Or better yet, if we could get one organized, would you be willing to have a public debate with him in person?
This http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/benefi ... ation.html told me as much as I need to know about O'Reilly.Midsize Jake wrote:I actually think Morozov is being a bit harsh in his assessment of Tim O'Reilly, and perhaps of the tech-PR world in general.
Another huckster.This skill has helped me to reframe big ideas in the computer industry, including creating the first advertising on the world wide web, bringing the group together that gave open source software its name, and framing the idea that “Web 2.0″ or the “internet as platform” is really about building systems that harness collective intelligence, and get better the more people use them. Socrates is my constant companions [sic] (along with others, from Lao Tzu to Alfred Korzybski to George Simon, who taught me how to listen to my inner daimon.)
+1Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.
He quotes Pamela Hieronymi, a professor of philosophy at UCLA: "Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less."
This is more than a theoretical concern. We live in an increasingly polarized society where people on the extremes perpetually recycle information long since debunked, apparently incapable of - or uninterested in - evaluating the validity of information. It's why we still hear about the "hoax" of climate change, President Obama's foreign birth and autism-causing vaccinations.
Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/technology/d ... z2PQQmXBdv
EvgenyMorozov is to tech writers as stoats are to kiwis. They didn’t have any natural predators before he arrived.
https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov
@annamasera having O'Reilly lecture me on truth is like having Exxon celebrate ecology.
@noUpside @benjy Nassim and me have the same coach in Obnoxiousness. but me, I also signed up to Humor classes.
Well, his company did in fact (it seems) invent banner advertising on the web, so for that alone, I'd say he's noteworthy. (Not to say that he couldn't still be a complete huckster.)Peter Damian wrote:This http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/benefi ... ation.html told me as much as I need to know about O'Reilly.Midsize Jake wrote:I actually think Morozov is being a bit harsh in his assessment of Tim O'Reilly, and perhaps of the tech-PR world in general.
Another huckster.This skill has helped me to reframe big ideas in the computer industry, including creating the first advertising on the world wide web, bringing the group together that gave open source software its name, and framing the idea that “Web 2.0″ or the “internet as platform” is really about building systems that harness collective intelligence, and get better the more people use them. Socrates is my constant companions [sic] (along with others, from Lao Tzu to Alfred Korzybski to George Simon, who taught me how to listen to my inner daimon.)
Actually, as I was reading Morozov's book recently, I came to basically the same conclusion as Manjoo that Morozov is using a strawman argument to some degree. Still, I think that the core of Morozov's reasoning is compelling- that advocates of the universal, saving grace of the open Internet are blowing a lot of sunshine up the public's patootie.EricBarbour wrote:In case you missed it:
Slate column in which Farhad Manjoo bitched Morozov out for a long list of "sins" (and just makes himself look petty).
Morozov has a talent for provoking "digerati". We need to make an alliance with him.
The efforts to suggest the uprisings were down to Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikileaks or etc. etc. have been signs of naive, ignorant, smug minds from the very beginning. Drives me batty.Sweet Revenge wrote:Morozov's first book, The Net Delusion, is excellent. It turns out that (go figure) Twitter didn't really free the Arab world after all. The stoat/kiwi analogy is dead on, by the way.
That's another nice piece of work, Dan. I like the way you point out that it's impossible to tell now why Bouazizi's suicide set things off when it did. That feeling for the ambiguity of historical causality melts like a snowflake in the oven of wikipedia.DanMurphy wrote:The efforts to suggest the uprisings were down to Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikileaks or etc. etc. have been signs of naive, ignorant, smug minds from the very beginning. Drives me batty.Sweet Revenge wrote:Morozov's first book, The Net Delusion, is excellent. It turns out that (go figure) Twitter didn't really free the Arab world after all. The stoat/kiwi analogy is dead on, by the way.
And not for the first, or only time either.DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
Have a Barnstar Evgeny!"Soviet planners were also gamification enthusiasts, even if they never used the term." Their preferred label was 'socialist competition', and the 'games' they arranged involved unending, repetitive labour rewarded by empty titles - not entirely dissimilar to using some online services today."
Indeed.The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.
Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
The Gazprom entry is thin and out of date in places. It's not true that Gazprom gets 75% of Turkmenistan's natural gas output, for example; since the explosion on the central line in 2009 (each country blames the other for it), deliveries fell to 10 bcm, and now China buys most of TM's gas.eva pascoe @EvaPascoe 29 Mar
@evgenymorozov for even more laughs read Gazprom entry on Wiki, pure pr propaganda straight from pravda.ru, Not a word on Arctic rig issues
That would make a nice entry for the Wikipediocracy blog--how the coverage of Russian subjects is being biased.Catfitz wrote:The Gazprom entry is thin and out of date in places. It's not true that Gazprom gets 75% of Turkmenistan's natural gas output, for example; since the explosion on the central line in 2009 (each country blames the other for it), deliveries fell to 10 bcm, and now China buys most of TM's gas.
The TNK-BP entry is also very, very light on its business disputes that in fact led to court cases, not just visa disputes. If there were world enough and time, I'd find people to work at fixing these. But...perhaps they value their lives. No one wants to mess with these oligarchs.
I gathered that, but one shouldn't dismiss someone like him just because you don't agree with his "vision" of the Internet. Fighting Wikipedia's massive headstart in public relations "happy feelings" requires as many allies as possible.As for Morozov, I'm a long-time critic of him. I appreciate what he does and his own body of criticism, but it can be very misleading because ultimately, his own vision of an Internet society is a kind of Soviet bureaucratic centralism.
Well, this is an interesting proposition, whether the problem is "just" Wikipedia and whether you can get Morozov more intellectually interested in Wikipedia, or whether Wikipedia is a function of the larger Silicon Valley cult problem that Morozov is good at attacking, and whether you can enlist him in that larger project.You need allies, and support.
Don't have to tell me---I was working in an office building in Portola Valley in the late 1990s. On the other side of the building was CMGi, one of the major Web 1.0 venture capitalists. I had plenty of time to talk to those fine gentlemen. They were amazingly like frat nerds, and cheerfully admitted they were "out to steal someone else's great ideas". I saw them take one outside idea after another, from ancestry.com to Lycos to GeoCities. Flew really high, everyone sitting in Aeron chairs and driving Porsches. Then the 2001 dotcom collapse came, and they were instant roadkill -- disappeared literally overnight. I later heard one of the senior partners killed himself.Catfitz wrote:But there's also the human dynamics that I think happens with all these SV start-ups:
o claim of openness and open source, but appearance of "benevolent dictator" who isn't so benevolent, and his fanboyz
o VC infusions and first and second rounds
o alpha and beta test love fests where testers selected by the devs in a closed system become the shapers of the app/platform/site/world/game/ whatever
o second tier of "early adapters" who are at odds with snuggly beta-test love testers who suck up to the devs
o founder's syndrome and forcible removal of founder (this will inevitably happen to Wales, these companies are not like Wendy's, keeping Dave around even after he died).
o hockey-stick growth, Gartner hype cycle, loads more users, and gulf between incrowd and early adapters and average customer
o different sets of privileges, early announcements of features, influence on feature sets, influence on rule-making etc by insiders and devs' friends
o list of recommended followers or automatic friends, made up of devs' friends (Twitter)
o abject failure, or VC pass around to each other, with new infusions and more failures and no business model
o sometimes IPO -- usually failure
o lather, rinse, repeat for each new thing, and they're all connected...
Heh heh. People don't realize that Facebook is going to soon overtake Google as the world's most popular web property. But it's not a USEFUL web property, it's a combination of a shell game and a stiff dose of heroin.Wikipedia isn't immune to these cycles and features for being "nonprofit". All things in Silicon Valley are nonprofit -- Facebook doesn't really have income and its stock is falling.
And these days, there's talk of Chinese prison guards forcing their inmates to grind in World of Warcraft to earn them virtual gold, which they exchange for money. How the world has moved on!"Soviet planners were also gamification enthusiasts, even if they never used the term." Their preferred label was 'socialist competition', and the 'games' they arranged involved unending, repetitive labour rewarded by empty titles - not entirely dissimilar to using some online services today."
I keep saying that Mr. Doctorow is a delusional egotist. Now he sounds like Bush -- "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists".1. He never offers a credible vision of what technology should be like in order to promote freedom and justice. Morozov gives the strong impression that activists should just give up on using or attempting to improve the Internet, a counsel of despair that would result in an unchecked march to total surveillance, control and censorship for just about everyone, with no hope of change. In his first book, Morozov asserts that the mass demonstrations following the Iranian elections would have taken place without the net, just through word of mouth -- as someone who spent about a decade helping with phone-trees, mass-mailouts and wheatpasted poster campaigns for demonstrations, I was dubious on this score.
2. He is fundamentally pandering to censors, surveillors, and repressors. All of the former are cheerful about their attempts to lock down and spy upon the net, because, they assert, nothing of much importance happens there (I wrote about this at length earlier). Morozov's biggest boosters are the copyright thugs, the spyware vendors, and the data retention snoops who argue that ripping up the Internet's fabric does no particular harm because the Internet isn't even a thing. "There is no such thing as the Internet" is the 21st century version of Maggie Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" -- a dangerous, reductionist self-fulfilling prophecy.
The biggest surveillors and repressors happen to be Google and the other tech companies the virtues of whom Doctorow extols every week. And how did these tech companies obtain the wealth that allows them to be scofflaws as regards privacy? They got that by accumulating money by selling advertising against pirated content. I'm reminded here of the medieval priest, with grease running down his chin, sitting in the lords hall on feast day and exhorting him to give a few pennies to charity, whilst preaching up the duty of peasants to give all they have to the lord on every other day of the year.EricBarbour wrote: I keep saying that Mr. Doctorow is a delusional egotist. Now he sounds like Bush -- "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists".
Except the fight was started by Wales who popped out of nowhere insulting ("gadfly", "You arrogance is breathtaking.") and starting dictating ("you should apologise"). Didn't know this Wales before but the way he behaves scares me-is this bullythekohser wrote:A classic Twitter fight took place today between Jimmy Wales and Evgeny Morozov.
type of guy running that supposedly "noble" idea-Wikipedia?