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Rants & RavesReader Feedback
I have two very strong objections to your article on viruses ("Viruses Are Good for You," Wired 3.02, page 126). First, you confuse the issue by applying the word virus to things that are not viruses. Second, you glorify virus writers by endowing them with a vision they do not have.
Organic viruses infect us and make us sick. Computer viruses get on our machines against our will and often damage data. Referring to the network agents of General Magic or the digital organisms of Tierra as viruses does serious harm to work on those new technologies. The public is not sufficiently familiar with the issues to understand that the word virus is being misapplied.
On the second point, your article suggests that underground virus writers have pointed the way toward the computational future of the Net. You are giving them credit way beyond what they deserve. In my view, they are not visionaries but delinquents.
Tom Ray
ATR Human Information
Processing Research Laboratories
ray@santafe.edu
The point of the article is that viruses can be both useful and destructive. Yes, the public usually associates the negative with viruses. But it doesn't have to, and this is why this article was run: to educate the public.
Tom, I think you'll get a lot further in your efforts to colonize the Net (a goal I am in favor of) if, instead of denying your work is unrelated to viruses, you were to cop to the fact and take the discussion beyond that level.
- Kevin Kelly
I am a Lexis Counsel Connect user and have found it invaluable ("The Supreme Court," Wired 3.03, page 116). Although your description of its technical problems is accurate, the service may be more revolutionary than you described. By providing access to specialized expertise without having to consult a large law firm, Counsel Connect has the potential to profoundly decentralize the country's legal profession.
Jeremy D. Weinstein, Esq.
ehkn28a@prodigy.com
You headlined the review of Klik & Play "Shareware Game Maker" (Wired 3.04, page 155). What you failed to mention (and what you've got to call Europress in England to find out) is that in order to distribute the games you create as shareware, you must first pay Europress US$165 for a license. And if that's not enough, you must then submit your game to the Recreational Software Advisory Council to "ensure that your games or programs include no obscene or offensive material." That's another $25.
Klik & Play is a lot of fun, but I sure wouldn't have bought the program if the price on the box was $230 instead of $40!
Mike Yacullo
myacullo@echonyc.com
Jon Katz spins a quaint little tale about Elvis's adolescence and young adulthood ("Why Elvis Matters," Wired 3.04, page 100). Too bad the portrait he paints of a "poor, spiritual, simple, young, family-centered" Elvis and the American cultural landscape that produced him is as simplistic and mythologized as the tabloid view of the King.
The "black-and-white world" Elvis and his young fans supposedly inhabited had, of course, already discovered television, the first of Katz's revolutionary "means of expression." The movies, which Katz dismisses out of hand, were a potent source of communal values as well - values often staked along generational lines, as any fan of James Dean will tell you. Add to these media the subterranean social rumblings caused by the Beats, increasing racial tension, and the queasy spectacle of the McCarthy hearings, and America in the early '50s becomes a very expansive, complicated place for a teenager indeed.
But Katz's simplistic portrait better serves his rhetorical purpose: to convince the "kids" of the Net that they're on the front lines of a new, idealistic, autonomous revolution, delivering a "devastating" blow to some vague, nefarious "Them."
The Net actually bears a closer resemblance to Elvis's later career and afterlife than to anything else: a titillating, often exhilarating, sometimes nauseating playground of images, bombast, and unexpected inspiration, in which commerce, expression, and identity are uneasily yoked.
Ed Heinemann
word@leland.stanford.edu
David Weinberger's "The Daily Me? No, the Daily Us" (Wired 3.04, page 108) totally misses the point. Of course traditional newspapers play an important role as social glue. And of course editors' judgments and points of view create a sense of community and awareness of what is relevant. But there's no need to choose between mass-media publications and the social tunnel vision Weinberger fears will result from personalized software agents.
Two common phenomena refute the idea that we will retreat into predetermined intellectual cocoons:
First, when do newspapers sell the most copies? The day after everyone knows all the facts from radio, TV, online services, and word of mouth. People want the perspective that newspapers provide.
Second, when agents are combined with hypertext links, people tend to read more, not less, broadly. Surfing the Net has become the analog of skimming the paper. The results are equally serendipitous.
There's nothing inconsistent with mass media and powerful personal news agents. Sure, dots of ink on paper will eventually be replaced by dots of phosphorus on a screen. But that isn't regrettable, because the same news-gathering - and news-analyzing - organizations that publish on paper today will fill that screen tomorrow.
Geoffrey E. Moore
jeff@prodigy.com
The increased freedom the Net supposedly provides has always been a red herring ("Agent of Change," Wired 3.04, page 116). As Pattie Maes says, "We think it's important to keep the users in control, or at least always give them the impression they are in control."
Cyberspace is not a free space (it's not an ocean that one "surfs"), it is a guided space, a governed space. All agents are double agents - they work for you, but also for Microsoft.
J. Macgregor Wise
Urbana, Illinois
I read Wired to keep up with art, music, business, communication, etc., in relation to the Internet and technology.
But, because Wired is so jam-packed with content, I cannot keep up with the issues as they come out. Hence, I am 10 issues behind.
I hope you take a summer vacation or something.
Neil Barman
nbarman@nero.uvic.ca
I just finished reading the conversation between Ron Martinez and Michael Backes ("Shape Shifter," Wired 3.04, page 88) and have come to the conclusion that these guys have no clue.
It's obvious to any serious game player, if not any marketing VP, that technology still drives games. Look at the biggest and most groundbreaking work; it hasn't come from the artist-given-digital-tools that everyone's hyping, but from the tech guy who gets up one day and starts to make a game. Doom, Myst, Street Fighter II, Zelda, even Pac-Man and Pong all came from people who had the tech understanding first, then started coming up with the ideas.
I would have thought you smart enough to see through Backes. He claims the thing to do is get the story and then adapt it to the particular platform or technology. Remember: the medium is the message.
Chris Jones
coldjones@mail.utexas.edu
While John Batelle gives a good account of Viacom's development into a new media giant ("Viacom Doesn't Suck!," Wired 3.04, page 110), he fails to mention its shortcomings. Just like Sony, Viacom owns killer content in the conventional media section. So far, neither Sony nor Viacom has succeeded in translating this into good games. Beavis and Butt-head, as well as Club Dead, were fair at best, and far from innovative. To produce great games, Viacom had to swallow smaller game companies like Virgin.
However great the Viacom in-house game productions may sell, they have little to offer in terms of interactivity and gaming value. The interactive stuff our dreams are made of won't be made by megacorporations, but by companies that have been in this business for years and years.
Elmar Schwarzl
evs@mars.gp.schwaben.de
In "Faded Genes," Greg Blonder comments, "Humans are programming computers today that will someday take our place in nature...." (Wired 3.03, page 107). This may not be an accurate assessment. There exists the possibility that humans will become so necessary to the functioning of computers that we are no longer viewed as separate entities. There is precedent for this in biology: the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the organelle in the cell that manage energy consumption. It is believed that at one time, they were free-floating viruses that found it beneficial to join with a host. Mitochondria are now so integrated into intracellular life that without them we would die. We and they have co-evolved into something neither could be without the other. I suspect the same will be true of humans and computers.
Allison Leonard
Dallas, Texas
I was surprised to read the Wired 3.04 letter titled "The People Are Powerless" (page 28), which suggests that the White House edits its postings. This is untrue.
The White House has no control over any of the White House forums on any of the commercial services. Each service gets a complete document feed from the White House. It is asked not to edit the posts and to post them to read-only directories.
What those services do with the document feed, how they charge for it, what they post, when they post, and when they remove it is up to the owner or operator of the service. They may make no claims of special relationship with the White House.
To go to the source for documents, e-mail the Almanac server at publications@whitehouse.gov or try the publications section on the White House home page at http://www.whitehouse.gov/.
Jonathan Gill
jgill@casti.com
The PEAR team ("Mind over Matter," Wired 3.04, page 80) waxes ecstatic over human minds diddling a "random number generator," "altering one bit in 1,000," and doing it "as far away as Hungary, Kenya, Brazil, and India." What is the control experiment when the 5.6 billion minds within 7,930 miles of Princeton can all be unwitting participants?
Alan M. Schwartz
Irvine, California
Just read the article "The Age of Paine" (Wired 3.05, page 154), and wanted to note that The Age of Reason and Common Sense are on the Web at http://www.hypermall.com/LibertyOnline/.
There are a number of other historical documents there, and we're scouring the world for more. None of these documents was given to us to read in school - they were all "interpreted" for us instead. It's time Americans took politics and history back from the ivory-tower academics and professional politicians. And the Internet will let us.
Jawaid Bazyar
bazyar@hypermall.com
The correct address for information about the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence ("What's It Mean to Be Human Anyway?" Wired 3.04, page 132) is Hugh Loebner, Crown Industries Incorporated, 155 North Park Street, East Orange, NJ 07017, or loebner@acm.org.
We forgot to mention that it costs money to subscribe to the Leonardo Electronic Almanac ("Mona Lisa Hard Drive," Wired 3.04, page 47). A one-year subscription is US$15 for Leonardo members and $25 for everyone else.
Contrary to our claims, the Internet Phone program is not currently available for the Macintosh ("The Internet as Ma Bell," Wired 3.05, page 46). However, a similar program that does work on the Mac is available at http://www.emagic.com.
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