With the Facebook Timeline just around the corner, and with Steve Jobs shuffling off this mortal coil, I'd like to consider what makes some technologies so different, so appealing.

Last night I asked my art history students what was distinctive about the contribution of Steve Jobs. A few compared him to inventors such as Edison or Tesla. A few looked for an answer in his emphasis on design. I joined the second group and challenged the first by pointing out (as The Economist had already done with great clarity) that Jobs had invented none of the technologies or devices for which he's best known: the mouse-driven computer, the digital audio player, the smart phone, and the tablet. But I also pressed that second group with a follow-up question: if his contribution had to do with design, not invention, then just what was the nature of his contribution to design?

The ensuing discussion was brief and stimulating. After the students had shared their views, I shared mine: I think Steve Jobs emphasized machine beauty with such focus and force that he made the artificiality of devices disappear. Calling him "The Magician", The Economist ascribes to him the ability to connect emotion to technology:

"His great achievement was to combine an emotional spark with computer technology, and make the resulting product feel personal."

Almost. It is the relationship we have with ourselves and our own capabilities that is emotional and personal; Jobs introduced into this already extant feedback loop a device which amplifies our self-signal without getting in our way. Rather than wallow in the narcissism of self-admiration as we see our latent powers amplified, we call the device itself cool. But whenever we call a device cool, what we mean is that it can easily make us more powerful in a way we desire. And that's cool.

What is machine beauty? The clearest and most useful answer to this question comes from David Gelernter (innovator and former patent-holder of the Lifestream technology, which has been at the center of consequential litigation involving Apple). Many stakeholders have by now laid claim to this concept, and perhaps we'll have a post here someday on the idiocy of many software patents, the Peter/Paul problems in patent granting, and the incoherence of the very idea of a software patent. For now, though, I want to bracket out the question of Apple's possible employment of Microsoftian market practices. Gelernter is noteworthy here not just because of his technological innovation, but also because he thinks deeply about the usability of machines, about art, and about beauty.

In his terse, punchy book Machine Beauty, Gelernter proposes a simple definition of the factor that distinguishes great technologies: machine beauty is the well-balanced integration of simplicity and power. Consider technologies that consists of devices. A device may be powerful but not simple; it requires the user to learn, study, and practice. A device may be simple but not powerful; it's hardly worthy of attention, so weak is the signal it delivers. And a device may be neither. But the device that manages to empower the user with virtually no learning curve is machine-beautiful.

The iPhone exemplifies this delicate balance. One day there was no iPhone; the next day there was an iPhone. And on that next day, children and elders, techies and Luddites, the deft and the daft— these were all standing around Apple Store displays and using the iPhone, with no instruction, to do things they wanted to do that they had previously been unable to do so efficiently, transparently, and enjoyably. Machine beauty.

Here, then, is a third question: why do we value technologies that are machine-beautiful?

I think it's easier to frame an answer to this question if we think about technologies in the way I recommended in my earlier post on Rodin's The Burghers of Calais:

I prefer to emphasize that technology always stands in a certain relation to the people who use it: technology is anything that amplifies what the human body can already do. A club amplifies the ability to punch. A gun amplifies the ability to throw. A telephone amplifies the ability to shout. A motor vehicle amplifies the ability to run. Clothing amplifies the protective and insulating qualities of skin. Architecture, oddly enough, is large, static, communal clothing. Telecast media amplify vision or audition. The hard drive and RAM of a computer amplify the ability to remember and to calculate. And so on.

Any technology may be understood this way, and therefore anything that acts as a force multiplier on what humans in general can already do may be construed as a technology.

If we take technology in general as any means of converting our existing capabilities into superpowers, then the appeal of a machine-beautiful device is immediately apparent: the power of the device makes us harder, better, faster, stronger, and the simplicity of the device spares us from having to think too much about the device itself. The technology is a nearly transparent biomodification that empowers us to do with facility from now on what we could do only at great pains before.

The distinctive contribution of Steve Jobs, as I see it, is that he created a post-now class of consumer citizens: the Cybourgeoisie.

Conventional wisdom changes over time.

There are two ways to discuss this, the crude, and the technical.

If you're crude, it's fun to discuss things the technical way; if you're technical, it's fun to discuss it crudely. I'm a a bit crude and a bit technical, so I'll share my thoughts on how convention wisdom changes in both ways.

The crude first.

There are two folks sayings (one is actually a Gandhi quote, but that makes it sound a bit high-falutin', so let's just ignore that weird old sexually hung-up dude and call it a folk saying). Anyway:

Science doesn't advance when minds are changed; it advances when old scientists die.

and

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

The point being contrary to the nice crisp models of the scientific process, (a) the more data you get to support your side, the more vehement the other side gets, and (b) there's no amount of data that can convince some people. You just have to wait until they get somewhat less attractive, and corpsified, and gross, and then continue the conversation over their age-whithered remains.

Now the technical:

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of those books that everyone with pretensions to intellectualism should read.

For that matter, so is C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures".

The difference is that I've actually read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's not quite as deep – nor as original – as its reputation suggests, nor could it be. The name of the book has become something of a totem – loaded (not "freighted". I hate that term. Unless there are actual, literal forklifts or cranes involved you can stick your "freighted" right next to your "fraught" in your hipster-pretentious-J-school three ring binder, and shelve it next to Salon.com and the NYT style pages).

Uh…where was I?

Right, right. "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". "Freighted". "Hipsters".

Anyway, the name of the book is loaded with a lot of cultural signifiers and baggage, because that's what pretentious intellectuals do, and because the book is a convenient stick in the dirt and thus its title is as good a phrase as any to label that patch of ground.

The patch of ground being the social process by which conventional wisdom changes.

Kuhn argues (to simplify) that at any given point in time there is a dominant theory. If the theory is hugely dominant, and there are no observed problems with it, there's little action, and no one much cares.

Had any rousing debates about electron shells, the mass of a neutron, of the photovoltaic effect recently?

Nor have I.

However, from time to time, a theory that was dominant gets some countervailing data piled up against it.

…and then a bit more.

…and then a bit more.

In theory there's no difference between the model of the scientific process and the actual practice of science.

…but in actual practice there is.

In theory academics of whatever stripe – physicists, chemists, economists, political scientists – would welcome contrary opinions and contrary data.

We all know what we really see, though: anger, fear, and outrage.

This is because the theory of the scientific process oversimplifies: it forgets that academics are first and foremost humans, and humans are the end product of a whole butt-load of tribal living.

…and when it comes to tribal living, the powerful get first choice of meat and first choice of nubile hunter-gatherers-of-the-curvy-variety.

Thus we humans can be fairly prickly about power, status, and signaling (you can Google up Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson on your own). When it comes to power dynamics in the nerd – ah – academic set, there's something a lot worse than being challenged by the first-row, second-seat sax player, or having your rook snatched by the kid with an Elo score one notch down from yours. These challenges will just have you lose one or two ranks. The thing that's a lot worse is being kicked out of the group all together: being made a laughing stock and mocked as utterly, entirely wrong.

And, of course, this is exactly what the scientific process – as it's SUPPOSED to work – threatens to do to non-ideal actual-human-meat academics.

So the Old Guard fight as hard and as long as possible…and they get more and more angry as the evidence piles up against them.

…and eventually the expire and the old much-hated ideas are allowed to be spoken in public.

Paul Graham touched on this in his essay What you Can't Say:

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.

Anyway, having quoted two bumper stickers, one philosopher of science, and one start-up millionaire (as well as mocking a universally-beloved 20th century saint), I arrive at my point:

After almost 150 years, the idea of the universal welfare state may be crumbling before our eyes.

The welfare state – at least the American version of it – is like a shark that must constantly swim forward or die. It's like an embezzling employee who must not only show up at work every day to cover her tracks, but must steal more and more to cover the old debts plus new expenses. It's like a Ponzi scheme.

In fact, it's not like a Ponzi scheme, it is a Ponzi scheme. Both at a concrete level and at a conceptual meta-level.

The American welfare state must constantly grow because it is as much a social system of outrage, signaling, and demonstrated "compassion" (those damn dirty apes – uh, I mean "humans" – again). If you're a good progressive and you're born into a system that already has emergency health care for the poor, welfare, free schooling for all, etc., etc. ad nauseam, then how do you demonstrate to the 20th century version of the hunter-gatherers-of-the-curvy-variety that you're a good person with all the right opinions and thus deserve a bunch of crazy monkey sex worthy of a Dan Savage column?

You agitate for even more welfare statism.

(I note that I could have merely referenced the hedonic treadmill to explain all of this, but that wouldn't have allowed me to use the phrase "crazy monkey sex", and I bet Ken two free hours of dental-expert-witnessing that I could work that phrase into every single post for the remainder of the year. I won't even tell you what I get if I win.)

And thus we run into the problem we see today: the economic meltdown.

As Margaret Thatcher famously said "the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".

Bush bought an election or two by buying off the votes of elderly with prescription drug benefits.

Obama's been trying to buy himself a second term since Day One buy buying GM from its creditor/owners and handing it to the unions…along with a thousand other equally stupid schemes.

…but the moment of reckoning that many of us have seen since the 1980s has finally arrived.

We've run out of other people's money.

You can see the graphs everywhere in the economic blogosphere: expenditures racing far beyond revenues and never ever ever being caught.

This leads us to the second shoe drop, which is only a few years away: the point where the government is not just spending wildly more than it takes in, but the point where it becomes physically impossible to even keep up with the interest payments on the debt.

And then the – uh – gripping foot drops a third shoe: as the market sees this point coming, it gets more and more leery of lending any more money to the government, thus bidding up the interest that the government must pay in order to borrow additional dollars.

This is basically a tripwire: as soon as the apocalypse can be seen on the horizon we're rapidly accelerated towards it.

So, back to Kuhn and others: this has all been clear to some folks for a quarter century or more, but it's finally becoming more and more clear to the average man in the street.

In a better world the Krugmans and others would say "hmm…this isn't how I expected things to play out; perhaps my theories are wrong".

…but the Krugmans and others are afraid of losing their status and their access to crazy monkey sex (although I think the NYT still pays in dollars and suggests that columnists go procure on their own…although I admit that that may change as the dollar devalues).

Over the last few decades libertarianism / governmental minimalism / the night watchman state has gone from being a term that most folks had never heard of, to being a concept that just a bunch of low status geeks and freaks chatted about in between rolling the d20, to being a virulent / arrogant / hateful / racist concept.

The welfare state is dying, the evidence is becoming more and more clear, the Chief Monkeys are losing their power, and the world is about to undergo the kind of intellectual revolution and tumult that it only sees once every few centuries or so.

Punctuated equilibrium – it's not just for meatspace evolution any more.

P.S. Hi. I'm Clark. Nice to meet y'all.

If CERN is correct, the little neutrino the Europeans just measured breaking the speed of light means that everything anyone knows is wrong.

We've taken our first step into a larger universe.

Really, Google News.  Really!

A friend of mine lost his First and Second Amendment rights, in perpetuity, for making a joke not as tasteless as what's on Google News' front page right now.

If Google News has no actual human moderation, I find it difficult to believe this story made it to the top.  If Google News has human moderation, perhaps it needs to be in-sourced back from China.

SECURITY THEATER isn't the only option!  There's also Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner….

(ACME schematics via Bruce Schneier)

I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS: Paraplegic student Austin Whitney walked to receive his high school diploma, with the assistance of a robotic exoskeleton.

EVERYONE KNOWS that if you call for a pizza, an ambulance, and a cop, you'll get the pizza first.  Now, apply the logic behind that joke to space exploration, and predict who'll dominate space in the next century. That is, unless the government steps in. For our own protection of course.

Via Brian Dunbar.

STUCK ON STUPID: "Facebook was caught red-handed last week being socially unfriendly to Google, its Silicon Valley competitor. It hired a public relations firm to plant negative stories about Google's privacy policies, and then it tried to hide its involvement in the whisper campaign."

CLARKE'S THIRD LAW MEETS MOORE'S LAW?  HP advances next-gen 'memristor' memory technology.  "Memristors were first described in 1971 by a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to that, scientists knew of only three basic circuit elements — the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor. Professor Leon Chua posited that there was a fourth.

Decades later, scientists at HP proved that memristors existed…  although working memristors [have] been built in the labs, scientists didn't know exactly what was happening inside the tiny structures. So while HP was already confident it could commercialize the technology, this discovery will allow it to greatly improve its performance…."

Read the whole thing.

HECKUVA JOB, BROWNIE: "One Huntsville woman is using her professional skills to help volunteers assist those affected by the April 27 tornadoes.  Alice Brown has set up a website, www.keepvolunteering.org, to provide information about volunteer efforts in areas hit by the tornadoes. People can also ask for help on the site."

Web intervention while FEMA dawdles?  Somebody should write a book about this kind of thing!

I JUST MAKE THEM GO UP: "I don't care where they come down.  That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

DEAR POPEHAT:

Sony Online Entertainment has not put up a “not today” message since Thursday.  I’m not sure if that is a bad thing or a good thing.

If you're not sure, it's probably a bad thing.  Of course, if you're not sure at this point whether patronizing a Sony gaming network that requires credit card information is a good idea or a bad idea, I can't help you. I wouldn't play an online game from Sony even if the only personal information Sony required was the email address I use for trolling and dealing with spammers.

ONE OF THESE IMAGES COMES FROM A TOTALITARIAN OLIGARCHY in which the flow of information is managed for the benefit of a self-selecting elite.

The other, of course, comes from North Korea.

How often, when directed to do this or that by some government agency or official, do Americans ask this simple question?

"Why?"

Not often enough, I'd say.  Many of us are too apathetic to care.  Many are afraid to ask.  Others don't know how to phrase the question in a fashion that dumb brutes like, say, an agent of the Department of Homeland Security can understand.  Still others don't ask because they suspect they know the likely answer:

"Because I said so."

And the likely follow-up question:

"Are you refusing to obey a lawful command?"

For many of us, trained in government schools to be what the government considers good citizens, or worse, conditioned to fear our own government, it's difficult to ask questions of authority, no matter how petty.

Far easier just to show him the papers, even though we'd rather not.  We're afraid of what will happen if we refuse permission to open the trunk, even if we don't think he has any business back there.

So I'd like to congratulate the Mozilla Foundation, publishers of the Firefox web browser, for asking the Department of Homeland Security the hardest question: "Why?"

"Why should we de-list  a browser extension which, to our knowledge, is legal?"

Or to quote Harvey Anderson, Mozilla's lawyer, in response to a demand from the Department of Homeland Security to remove a browser add-on which re-directs traffic from domains seized by the government to the original owners' new domains:

• Have any courts determined that the Mafiaafire add-on is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
• Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
• Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down the Mafiaafire  add-on is based?

Surprisingly, the Department has not answered the questions.  I suspect they never will, because the only answers they could give would ultimately boil down to:

"Because I said so.  Are you refusing to obey a lawful command?"

Except that DHS knows that answer won't fly.  By asking the question through its lawyer, and having the guts to tell the world it asked the question, Mozilla has already shown it won't be intimidated.

Which leaves DHS with the response that is to cops what kryptonite is to Superman, what the word "wrong" is to Fonzie:

"Gee, I don't know why."

So hats off to Mozilla.  By getting in front of DHS, and asking the questions publicly, the company shows a genuine concern for the interests of its customers, and frames the issue, correctly, as censorship by extra-legal threat, the sort of threat to which Mozilla's much larger competitors Google and Microsoft cave all too often. By asking the hardest question, in public, Mozilla will prevent DHS from playing the bottom card in its deck:

"You wouldn't want us to tell people you're a poor corporate citizen, would you?"

Kids I've flown from one end of this galaxy to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff.

But I've never seen anything like this morning's New York Times:

Where a lead story includes references to, well, you'll have to read it yourself but it does include the phrase "Two turds and a golfball," surely a first for The Times.

Yes, it's April Fool's Day, and yes, once again, the New York Times proves that layers of fact-checkers and editors cannot save a dying newspaper industry from its own gullibility. From the need to find the story that fits the narrative, no matter how ludicrous it may be.

During the cultural revolution, figures to be humiliated were made to wear a giant dunce cap of shame. Today, they are given a position at the New York Times.

Never mind that  the man who is the subject of the story does not exist.

Never mind that the story includes giveaways like "over 9,000" and "does not forgive, does not forget."

The story was too good to check. So the Times, which once ran all the news that was fit to print, ran with all the news that fit the Times' preconceptions.  And the result is another humiliation for the Gray Lady of American journalism.  On April Fool's Day, no less.

Unfortunately, today being, as everyone outside the 42nd Street cocoon knows, April Fool's Day and all, the Times has hidden its shame behind a paywall.  I won't link directly to the Times because I'm sure most of our readers haven't paid the toll. But Dr. Westby Fisher has more. Much more.

And screenshots on the way.