My Thoughts Exactly

Congressman Delahunt on Net Neutrality

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I called Bill Delahunt’s office and sent him emails in support of net neutrality.

I received this response by email a few days ago. I’m entering it here for the record, without comment. I may comment on it later, and would be interested in what you think of it (espescially in the case where “you” == Harold Feld).

Dear Friend:

Thank you for your email message in support of net neutrality legislation.
I appreciate the benefit of your views, and wanted to take a moment to
explain my vote of “present” during last week’s consideration of the
Sensenbrenner-Conyers bill in the House Judiciary Committee.

First, I support keeping cyberspace free and open to all. As a member of
the House International Relations Committee, I’ve seen how the Internet has
made it possible to bridge cultural and political differences that exist.
As a father, email made it possible for me to keep in touch with my daughter
while she was working overseas in Spain – and helped me to make sure that
she was safe after the Madrid terrorist bombings.

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Some site news

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Wetmachine has been up and down somewhat lately due to hardware problems at our hosting ISP. We believe that the problems have all been fixed & we expect things to be stable.

We’ve also found out that the site is not rendering correctly in all browsers. In particular, IE doesn’t always seem to work for viewing extended sections. Apologies about that. We’ll look into it more at the weekend. In the meantime, firefox and safari seem to perform reliably.

Welcome Boingers and Sundry Wetmachine Virgins!

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Step right this way!

If you’re looking for what Cory Doctorow calls my “gonzo hacker novels”, you are almost there. Click on the images on the top left of this page.

The creator of the illustrations for The Pains, Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming, is selling prints of the illustrations. Check out his site too!

Speaking of Cory, check out the podcasts of his interview with me:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

If you care about holding onto democracy and yer constitutional rights in today’s modern digital-futuristic world of today, check out Harold Feld’s Tales of the Sausage Factory. He’s written a lot of good stuff lately — on net neutrality, on the new FCC chairman, on collusion in FCC auctions, on municipal wireless & democracy. . . When Harold writes something it’s usually well written, informative, funny, and very important.

If you’re a software geek, check out Howard Stearns’ Inventing the Future. Howard is one of the lead developers on the Croquet project.

Speaking of cool web n+1 software, isn’t about time that you checked out OpenLaszlo?

In conclusion, let me beg for money. Please buy one of my books (or make a paypal donation as a token of value received for the free downloads).

A painful tale

Today, Cheeseburger Brown and I announce our illustrated novella, The Pains (written by me, illustrated by him). Here’s my introduction.

It started with a simple sentence in a Kuro5hin diary. Farq Q. Fenderson wrote,

“I woke up this morning with a pain in my body that felt like it might be a soul gone bad.”

I was struck by that conceit. What might “a soul gone bad” feel like? And how would you know? What would cause it? And by the way, what exactly does that phrase mean, “a soul gone bad” : Bad like falling irremediably into sin? Or bad like rotten meat? I liked the way Fenderson wrote, “pain in my body”, making explicit and emphatic the distinction between a soul-pain and a bodily pain.

(The rest of that diary entry is pretty intriguing as well, but in a much less mystical way.)

For weeks that sentence ran around in my head. Eventually I wrote to Farq Q. and asked him if he would mind lending it to me for a story I could feel bubbling up within me. Fenderson responded afirmatively right away. The bubbling up, however, took a while. In fact the story bubbles still.

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Technoparanoia at its finest

When it comes to distrust of the concept of “progress” and general dread of the technopoly in our future, I yield to few. Frinstance, my stunning novel Acts of the Apostles (free download, look to the left of this page) might be characterized as a dystopian Orwellian panic attack (with hot chicks and car chases, etc.) inspired by molecular-nano technology (MNT). However this morning I must doff my virtual technoparanoid cap to Damien Broderic, an SF author and comparative semiotician. Check out this essay, which I discovered via Kurzweil AI:

Can civil societies absorb the impact of MNT without degenerating almost instantly into Hobbesian micro states, where the principal currency is direct power over other humans, expressed at best as involuntary personal service and, at the worst, sadistic or careless infliction of pain and consequent brutalization of spirit in slaves and masters alike? It is a disturbing prospect, more worrying than crazed individuals or sectarian terrorists. Are we, indeed, doomed to this outcome through frailties in our evolved nature, unsuited to such challenges, or perhaps to the rapacity of the current global economy?

A deeper question might be this: even if we assume that rich consumerist and individualist First World cultures like the USA might be prone to such collapse, is that true of all extant societies? Might more rigid or authoritarian societies have an advantage, if their citizens or subjects are too cowed by existing power structures to dash headlong into lawlessness? Might technologically simpler and poorer societies, possessing fewer goods to begin with and perhaps having fewer rising expectations, rebuff the temptations of MNT? Or might they seize upon such machines eagerly, but distribute them and their cornucopia, if only locally, on models of community or tribe unfamiliar to us in the West?

Now that, my friends, is the true technoparanoid goods! I stand in awe. In honor of which I hereby institute the office of Honorary Wetmachiner (Wetmechanic?), and confer it upon our worthy expostulator from Down Under.

BoingBoing reunited with its evil twin! — The Conclusion of Cory Doctorow’s visit with Wetmachine

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A few weeks ago Cory Doctorow, major-domo of House GeekZeitgeist, stopped by for a chat with Wetmechanics John and Gary. Earlier installments of our conversation can be found here and here.

Highlights from this episode:

  • Wetmachine is revealed as the evil twin of BoingBoing! (Or, in any event, its aspirations to same are revealed.)
  • Cory recapitulates how the seminal Clarion writer’s workshop was saved from extinction;
  • We explore the philosophical tug-o-war between the transhumanist and bioconservative impulses, touching on light subjects such as disabiliy rights and societal pressure to selectively abort “defective” fetuses in the post-Human-Genome-Project era.

You’ll get to hear Cory ignore my rambling introduction to my soon-to-be revealed novella The Pains as he paws Gary’s iAudio X5, the mp3 player used to record the interview. (Which, as Gary points out, is much more politically correct than a iPod, since it supports the open-sourced Ogg Vorbis audio format, and doesn’t contain any stinkin’ drm.)

Most tantalizing of all, you’ll get to hear Cory’s enthusiastic reponse to the killer illustrations from The Pains, soon to be appearing in a Wetmachine entry near you!

Podcast

Begone, ye serpents and grasshoppers!

Sure, ’tis a great day for the wearing of the green. And a good thing it was, too, how Saint Patrick drove the serpents right back into the sea.

But let’s not neglect that other saintly colusus, he who drove the grasshoppers out of Finland, whose name-day we also celebrate today. (Although some people observe St. Urho’s Day on March 16th, the 17th is also an acceptable day for observance, kinda like how going to Mass on Saturday night counts just as much as going on Sunday morning.)

As the grandson of Jakob Sundman from Minas, on the coast of Finland, and his good wife Lillian Hudson, from County Roscomon, I shall do my level best to preform the rituals associated with these two spritual icons of my ancestral heritages. To wit: anybody seen my green food dye? I need to doctor up my Lapin Kulta.