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Author: Bryant

Small gathering

If I still lived in San Francisco, I would go to Potlatch 12 this weekend. It looks distinctly like Readercon, an East Coast literary SF convention that started up after I left Boston. It seems to have good guests, there’s going to be a writer’s workship, it benefits Clarion West, and they make a good attempt to put panel notes online. Which is just so cool; I’ve always thought it’s a shame that SF cons don’t tend to preserve their panels. Wiser heads may realize that this is in fact a blessing.

Oasis time

Phew. I finally hit the Warren Ellis run on Excalibur. After all the really bad stuff, it was a total breath of fresh air.

Ellis’ work on Excalibur is not of the quality of Stormwatch or Planetary, but it is very good superhero work. Despite his current distaste for writing ongoing superhero books, I think it’s an excellent form for him. Working within someone else’s continuity must be a pain in the ass, but the challenge seems to bring out his ingenuity.

It doesn’t have the same overarching story that his other superhero runs have had. He did a couple of good arcs, including the superb “London Burning” arc, and you can see him working on developing the style that led to the longterm plotting of Stormwatch, but this is definitely early Ellis. The characterizations are awesome. He turned Kitty Pryde into an adult, and Pete Wisdom is a neat anti-hero without being anything like Wolverine or Gambit. He’s an adult anti-hero. You don’t get a lot of that in superhero comics.

I’d recommend seeking out issues #83-103 of Excalibur, along with his miniseries, Pryde and Wisdom. You can skip the Age of Apocalypse stuff, which was four issues under the X-Caliber title. Slogging through the crap was worth it for the Ellis, but you shouldn’t subject yourself to the same pain and his issues are completely legible even if you haven’t read any of the earlier material.

I have also read all the Ben Rabb issues, which conclude the series, but I’ll talk of those when I’ve regained my strength.

And now?

So where do we go from here? Terrorism is a real problem, and one that will only get more dangerous. I’ve argued that terrorism is well within the capabilities of the individual, with or without backing from rogue states. I don’t think removing Hussein will make us appreciably safer. Even if stopping rogue states is the best way to combat terrorism, we’re literally months away from seeing North Korea get more than enough nukes, and Pakistan is one coup away from being very unfriendly. As has been accurately observed, the problem of regime change in a rogue state with nukes is a far cry from the problem of regime change in a rogue state without nukes.

Or, in short: regime change in Iraq ain’t gonna make that much of a difference in the terrorism threat. It would feel good to believe that it does. Terrorism scares me. But the war on Iraq is not making me feel any safer.

So where’s safety?

One really obvious approach is to surrender our privacy to the government. Central London’s a good example of this; there are cameras everywhere. When you go down into the subway, there are posters encouraging people to pay the television tax — and they identify specific streets and specific numbers of people who haven’t paid the bill. It’s a surveillance society. There is not a lot of crime in Central London. It works.

The Patriot Act, Operation TIPS, and other such bills would work. There would certainly be ancillary damage to our rights. Some innocent people would get caught in the net. Misguided Presidents would use the technology to crack down on legitimate actions. Terrorism would be sharply reduced. It wouldn’t be worth the price.

So what’s worth the price?

David Brin proposes one method in The Transparent Society. He says we should give up our privacy — but not to the government. Rather, we should give it up to each other. He argues that we have nothing to fear from large databases and cameras, as long as they’re open to anyone who wants to look at them.

It’s an interesting argument. When I originally read the book, I didn’t think that there was any benefit to such openness that would be worth the sacrifice. My opinions have shifted somewhat since 9/11. It might be an emotional reaction, but I don’t think we’re as safe as I once assumed we were. I think that in the face of terrorism, maybe it would be worth giving up the privacy in a way that doesn’t force us to give up our freedoms.

A libertarian response (I hesitate to say the libertarian response) is withdrawal. Jim Henley, whose blog I linked above, argues that we should take a step back from our various international entanglements, thus reducing accidental resentment. There’s a lot to this; while Osama would probably still be a terrorist if we hadn’t stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, he might not have focused quite as hard on us. On the other hand, I think our relative wealth would still make us a target for resentment.

My anarchistic belief is that we’d be well served by going a step further (and one step sideways), and devolving as much responsibility as possible back to the states. The United States is a very large target. Few terrorists talk about going after the EU. Perhaps we should draw some conclusions from that. And, frankly, if the State of North Carolina feels compelled to involve itself in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I’d just as soon that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is clearly not involved in that decision.

Combine both approaches — decentralization of responsibility, and a transparent society — and you’ve gone a lot further towards preventing and combatting future terrorist attacks without spending tens of billions of dollars on bribing Turkey to let our troops attack Iraq from the north. Kind of radical concepts, I’ll admit, but it behooves me to fess up to what I have in mind given the amount of time I’ve spent criticizing Bush.

Time out, go to the corner

Recently, the Observer reported on US plans to punish Germany by pulling out US troops. This would hit Germany’s economy fairly hard.

Glenn Reynolds covered this in one post.

Two days later, Chirac threatened Romania and Bulgaria for their pro-US stances. Reynolds covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and covered this, and there are another four or five references which I won’t link.

Atrios, who’s more or less Glenn’s counterpart on the left, hit the Rumsfeld issue once and hasn’t commented on Chirac’s threats. No points for ignoring Chirac, but points for relative consistency.

I think both Chirac and Rumsfeld were over the line, and I think it’s hypocritical to harp on one while ignoring the other. It seems to me that both statements reflect a fundamental confusion about the definitions of ally and enemy; or, more accurately, they reflect a failure to realize that there’s something in between. Germany and France are not saying that they’ll oppose the United States militarily if we invade Iraq, they’re saying they don’t think we should do it and they won’t vote for it in the Security Council. Similarly, the European countries supporting the United States aren’t threatening to invade France if France doesn’t stand aside, they’re just disagreeing.

It is somewhat disturbing to see disagreement treated as if it were active threats. The first country to threaten force in the US/Europe dispute was, um… us. The second was France. Neither the French or US citizens should be proud of either action.

Lone gunman

First off, the families of those killed or injured in the South Korean subway tragedy have my utmost sympathies. I want to make that clear up front, since I’m about to use it as an example to support my thesis regarding the future of terrorism. I wish it had never happened. I also know it wasn’t terrorism, but it’s relevant nonetheless.

One person, acting alone, killed over 140 people in a single action. It didn’t require a lot of technological ingenuity, nor did it require the backing of a rogue state. He just tossed a flaming container of liquid into a subway car. Not too difficult.

What’s more, he was immediately jumped by other passengers. A pack, not a herd — but it made no difference. It’s nice to think that through group action we can thwart terrorism, but we can’t. We can be effective. It’s good that the guy was caught quickly. But citizen action isn’t going to stop all of these.

I’ve seen arguments that the tragedy wouldn’t have happened in New York, because we have better safety measures. Probably not this particular incident, nope. Other incidents? Sure; surely the fall of the WTC taught us that we haven’t considered all the safety possibilities. Further, that line of thought brings us to the world in which we can’t buy a steak because there are carcinogenic chemicals in meat, and I’m not too fond of that world. Things are too cotton-wrapped already. (Safety versus liberty, again.)

A world in which all rogue states are gone is not a world without terrorism. There are more than enough examples of individuals and non-state backed terrorist groups to prove this. We can’t stamp out terrorism that way.

Past glories

What really amuses me about this review (warning: 100K GIF file) is how astoundingly accurate it is. I mean, yeah:

In general, the concept and imagination involved is stunning. However, much more work, refinement, and especially regulation and simplification is necessary before the game is managable. The scope is just too grand, while the referee is expected to do too much in relation to the players.

That’s the original three booklets in a nutshell.

End game

AltaVista, my home for several years, has been bought by Overture. I think congratulations are in order.

The price was $60 million in cash, plus $80 million in stock. How times have changed; AltaVista paid $163 million for Raging Bull, a few years back, and of course CMGI paid $2.9 billion for AltaVista back in the day. Still, I hope that the employees will get a small liquidity event (damn, that sounds coy these days).

I learned how to do what I do at AltaVista, and had some of the best mentors I could ever ask for. I’ve missed the place ever since I left, although I’ve never regretted the decision to leave. This, for me, is just the poignant coda to the story of a company that ought to have been one of the core companies of the modern Internet.

Most of the lessons one could learn from AltaVista’s decline are painfully obvious, but here’s one that perhaps isn’t. Brands don’t mean shit on the Internet. It’s not like most brick and mortar businesses. It’s very easy for a customer to get up and move somewhere else. Brand awareness is important, but it will not in and of itself retain customers. It will merely convince them to give your service a try.

AltaVista, at one point, thought that brand was a magic wand. Netcom, where I also worked, thought that brand was a magic wand. Both didn’t make it.