Brief attack of webloggage. Again.

[hirez]

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001635.shtml#001635

Lessig: "Euro comms is horrid and smells of wee."

Europeans: "Piss off and get a real personal comms infrastructure, foolish yankees!"


http://www.manitoba.fm/

Utterly marvellous bloody racket. Infinitely better than any filthy g*th/INDUSTRAIL(tm)/EDM jibber-jabber ever.

Comments

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

Lessig=pretentious self important ninny who thinks he is the only one qualified to pontificate on "information structures".

*But* he gave me an A+ in the Cyberspace and the Law course he tought my last year of law school (before he moves to Stanford), so I have to cut him some slack.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ah. Clearly a fellow of taste and distinction then...

I think it's a problem for people in the US in the same way that I (still) have difficulty conceptualising the scale of the place when thinking about driving from A to B.

I still get the impression that mobiles (we've not called them 'cellphones' for ten years) are a sort-of 'aspirational' item the way (say) Saabs are. (I have two Saabs and four phones in various states of repair.) Whereas here they fall out of cornflake packets and if they are remarked upon, it's not that you've got one, rather than what colour the case is or if it takes pictures or not.

As a daft example, it was cheaper for me to SMS my friends from the beach when we went to France than send postcards. The fact that I'd changed countries and roamed across three or four different providers was uninteresting - It Just Worked and cost me pennies. Lord alone knows why y'all put up with something that doesn't.

(Sorry. Ranting again.)

[quercus.livejournal.com]

What's "comms" though ?

Lessig is talking about Swiss business practices for WiFi, where everyone uses the same tech standards, but the Swiss have bollocked up the charging model (and no-one else has really worked out how to do it either, without bizarre coffee-related back-channel profit models)

Mobile phone comms (where the Yanks truly have buggered it up) is no more relevant than blaming the Brits for spending the '70s stuck with LD dialling not DTMF.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I like Lessig - met the guy at HP once. Struck me as the first lawyer I'd ever met where I thought "What a nice lawyer-chap. He might achieve something useful here, despite, well, Being A Lawyer". It's a shitty job, but I guess someone has to do it and he certainly Has Clue where it's needed.

(Following only briefly afterwards by the thought of what great human happiness he might have achieved in the brothel trade, if only he'd kept up the piano lessons.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Well, quite. I have no particular point, other than being amused over the argument.

Though it does strike me that The Great BoingBoing Crusade that is 'public whiffy' will likely (and with any luck) go the same was as 'clicks and mortar', 'B2B' and 'Internet pure-play'. If only because the sort of 'road warriors' who cart about craptops are by and large complete wankers and I can already send messages to most of the people I want to talk to with my Nokia. SMS is more democratic than whiffy.

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

You're right - we simply don't think of mobiles the same way. Then again, I can call California for nothing on my cell, which is significantly farther than from Fishponds to France. Perhaps it is the sheer size of the US that creates different thinking. State to state calling is seamless, unless you are in some remote part of Alaska or something. Let's face it, the majority of the American populace is not going much farther than the next state over, or maybe to Tiajuana for a drinking binge. It is only people who have dollars and status who are going to be affected by not being able to use their phone in Europe.

Trust me, among the "yute of today" (tm) cellphones, mobiles, what have you, are more commonplace than calculators. It is from them, and from the Lessigs of this world (who want to be the YOT) that any universal standard that includes the US is going to come from. For me, if I can't use my phone, and Blackberry, etc. while I'm traveling, so much the better - if the office can't reach me, they can't interrupt my vaca!

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

Great guy, actually. Very friendly. Knows his stuff. As pretentious as all get out. Then again, he was one of the first people to actually realize that this whole global communications thing had intellectual and legal implications, so maybe he has the right to be. A very good teacher, too. It was a great loss to Harvard and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society to lose him to Stanford, IMHO.

I'm sure the students who wanted to sleep with him (I believe his eventual wife was one of them, but I could be slandering the man with my piecy memory) would agree with your brothel acessment. ;)