Right back at ya!

Some two and a half years ago, I started a three-parter on discrimination on this blog. That was one of the last posts I wrote in a long time. That three-parter was something that had been brewing in my head for a very long time, so I still intend to get back to it eventually and write the remaining two parts. The second part is one that will be more or less the same no matter when I write it, except that I might learn a thing or two and change my opinion a bit. The third part is one that is much more related to the things happening in the world at the moment, so its content will largely be dictated by when I do actually write it.

Today I want to do something different, though. I want to comment on something that I wrote in the first part, and add to it the understanding that I have gained since I wrote it. Let's start by quoting what I wrote in the past.

However, there is this strange other side to [the word nigger], where it is accepted if a black person says it. I would understand this if it was about intention and sometimes a bit of it is about intention. However, the word is also considered racist if it is used by a white person without intending to insult. If anything, the fact that white people cannot use the word while black people can sounds like racism to me.

Jasper Horn right on this blog

I don't really want to get into whether calling someone a nigger is racist. I do think that I can say without evoking any controversy that you generally shouldn't call someone a nigger. Black people generally don't like being called a nigger and that should be more than enough reason not to do so. I think that by extension, we can say that is often okay for one black person to call another black person a nigger. And by putting it like that, I think that we can clearly see that the idea that whites cannot use this term isn't actually racist. After all, it's not that they are actually not allowed to say the word, it's that they shouldn't.

Today, I want to look at why a white person shouldn't call someone a nigger while a black person can do this if they want to. When I wrote that, I didn't understand it at all, and I think that the quote above very much shows that. I think I understand it a bit better now, so that's why I'm writing this.

My understanding of this changed completely when I read something on the internet. I don't know where I read it or who wrote it, but what they had written was that when you can respond with "right back at ya", an insult is much more of a playful thing than an insult.

And that's basically all there is to it. It's basically that any insult doesn't really hit as hard when it could also be used against the one using it. For that, it doesn't matter what the insult itself is. It could be some way in which a person is not neurotypical, it could be related to a hobby that isn't considered normal by the mainstream, it could be almost anything else. The key is that when the one using the insult falls in the same category, they can't really mean it as an insult, so it's playful rather than truly an insult.

Of course, being a white male was the first thing that made it hard for me to understand the way this worked for a word like nigger. However, while I think that made it hard, I also think that nigger is also a more or less unique situation where we took things to the extreme. Just like how I think that for many people the main reason it's a "bad word" is because they have been taught it's a bad word, I think that for most people a black man using the word is accepted behavior because they have been taught it's accepted behavior. And we've taken things to a rather extreme point to begin with by basically saying a word is not okay regardless of context or intention, and making basically implying that it's always just in friendliness when a black guy says the word is a similar extreme to me.

At the end of the day, understanding where this difference in judgement of people based on their skin color helped me understand why this isn't actually a problem. I'm not entirely sure if I think this is a good way to tackle problems, but at least now I understand. And if you didn't before, maybe now you can too.

The Burqa Ban

I live in a country where it has recently become illegal to wear a Burqa in public. Well, I think the correct term for the garment most commonly worn in these cases is Niqab, but it is commonly referred to as a Burqa over here ("boerka" in Dutch). Moreover, though, the Burqa alliterates nicely with ban, which is why I picked it for the title, and it's also the translation of a common moniker for the ban in Dutch. In order to be more correct in my text than in my title, I will use the term Niqab in the rest of this post. Of course, the ban does actually cover both garments and so does most of what I have to say, so neither is actually wrong.

I decided to write about this topic after reading an article about a protest against the ban. The whole thing is a difficult matter. It's a complex situation. And I don't really know what to think about it. I see why people are against the ban. I also see why the ban does make some sense. I'm not going to write towards a conclusion because I don't have a conclusion. Still, I felt like writing down my thoughts. And writing on my blog again after it has been far too long is a nice way to do that.

Inequality

I think it's hard to deny that the Niqab is a clear sign of inequality between men and women. While men aren't entirely free to wear whatever they want, they also do not have the same limitations as women. Not being allowed to show your face is a pretty strong restriction.

Of course, this is a much stronger point when you are looking at the Hijab. It's much harder to deny that wearing a Hijab is something that girls and women do not get a say in in many cases, they just have to. This can range from fear of violence from community members if they don't wear it to merely the disapproval of parents. This disapproval can include (fear of) getting disowned, but can also be limited to just the way a parent feels about you. Of course, disapproval by a parent over a simple choice like that can be quite harmful all by itself. Alternatively, it might just be the thing you were brought up to do.

Just the other day, I passed a man with a number of children on my bike. It was a hotter day, so the man was wearing a sleeveless shirt. The boys in the group were dressed less casually, but they were still just wearing shirts. The girls in the group were wearing very long sleeves, clearly not in keeping with the weather, and Hijabs. All of the kids looked like they were in their late single digits or early teen years, so I doubt that they were making independent decisions about this. As I overtook the group, a chill went down my spine because that's not what equality looks like to me.

The Niqab is a more extreme garment. Not showing your hair because you are female just isn't as extreme as not showing your face because you are female. I think either is a clear sign of inequality, but the Niqab is simply more polarizing because it is more extreme, even though it's harder to say to what degree the women in question feel they have no choice but to wear it.

It doesn't really matter to me whether women actually make an independent decision to wear a Niqab - or a Hijab, for that matter. All that does is show that they have been raised in a culture where they are taught it's okay to put such limitations on just one of the two genders. It shows that the inequality is systemic, not that there is none.

A Symbol

At this point, it's clear that the Niqab is a symbol of inequality between men and women. When you consider the limited number of people who wear it and the claim by many that it is their own choice to wear it, it becomes clear that it's not a big part of the inequality itself.

However, I don't think that banning a symbol is the way to go. It's never very effective because it does not address the underlying issue at all. And even if all the main symbols of a problem are banned, new symbols will crop up to take their place. You simply cannot expect the banning of symbols to actually have much effect on a systemic problem.

I don't think inequality between men and women should have a place in our society. There is still a lot of it and we have a long way to go before we have actually banished the inequality all together. I also think that the Niqab and Hijab are indicative of a culture that has more inequality than our "Western" currently does. However, I don't think a ban will change anything, even though I do not have any other ideas on how to get rid of this heightened inequality in this subculture of our own.

Real Motivations

On the other hand, I also think it's clear that this ban is religiously motivated - or perhaps even racially motivated, the two are strongly related here after all. No decent politician will admit that, though. Nevertheless, it is clearly a law introduced to cater to the part of their following that is intimidated by the muslim influence on our culture.

That's the most wrong thing about this ban. Even if the ban can be defended, the real - as I see it - motivation of the ban just cannot. It's one thing to be ineffective by attacking symbols or to end up attacking a problem that isn't really too big because the number of people involved is quite limited, but it's an entirely different thing to be attacking a group of people based on their culture or religion.

Hiding Faces

There are other reasons you can give for the ban, and those are the reasons that make a lot more sense to me. It basically comes down to the reason why I avoided using the word "discrimination" in the previous paragraph. While the law is colloquially known as the Burqa ban, that's not literally what it is. Rather, it is a law disallowing covering one's face. This is not really a new thing, as it wasn't really allowed before either. The new thing is that the freedom of religion does not count as a reason to do it nonetheless.

The balancing of different rights is always something that is required and hard at the same time. One way you have to find this balance is to see where the right of equality cuts into the right to freedom of religion. Another way is to look at how far the right to freedom of religion trumps our laws and cultural norms. To understand that, we have to look at why we do not allow one to cover their face in public places in general.

Whether it's a police officer, a bus driver or your local baker, when you interact with someone, you are creating a sort of contract with a person. In person, this contract traditionally does not include anonymity. The other person knows who they are dealing with and that's generally a good thing. One can easily look at online anonymity to see how it can bring out the worst in people. It's much easier to be rude to someone if you know they can't really recognize you on your next encounter anyway.

Of course, we also behave (somewhat) nicely to people we do not expect to see ever again. Maybe that means that covering you face does not mean you will treat others poorly. However, there's also the fact that it's hard for others to build the rapport with you and understand your intentions when they cannot see your face. Facial expressions are an important part of the way we communicate and taking that away takes away a lot of our ability to figure out someone's true intentions.

The final point is one that perhaps is a little less closely related by the ban because it's not actually related to covering your face. It is related to the rest of the outfit a Niqab often comes with. This is about how when your garb comes with religious protection, it becomes a lot easier to hide things in it. This could mean that you hide the assault rifles you are going to rob a bank with, which you would probably stand out a lot more with when it wasn't just a religious garb you were wearing. It can also refer to petty theft in a grocery store, at which point it becomes a lot harder to check if someone has hidden the item they claim they do not have when there's the protection of a religious garb to hide it with.

I'm not sure how I feel about the last point I raised. It does assume the worst of people. On the other hand, freedom of religion also means a lot of protection when you simply claim to follow a religion without the need to prove that you do. It also doesn't directly relate to the ban on covering your face. Perhaps that's why we shouldn't really take it into account here.

Conclusion

As I promised up front, I don't really have a conclusion.

There are some sensible reasons for the ban, there are some misguided but well-intended reasons for the ban and there are some absolutely horrible reasons for the ban. Unfortunately, I think that the real reasons for politicians that pursued this bad to do so were in the last of the three categories, even if they won't admit it. And that's a very bad thing. Does that reflect on the ban itself? I don't know. It definitely doesn't make it look too good. Yet, the ban itself is separate from the reasoning of the people who supported it. And... well, I just don't know.

What is discrimination? (part 1)

For a long time now I have wanted to write this blog post. I just never got around to doing it the justice it deserves. It was called "What is racism?" in my head, but just as I was finally starting on it, I realized that it was really about discrimination in general. I will be using both terms, though.. At the end of the day, racism is just a form of discrimination.

Racism ain’t what it used to be. Time was, if you were racist, you bloody well knew it. [..] No more. [..] racism has become recast as a kind of bad etiquette, where merely saying the wrong thing, even unintentionally, is enough to mark you out as a moral leper.

Tom Slater at Spiked-online

A couple of years back, I was riding my bike from the train station to my home. As I live in the Netherlands, there were plenty of other people riding their bikes as well. One of them got me in a bit of an annoyed mood because he delayed me by not indicating that he was taking a right turn at a traffic light. Then, I approached the next traffic light. There was someone else who slowed down because he had to wait for the light to go green. However, he did this on the left side of the bike lane, making it impossible for me to pass him and take the right turn for which there was no wait.

It was at this moment that a comment towards him sprang into my mind. I wanted to say something like "hey, this is the Netherlands and here we ride on the right side of the road". However, I kept my mouth shut and avoided the conflict. It wasn't until a couple of minutes later that I realized how racist that sentence would have sounded if I had actually said it. After all, this guy did look like his parents weren't born in this country.

To me, the statement wasn't racist at all. I hadn't even registered yet that this person looked a bit foreign and I would have said the exact same thing to someone who looked like he had thorough Dutch roots. It was just a way of me ridiculing that the person for not following the single most basic traffic rule. I didn't really think anything of where that person was from, I just made the ridiculous assumption that this was a misunderstanding of the rules and commented on the fact that there are some countries where they drive on the left side of the road.

But then was that comment truly racist? Did it matter that I didn't mean to offend him over his race? Did it matter that I would have said the same thing to someone who looked more like a native? Would it still have been racist if I had said it to someone who looked more native? Would it have mattered whether that person was as native as he looked? Would the same sentence have been racist if it had been uttered by someone who did so because of how the person in question looked?

My personal interpretation of what racism is - and in fact what discrimination is in general - has not lined up with what it popularly is for a long time. Let's take the word "nigger". This is widely recognized as a racist term. This is because of its historic ties of the word to slavery. I am not trying to deny the hurt the use of this word may incur, but I would like to question the fact that just using a word like that is discrimination or racism. To be honest, I think that for many black people there isn't in fact an association to this slavery. They will be offended by the word just because they were taught it is a bad word. Of course, it's also connected to the more recent usage of the same word as a slur and it can hurt in that way. But that use of the word as a slur is also just because people have been taught it's a bad word. Once again, I don't mean to deny the hurt that this word causes, no matter whether it is because of it being a bad word or because it's because there are people that do experience a connection between the word and slavery. I'm not even trying to say it's not a bad word either.

However, there is this strange other side to this word, where it is accepted if a black person says it. I would understand this if it was about intention and sometimes a bit of it is about intention. However, the word is also considered racist if it is used by a white person without intending to insult. If anything, the fact that white people cannot use the word while black people can sounds like racism to me. Of course, as a privileged white male, I don't have much to complain about. I'm really just trying to get to the issue what discrimination and racism are. To me, it really just seems that the word isn't inherently racist.

If it's just about intention, though, things get very hairy. Take the example from the traffic light situation above. My intention was to take a verbal stab at this person without it relating to where he - or his parents - were from. However, he wouldn't have been able to tell that. If there was a third traffic light he had to take and he did the same thing there and someone else made the same comment to him there, but this time with the intention to hurt him based on his race it would have sounded exactly the same. Moreover, it would have felt exactly the same to that person.

What about racist jokes? A racist joke really just evokes a stereotype for the sake of comedy. However, racist jokes are considered a bad thing. They may very well hurt people. However, jokes about dead babies are considered much more acceptable. Not everyone likes these, but they don't carry the same stigma. That's while such a joke can hurt very much to someone who has lost a baby.

Let's take the combination of racism and comedy a bit further. Let's talk about such things in the context of entertainment. The satire of shows like South Park spring to mind immediately. They had a whole thing about gingers not having souls. Basically, their characters were discriminating other characters. It sounds strange to me to call a piece that has fictional characters discriminating other fictional characters as being discrimination itself. However, when episodes on this theme aired, the number of children with red hair being bullied skyrocketed.

Maybe we can shine a different light on this. Imagine you are making a period piece. A movie, let's make it a movie. It's set mid-1900s. Women were discriminated against in that period. Should you not show that in your movie? Is being authentic in that respect discrimination all by itself? Of course there is room for a movie showing those troubles, but say you just wanted to make a police drama set somewhere in that time period. Does that mean you can't show a man being a pig towards the typist woman?

If anything becomes clear to me through all of this, it's that discrimination is not the same as "shouldn't do". Of course you shouldn't discriminate. That's something that's so important that many countries (at least the ones in the West) ingrained this in their constitution. However, there are things that you shouldn't do, but not because they are discrimination. In the extreme, hate-mongering is often not discrimination in itself, but it does move others to discriminate and it should be clear that it's not acceptable behavior.

In my opinion you shouldn't ask yourself if what you're saying is discrimination. It should be clear when it is discrimination and you should know to stay well away from that. However, I do think it's good to ask yourself whether what you're doing is offensive to people. It doesn't even necessarily have to do with something you can discriminate about. Likewise, it's good to ask yourself if what you're doing may validate people hurting others, through discrimination or something else. I'm not against free speech, but I would like those practicing free speech to take their responsibility.

Today, I really just took a look at what I think isn't discrimination. In the next part, I will take a look at what I think is discrimination. I hope you'll join me for that part as well.

Has a game aged well?

I recently read a bit on Reddit that talked about "video games becoming outdated". It said that it didn't understand the concept, since technology can go out of date, while art cannot. Today, I want to talk about the same general concept. However, I'll call it "aging well" and "not aging well".

So, the idea is that some games have aged well. What does that mean? It means that though it was made in a different time, it still holds up to the changed standards. It means that it feels like it could have been made more recently. It means that when playing it you aren't bothered by the signs that the game is old. It means that it doesn't feel like it was limited because of restrictions that are no longer there.

Other games have not aged well. The controls may feel wrong and even with some tweaking you aren't getting to what you're used to today. The story might not hold up to standards that are set these days. It may be that it simply looks really bad to someone used to more newfangled graphics. The pacing might not be what we've come to expect. Perhaps it's simply the learning curve that couldn't pass today.

It should definitely be said that this is a very personal and opinion-based thing. It's better possible to discuss why you feel that a game has or has not aged well than to debate whether red is more beautiful than green or not, but in the end it is still about an opinion. It's like how we can discuss why we like a game and whether it is a good game, but at the end of the day we're still going to have our own opinions (hopefully).

Of course, this whole concept is not limited to games only. The same terminology is often used when talking about film. Both tv shows (as well as their individual episodes) can age well or poorly. It''s all about whether or not it holds up today. Whether or not it feels antiquated. Both these media are rather young and still actively evolving. Music is also going through a lot of changes, so it could probably apply there as well, even if I don't see it. I don't know if it can apply to more traditional forms of art, such as sculpting or painting. I don't know so much about them, but at the surface it doesn't seem to be the same there.

That's my views on aging of games and a couple of other media as well. I'm not sure if I can really put a conclusion on it and if I try to summarize it, I just end up paraphrasing something from the second or third paragraph, so I'll just leave it at this: not all games have aged equally well.

The Copyright Debate

Today, I read up for a bit on how the case of MegaUpload was going. As it turns out, they are working on a new service to be released a year after MegaUpload being taken offline. The few details disclosed about the new service are a good example of one of the points in the copyright debate. It inspired me to do a piece on the whole debate.

Basically, the copyright debate takes place in two areas. There's the practical area and the ideological one. I'll start with the practical part because, well, it's more practical.

The whole piracy play is a cat and mouse game. Once a certain way of piracy gets closed down, piracy evolves to its next form that isn't blocked. This effect can be seen when looking at the history of file sharing, like when you look at the stories of Napster and Kazaa.
However, it can also be seen in more recent developments. When The Pirate Bay was facing legal consequences in a number of countries, it started adopting a new technique (magnet links) through which the legal processes against them would become invalid. When you release a new sophisticated form of DRM, it may take a couple of days longer before it has been cracked. And now there's the new mega site is planning to use a technique that makes them unaware of the content of what is uploaded to them, making sure they can't be held responsible for ignoring illegal content on their network. Basically, the copyright industry will never be able to catch up with the pirates.

The proponents of the copyright system as it is right now are eager to come up with a way to more fundamentally tackle the problem. That's basically what the proposals like SOPA and PIPA were all about. They were meant to give more powerful tools to the copyright owners to shut down piracy and also defined piracy in terms very loose as to also encapsulate future forms.
However, there are some serious problems with it. The problems specific to systems mentioned above is that they put amazing amounts of power into the hands of the copyright owners, had systems in which the mere allegation of copyright infringement would be punished very harshly without substantial evidence or the possibility of a defense and finally that it held websites fully responsible for anything posted by users, meaning that it would have become impossible to have user contributions that aren't all moderated by hand before publicizing them.

However, there is a more substantial problem with the whole idea of tackling the copyright defense in any fundamental way that circumvents the whole cat and mouse game. Basically, it's about how bits and bytes don't have a meaning all by them selves. This is what the new mega site is such a good example of. Basically, what it does is that you will create a key and encrypt the data you upload to them with it. As such, the data stored by Mega does not have a meaning without the key. Neither does the key have a meaning without the data. However, a user receiving the key and the data through separate channels will be able to decrypt the data and assign a meaning to it again. In this example, never did any one service ever share copyrighted data and yet the data came from one person and ended up at another person.

This is basically the big problem. The lesser version of this problem is that you would have to inspect everything a user does - like reading personal mails - in order to make sure he doesn't send copyrighted materials. And the bigger version is that even then you can never reliably check what is copyrighted material and what is not as shown with the Mega system. The only thing one could do is put systems in place that invade our privacy by checking everything we do and at the same time taking down any websites that might facilitate piracy, which is nothing short of a full-fledged censorship system.

If there are so many practical problems with copyright then you might wonder why it is defended so doggedly. And that's when you come to the ideological part of the debate. Often copyright is taken for granted, but in fact it's very much a artificial construct. Something made by man that should not be taken at face value but instead carefully inspected for its advantages and disadvantages.

Looking at the history of copyright we'll actually see that it is an ancient system created in England centuries ago and having undergone many revisions since. What also springs out is that from the very start it was mostly used to the profit of not those who made the copyrighted material but those who distributed it. That's also who currently profit from it right now, the big music and video companies. The fact that those companies have insane amounts of money is not only a testimony to the unnatural distribution of money the copyright laws cause, but also something that greatly eschews the entire debate, as much of it is fought in courtrooms and through lobbying.


When we look at the arguments against the current copyright system you'll quickly stumble upon the one about shoulders of giants. We stand on those shoulders when doing just about anything. When the field of physics is advanced through new theories, for example, we build upon what previous physicists have done, perhaps most notably Newton and Einstein. This goes for the creation of culture as well. For example, story telling is just about never done without drawing inspiration from other works. Oftentimes, authors state their sources of inspiration or their "influences". Other times, trhe story is even stated to be a retelling of another story. Notable examples include the way the Grimm brothers became the authority on folk tales by publishing them and the Walt Disney becoming big by making films out of fairy tales. Copyright is a construct that limits us in basing our work off of other works and thus can be said to have a negative effect on the development of our cultural heritage.

We have to look a little harder to find the arguments defending the copyright system. This is because it is so often taken for granted and the battle is often fought through implications rather than arguments. There's always the ads we have been given over the past decade or so that say piracy is equal to stealing, but there isn't any argument to be found in that. This is because these ads do not try to substantiate that claim in any way and instead work by trying to instill a sense of right and wrong in people based on emotional value. On top of that, this argument usually completely skips the distinction between software and a car, which is the same as the reason why one is shared through piracy and the other isn't: software can be copied with barely any cost to it, while a car can't be.

The one argument that does sometimes come up is what we stand to lose by abolishing copyright. And there is most definitely some truth to this. There is little doubt about it that some artists would disappear in a world without copyright. However, this can be countered by the sentiment that music or art or writing as a whole won't and other artists that won't show up on people's radars in the current system would be able to flourish in a copyrightless system. In fact, the way some artists are already coping with the fact that piracy is so common these days proves that there are profitable models for - for example - making music in a world without copyright.
Once again, there is no doubt that the current situation would change radically. One example I think it often left out of this debate is the one of single player computer games. It's pretty clear that the landscape of single player games would radically change if there wasn't copyright to protect it. Big companies making lots of money off games created by large teams define what is possible in those realms and those seem likely to be hurt the worst by such a change. The argument goes, though, that we shouldn't judge the current system to be better than the one that we would end up with if copyright is abolished.
The things that we know up front are that the fields where copyright currently exists wouldn't disappear if there no longer were such a thing as copyright and that it is quite probable that distributors won't be making quite as much money. Unless you are in the distribution business, neither of those sounds like a bad thing.

That's the copyright discussion as far as I know it. I have tried to give a good and objective perspective on this all, but I have probably failed considerable since I am a human and I do have an opinion on the matter. I also might be unaware of some of the arguments in this discussion. However, I do think it's a decent overview, even if a bit tainted by my personal view of the matter.

The Internet Generation

Every title has its stories. The most important story is often the one that follows it, but for this one I also want to give the hi-story. (Sorry for the bad pun.)

This title started off as a comment on facebook. It was formatted for that medium (it had only a single capital letter, and it had a smiley trailing it). I meant it as a funny comment relating to the fact that someone had made a note about having (better) internet access, but it also got me thinking. And that thinking is what this blogpost stems from. As such, it's going to be the more serious discussion of the title.

So.. the internet generation. It's the generation I believe I am a part of. It's the generation that grew up with the internet. Well, that's not entirely true. There may be many more generations (it depends a bit on how long the internet is going to live (which is looking like a very long time right now) and what direction the internet is going to take from where it is now), but I still believe that we are the internet generation. That's because we are the first generation that grew up with the internet.

Defining a generation is never an exact science and even the question "how old can you be while still having grown up with the internet" can lead to many different answers. Nevertheless, there is clearly one thing that defines a generation: the differences between it and the generation that went before it. That's why I say the first generation that grew up with the internet is the internet generation.
(And perhaps it should be interpreted as "the people who grew up with the internet while their parents did not".)

Of course there is more to it than just that. We are also the first to massively adopt things like wikipedia, despite the early claims of it not being very factual. We are also a generation of which the larger part is on facebook. (Well, in the West anyway, but I suppose we were talking about the West anyway.) We are also the first generation to have gotten used to having the internet in our pocket through our smartphones. And we are also the generation that hates not to have the internet at our finger tops (or even just a little less at our fingertops than usual).

There is a number of properties we can ascribe to our generation (again, compared to the previous generations, future generations may well follow in our footsteps in a number of those). One of the most interesting of those properties - in my eyes anyway - would be how we handle information. We are very good scanning and picking out the useful bits of information, as we do whenever we arrive on a website. We are also very good at separating what we are looking for from distractions (well, some anyway) as we read completely around advertisement (the ones that aren't annoying anyway) and barely even notice they are there. And like no other, we can look at a summary like the ones on Google and decide if this is what we are looking for or not.

Another property would be how we handle multitasking. I don't exactly know how much better humans are at "actual multitasking" (doing different things at exactly the same time), but wouldn't be surprised if we aren't able to do that or do it much. However, there is still the fact where fact that we can do different things at the same time by actually just switching between them quickly, which I think we as a generation are pretty good at (and which computers are way better at, even). However, I that's not where we make the big difference in my opinion. The real difference is how we can switch between things consciously almost effortlessly. Tabbed browsing is a good example of this, and not being able to do multiple things at the same thing easily makes us feel restricted.
(And to make a circle out of my whole story again, that's also one of the things the post I responded to on Facebook was about).

If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed my rambling!

Open Source: LZMA

A while back I wrote a single post about the era I believe we are at the doorstep of. At the time, it was more of a crazy theory of which I wasn't sure I believed it myself. It was more of a feeling than anything. Recently I have come to believe it more and more. For those who have missed the installment in question, let me summarize it. I feel that we're on the edge of a new era. Technological progress is slowing down (with computers being one of the notable example). Instead, we now have to go find out what we do with the technology we do have. The new advances will be mostly social, in the way we use our technology. A major battle that will be fought at the beginning of this era is the one for freedom of information and it will shape the entire era.

Now that that is behind us, let me get to talking about the subject of the day: Open Source. This is usually mentioned in the context of software, as that's where it originated and still is the place where it is the biggest by far. However, one could argue it applies to just about anything copyright governs. It is about the freedom to duplicate, spread and modify the content you receive. The thing that relates this to the fight I described above is that very copyright. It is heavily involved in this battle, though mostly as a weapon or a subject, it isn't the wrong-doer itself. Open Source is in fact voluntarily giving up copyright.

Today I saw what I consider on of the biggest victories for Open Source I have ever seen. It is not all that long ago that open source was a thing for nerds who ran this mystic thing known as Linux. This has been changing, and one of the most telling signs may be that current poster boy for linux is barely any harder to use than Windows. (Not everyone may like Ubuntu, especially not all the nerds. Still, it is hard to deny it is currently the poster boy.) However, that is just one aspect of the whole story. I think one of the earlier big victories was FireFox, the browser that dethroned Internet Explorer, who was sitting back while it thought it had won the browser war already.

Since that victory, we have also seem what I would personally dub "semi-Open Source", which was a number of companies (most notably Google) who release their software under an Open Source license because their business strategy wasn't based on selling their software. The most notable example might be yet another example, Google's Chrome. It is clear that one of the major driving forces behind releasing this under an open source was that they wanted to be able to incorporate improvements made by the community into their own product and they do wait before releasing new features under an open source license to make sure they don't lose their "competitive edge". However, it still continued to promote open source. On top of that, it also showed that open source and profit-based companies aren't necessarily incompatible.

From there, I want to talk about the latest victory I have seen lately: LZMA.

I don't blame you if you just scratched your head and wondered what that abbreviation meant. However, the meaning isn't the important thing. The important thing is what it is the name of: the successor to rar. Besides zip - because of its integration in Windows - rar has been the leader in compressed archives. The open source communities have always used alternatives to it, but never did those other options make the cross over to Windows users.

LZMA has already become somewhat of a new standard in the open source world, where an important reason is just that its compression rates are really good. Of course, there it also met the hard requirement of being open source itself. Slowly, I have seen it seep into the more nerdy communities of Windows users as well. However, today I saw mention of it by a "software cracker". Oh, don't get me wrong, that's still a nerdy bunch, but they are making software for the uninitiated in the arts of computerfare (well, the technical part anyway, these people are good at playing games). And yes, he was merely talking about the next version of something and he was still going to hide lzma archives behind an "auto-extractor" so the end user would not even get to see it was there, but I still think that slowly but surely lzma is moving into a a really good position in the non-open source world. From that position, I think it will be able to take over this hill from rar and become king of it.

Imagine downloading a file from the internet that is compressed. Without spending a second thought, you open the lzma file it came in. Without even realizing, you just use open source in your normal usage. If getting that deep under the skin of the non-open source user isn't a major victory for open source, I don't know anymore.

One Crazy Theory Coming Up

I haven't been posting in a while. As a way to make up for that, I offer you one really crazy post.

We are at the doorstep of a new era. For a while, we have been living in what I would call the technological era. This era is called such because the one thing that was ahead of others was technology, the one thing we have been making more progress at than anything else was technology.

No more. Technological progress is slowing down. One interesting thing to look at is the the home computer market. For a long time it has been that almost everything that is in your pc gets better every month. However, currently, there are already components that are barely making any progress, like hard discs. That said, there is some more progress this market is making, but there is one interesting thing to note about this: it's all high end progress. In quite a while there has been very little progress that's useful in personal day to day usage of an average person (think: your mom) or most office use.

At the same time, there is a social part of the internet that is changing radically. Of course, this has been going on for a couple of years with websites like wikipedia, but I think there is a lot more in store. I think that the SOPA protest in which a large part of the internet pulled together to tell that an American bill couldn't be passed will be remembered as a turning point.


I don't fully believe it yet, but it is what I feel like. I guess history will teach if I was right or not.