In March of this year Apple applied for a patent on technology that enables or disables features of a phone via a config file. The tech is already in use: it’s the carrier profiles we’ve been downloading recently. On the one hand this is just an extension of the parental controls that Apple has included in Mac OS X since the early days, but it also implies some rather anti-consumer thinking at the company.

One examplar claim in the patent is that the config file can include a “blacklist of device resources to be restricted from access.”

AT&T used this this technology to block MMS until recently, and uses it now to block tethering, but the description given in the patent application goes much further:

For example, a carrier may wish to provide an enhanced service which utilizes the global positioning system (GPS) functionality in a mobile device. Carrier may wish to charge a premium for this service, so it may configure carrier provisioning profile to disallow third party applications from accessing the GPS functionality in device, and instead only allow applications digitally signed by carrier (or another entity affiliated with carrier) to access the GPS services in device.

Readers may remember the Trusted Computing video by Lutz Vogel and Benjamin Stephan that spotlighted the growing interest within the computing industry to impose new and artificial restrictions on the way we use the hardware and software we use daily.

It’s an aside to Kathryn Greenhill’s larger point, that all this 2.0 stuff is about a shifting power to the user, but she places L2 somewhere on Ghandi’s continuum of change between ridicule and fight.

The photo above (original by Monster) is in support of Greenhill’s larger point: control is shifting. Trains were once seen as icons of freedom, but that view changed with the development of the automobile — and the way it shifted control of routes and schedules from the railroad to the driver.

We’ve been arguing transportation policy for a long time since, but here’s a simple fact: railroads didn’t realize they were competing against automobiles until it was too late.

Who are you competing against?

libraries, lib20, l2, library 2.0, competition, control, railroads vs. automobiles, change, locus of control

I wasn’t planning on posting much about Keen’s Cult of the Amateur, but I did. And now I find myself posting about it again. Thing is, I’m a sucker for historical analogy, and Clay Shirky yesterday posted a good one that compared the disruptive effects of mechanized cloth production to today’s internet.

Yes, that’s actually the birth of the Luddite movement, or at least where it got its name. And, though I was aware of the story, Shirky’s study offered details I’d not know previously.

Most interesting was the news that the handweavers largely opposed only the mills that sold their textiles cheaper than the handweavers did. And mills that sold their products at artificially high prices and used the efficiency of the mechanized looms to earn exorbitant profits weren’t opposed by the handweavers.

Hmmm….

Now back to Keen. Keen “doesn’t oppose all uses of technology, just ones that destroy older ways of doing things.”

But Keen is wrong. Using the internet without putting new capabilities into the hands of its users (who are, by definition, amateurs in most things they can now do) would be like using a mechanical loom and not lowering the cost of buying a coat — possible, but utterly beside the point.

The criticism here is that Keen wants technology to be controlled, and the value enjoyed exclusively by the establishment.

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Keen is right in understanding that this massive supply-side shock to freedom will destabilize and in some cases destroy a number of older social institutions. He is wrong in believing that there is some third way — lets deploy the internet, but not use it to increase the freedom of amateurs to do as they like.

(Emphasis added.)

web 2.0, internet, anarchy, control, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, luddite, luddism, disruptive technology

Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur; How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is getting a lot of attention from usually quiet corners of the web, and I’ve had to quell the urge to write a story under the headline “Andrew Keen Tells YouTubers to Eat Spinach.”

Keen’s argument rests on the belief that “culture” is the sole provence of established media, and falls flat as soon as you get past the bombast of the subtitle. Our consumer relationship with culture is a recent development that has done great harm to us. Culture is participatory, messy, and resilient.

And that’s pretty much exactly how it played out on KCRW’s To The Point (listen), which invited Keen along with anti-Wikipedian Larry Sanger to take up the issue with Xeni Jardin and NYU prof Clay Shirky.

Keen is right to doubt Web 2.0 proponents who suggest technology will solve the world’s problems (it never did, it’s unlikely it ever will), but Jardin and Shirky didn’t argue that. The real issue isn’t technology, it’s the growing clash of control vs. anarchy as described in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Anarchist In The Library. Well, that and the fact that the internet is still rather immature, even if it’s regularly used by a majority of Americans.

internet, web 2.0, anarchy, control, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

Perhaps it’s just because I’m in the air again today, but I’m fascinated by Aaron Koblin’s animation of aircraft activity, illustrating the pulsing, throbbing movements of aircraft over North America. Nah, this is hot. You’ll love it too.

Also worth checking out: Koblin’s other works.

Aaron Koblin, aircraft, animation, aviation, flight, path

I have a sort of guilt complex about looking at home theater issues. Nonetheless, I’ve been building one piecemeal ever since I found an incredible deal on a video projector. Now I’m working on assembling a video jukebox of sorts and I need to face the remote control stumbling block.

That’s why I like the Logitech Harmony 520, available at Amazon. Credit due: I got the tip from a post at Engadget some time ago.

tags: control, harmony 520, home theater control, home theater remote, home theater remote control, logitech, logitech harmony, logitech harmony 520, logitech harmony remote, logitech harmony remote control, remote, remote control