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Friday, December
13, 2002 DOW, BURSON-MARSTELLER CLAMP DOWN ON FAKE WEBSITES I couldn't find a link to this press release, so I'm posting it in its entirety. Thanks, Bobby! December 13, 2002 But companies find it harder to stifle criticism Two giant companies are struggling to shut down parody websites that portray them unfavorably, interrupting internet use for thousands in the process, and filing a lawsuit that pits the formidable legal department of PR giant Burson-Marsteller against a freshman at Hampshire College. The activists behind the fake corporate websites have fought back, and obtained substantial publicity in the process. Fake websites have been used by activists before, but Dow-Chemical.com and BursonMarsteller.com represent the first time that such websites have successfully been used to publicize abuses by specific corporations. A December 3 press release originating from one of the fake sites, Dow-Chemical.com, explained the "real" reasons that Dow could not take responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe, which has resulted in an estimated 20,000 deaths over the years (http://www.theyesmen.org/dow/#release). "Our prime responsibilities are to the people who own Dow shares, and to the industry as a whole," the release stated. "We cannot do anything for the people of Bhopal." The fake site immediately received thousands of outraged e-mails (http://www.dowethics.com/r/about/corp/email.htm). Within hours, the real Dow sent a legal threat to Dow-Chemical.com's upstream provider, Verio, prompting Verio to shut down the fake Dow's ISP for nearly a day, closing down hundreds of unrelated websites and bulletin boards in the process. The fake Dow website quickly resurfaced at an ISP in Australia. (http://theyesmen.org/dow/#threat) In a comical anticlimax, Dow then used a little-known domain-name rule to take possession of Dow-Chemical.com (http://theyesmen.org/dow/#story), another move which backfired when amused journalists wrote articles in newspapers from The New York Times to The Hindu in India (http://theyesmen.org/dow/#links), and sympathetic activists responded by cloning and mirroring the site at many locations, including http://www.dowethics.com/, http://www.dowindia.com/ and, with a twist, http://www.mad-dow-disease.com/. Dow continues to play whack-a-mole with these sites (at least one ISP has received veiled threats). Burson-Marsteller, the public relations company that helped to "spin" Bhopal, has meanwhile sued college student Paul Hardwin mailto:(phardwin@yurt.org) for putting up a fake Burson-Marsteller site, http://www.bursonmarsteller.com/, which recounted how the PR giant helped to downplay the Bhopal disaster. Burson-Marsteller's suit against Hardwin will be heard next week by the World Intellectual Property Organization (http://reamweaver.com/bmwipo/wipo.html). Hardwin, unable to afford a lawyer, has composed a dryly humorous 57-page rebuttal to the PR giant's lawsuit (http://www.reamweaver.com/bmwipo/response.htm#reality). On page 7, for instance, the student notes that Burson-Marsteller's "stated goal is 'to ensure that the perceptions which surround our clients and influence their stakeholders are consistent with reality.'" Hardwin goes on to assert that his satirical domain is doing precisely that, by publicizing "academic and journalistic materials about Burson-Marsteller's involvement with and relationship to, for example, Philip Morris and the National Smoker's Alliance, a consumer front group designed to create the appearance of public support for big-tobacco policies; Union Carbide and the deaths of 20,000 people following the 1984 disaster in Bhopal; and political regimes such as that of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and more recently Saudi Arabia following the events of September 11; and to properly associate them with the relevant Trademark so that they may be understood accordingly by Internet users." In response to the suit's claim that "a substantial degree of goodwill is associated with [the Burson-Marstellar Trademark]" Hardwin offers much "evidence to the contrary" including "a newspaper headline in which the Complainant is characterized as 'the Devil.'" Thursday, December 12, 2002 More on World Sousveillance Day John Ratliff's written a piece, inspired by World Sousveillance Day, for the Austin American-Statesman. John conducted his own sousveillance project at Walmart's, and came to a very interesting conclusion about store security. [Link] It was while I was still inside the store that the second prospect started occurring to me. Above each cashier's station was a shiny globelet attached to the power poles. I asked one employee what they were, and she looked like she had never noticed them before. "I don't know," she said. "Probably cameras." Wednesday, December 11, 2002 World Sousveillance Day December 24 is World Sousveillance Day! Sousveillance is a response to surveillance, i.e. the watched watches the watcher. Also called World Subjectrights Day. Thanks, and a tip o' the weblogsky hat (with its surveillance camera), to Bill Scannell and Bobby Lilly for the pointer! [Link] This is a day when security forces are very busy watching for shoplifters, and it is also a time when folks are reflecting on the year's activity and it's something to do rather than merely buying something. It's also a time of year when many people go back to their home towns, to visit friends and relatives. For many students, exams are over, but courses start again in January (a good time to show off some great holiday pictures). It's a time to stop spending, and instead to add to the frantic state of panic and start shooting! And WSD is also a satire of the way in which authority has replaced spirituality. As surveillance develops into an omniscient network, that people are willing to praise as their saviour, it may in fact become their slaviour. American Rebellions Thom Hartmann compares contemporary concerns about corporations to the origins of the American revolution, and notes that the controversial concept of "corporate personhood" resulted from a legal error. [Link] That war—finally triggered by a transnational corporation and its government patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive local marketplace—would end with independence for the colonies. Tuesday, December 10, 2002 Democracy Someone didn't particularly like my comments on decentralization yesterday, in followup on an email list, so I wrote something to clarify my thinking. Thought I should post it here, too. Democracy is a problematic word because it's fuzzy, and there's not always clear thinking about its implications. Democracy works best with relatively small, relatively homogenous populations. Where you have size and diversity, as in the U.S., it's difficult to find shared perspectives and build consensus. Because democracy doesn't scale well, we have a system where democracy is mediated by hierarchical structures for governance, and we have buck-stops-here roles for leaders who make critical decisions that won't wait for consensus. The policy machines are inherently somewhat centralized but not unapproachable. In an ideal situation we'd have an informed electorate, clear channels of communication with representatives (mediators of democratic will), and (most critical for democracy) informed debate on critical issues. Some of us have held a vision for the Internet's role in taking us closer to an ideal of democracy where citizen participation is more possible and better acknowledged, and perhaps where grassroots movements can emerge and have real effect. This looks viable but we have a lot of thinking and a lot of work to do before we can realize our vision, and we should understand how difficult it is to realize. If we focus on a vision of 'nodal politics' and fail to organize effectively for the existing political system, we may have significant, critical, troubling losses before we have any wins. It's also important to realize
Monday, December 09, 2002 Bruce Sterling on Tomorrow Now My brief interview with Bruce Sterling about his just-published nonfiction book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years is in the latest SXSW Interactive Tech Report. [Link] Funny thing about predicting the future: even if you hit it on the money, you can't state it in the future's own terms. Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" is probably the most impressive work of speculative technical forecasting that I ever read. It's all about databases and networks and it comes from a day well before any digital technology. But the nouns are all wrong. "Memex." There aren't any. The technology that Bush was forecasting doesn't mean to us what it meant to him. It feels different to us because we are swimming in it. So we speak and think of it in ways that he could not. Comments on 'decentralization' Adina Levin just posted this about decentralization and sent me a pointer. The response I emailed her: Heh... I just shake my head and sigh.One of my greatest failures, I think, was in failing to find the focus to complete that book so that MIT would actually print it. What I submitted must've been pretty crappy, because the editor stonewalled me 'til I threatened to take it elsewhere, then we spent another couple of years with me trying to figure out what was wrong with it and restructure it so that it was acceptable. The idea was to write something like Alinsky's 'rules for radicals,' except in this case for Internet activists. I had a vision of something I referred to as 'nodal politics,' in which the form of the Internet would become the form of political networks... there would be activist nodes feeding information to each other peer to peer, building ad hoc movements around specific issues. We wouldn't need political parties to hold their constituencies together around rigid ideologies, so we would be less consumed by political dogma and more clear about our intentions and expectations. So I had this hazy idealism stewing in my brain and I couldn't quite write it, because I saw real flaws. I couldn't really point to any grassroots successes. Democracy itself seemed flawed, impractical. . While I was thinking about (and conflicted about) nodal politics, the
Republican right wing was organizing effectively on the ground, building a
strong ideological and practical base to take and sustain power. They have
demonstrated to me that my I should be conflicted over 'nodal
politics.' The conflict was from a nagging concern that my idealistic
notions would not lead to any wins, that the notion of a nodal politics
needed more, needed a practical dimension rooted in physical-world
political reality. So as other people are celebrating the Internet's
potential to further something called "democracy," I can only think that
we're fiddling while Rome burns. Saturday, December 07, 2002 TextArc  TextArc
is an application that arranges all the words from a given book or other
text on one page, and maps their relationships within the narrative. The
site includes examples using Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland.
[Link] Friday, December 06, 2002 Before the Web Before the Web is a site that's collecting stories about the genesis of today's Internet, before web technology was deployed in '92. There were plenty of interactive technologies at the time, though. They're looking for stories about videotext, teletext, database publishing, corporate email, BBS sysops, SIGs, chat, User Publishing, key-word search and conferencing before http/html, and before the Internet evolved from a limited-access r&d network to the pervasive, increasingly inclusive phenomenon we have today. [Link] Before the Web will help fill in the blanks, by providing a place for practitioners of the online services era to contribute anecdotes, stories, and recollections of first-time-ever events that illustrate what it was like to invent a new medium out of thin air. Karl Auerbach: ICANN is "Out of Control" The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, was created by a coalition of user communities to coordinate the standards for identifying locations on the network. The idea was that there had to be some central authority to ensure the integrity of domain name, ip numbering, and related systems. This is as close as the Internet has come to any kind of governance. ICANN included publicly elected members, one of which, Karl Auerbach, has been critical of the organization throughout his tenure. ICANN finally took action in response to his criticisms: they voted to dump the public members from the board, so Karl and others will be leaving soon. In this interview at oreilly.com, Karl summarizes his perspective on ICANN. (via boing boing). [Link] A lot of people look at the domain name system as equally in need of centralized control. They look at DNS and see there's a root on top and some number of names underneath and they say, "Whoa, we need an organization to manage that." From a technical point of view, that's completely untrue. The DNS is really an optional service on top of the basic functionality of the Internet. We could have many different versions of DNS. The only concern is they be consistent with one another. People have elevated this argument for consistency to the idea that we can only have one, catholic source of names. That's a leap of logic that does not exist in reality; nevertheless ICANN uses that leap to justify its existence. Copyright Info: |
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