Free - as in mind

Thursday 12th November 2009

An outfit called MacHeist is running an interesting promotion with, as I write, just nine hours to go. The pitch is six applications for your Apple Mac, applications 'worth' $154, for... well, for no money at all. What they say is 'for free'. But I don't think that's right.

When they've run this sort of thing before, there's always been a cash price. So far I've never jumped in.

My best guess about my own motives used to be this: I was holding back because although the price was low, it was still not low enough, it still exceeded the value I put on owning any one of the applications in the bundle. Just to be clear, each time around there has been at least one application that I really thought I liked the look of.

Well I think my best guess about my own motives was just wrong. Because I'm still not jumping in.

So here's what I have got out of MacHeist this time around: a clearer insight into why even free - as in no cash cost - is too high a price for me.

It's the same when the pizza chain guy comes to the door with this no strings money off voucher scheme - and there's "no commitment" and "if you do it even once you'll save money". I say no. The hidden cost is stuff in my head, clogging up my decision making processes, in a way that I just don't want. When I'm trying to decide who to order my carry out from, I don't want marginal cash savings to run interference with my choosing style. I don't want, say, to be steered to pizza rather than curry just because, in a moment of weakness, I picked up some voucher.

So if I am going to install a new application on my computer then, again, I want the right values to inform that decision making. Is the application going to make my time at the screen better or worse, more elegant or more like using a scratchy biro? And, in any case, do I want to be making decisions about that right now, on the seller's schedule and not mine.

Well, I could just sign up, get the goods and then, at a time of my choosing, evaluate the new applications along with other potential candidates. Couldn't I? I could just take the pizza voucher and only spring it after I had decided that, tonight, yes, I do want pizza. Couldn't I? Well, maybe you could. I know what I'm like when I let this kind of stuff get in my head. If I've invested a bit, I feel some sort of obtuse obligation to follow through. And then I've given away a bit of my mind to pizza guy, sold a bit of my soul to software seller.

These sales folk are smart and creative. For some people they are offering a great deal. But I'm not biting. Not at zero cash cost and, hey, not even if you paid me.

© Matthew Elton 2009

Micro Men - stirring memories...

Thursday 8th October 2009

I've just finished watching the BBC drama 'Micro Men' on BBC Four. It's a strange thing to see a drama in which many of the events and characters are familiar on a personal level. I worked for both Clive Sinclair and Hermann Hauser in the late 80s and early 90s, two of the most prominent characters portrayed in the show. I knew of, but did not know personally, the third key character, Chris Curry.

My contact with Clive was limited, though I used to see him about the office when I worked on the Z88 project . His right hand technical man, Jim Westwood, was someone I had daily contact with for several months. For the purposes of drama, he was portrayed as shy and retiring. He was, in some ways, a gentle man. But the drama completely failed to capture his powerful personality which included occasional moments of fierce anger. As in the show, there was a lot of swearing, but it was by no means limited only to Clive. It was the first time in my life that I'd witnessed grown ups really swear. It was exciting, as well as a little scary.

Sadly, the show missed the depth with which engineering ran right through Jim's very being. I remember a particular occasion where I had some very elaborate theories as to why my prototype Z88 model might be misbehaving. Jim, always methodical, thought first about power. He had me investigate the batteries by rubbing their ends gently on some clean white paper, revealing tell tale black marks. Jim's hardware was fine. Slightly greasy batteries were the source of intermittent power. For me, it was an early real world example of how experience can trump quick thinking. I'm not sure I wholly absorbed the lesson at the time, but the memory stays with me.

At one point in the show Hermann says 'I'll make the tea'. In the early days of the Active Book Company, based then in the Market Square in Cambridge, I remember a particularly hot day. Hermann bought the whole team cornettos. In one way, we knew it was a calculated gesture, an act carefully designed to raise morale. But in another way, it was quite genuine. He was happy to do this small thing for us, knowing that he couldn't, at that point in time, do anything more to move the project forward in a technical way. And, given who we were and what we were doing, we rather respected the calculated gesture. It was like a well thought out program, designed to achieve a specific effect. It worked.

Hermann made you believe in the project and he oozed a sense of vision. He didn't always say much, but I always had a sense of him thinking big, thinking beyond the details. He was confident in himself, to be sure. But my experience was that he made me and all my colleagues feel confident, he helped us believe that we were really good and could could achieve the goal. In the case of the Active Book, it was too much. We were trying to make Objective Oriented Programming (then we used Smalltalk), now common place, work on hardware that just didn't have the grunt. A short lived skunk project to rewrite all the software in C never quite came off. But the vision was always fantastic. It was a privilege and a delight to work on the Active Book project. Or it was, until the directors decide to sell up and move on. With the advent of the iPhone, the hardware has caught up with the vision. That was the kind of product we were shooting for.

The BBC film mixed drama with historical footage including stills of computer magazines that I remember buying at WH Smiths and poring over for hours. The pub in which the characters met, the Baron of Beef, was once run by the father of a school friend. I went to parties there as small child and, later, as a teenager, drank the occasional pint.

Watching the film, I grew nostalgic for the friends and colleagues that were not portrayed. Paul Bond, the big brain behind the Z88 and the Active Book, was a mentor and a role model for the late teenage me. He once took me flying in his Cessna. As exciting as that was, and it was exciting, the battle to break his software and to persuade him to accept some of my user interface ideas, was even more exhilarating. With a bigger canvas, Paul would have been at the edge of this drama. As would, I suspect, Eric the wireman, who shocked me with his homophobia at an age where I lacked the confidence to protest and, indeed, in an age where such protest was much more of a challenge. Perhaps further out of this drama's brief, not least because further forward in time, I thought of other good friends, such as Jamie, whose Scottishness seemed so exotic to me then, and Martin, with whom I shared Thatcher's passing - a delight for me and a disappointment for him. Most of all, the show made me remember how exciting it was to be making new things. And, of course, it still is.

© Matthew Elton 2009

Review: On the Internet by Hubert Dreyfus.

Sometime back in 2003...

This book is a brilliant polemic targeted at those who would promote the internet as a tool for the social good and, indeed, a tool for expanding the possibilities of being human. While there are ways in which the internet can allow us to overcome geographical and bodily impediments, for Dreyfus there is, ultimately, something corrupting and possible incoherent about abandoning our identity as embodied agents. Physically being in the same space as another human being not only brings a richness of detail that 'virtual presence' cannot achieve, it also brings with it a sense of engagement, of relevance, and risk, that is integral to genuine human-to-human engagement.

Dreyfus addresses a range of topics. He writes about the ultimate poverty of internet search engines, stressing that search in the absence of understanding will always have severe limits, limits we should not allow ourselves to forget. And he writes about how the idea of trust, interconnected with the idea of risk, must inevitably wither in situation in which human beings are only virtually, as opposed to actually, present to one another. But for me, the two most exciting targets concern education and public debate.

Distance learning is widely hailed as a means of broadening access and lowering education costs. Dreyfus is clear that much can be achieved in this way, but argues that it can only take us so far, and, indeed, only a little further than more conventional methods, such as reading books or watching instructional videos. For all that you might receive personalised feedback via email, there is something critical missing in the learning experience. Both learners and teachers need to see each other exercise and explore their expertise. To learn you need to try out your understanding or your skill, and run the risk of embarrassment when things go awry. When it comes to achieving expertise and mastery, the actual co-presence of teacher and learner, far from being some accidental feature of learning, is essential to it.

For Dreyfus, far from being a tool of democracy, the internet encourages the sort of communication that threatens to undermine clear, effective, and responsible social thinking. Dreyfus here draws on the work of the nineteenth century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Writing about the increasing power of the press, Kierkegaard feared the creation of a 'world in which everyone had an opinion about and commented on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and without having or wanting any responsibility'. Arguably Kierkegaard overplayed his case, and under-estimated both the positive power of the press and the responsibility that some sections of it are prepared to take. But Dreyfus shows convincingly that Kierkegaard's critical analysis fits perfectly the world of internet chat-rooms and newsgroups. Participation in such forums can be addictive, but it is, ultimately, a failure to engage. Moreover, because, as is true, what is said in such a forum really does not matter, and because if you get bored you can simply walk (virtually) away, it can encourage us to think that this is what human engagement is really about, and thus lead us towards nihilism. All very dramatic, you might say. But Dreyfus makes a compelling, and at times, quite chilling case.

Dreyfus mixes common-sense with sociological research, and makes obscure philosophers--Heidegger is invited to the party along with Kierkegaard--address some very contemporary issues with impressive clarity. And he gets us to think deeply about the internet, and to think about it in relation to deep and perennial questions about who we are and how we live. But, remarkably, he achieves all this in a short and highly readable volume.

© Matthew Elton 2003