RE: His and Her Anarchies

"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
>Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues.

Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage
them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant way when
it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the
information flow of everyday life. The net is going to matter when I can rely on
it to store the information I now keep on disk, and the computer is a completely
transparent object. All the documents that are important to me are maintained by
the Net with sufficient reliability that I can unplug my computer and smash it
with a hammer without affecting anything.

Under this scenario, strong, reliable crypto becomes similar to electricity. The
entire infomration infrastructure is built on it, but hardly anyone gives it a
second thought.

What kind of people use the Net and what are their activities doing to the
country, the world, the culture? It may sound like a parochial issue that women
don't much like computers, but they don't, and the issue is a tremendously
important one. They're not attracted to this world, certainly not to the extent
that men are, and that's one of the reasons why it is such a spiritually
impoverished world. Most reasonable sophisticated men are happier in an
environment that included women. One of the problems with the computer society
is that not only is it an almost all-male society, but it's part of a little-boy
society, part of an ongoing infantilization of the society over the past half
century.

Excerpt from Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (HardWired 1996) where
David Gelernter, a Yale computer scientist, comments on the Web.

>This may sound sexist. But sexism, like other "isms," is often based
> on plain old truth, however politically incorrect it may be to some.

>--Tim May

Galileo, you must recant. You are in blatant disagreement with the truth.

Ciao,
James

At 12:50 PM -0500 11/11/96, jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:
>"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
>>Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues.
>
>Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can leverage
>them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a significant
>way when
>it relieves people of the burden of dealing with the garbage inherent in the
>information flow of everyday life. The net is going to matter when I can
>rely on

Well, in the 23 years I've been on the Net in one way or another, I can
honestly say it is _increased_ my exposure to garbage. The notion that
computers are time-savers is fraught with problems. For some tasks, it
clearly is.

But for other tasks and situations, it's a time sink. I view it primarily
as a communications mechanism, e.g., lists like this, the Web, news, etc.
Your mileage may vary.

Notions that computers will be widely accepted because of their
"time-saving" powers I file right next to claims that computers will be
useful for storing recipes and balancing checkbooks.

--Tim May


"The government announcement is disastrous," said Jim Bidzos,.."We warned IBM
that the National Security Agency would try to twist their technology."
[NYT, 1996-10-02]
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

Timothy C. May wrote:
> At 12:50 PM -0500 11/11/96, jbugden@smtplink.alis.ca wrote:
> >"Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net> wrote:
> >>Well, I think there clearly _is_ a gender gap on these sorts of issues.

> >Technologies that matter make daily life less obnoxious, and you can
> >leverage them all the time. The Net is going to start mattering in a
> >significant way when it relieves people of the burden of dealing with
> >the garbage inherent in the information flow of everyday life. The net
> >is going to matter when I can rely on

> Well, in the 23 years I've been on the Net in one way or another, I can
> honestly say it is _increased_ my exposure to garbage. The notion that
> computers are time-savers is fraught with problems. For some tasks, it
> clearly is.
> But for other tasks and situations, it's a time sink. I view it primarily
> as a communications mechanism, e.g., lists like this, the Web, news, etc.
> Your mileage may vary.
> Notions that computers will be widely accepted because of their
> "time-saving" powers I file right next to claims that computers will be
> useful for storing recipes and balancing checkbooks.

Huh?  Just this year, I wrote a letter to an insurance company about
some bozo who hit my car, and thought he'd get away with it.
The computer allowed me to keep re-editing the letter until it was
perfected, which task would have been not feasible or simply would not
have been done manually, for what should be obvious reasons.
I won my case, and the other guy is suffering those nasty payments...
I even beat the CHP on that one....

Three to four years ago, I used my computer to edit my cover letters and
resumes, to perfect them, to send out to hundreds of potential employers,
which resulted in my getting the exact job I wanted (which now pays very
well), in spite of the fact that I started looking in L.A. just when the
riots commenced, at the same time that tens of thousands of "technical"
people were laid off from various defense contractors.

Of course, I used my computers to perfect certain computer skills (for
which I never went to College) which landed me a whole series of nice
jobs from 1979 through 1992, but that doesn't count, right?

I hesitate to admit this, but the bottom line is that the computer is
a tool that can give one person an advantage over another, for which
messaging and communications is just incidental.  Since we are in fact
an animal predator (as humans), I don't think you have to have a whole
lot of imagination to understand where that goes...

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