Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2003
First essay. I want to like David Weinberger. He's popular, he's influential, and he's obviously smart, witty, and downright nice. If only he would stop writing things that make me grit my teeth.
In The Cluetrain Manifesto, Weinberger set my teeth grinding with his insistence that the fundamental unit of life is the group and that individual human beings only have meaning or worth as members. Now, I suspect that he realizes that this is not the case: He regards it as a useful fiction, and offers it up as one of several Lies to Live By. Personally, I think that valuing bloodless abstractions above flesh-and-blood humans is both antihuman and dangerous, and I said so in a previous column.
In Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus Publishing, 2002; ISBN 0-7382-0850-7), he's at it again. Here are the ideas we need to abandon, according to the doctrine of Weinberger:
He is only suggesting that we jettison these truths and live by lies on the Web, as I understand him. He's not talking about "real" life. The Web is a new world that we are creating, Weinberger says. Why not make up better rules than those we live by in the "real" one?
That's a fascinating idea, but when we can't settle on rules for running a mailing list, is it likely that we will all agree on a single set of values for all cyberspace? And if so, is it likely that the values we'd choose would be these upside-down ones that Weinberger is pushing?
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Weinberger, an ex-professor of philosophy, is merely espousing a more nuanced humanism than I can grasp. And maybe a marketing consultant is the right sort of person to articulate the moral code of cyberspace.
Or maybe not.
Second essay. I want to like Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It purports to present "a unified theory of the Web." I don't know if it succeeds in that, but here's an example of why it fails to win me over: In an attempt, I think, to justify the questionable notion that group communication on the Web is more important than one-to-one communication, Weinberger quotes from an interview he conducted with legendary computer-scientist David Reed. The interview can be found at http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-jan19-01.html#reed. "About seven years ago," Weinberger writes, "David [Reed] was explaining Metcalfe's Law [which states that the value of a communications system grows as the square of the number of users of the system] to a skeptical engineer. She understood that the value of the telephone network, measured in potential numbers to call, increases as the square of the number of users. But she pointed out that the number of calls each person makes every day doesn't increase every time a new person joins the network. In fact, the number of calls each of us makes per day probably remains pretty steady as new people join the system. Therefore, she reasoned, the value measured in the total number of calls increases one-to-one with the increase in the number of users..."
Well, she may claim to understand Metcalfe's Law, but she obviously doesn't. By her logic, tin cans and a wire between two houses would be as valuable as the entire telephone system to the occupants of those houses, because they could make just as many calls on the cans.
In the actual interview, Reed points out her error. In the abbreviated version Weinberger presents in the book, he has Reed appear to offer an explanation of Reed's own Law—which extends Metcalfe's Law to include multiparty connections—as an answer to the befuddled engineer. Reed's anecdote is twisted beyond recognition to make Weinberger's point.
But I'm probably making too much of this. David Reed, offered a chance to comment on an early draft of the book, only corrected Weinberger's math. Why is it that philosophers are so often bad at math? And what does that say about their ability at logic?
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com