Jonathan Hitchcock - Vhata Vas Hyah

Yesterday, August 9th, was Women's Day, which is a public holiday in South Africa. I didn't do much at all, basically just sat around in my underwear all day.

I did get thrown out of a couple of places, though.

As anybody who has studied English literature can tell you, drama is created by conflict. Without conflict, there is no drama. You can't tell a story about everybody getting along just fine. Whether the conflict is external (between Romeo's family and Juliet's family in an endless feud) or internal (between Hamlet and himself, undecided over what the best course of action is), there must be conflict before anything meaningful can happen.

This is true everywhere, however, not just in literature. You need conflict in your life - the "battle" gives you a goal, something that defines your life. How do you know whether you are achieving anything? You examine your conflict, and see how close you are to winning. Without this conflict, every day is the same. A man who has no conflict is, to be frank, boring - nothing happens in his life, it's empty. You can't talk to him about anything.

Having thought about it, I think there are two types of people in this area. There are those that consider the conflict in their lives to be a free-for-all battle against the rest of the world: they are on one side, with their allies, and everybody else is on the other side. The other type consider the conflict to be between those in the right, and those in the wrong, good-vs-bad. This latter type sounds a little dangerous - very fundamentalist. Everybody always accuses the Americans of being of this sort: they think that they are in the right, and that their enemies are in the wrong, and they use this as a justification for their actions. However, I think that the Americans are more of the free-for-all type: they think that the other side is wrong because it's the other side. They will denounce you as being unprincipled and terrorist if you criticize them, because you criticized them. They see it in terms of us and them, and then apply their principles to the situation afterwards, in order to justify it. By contrast, the good-vs-bad type will identify the principles they believe in, and will then defend those principles. I personally identify more with this latter type - I think it is a good thing to formalise what you think is good, then to do your best to be on that side.

I'd like to apply this dichotomy in the way people view conflict to two areas: software, and personal relationships.

Open Source advocates, I think, tend to be in the good-vs-bad camp. While some simply see Open Source as more practical than the proprietary way, a lot of advocates will fervently believe that not only is it more practical, but it is somehow right. Software wants to be free! It's wrong to withhold your code! I am definitely in this camp - I unfortunately get quite rabid about some of these issues. But one thing I've noticed is that many Open Source advocates are also activists in many other areas. The Rhodes/RUCUS geeks are all fervent Open Source advocates, and many of them are working on projects to bring computers, technology and education to underprivileged schools. The TuxLab phenomenon is well known: people give up a day of their time to go out and install computers in rural schools. They do this because they feel that it is the right thing to do. They are more often than not activists in other areas, too: most commonly politically.

On the other hand, Microsoft supporters (supporters, mind, not just people who are just using their software) tend to see the world as an us-vs-them battle. They license their software because they want to make money. More often than not, they will see no problem with charging exorbitant prices, if people are willing to pay them. They write software for personal gain, not because it needs doing. I know I am generalising badly here, but there is a definite trend in that direction, even if it is not always the case.

In personal relationships, this idea of conflict also applies. There are those who think that Liebe ist Krieg - love is war. You have to play your cards right to get what you want. Don't tell the other person how you feel too much, or too early - you have to keep your cards hidden, so you can play trump cards later. I've often noticed a strange phenomenon: two people who seem very loving and caring one week, once they break up, are venomously hateful to each other the next week. Their friends badmouth the other person, they are catty and mean. How can you go out with somebody for so long, and then do a complete 180 degree turn? The fact is, they are treating it as an us-vs-them conflict. If the person is not on your side, then they're the enemy. This is why you play mind-games during the relationship: it's a battle.

On the other hand, some people see it as a good-vs-bad battle. You're trying to do the right thing. You're open and honest. You lay your cards on the table, and so on. You consider that the relationship is a good relationship, and that the two of you are good for each other. Thus, you do your best to make it work.

Normally, people that do this get absolutely shredded by everybody else.

Being an us-vs-them fighter is often better for one personally. You're fighting for yourself, with whoever happens to be allied with you. If they don't ally with you, they become the enemy, and you can fight them tooth and nail as well. Since the only real principle is alliance, you can use any means to fight, be it dirty or not. On the other hand, a good-vs-bad fighter does not choose his opponents, he chooses his principles. Anybody aligned with his principles is his ally, whether he likes it or not. He cannot choose his methods, either - he must fight for the principles without betraying them. This is probably why he gets screwed so badly half the time.

Having said all this, I can't really think why you'd want to be a good-vs-bad fighter any more. Except that I think it's the right thing to do. However, somebody who was only interested in what was going to be best for himself (possibly an us-vs-them fighter?) would not choose that way, since it's bound to lose. He'd say, screw which way is the best to choose, I'm going with the way that's a winner. In other words, whichever way you see conflict, you're not going to change, because of the way you see conflict.

I'm not sure if that's bad or good.

Guy (Taylor, not Halse) has already nabbed the Beatles lyric about monkeys, so I had to think up some other pun for the title of this entry. I haven't excelled myself, but it'll do.

On #crypt on the reaper.org SILC server, we're having our own version of celebrity deathmatch, as an indirect result of a challenge thrown at me to prove that one person was objectively more stupid than another (although my well known theory ("People Are Dof") has much supporting evidence) . Certain individuals on the channel have been chosen as monkeys, and Guy, Peter and I are their handlers, to see how they do. Think of it as a social experiment. Guy has posted the rules of the contest. Personally, I think my monkey, Patrick from XSInet, has it in the bag.

I don't drink Coca Cola, or eat McDonalds, and all that pinko-liberal leftie hippie longhair tree-hugging stuff. But it's not just because I think it's cool to strut around in tie-dye, and have nothing else to protest about. This post is an attempt to explain what the Corporation is, and why I think it is a Bad Thing.

The Corporation was actually illegal in England between 1720 and 1825 - the Bubble Act made them illegal, because they were just horribly prone to abuse. However, the Act was repealed in 1825, because the Corporation had become necessary during the Industrial Revolution. When people started on a business venture, they normally formed partnerships: two or three people put their money together to finance the new venture. However, it just wasn't possible for these people to raise the sort of capital needed to lay railway track right across a continent, or build huge factories. This is where the Corporation comes in. The idea of a corporation is that people buy shares: an effective way of getting a large number of people to put in their money. In this way, you can raise a much larger amount of money, and finance much bigger ventures. However, the new structure has some clear flaws. On the one hand, you have the managers of the company, who run it, but who have not actually put any money into it. On the other hand, you have the investors, who have put the money in, but do not take part in actually running the company. An important point is to note that the investors have limited liability: this means that they can't lose more than they put in - nobody will sell their house to get the company out of any debt it lands itself in. So, we have two parties: the managers who don't care because it's not their money, and the investors, who don't care because they are not liable if things do go down the creek.

Another problem comes in when mergers and acquisitions are allowed (they were not, at first - they're a terrible idea, and used to be illegal). Now, instead of having lots of smallish corporations, which can be watched and governed, you have an enormous monolithic corporation with hundreds of thousands of people involved. There is no way you can mobilise so many shareholders to try to influence the management of the company. With only twenty shareholders, you can threaten to cut off the money, and force the management to make decisions. With the company sizes we now have, this is just unfeasible - corporations buy each other out, and get larger and larger. To illustrate: there were 1800 corporations in America in 1898. Six years later, in 1904, they had been consolidated into 157. "In less than a decade, the U.S. economy had been transformed from one in which individually owned enterprises competed freely among themselves into one dominated by a relatively few huge corporations, each owned by many shareholders" (Joel Bakan).

The next step happened towards the end of the nineteenth century: the Corporation was reclassified as a legal entity. This means that, to all intents and purposes, according to the law, the Corporation was an actual person. This person could own property, sue people, be sued, and so on. To illustrate - the Supreme Court in America invoked the Fourteenth Amendment in 1886, to say that the Corporation had rights to "due process of law" and "equal protection of the laws". The Fourteenth Amendment was originally entrenched in the Constititution to protect newly freed slaves...

So, we have a legal entity that exists in perpetuity (Disney Corporation is still Disney Corporation even though none of the original employees or shareholders are still alive - the Corporation goes on, people come and go. It owns property, both material and intellectual, and it will continue to own it, long beyond a normal lifetime), which is made up of a bunch of people who really aren't responsible in any sense for what the corporation does.

This is where we get a bit philosophical. You may have read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. His basic argument is animals are driven by their DNA, and everything they do is essentially aimed at passing their genes on. In this way, an animal will appear to be acting irrationally when it starves itself to provide food for its offspring, or when it kills itself to defend them. However, these actions are perfectly rational when you consider that the goal is not self-preservation, but gene-preservation.
We have seen that a Corporation is an entity. I want to argue that it is more similar to DNA-based entities (such as humans) than is at first obvious. It clearly has no DNA driving it to reproduce - that is not what Corporations do. The "DNA" of a Corporation is money: its sole purpose is to make more money. That is what it is for, and every action it does will have the ultimate goal of making more money.

This is going to happen regardless of whether people want it to or not. I'm not saying that people are going to purposefully commit crimes to make money for the corporation. It will just happen. Think about it: if somebody in division A says to himself: "I had better not implement that policy, as it is ethically wrong, even though we'll lose money", his division will not do as well as it could have. At the end of the month, somewhere up the ladder, somebody is going to review the results, and notice that division A has not been doing as well as division B (with an unscrupulous manager). Just because of the numbers, division A will get dropped, and division B will get moved up. It's just a matter of economics. Corporations that sacrifice profits for principles will not do as well as other corporations.

Before I get accused of being overly negative: this Do-Everything-For-Profit thing is actually entrenched in the laws of America. In 1916, Henry Ford decided to cancel the dividend, and funnel the money back to the customers, and the product - he wanted to produce a better car, for a cheaper price. The Dodge brothers (two partners) took him to court, and won. Dodge vs Ford stands as precedent to this day: managers and directors have a legal duty to put shareholder's interests above all others, and no legal authority to serve any other interests. This is the "Best Interests of the Corporation" principle: everything should be done for the best interests of the corporation, and nothing else.

An even scarier legal case: on Christmas morning, in 1993, Patricia Andersen's car was rammed by a drunken driver, and exploded, severely burning her and her children. The findings later were that General Motors had intentionally moved the fuel tank closer to the axle, to cut costs. They realised that this could cause accidents, but they did a little sum: they estimated that there would be about 500 fatalities as a result of this change, and that each fatality would cost them about $200,000 in legal damages. They divided this by the 41 million GM vehicles in operation, and discovered that it would cost them $2.40 per car. However, the cost of ensuring that the fuel tank wasn't a risk was $8.59 per car. Therefore, in the full knowledge that deaths would result, they moved the fuel tank, because it was cost effective.
These sorts of actions are the direct results of an entity whose sole purpose is to make money. And since these entities are now so powerful that they control the government (Corporations are the only things rich enough to fund political campaigns), there is no way of getting rid of them.

Possibly more on this at another time.

Apologies for a seriously late post. Joburg was great, we didn't win, we didn't expect to, much fun was had by all.

LinuxWorld was great fun. I got to work at the Go:Opensource stand, doing my bit for Linux Advocacy, and earning myself a free geek t-shirt and a geek mug, and stuff. I also met Jon "Maddog" Hall, who was quite a character, as one would expect. One thing that did surprise me was the puppy-dog awe with which several of the other geeks (Rhodes ones specifically) treated him. I wouldn't say that I am a disrespectful person. I just give everybody the same amount of respect (where "everybody", of course, means "everybody, except children and women and foreigners and poor people and cripples and stupid people and the insane and black people and Jews and lawyers and gay people and criminals and people who like Westlife and the Dutch"). Maybe there's not enough to go round or something. I just didn't feel that anybody, no matter how famous, should be treated with such awe and trembling. He's just this guy, you know? A really nice guy, with some great stories, and a lot of experience and wisdom under his belt. But just a guy.

One upshot of going to Joburg is that I have been offered a job at OpenVoice. Which makes my life substantially more complicated.

I am heading up to Joburg tomorrow, for the prizegiving of the National Finals of the Innovation Fund. Together with Jason Penton and a chap from Fort Hare, I was on the team that won the regional competition last year, in Grahamstown. This qualified us to go up for the finals, which should be good. I get a free plane ticket there and back, and lodging in the City Lodge in Bryanston. I will also see all the RUCUS Linuxworld Geeks (who are, as I type this, out having beer with Jon "Maddog" Hall, no less), and I will get to spend the weekend with Tim and all the Family girls! Hurrah!

Back on Sunday afternoon.

In an effort to increase my blog's readership, I am going to Extreme Lengths. Charmaine says it's not interesting enough, because it doesn't have enough about her in it. So here is a post all about Charmaine. Isn't she photogenic?

Blog readership += 1.

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to South Africa first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the R.S.A.

Almost by Leonard Cohen

One of the first things anybody says when they find out that I've moved to Stellenbosch is "Oh, we must come do a wine route!". There are, indeed, a huge amount of wine farms in the area. Well, a week ago, when I went down to Capetown, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and invite everybody I saw to come do a wine route. The date set was this last weekend, Saturday the 23rd of April.

At one stage, the number of people coming reached seventeen, which worried me somewhat, but the final entrants were: the Morreira sisters (Shannon and Kirsten), Chris Robson, Pippa van Straaten, myself, Jeremy Alcock, and Cathy Irwin and a friend of hers joined us later. There was some strife about transport - Pippa lives on Robben Island, and it was not easy to get her out to Stellenbosch, but we managed in the end.

We visited L'Avenir, Muratie, and Uitkyk.

L'Avenir was pleasant, although Chris made the faux-pas of asking to taste the very same wine that he had just tasted - this lost us the good will of the helper, and she was rather cold to us after that. This did not affect Jeremy, who rather liked the Cabernet Sauvignon 2004, and desired to buy a bottle. He discovered that the wine had not been "released" (it's like being published, but it's not a book) yet. When he enquired, the manager came down and released the wine then and there - Jeremy bought the first bottle of the stuff! Oh, they also had dogs that looked like pigs and ate corks.

Muratie was fairly pleasant, it had a nice homely feel about it - it looked like they had specially trained spiders to spin the cobwebs to give it atmosphere. They had port as well (or "fortified wine"). We were quite disturbed when we got there to find a fowl (a pheasant or something? It was large and white. Could've just been a chicken, actually) lying on its back with feathers all around it, looking very unwell. We figured it had been mauled or something - not nice at all. We alerted the lad behind the counter, and he came out to see. After standing around it scratching his head for a bit, he prodded it with his foot, and then turned it over, so it wasn't lying on its back any more. At this stage, it ran off into the bushes looking ruffled. Apparently the dratted thing was merely drunk.

We moved on to Uitkyk, after a minor altercation about whether it was "Uitkyk" or "Uitkyks", which ended with Kirsten's map being torn. We tried hard to pay the lad behind the counter, but he kept dismissing us with waves of his hand. The wine was fairly nice, although we did have to endure a good seven minutes of organic chemistry when we asked about the taste. We finished with some brandy, and then thought we'd try Le Bonheur, but when we got there, it was shut. At this stage, we moved back into Stellenbosch, had some late lunch/early supper, and went out - Shannon was desperate to have a drink at the fabulously named Mystic Boer. After an enjoyable evening, we ended up back at my house, drinking hot toddies and watching Pink Floyd, and passing out on the floor.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, and we've all mumbled about doing it again Real Soon Now.

There has recently been a spate of comment/trackback spam on a lot of blogs - this is one of the main reasons why I upgraded serendipity not so long ago. The point of comment/trackback spam is that it adds a link on your page to somewhere else, via certain keywords. One of the most prolific spammers has consistently linked the words online poker to one of their own sites. What this means is that when you search google for those words, their site comes up first.

In what has been called vigilante justice by some, and democracy in action by others, the blogosphere have decided that enough is enough, and they are trying to googlebomb the words "online poker", to make them point to the wikipedia entry of the same name. The argument is that people who want to know about online poker will find the wikipedia entry much more useful than some spammers site. There are various arguments and counter-arguments (this will cause spammers to work even harder and cause even more damage; this is no better than the spammers themselves; etc). I am clearly in favour of the googlebomb. Maybe it's just peer pressure. I do know that I was incredibly annoyed by all the comment/trackback spam I got.

See Slashdot for more details.