Journal tags: knowledge

I love it when I come across some bit of CSS I’ve never heard of before.

Take this article on the text-emphasis property.

“The what property?”, I hear you ask. That was my reaction too. But look, it’s totally a thing.

Or take this article by David Bushell called CSS Button Styles You Might Not Know.

Sure enough, halfway through the article David starts talking about styling the button in an input type="file” using the ::file-selector-button pseudo-element:

All modern browsers support it. I had no idea myself until recently.

He’s right!

Then I remembered that I’ve got a file upload input in the form I use for posting my notes here on adactio.com (in case I want to add a photo). I immediately opened up my style sheet, eager to use this new-to-me bit of CSS.

I found the bit where I style buttons and this is the selector I saw:

button,
input[type="submit"],
::file-selector-button

Huh. I guess I did know about that pseudo-element after all. Clearly the knowledge exited my brain shortly afterwards.

There’s that tautological cryptic saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” But I don’t even know what I do know!

There’s a repeated catchphrase used throughout Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet: ignorance is our ammunition.

There are certainly situations where knowledge is regrettable. The somewhat-silly thought experiment of Roko’s basilisk is one example. Once you have knowledge of it, you can’t un-know it, and so you become complicit.

Or, to use another example, I think it was Jason who told me that if you want to make someone’s life miserable, just teach them about typography. Then they’ll see all the terrible kerning out there in the world and they won’t be able to un-see it.

I sometimes wish I could un-learn all I’ve learned about cryptobollocks (I realise that the term “cryptocurrency” is the more widely-used phrase, but it’s so inaccurate I’d rather use a clearer term).

I sometimes wish I could go back to having the same understanding of cryptobollocks as most people: some weird new-fangled technology thing that has something to do with “the blockchain.”

But I delved too deep. I wanted to figure out why seemingly-smart people were getting breathlessly excited about something that sounds fairly ludicrous. Yet the more I learned, the more ludicrous it became. Bitcoin and its ilk are even worse than the occassional headlines and horror stories would have you believe.

As Jules says:

The reason I have such a visceral reaction to crypto projects isn’t just that they’re irresponsibly designed and usually don’t achieve what they promise. It’s also that the thing they promise sounds like a fucking nightmare.

Or, as Simon responded to someone wondering why there was so much crypto hate:

We hate it because we understand it.

I have yet to encounter a crypto project that isn’t a Ponzi scheme. I don’t mean like a Ponzi scheme. I mean they’re literally Ponzi schemes: zero-sum racing to the bottom built entirely on the greater fool theory. The only difference between traditional Ponzi schemes and those built on crypto is that crypto isn’t regulated. Yet.

I recently read The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel with the collapse of a Ponzi scheme at its heart. In the aftermath of the scheme’s collapse, there are inevitable questions like “How could you not know?” The narrator answers that question:

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Clearleft recently took on a project that involves cryptobollocks. Just to be clear, the client is not a fly-by-night crypto startup. This is an established financial institution. It’s not like Mike’s shocking decision to join Kraken of all places.

But in some ways, the fact that this is a respected company almost makes it worse. It legitimises cryptobollocks. It makes it more likely for “regular” folk to get involved (and scammed).

Every Thursday we have an end-of-week meeting and get a summary of how various projects are going. Every time there’s an update about the cryptobollocks project, my heart sinks. By all accounts, the project is going well. That means smart and talented people are using the power of design to make the world a little bit worse.

What will the metrics of success be for this project? Will success be measured by an increase in the amount of Bitcoin trading? I find it hard to see how that can possibly be called successful.

And I haven’t even mentioned the environmental impact of proof-of-work.

Right now, Clearleft is in the process of trying to become a B corp. It’s a long process that involves a lot of box-ticking to demonstrate a genuine care for the environment. There’s no checkbox about cryptobollocks. And yet the fact that we might enable even a few transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain makes a complete mockery of all of our sustainability initiatives.

This is why I wish I could un-know what I know. I wish I could just hear the project updates and say, “Crypto? Don’t know much about it.” But I can’t.

For seventeen years, I’ve felt nothing but pride in the work that Clearleft has done. I’d happily talk about any one of the case studies we’ve worked on. Even on projects that didn’t pan out as expected, or that had all sorts of tricky complications, the work has always been second-to-none. To quote the Agile prime directive:

Everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Now, for the first time, I can’t get past that phrase “what they knew at the time.” On the one hand, I’m sure that when they started this project, none of my colleagues knew quite how damaging cryptobollocks is. On the other hand, the longer the project goes on, the harder it is to maintain that position.

It’s possible to both know and not know something.

This is a no-win situation. If the project goes badly, that’s not good for Clearleft or the client. But if the project goes well, that’s not good for the world.

There’s probably not much I can do about this particular project at this point. But I can at least try to make sure that Clearleft doesn’t take on work like this again.

It feels a little strange to refer to Going Offline as “my” book. I may have written most of the words in it, but it was only thanks to the work of others that they ended up being the right words in the right order in the right format.

I’ve included acknowledgements in the book, but I thought it would be good to reproduce them here in the form of hypertext…

Everyone should experience the joy of working with Katel LeDû and Lisa Maria Martin. From the first discussions right up until the final last-minute tweaks, they were unflaggingly fun to collaborate with. Thank you, Katel, for turning my idea into reality. Thank you, Lisa Maria, for turning my initial mush of words into a far more coherent mush of words.

Jake Archibald and Amber Wilson were the best of technical editors. Jake literally wrote the spec on service workers so I knew I could rely on him to let me know whenever I made any factual missteps. Meanwhile Amber kept me on the straight and narrow, letting me know whenever the writing was becoming unclear. Thank you both for being so generous with your time.

Thanks to my fellow Clearlefty Danielle Huntrods for giving me feedback as the book developed.

Finally, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has ever taken the time to write on their website about their experiences with service workers. Lyza Gardner, Ire Aderinokun, Una Kravets, Mariko Kosaka, Jason Grigsby, Ethan Marcotte, Mike Riethmuller, and others inspired me with their generosity. Thank you to everyone who’s making the web better through such kind acts of openness. To quote the original motto of the World Wide Web project, let’s share what we know.

There is much hand-wringing in the media about the impending death of journalism, usually blamed on the rise of the web or more specifically bloggers. I’m sympathetic to their plight, but sometimes journalists are their own worst enemy, especially when they publish badly-researched articles that fuel moral panic with little regard for facts (if you’ve ever been in a newspaper article yourself, you’ll know that you’re lucky if they manage to spell your name right).

Exhibit A: an article published in The Guardian called How I became a Foursquare cyberstalker. Actually, the article isn’t nearly as bad as the comments, which take ignorance and narrow-mindedness to a new level.

Fortunately Ben is on hand to set the record straight. He wrote Concerning Foursquare and communicating privacy. Far from being a lesser form of writing, this blog post is more accurate than the article it is referencing, helping to balance the situation with a different perspective …and a nice big dollop of facts and research. Ben is actually quite kind to The Guardian article but, in my opinion, his own piece is more interesting and thoughtful.

Exhibit B: an article by Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times called The Web Means the End of Forgetting. That’s a bold title. It’s also completely unsupported by the contents of the article. The article contains anecdotes about people getting into trouble about something they put on the web, and—even though the consequences for that action played out in the present—he talks about the permanent memory bank of the Web and writes:

The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities.

Bollocks. Or, to use the terminology of Wikipedia, citation needed.

Scott Rosenberg provides the necessary slapdown, asking Does the Web remember too much — or too little?:

Rosen presents his premise — that information once posted to the Web is permanent and indelible — as a given. But it’s highly debatable. In the near future, we are, I’d argue, far more likely to find ourselves trying to cope with the opposite problem: the Web “forgets” far too easily.

Exactly! I get irate whenever I hear the truism that the web never forgets presented without any supporting data. It’s right up there with eskimos have fifty words for snow and people in the middle ages thought that the world was flat. These falsehoods are irritating at best. At worst, as is the case with the myth of the never-forgetting web, the lie is downright dangerous. As Rosenberg puts it:

I’m a lot less worried about the Web that never forgets than I am about the Web that can’t remember.

That’s a real problem. And yet there’s no moral panic about the very real threat that, once digitised, our culture could be in more danger of being destroyed. I guess that story doesn’t sell papers.

This problem has a number of thorns. At the most basic level, there’s the issue of link rot. I love the fact that the web makes it so easy for people to publish anything they want. I love that anybody else can easily link to what has been published. I hope that the people doing the publishing consider the commitment they are making by putting a linkable resource on the web.

As I’ve said before, a big part of this problem lies with the DNS system:

Domain names aren’t bought, they are rented. Nobody owns domain names, except ICANN.

I’m not saying that we should ditch domain names. But there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that thinks about domain names in time periods as short as a year or two.

Then there’s the fact that so much of our data is entrusted to third-party sites. There’s no guarantee that those third-party sites give a rat’s ass about the long-term future of our data. Quite the opposite. The callous destruction of Geocities by Yahoo is a testament to how little our hopes and dreams mean to a company concerned with the bottom line.

We can host our own data but that isn’t quite as easy as it should be. And even with the best of intentions, it’s possible to have the canonical copies wiped from the web by accident. I’m very happy to see services like Vaultpress come on the scene:

Your WordPress site or blog is your connection to the world. But hosting issues, server errors, and hackers can wipe out in seconds what took years to build. VaultPress is here to protect what’s most important to you.

The Internet Archive is also doing a great job but Brewster Kahle shouldn’t have to shoulder the entire burden. Dave Winer has written about the idea of future-safe archives:

We need one or more institutions that can manage electronic trusts over very long periods of time.

The institutions need to be long-lived and have the technical know-how to manage static archives. The organizations should need the service themselves, so they would be likely to advance the art over time. And the cost should be minimized, so that the most people could do it.

The Library of Congress has its Digital Preservation effort. Dan Gillmor reports on the recent three-day gathering of the institution’s partners:

It’s what my technology friends call a non-trivial task, for all kinds of technical, social and legal reasons. But it’s about as important for our future as anything I can imagine. We are creating vast amounts of information, and a lot of it is not just worth preserving but downright essential to save.

There’s an even longer-term problem with digital preservation. The very formats that we use to store our most treasured memories can become obsolete over time. This goes to the very heart of why standards such as HTML—the format I’m betting on—are so important.

Mark Pilgrim wrote about the problem of format obsolescence back in 2006. I found his experiences echoed more recently by Paul Glister, author of the superb Centauri Dreams, one of my favourite websites. He usually concerns himself with challenges on an even longer timescale, like the construction of a feasible means of interstellar travel but he gives a welcome long zoom perspective on digital preservation in Burying the Digital Genome, pointing to a project called PLANETS: Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services.

Their plan involves the storage, not just of data, but of data formats such as JPEG and PDF: the equivalent of a Rosetta stone for our current age. A box containing format-decoding documentation has been buried in a bunker under the Swiss Alps. That’s a good start.

David Eagleman recently gave a talk for The Long Now Foundation entitled Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization. Step two is Don’t lose things:

As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, “knowledge is hard won but easily lost.”

I’m worried that we’re spending less and less time thinking about the long-term future of our data, our culture, and ultimately, our civilisation. Currently we are preoccupied with the real-time web: Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook …all services concerned with what’s happening right here, right now. The Long Now Foundation and Tau Zero Foundation offer a much-needed sense of perspective.

As with that other great challenge of our time—the alteration of our biosphere through climate change—the first step to confronting the destruction of our collective digital knowledge must be to think in terms greater than the local and the present.