I just realized that not only was the last known original copy of the Beowulf manuscript nearly destroyed by fire on October 23, 1781, but the fire was in a place called Ashburnham House.
Note to self: do not store tape backups or other media at the Meltfiremagnet Colo.
That was the title of one of my favorite books a long time ago, written by Will Cuppy. I was reminded of this kind of lighthearted zen theory of the world after I recently read a 2005 interview with Linus Torvalds:
I just don’t believe in dynasties. Things erode over time. Successes start to take themselves for granted, and the successful companies aren’t nimble and hungry enough any more.
In the tech market in particular, companies just don’t tend to stay on top forever — they become irrelevant either because of their own missteps or because their market just isn’t the “happening thing” any more. You can only skate the cutting edge for so long.
So the question is how the decline happens, and in what timeframe. Will open source be a factor? Almost certainly. Will it be the factor? I don’t know.
I understand this from a monolithic perspective, like how the human body ages, but what about rebirth or regeneration? Humans have certainly managed to extend their life expectancy, and the rate of successful birth is higher as well. So in the context of dynasties that use descent to survive, does open source accelerate the decline of a tech company, or alternatively does it allow it to extend its life through facilitating a less risky rebirth?
Tough questions, but Cuppy had some historical pointers in his book on how dynasties go awry:
Agrippina had long been a problem to Nero, always interfering as she did and quarreling about who should be murdered and who shouldn’t. (Ed. Note: Agrippina was Nero’s mother.) Since he owed her everything for murdering Claudius, he had hoped to kill her as gently as possible. He did not want her to suffer, and he went to some lengths to prevent it. He gave her quick poison three times without result, then fixed the ceiling of her bedroom so it would fall and crush her as she slept. Of course that didn’t work. It never does. Either the ceiling doesn’t fall or the victim sleeps on the sofa that night.
Next, he attempted to drown her by means of a boat with a collapsible bottom, but the vessel sank too slowly and she swam away like a mink. Nero then lost his head completely, as who wouldn’t, and told his freedman, Anicetus, to try anything. Anicetus, a rude but sensible fellow, went and got a club and beat her to death. Maybe the Cave Men knew best.
We cannot be sure how many others Nero murdered, since some of the stories are probably mere gossip. You know how it is. Once you kill a few people, you get a bad name. You’re blamed for every corpse that turns up for miles around and anything else that goes wrong.
Ah, Nero. Fiddling while Rome burned also probably hurt his legacy and chances to remain competitive, at least compared with those upstart civilizations who believed in lower margins for the ruling-class.
I noticed that several of the films vying for awards in Europe right now are about terrorism, detention and secret police:
But The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen ) managed to come on strong, winning the top prize and capturing two others: best actor for Ulrich Muehe and best screenwriter for director Florian Henckle von Donnersmark.
“It means a lot to me to get this award here, since my father was born in this country,” said von Donnersmarck.
The Lives of Others, set in 1984, explores the system of control imposed by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and the lives it destroyed. It follows a policeman who becomes immersed in the lives of a playwright and his girlfriend whom he is spying on.
Other films in contention included the British movie Road to Guantanamo directed by Michael Winterbottom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film about the IRA directed by Ken Loach.
But will they play in the US?
Bruce has a post called Forecasting Murderers, which has some insightful comments. Bruce himself says “Pretty scary stuff, as it gets into the realm of thoughtcrime.”
I was just reading an article by the BBC on a completely different project that seems to have a similar aim — forecasting psychopaths to figure out how to treat them or at least stop them before they can do harm.
The study monitored how the brain reacts when people see positive and negative expressions by others:
They can commit hideous crimes, such as rape or murder, yet show no signs of remorse or guilt.
It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lack empathy because they have defects in processing facial and vocal expressions of distress, such as fear and sadness, in others.
That reminds me of L’etranger (published in 1942) by Camus…or that line in Killing an Arab (released in 1979) by the Cure:
Staring down the barrel
At the arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound
If a tree in an unprotected forest falls and no environmentalists are around…
The impossible question appears to be, I guess, whether someone’s abnormal behavior should be treated in and of itself as a security threat, or if it reflects a different perspective that could offer meaningful keys to unlock the secrets in your own world; or balance of the two.
And on that note, I feel like mentioning that while Rumsfeld was terminated for being a horrible listener (among other things) President Bush’s nomination for a replacement appears to suffer from some of the same “deaf-reckoning”…
Mr. Ford, 85, who worked at the agency from 1950 until the early 1990s, said he remembered Mr. Gates exaggerating Soviet misdeeds around the world. “He painted a dire picture of increased Russian pressure on Iran when the people who followed that issue were telling me the exact opposite,� he said.
Melvin A. Goodman, a former Soviet analyst for the agency, said on Thursday that during the 1980s, Mr. Gates acted as a “filter” for intelligence, trimming findings on the Soviet threat to match the hard-line ideological expectations of his boss, William J. Casey, then the director of central intelligence.
[…]
The study, by Raymond L. Garthoff, a former diplomat and arms control expert, finds that analyses of the Soviet Union in the Mikhail Gorbachev years were often withheld from policy makers by Mr. Gates “because he held a different view.” The study continues: “That was his right. But it was regrettable because the C.I.A. analysis was far more correct than the view he had.â€?
Sounds familiar. Bush seems to really dislike bringing people into his administration who will let the facts breathe, so to speak. Or perhaps he seeks people without empathy? Gates’ appointment will probably end up demonstrating as fact, if successful, that Rumsfeld’s idiocracy was no abberation. The continuation of a military-industrial complex model is kept alive by this group of men who are considered loyalists to the Ford and Bush Sr. administrations. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave…