eon

angel.mp3

Robert Darnton on Rhetorical Poker and the future of research library

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The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books
“I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.”
(tags: internet information tech books digital culture library history)

I used to be a newspaper reporter myself. I got my basic training as a college kid covering police headquarters in Newark in 1959. Although I had worked on school newspapers, I did not know what news was—that is, what events would make a story and what combination of words would make it into print after passing muster with the night city editor. When events reached headquarters, they normally took the form of “squeal sheets” or typed reports of calls received at the central switchboard. Squeal sheets concerned everything from stray dogs to murders, and they accumulated at a rate of a dozen every half hour. My job was to collect them from a lieutenant on the second floor, go through them for anything that might be news, and announce the potential news to the veteran reporters from a dozen papers playing poker in the press room on the ground floor. The poker game acted as a filter for the news. One of the reporters would say if something I selected would be worth checking out. I did the checking, usually by phone calls to key offices like the homicide squad. If the information was good enough, I would tell the poker game, whose members would phone it in to their city desks. But it had to be really good—that is, what ordinary people would consider bad—to warrant interrupting the never-ending game. Poker was everyone’s main interest—everyone but me: I could not afford to play (cards cost a dollar ante, a lot of money in those days), and I needed to develop a nose for news.

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the Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford. By digitizing the correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson—about two hundred volumes in superb, scholarly editions —it will, in effect, recreate the transatlantic republic of letters from the eighteenth century. The letters of many other philosophers, from Locke and Bayle to Bentham and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, will be integrated into this database, so that scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment.

what of the enlightenment of the internet.
what should a great research library archive?

i want to thank everybody for coming here today and especially the people who were here from the beginning

eric wiseman
tom smuts
dave marglin
jon zittrain
john perry barlow
larry lessig
alex and wendy
myles berkman
fern and eric saltzman

we are here to talk about the future of the net.

my vision of the future of the net is the same as the vision i enunciated ten years ago.

cyberspace is an integrated media realm of stories told and shared by digitally connected and enabled hearts and minds.
WE are the Future of the Internet. We have good stories to live and to tell.
let us make our stories represent our values of
open code
open access
open talk
open education
let’s bridge the digital divide
let’s build the commons of the net

To the Honorable Deval Patrick
Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

Dear Deval:

Who Wrote Your Casino Bill?

Your Casino Bill tries to make playing poker online a CRIME! You threaten people like me with two years imprisonment and $25,000 fine. A disgraceful federal law passed without democratic process as a rider to a port security bill already criminalizes payment companies for processing bets. But even that misguided law stops short of criminalizing online poker players.

Since November 2007 when you offered up your casino bill I have been trying to determine who or what the force is behind the criminalization provision. I spoke with your spokesperson on the casino bill. He surprised me by being completely unaware of the criminalization provision. Obviously to him this was not something high on your agenda.

Word in the poker community was that lawyers for Sands Casinos in Las Vegas had contributed to the crafting of the casino bill. And indeed I had seen Sheldon Adelson, the powerful chairman of Sands, present and in the flesh at the State Legislature’s December 18 hearing on the bill. So I wrote him a letter and asked him directly: do you support the criminalization provision? Did you help write it? To my delighted surprise, on March 6th he replied to my letter disavowing any involvement in or support of the provision. He offered to help “encourage its separation from the bill.” So it seems not to be the casino interests who stand behind the criminalization provision.

With Mr. Adelson’s letter, I have gained an ally. But I have not solved the puzzle. In the meantime, Kyle Sullivan, your press secretary, accused me in public print of being “ill informed” about the bill. So I wrote him and said, “As one who is well informed, would you please clarify who wrote the bill and how the criminalization provision got in there?” There’s been no reply as yet.

I keep sending letters – to Daniel O’Connell in the Office of Economic Development, to John Hall the president of Suffolk Downs, which is the State’s largest race track, to George Carney, who owns the dog track in Raynham. I will keep writing letters and pressing the issue until I get an answer.

Who wrote the bill’s provision trying to make playing online poker a crime? Do you stand behind it now?

Sincerely

Forwarded conversation

————————

From: John Palfrey
Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 5:53 PM
To: Staff List , faculty , Berkman Fellows
Cc: Tim Wu

Hi all:

Best,
John

–
John Palfrey
e: jpalfrey @law.harvard.edu
p: 617-384-9132
w: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/

———-
From: William Fisher
Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 6:00 PM
To: John Palfrey
Cc: Staff List , faculty, Berkman Fellows, Tim Wu

I want to add my thanks to John’s. It was an extraordinary event –
probably the best governmental hearing I’ve ever attended. The
combination of excellent panels and the freewheeling questioning by
the commissioners was very informative. Thanks to all for putting it
together — so well and so fast.

Terry

———-
From: Yochai Benkler
Date: Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 6:59 PM
To: faculty @eon
Cc: John Palfrey, Staff List, faculty, Berkman Fellows, Tim Wu

Just to add my thanks. It was extraordinary to see how seamlessley this all
went, and with what enormous turnout (including what seemed to be the Comcast Cheerleaders Brigade…) and crisp conversation.

———-

From: John Palfrey
Date: Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 7:36 AM
To: Staff , faculty , Fellows

From our friend Tim Wu:
w: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/

—–Original Message—–
From: Tim Wu

Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:32:39
To:John Palfrey
Cc:Staff List ,faculty ,Berkman Fellows
Subject: Re: FCC event today

John,

TW

Tim Wu
wu @pobox.com

–
when appropriate (in my judgment) to an open project and not sensitive (in my judgment) in terms of privacy, i may post email to my blog. all privacy requests respected.

A presumption of liberty
Give me liberty or give me death
Live free or die
Liberty
This is what America is supposed to be about
This is the original understanding

Common sense in common wealth
An equilibrium reached by men who had achieved personal liberty and saw the benefits of sharing in community
Framing a constitution to capture in words the very best of their intelligence expressing all that’s good in life in common without sacrificing their essential personal liberty
Freedom
Freedom with responsibility makes common sense

What do we human have in common
I say common sense

Imagine ourselves as free men and women who sit together to decide what is best for us in common

Common sense says we agree first and foremost that we will not give up what is most precious to us. liberty. At the least we can agree to maintain a presumption of liberty as we thrust ourselves forward into the developing thicket of statutory Law. Understand, we are gathering to create a government which will make statutes. Statutes are made by men for citizens to follow, not to lead. Can we agree then that as we go forward into the thicket of the statutes our government will generate in our future that we proceed with a presumption of liberty against arbitrary override by whim special interest reflected in exercise of legislative and executive power.

Let us articulate as best WE can this presumption in broad strokes of freedom of religion and speech and trial by jury drawn from among us, expressing our underlying commitment to liberty in our own fundamental rules here to be made. Let us leave a presumption of liberty to the future to stand as a beacon above all other presumptions our government may make after this one. This is our foundation and our goal, our original understanding and our polestar to wisdom in the future.

The essential constitutional role of the american jury is to preserve our liberty. To perform this function the jury must be informed of its function, its power, and its responsibility.

the judiciary quite rightly presumes reason and requires only rationality in legislative statutes which do not tread on explicitly articulated constitutional rights. to do otherwise would assert judicial prerogative into legislative sphere.

this means that the judiciary provides no check on legislative statutes which though rational lack wisdom yet are backed by special interest. such statutes intrude upon the liberty of citizens in a manner which the authority of judges does not check. the check for that abuse of citizen liberty in our constitutional system is trial by jury.

A JURY OF OUR PEERS
a jury of our peers was to have been our protection, the gateway through which legislative edict would have to march before taking a citizen’s liberty away.

from the vantage of the people, and the subset of us which is the jury in a criminal case, our trial system frames a question to us which we answer with our verdict. the indictment frames a question in terms of the violation of a statute.

what is the question to which we want an answer before we see a man’s liberty taken away

is it:
(a) did he violate a legislative statute
(b) did he do something covered by a legislative statute that is wrong
(c) did he do something wrong

balance is the essence of our constitutional ideal

a massachusetts referendum asserts the legality of possession of small amounts of marijuana
this is an assertion of legality
we the people are the keepers of our liberty
we the people decide whether the legalisms of the law intrude too deeply upon us

we need neither judges and nor legal training to tell us that our liberty is infringed by arbitrary law

this is not a judgment that requires legal education
all the logic of education is on the other side
on this side is the justice in our hearts

it requires our willingness to speak truth from the justice in our hearts

verdict - speak truth - guilty or not guilty