When I was seven, my dad built me a bed, taking inspiration from a drawing in an old woodworking magazine, scavenging the wood, cutting it to fit the lean in the room. It had three drawers and cupboard space beneath for the games and toys and books I steadily acquired, as well as the growing pile of tapes for my ZX Spectrum.

Around the same time, he carved me a miniature cricket bat the length of my middle finger, notching a V, varnishing it, winding cotton for the handle grip. It’s a precious thing to me.

He has built sheds, paved patios, dug out ponds, knocked out walls, fit gas fires, tied flies — and that’s just in his spare time.

My dad is a maker.

In his twenties, my dad bought a tenor banjo. It’s a beautiful thing: ivory buttons, inlaid mother-of-pearl on the head and fretboard, vellum skin, a duster stuffed behind to keep down the volume. Looking online some years ago, I found a site devoted to vintage banjos, which told me a little about its age and history and the journey it had taken over nearly a century of existence. I told this to my dad, and he was thrilled; I printed out the pages and posted them, because computers remain a mystery to him.

Last year he told me that the screws from a couple of the tuners had broken; finding replacements was difficult, because that gauge wasn’t made any more in Britain. I registered at a banjo forum, asked for help, and within days a kind person from New York not only told me the gauge I needed, but sent a bag of screws that I posted on to my dad. They were a perfect fit. When I described how I got them, I might as well have been telling him that aliens landed in the garden and left them behind.

A couple of Christmases back, I called my parents, who were staying with my sister and her family. Could I speak to my dad, I asked? I’ll give him a shout, said my mother, but he’s been playing on the Wii with the kids from the moment they switched it on.

I finally spoke to him, surprised by what I’d heard. “Bloody marvellous, son.”

When I look at the iPad, I see something my dad could use without hand-holding to find the history of that banjo, to seek out those screws, to look at old video of Sonny Terry, to feed his glorious practical creativity, unencumbered by the need to learn the habits and quirks of computing, and not relying upon a transatlantic support department.

There’s a liberation in open things (and opening things) but there’s a far greater one in how things can open up people.

Thus danah at SXSW on Google Buzz and the current state of online privacy. (Update 2010-03-14: danah’s rough outline of her talk.)

I’d like to say that what I wrote back in 2007 is still relevant, but I’m not so sure, given that it’s based in part on what danah was saying in 2004, and goes back a lot further. All the think-pieces and keynotes and chin-scratching form a conversation that exists, for the most part, in parallel to the actual development process, the two only converging briefly in the aftermath of the latest fuck-up.

Whether it’s through the creeping featurism of Facebook or the impact crater left by yet another half-arsed Google project which treats people as inconveniently emotional data generators, I think it’s becoming clear that what’s possible from an engineering standpoint, given the available datasets and querying methods, pushes out the boundaries of what is considered socially appropriate in a post hoc fashion. The line for which Scott McNealy will be most remembered seemed absurdly arrogant back in the scrag-end days of cypherpunk; a decade on, Eric Schmidt says the same thing, follows it up with the Buzz debacle, and the comic response is tinged with bleak resignation.

The uncanniness of Buzz on launch, at least from my perspective, was that it summoned up how the world’s surveillance networks do their data profiling in buildings with blacked-out windows. The ‘you’ constructed for the benefit of the spooks is the algorithmic product of a group of programmers with time, data and processing power, but it’s no different in kind from the algorithmic product that is the ‘you’ of a credit report or a social networking profile or a straightforward web search. It’s not special any more; it just has heightened privileges.

Perhaps it’s time to accept a new set of base assumptions about online privacy: that coders set the rules, whether they know it or not; that most users accept the defaults, whether they ought to or not; that transgressions become norms, whether checked or not; and that those who research and advocate and educate will continue to fight the last battle, while those with the power to implement their advice most directly will ignore it until shamed into acting.

The alternative? Get over it, and work out what comes next.

(h/t to Matt Locke)

At times it feels as if the internet can be analogised to anything and everything. Perhaps we should dive right in and treat it as a microcosm of the entire grand sweep of human civilisation, albeit one that’s moving at a fair clip.

It has a prehistory. At times, it feels as if we know more about Sappho or the Hittites or the people who built Stonehenge than the earliest years of the internet, of 1980s Usenet, of the web before Brewster Kahle started taking snapshots.

It has an ancient history. There are fragments that trigger memories: old Mosaic hotlists, preserved like the foundations of abandoned settlements, their datestamps testifying to when their users decamped to Netscape; ancient ‘home pages’, not just the ones abandoned on the soon-to-be-condemned Geocities, but also those surviving only in forgotten backups on degrading floppies and CD-Rs, or stored locally on thousands of hard drives to be copied across in every upgrade, because it’s easier than choosing what to delete.

As Phil says, the desire to dispose of such run-down properties, even as print-media institutions digitise their archives, disrupts the basic understanding of how we got here. When history is so compressed, the distinction between antiquated and antique is blurred; as someone raised in a Victorian industrial town who spent a decade in a mediaeval university city, I’m all too aware of how the demolition of an Edwardian building means something different depending upon the age of its surroundings.

On the other hand, for those of us who remember a time when all the links were dark blue, there’s always been a tacit understanding that the archives won’t suffice, and that we can’t be sure that a link or a post or an entire online community will be there when we look for it again. Instead, we absorb what we can, record what we can, then recapitulate and reiterate what we value, as best we can. There may be tools to help us, but their own fragility shows that what matters is our capacity to preserve and perpetuate an oral culture of the digital world.

It has a social history. If 4chan were to shut down tomorrow, what would someone be able to say about it in 20 years’ time? Archive.org is locked out (not that it would make a difference) and the site preserves nothing but its most recent past. Inbound links rot like dead trout washed up on the lakeside. There are Wikipedia summaries, ancillary archives, spoors of memes scattered across countless sites. But the best way to know what 4chan was and did would be to ask those who participated.

A history that’s not just in living memory but only really in living memory is one that is always potentially challengeable because it’s inherently subjective. At the same time, a history without archives is formative in ways that one with a coherent, authoritative narrative can never quite be. The people who remember the internet before it was archived are working from a kind of muscle memory that defines what they do, because once they stop doing it, it vanishes. It pushes those who lived it into a position of constant low-level advocacy of how their particular understanding of the past shapes the present and future. It encourages the formation of communities that amplify and elaborate those narratives, sharing the collective load of memory, and passing on wisdom to those who weren’t there to bear witness.

(What can the dynamics of online communities suggest to us about the early history of religions, and the blurry boundaries between praxis, doctrine and scripture?)

This is where I have problems with those who claim that the web in its current incarnation is changing our intellectual habits (or even rewiring our brains) and substituting the practice of looking-stuff-up for independent thought. The modern reference book is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the encyclopaedic impulse was itself a product of a culture where the breadth of expanding knowledge surpassed the individual capacity of even the greatest polymaths.

For every nostalgic bemoaner of a time when schoolchildren knew poems and Shakespeare soliloquys and Latin orations and the Bible by heart, there are hundreds and thousands of people that have internalised the narratives and cultural norms and vernaculars of their particular corners of the online world. They preserve them as best they can, perhaps without even knowing that’s what they’re doing, but in the understanding that no archives may be kept, no histories written, and that what sustains their digital lives is the lived-out, written-down, spoken word.