net.wars

Everyone except James Allan scrabbled in the bag Joe DiVanna brought with him to the Digital Money Forum (my share: a well-rubbed 1908 copper penny). To be fair, Allan had already left by then. But even if he hadn't he'd have disdained the bag. I offered him my pocketful of medium-sized change and he looked as disgusted as if it were a handkerchief full of snot. That's what living without cash for two years will do to you.

Listen, buddy, like the great George Carlin said, your immune system needs practice.

People in developed countries talk a good game about doing away with cash in favor of credit cards, debit cards, and Oyster cards, but the reality, as Michael Salmony pointed out, is that 80 percent of payments in Europe are...cash. Cash seems free to consumers (where cards have clearer charges), but costs European banks €84 billion a year. Less visibly banks also benefit (when the shadow economy hoards high-value notes it's an interest-free loan), and governments profit from Seigniorage (when people buy but do not spend coins).

"Any survey about payment methods," Salmony said Wednesday, "reveals that in all categories cash is the preferred payment method." You can buy a carrot or a car; it costs you nothing directly; it's anonymous, fast, and efficient. "If you talk directly to supermarkets, they all agree that cash is brilliant - they have sorting machines, counting machines...It's optimized so well, much better than cards."

The "unbanked", of course, such as the London migrants Kavita Datta studies, have no other options. Talk about the digital divide, this is the digital money divide: the cashless society excludes people who can't show passports, can't prove their address, or are too poor to have anything to bank with.

"You can get a job without a visa, but not without a bank account," one migrant worker told her. Electronic payments, ain't they grand?

But go to Africa, Asia, or South America, and everything turns upside down. There, too, cash is king - but there, unlike here with banks and ATMs on every corner and a fully functioning system of credit cards and other substitutes, cash is a terrible burden. Of the 2.6 billion people living on less than $2 a day, said Ignacio Mas, fewer than 10 percent have access to formal financial services. Poor people do save, he said, but their lack of good options means they save in bad ways.

They may not have banks, but most do have mobile phones, and therefore digital money means no long multi-bus rides to pay bills. It means being able to send money home at low cost. It means saving money that can't be easily stolen. In Ghana 80 percent of the population have no access to financial services - but 80 percent are covered by MTN, which is partnering with the banks to fill the gap. In Pakistan, Tameer Microfinance Bank partnered with Telenor to launch Easy-Peisa, which did 150,000 transactions its first month and expects a million by December. One million people produce milk in Pakistan; Nestle pays them all painfully by check every month. The opportunity in these countries to leapfrog traditional banking and head into digital payments is staggering, and our banks won't even care. The average account balance of customers for Kenya's M-Pesa customers is...$3.

When we're not destroying our financial system, we have more choices. If we're going to replace cash, what do we replace it with and what do we need? Really smart people to figure out how to do it right - like Isaac Newton, said Thomas Levenson. (Really. Who knew Isaac Newton had a whole other life chasing counterfeiters?) Law and partnership protocols and banks to become service providers for peer-to-peer finance, said Chris Cook. "An iTunes moment," said Andrew Curry. The democratization of money, suggested conference organizer David Birch.

"If money is electronic and cashless, what difference does it make what currency we use?" Why not...kilowatt hours? You're always going to need to heat your house. Global warming doesn't mean never having to say you're cold.

Personally, I always thought that if our society completely collapsed, it would be an excellent idea to have a stash of cigarettes, chocolate, booze, and toilet paper. But these guys seemed more interested in the notion of Facebook units. Well, why not? A currency can be anything. Second Life has Linden dollars, and people sell virtual game world gold for real money on eBay.

I'd say for the same reason that most people still walk around with notes in their wallet and coins in their pocket: we need to take our increasing abstraction step by step. Many have failed with digital cash, despite excellent technology, because they asked people to put "real" money into strange units with no social meaning and no stored trust. Birch is right: storing value in an Oyster card is no different than storing value in Beenz. But if you say that money is now so abstract that it's a collective hallucination, then the corroborative details that give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing currency really matter.

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of the earlier columns in this series.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spotted: net.wars obsessing over Gossip Girl instead of diligently reading up on the state of the data retention directive's UK implementation.

It's the cell phones. The central conceit of the show and the books that inspired it is this: an unseen single-person Greek (voiced by Kristen Bell in a sort of cross between her character on Veronica Mars and Christina Ricci's cynical, manipulative trouble-maker in The Opposite of Sex) chorus of unknown identity publishes - to the Web and by blast to subscribers' cell phones - tips and rumors about "the scandalous lives of Manhattan's elite".

The Upper East Siders she? reports on are, of course, the private high school teens whose centrally planned destiny is to inherit their parents' wealth, power, social circles, and Ivy League educations. These are teens under acute pressure to perform as expected, and in between obsessing about whether they can get into Yale (played on-screen by Columbia), they blow off steam by throwing insanely expensive parties, drinking, sexing, and scheming. All, of course, in expensive designer clothes and bearing the most character and product-placement driven selection of phones ever seen on screen.

Most of the plots are, of course, nonsense. The New Yorker more or less hated it on sight. Also my first reaction: I went, not to the school the books' author, Cecily von Ziegesar, did, but to one in the same class 25 years earlier and then to an Ivy League school. One of my closest high school friends grew up in - and his parents still live at - the building the inhabited in the series by teen queen Blair Waldorf. So I can assess the show's unreality firsthand. So can lots of other New Yorkers who are equally obsessed with the show: the New York Magazine runs a hysterically funny reality index recap of each episode of "the Greatest Show of Our Time", followed by a recap of the many comments.

But we never had the phones! Pink and flip, slider and black, Blackberries, red, gold, and silver phones! Behind the trashy drama portraying the ultra rich as self-important, stressed-out, miserable, self-absorbed, and mean is a fictional exploration of what life is like under constant surveillance by your peers.

Over the year and a half of the show's run - SPOILER ALERT - all sorts of private secrets have been outed on Gossip Girl via importunate camera phone and text message. Serena is spotted buying a pregnancy test (causing panic in at least two households); four characters are revealed at a party full of agog subscribers to be linked by a half-sibling they didn't know they had until the blast went out; and of course everyone is photographed kissing (or worse) the wrong person at some point. Exposure via Gossip Girl is also handy for blackmail (Blair), pre-emption (Chuck), lovesick yearning (Dan), and outing his sister's gay boyfriend (Dan).

"If you're sending tips to Gossip Girl, you're in the game with the rest of us," Jenny tells Dan, who had assumed his own moral superiority.

A lot of privacy advocates express concern that today's "digital natives" don't care about privacy, or at least, don't understand the potential consequences to their future job and education prospects of the decisions they make when they post the intimate details of their lives online. In fact, when this generation grows up they'll all be in the same boat, exposure wise.. Both in reality and in this fiction, the case is as it's usually been, that teens don't fear each other; they collude as allies to exclude their parents. That trope, too, is perfectly played on the show when Blair (again!) gets rid of a sociopathic interloper by going over the garden wall and calling her parents. This is not the world of David Brin's The Transparent Society, after all; the teens surveille each other but catch adults only by accident, though they take full advantage when they do.

"Gossip Girl...is how we communicate," Blair says, trying to make one of her many vendettas seem normal.

Privacy advocates also often stress that surveillance chills spontaneous behaviour. Not here, or at least not yet. Instead, the characters manipulate and expose, then anguish when it happens to them. A few become inured.

Says Serena, trying to comfort Rachel Carr, the first teacher to be so exposed: "I've been on Gossip Girl plenty of times and for the worst things...eventually everyone forgets. The best thing to do with these things is nothing at all,"

Phones and Gossip Girl are not the only mechanisms by which the show's characters spy on and out each other. They use all the more traditional media, too - in-person interaction, mistaken identity (a masked ball!), rifling through each other's belongings, stolen phones, eavesdropping, accident, and, of course, the gossip pages of the New York press.

"It's anonymous, so no one really knows," Serena says, when asked who is behind the site. But she and all the others do know: the tips come from each other and from the nameless other students they ignore in the background. Gossip Girl merely forwards them, with commentary in her own style:

You know you love me.

XOXO,
Net.wars

Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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Back in 1975, the Ithaca, New York apartment building I was living in had a fire in the basement, and by the time it was out so was my telephone line. The repairman's very first move was to disconnect the $3 30-foot cable I had bought at K-Mart and confiscate it. At the time, AT&T's similar cable cost $25.

In fact, by then AT&T had no right to control what equipment you attached to your phone line because of the Carterfone case, in which the FCC ruled against AT&T's argument that it had to own all the equipment in order to ensure that the network would function properly. But this is how the telco world worked; in Edinburgh in 1983 legally you could only buy a modem from British Telecom. I think it cost about £300 – for 300 baud. Expensive enough that I didn't get online until 1990.

Stories like this are part of why the Internet developed the way it did: the pioneers were determined to avoid a situation where the Internet was controlled like this. In the early 1980s, when the first backbone was being build in the US to connect the five NSF-funded regional computing centers, the feeling was mutual. John Connolly, who wrote the checks for a lot of that work, told me in an interview in 1993 that they had endless meetings with the telcos trying to get them interested, but those companies just couldn't see that there was any money in the Internet.
Well, now here we are, and the Internet is chewing up the telcos' business models and creating havoc for the cable companies who were supposed to be the beneficiaries, and so it's not surprising that the telcos' one wish is to transform the Internet into something more closely approximating the controlled world they used to love.

Which is how we arrived at the issue known as network neutrality. This particular debate has been percolating in the US for at least a year now, and some discussion is beginning in the UK. This week, at a forum held in Westminster on the subject, Ofcom and the DTI said the existing regulatory framework was sufficient.

The basic issue is, of course, money. The traditional telcos are not, of course, having a very good time of things, and it was inevitable that it would occur to some bright CEO – it turned out to be the head of Verizon – that there ought to be some way of "monetizing" all those millions of people going to Google, Yahoo!, and the other top sites. Why not charge a fee to give priority service? That this would also allow the telcos to discriminate against competitor VOIP services and the cablecos (chiefly Comcast) to discrminate against competing online video services is also a plus. These proposals are opposed not only by the big sites in question but by the usual collection of Net rights organization, who tend to believe all sites were created equal – or should be.
Ofcom – and others I've talked to – believes that the situation in the UK is different, in part because although most of the nation's DSL service is provided either directly or indirectly by BT that company has to be cooperative with its competitors or face the threat of regulation. The EU, however, is beginning to take a greater interest in these matters, and has begun legal proceedings against Germany over a law exempting Deutsche Telecom from opening the local loop of its new VDSL network to competitors.

But Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia and author of Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World, has pointed out that the current debates are ignoring an important sector of the market: wireless. The mobile market is not now, nor ever has been, neutral. It is less closed in Europe, where you can at least buy a phone and stick any SIM in it; but in the US most phones are hardware-locked to their networks, a situation that could hardly be less consumer-friendly. Apple's new iPod, for example, will be available through only one carrier, AT&T Wireless.

Wu's paper, along with the so-called "Carterfone" decision that forced AT&T to stop confiscating people's phone cords, is cited by Skype in a petition to get the FCC to require mobile phone operators to allow software applications open access. Skype's gripe is easy to comprehend: it can't get its service onto mobile phones. The operators' lack of interest in opening their networks is also easy to comprehend: what consumer is going to call on their expensive tariffs if they can use the Internet data connection to make cheap ones? Wu also documents other cases of features that are added or subtracted according to the network operators' demands: call timers (missing), wi-fi (largely absent), and Bluetooth (often crippled in the US).

The upshot is that because the two markets – wireless phones and the Internet – have developed from opposite directions, we have two network neutrality debates, not one. The wonder is that it took us so long to notice.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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It's pretty. It's very pretty. But it isn't going to change the world, and worse, it has an ugly parent. Not Apple, *Cingular*.

Long-time readers of this column may remember the worst customer experience of my life as a prepaid customer of AT&T Wireless. That company was, sometime last year, subsumed into Cingular, which a few weeks ago announced we had to move to new Cingular accounts. And get new phones.

You could ask why: the old phones worked on GSM. Anyway, the good news was that the company was willing to transfer any outstanding account balance, which in my case was two refill cards I'd bought ("They'll always be good") on the advice of AT&T Wireless itself as a backup in case of refill troubles. I called them in. Balance never showed up. Phoned Cingular: "Those expired." She seemed surprised it didn't occur to me they would. The "special deal": $40 for the new phone and get some of it back as a rebate. If you want any other phone, you can pay "full retail".

"Can you see any reason why I shouldn't change supplier?" I asked the customer-we-don't-give-a-fuck representative. She told me to visit a corporate store and "maybe they can do something for you."
Cingular's parents, Bellsouth and AT&T, are getting married now – pieces of the pre-1984 AT&T are melting and running together like the frozen, shattered shards of the liquid metal man in Terminator 2. This time next year, Cingular will have been renamed…AT&T Wireless.

This is the company that Americans desiring to own an Apple iPhone (if it's called that, by then, given that within 24 hours Cisco had sued over the trademark) will have to sign up with for two years at a probable minimum of $80 a month. Ick. The US has gotten the consumer protection angle of the cell phone business half right by making phone numbers portable. It needs to do the other half to really open up the market: stop this silly business of locking customers and their phones to one service provider. (It's unknown how the iPhone will be marketed in Europe, where customers have more choice about which phone they want to use with which operator.)

So many mobile phones are sold every week that you don't need much of a percentage to sell a lot of units. But watching Jobs and the other demonstrators show off the new device makes you wonder about what demographic the idesigners were aiming at. At $599 for 8Gb with that two-year contract (more expensive than some widescreen laptops), it's expensive for anybody. Scrolling through contacts is likely to be too unwieldy for power users – it's quicker to type in a couple of letters once you get above a few hundred contacts. As Jack Schofield points out, many people prefer to operate their phones one-handed, which the iPhone doesn't seem designed for.

And what about text messaging? As bad as it is typing on a number pad, doing it on a soft keyboard on a touch screen with no tactile feedback has to be worse. The phone also looks useless without a headset and insufficiently protected against the abuse most phones go through. I also really wonder how the iPhone will hold up to the stickiness and mess that gets on people's fingers – it's one thing not to have to use a stylus, another not to have the option. CNet's Declan McCullough asked this same question and was told the screen is designed to be easy to clean and relatively resistant to smudges.

But these usability questions are essentially personal quibbles. People talk about the fashion consciousness that has Europeans changing phones every 18 months to get the latest, whizziest models (a market created, incidentally, by the fact that you can move your SIM to any unlocked phone at will). But they forget: underpinning that is the fact that the underlying technology has been changing so fast, in the last ten years going from analog to digital, adding GPRS, 3G, Bluetooth, audio, colour screens, memory, storage, cameras of increasing resolution, and wi-fi. People haven't been buying new phones just because this year's color is chartreuse. If there's a part of the market that's underserved, it's the people who want their phones to be just phones with buttons big enough for their fingers to push. The iPhone is too expensive to use for only 18 months; and yet it reportedly won't allow expansion to respond to new trends such as VoIP (perhaps a consequence of partnering with Cingular).

The bigger issue is the behind-the-scenes stuff that's much harder to demonstrate dramatically. Smartphones live and die by their ability to synchronize data; one of the most appealing factors about the Palm, even now, is that you can hook a blank device to your computer and five minutes later have all the data you had on your previous device. Similarly, the real innovation in the iPod was iTunes, the biggest differentiator between the iPod and the many perfectly adequate MP3 players that preceded it. From the sounds of it, the iPhone only rethinks the gadget, not the infrastructure. It isn't going to change the world. It isn't even, sadly, going to change AT&T-Cingular-AT&T.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. Readers are welcome to post here, at net.wars home, at her personal blog, or by email to netwars@skeptic.demon.co.uk (but please turn off HTML).

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