Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Objectivist Guide to Parenting

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Let’s suppose you’re a good Randian, an objectivist, live your life in the cause of reason–and you end up with kids? *Atlas Shrugged* provides no guidance, at least not until your children are old enough to change the world with their entrepreneurial spirit.

What you need, obviously, is an *Objectivist Guide to Parenting*, right? Trouble is, there’s no such thing. But there might soon be. At least that was the discussion happening a row in front of me at an event I attended today.

(And, yes, I’m aware that passing along overheard conversations can be kind of uncool, but this was a great one, I won’t mention names or affiliations, and, besides, they were speaking relatively loudly in an auditorium. So, for any proceeding uncouthness, I can ask only that you forgive me.)

Back to the Randian tots: The discussion was about the glaring omission of a guide, the unstated desire of objectivists parents everywhere, and what the book might include. My first thought was “horrors unending,” but I imagine the discussants were more sympathetic to the moral teachings of Ayn than I. Anyway, among the suggestions was that strict property rights be assigned in *every* item in the house. That Optimus Prime action figure belongs to Billy, while the jar of mayonnaise is clearly mom’s.

So far, so good. You see, the problem with non-objectivists is that they so often indoctrinate their children into the dogma of *sharing*. This is irrational. A good objectivist kid doesn’t share, he barters. He exchanges. He *trades*.

And this is exactly what the guide would demand, these two Randians seemed to agree. If Billy wants mayo on his ham sandwich, he needs to be willing to give mom that Optimus Prime. Or some such thing. And if Jenny wants to use Billy’s crayons, she must trade him two of her colored pencils.

To me–a classical liberal but not objectivist parent–the idea of a free market and property rights in the accoutrements of the home sounds not rational but *exhausting*. But it must work, because it is the system one of the speakers practices. (I can only imagine how endearing this must be for his children’s school teachers.)

Still, I welcome the eventual emergence of the *Objectivist Guide to Parenting*. It sounds like a thrilling read.

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Why There's No Camera on the iPad (hint: because it would suck)

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Nobody wants to take photographs on their iPad. In fact, the only reason to have a camera on the device—a front-facing camera, specifically—is for video chat. Apple knows this, and they know video chat on an iPad would be an awesome, the-future-has-arrived feature.

So why isn’t it included? The simple answer is because Apple doesn’t want its customers using features that suck.

Video chat means using the iPad’s network connection to simultaneously upload and download large amounts of data at a constant rate for the duration of the conversation. The iPad has two ways of doing this, 3G and wifi, and both fail to function to Apple’s standards of user experience when it comes to video chat.

Sending live video over AT&T’s notoriously bad 3G network sounds painful. And even if Apple switched to a more reliable carrier, 3G lacks the bandwidth to transmit and receive beautiful, high resolution, 1024-by-768 video. Apple would rather not have you chatting than have to suffer through blocky visuals like it’s 1998 all over again.

Wifi can handle necessary the bandwidth, true, but it eats battery life like nothing else. If you’re going to chat with grandma and grandpa from the comfort of your couch, you want to do it leisurely. You don’t want to have it cut out after half an hour.

It was because 3G is too slow for great, Apple-quality video and wifi is a battery hog that Steve Jobs nixed the camera and its primary app. This is a bummer for all of us hoping to use our iPads as magical communication devices straight out of Hollywood fantasies, but it’d also be a bummer to have that magic ruined by the limits of existing tech. Apple, unlike so many other companies, would rather not do a feature than do it and have it suck.

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Why DRM eBooks Aren't That Big of a Deal

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If you [listen to Cory Doctorow](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html), ebooks wrapped in DRM are an evil plot by Lemurians and the Gnomes of Zurich to plant blasting caps about the ankles of western civilization. He may be right. But what I want to assert—and what seems so *uncouth* to say on the open culture Internet, especially [coming from the mouth of a fiction writer](http://www.aaronrosspowell.com/thehole)—is that it doesn’t matter very much. DRM, in books, isn’t a big deal.

Let’s start with one vision of how people interact with books. This is the romantic vision, where a book is a loved member of the family, an intellectual artifact to be turned to again and again, passed down to children and grandchildren, and eventually bequeathed to a library for the enjoyment of our eventual flying-car-piloting, vat-grown-beef-eating descendants. This vision sees books as icons, as treasures. It doesn’t limit this to the physical objects. With an ebook, there is no physical book, just electric stuff floating in physical stuff and made manifest via screen technology stuff. But what matters to the romantic vision is the *idea* of the book, and that idea is bound to no particular medium.

But most people—or, at least, most people so far as they relate to most of the books they read—aren’t romantics. Instead, they adopt what might be called a pragmatic vision of readership. These are the people who buy the latest Alex Cross novel, read it on the airplane, the subway, and for a couple of hours before bed, finish it in a week, and then either stick the paperback on a shelf, sell it to a used bookstore, or just throw it away. Their interest is not in perpetual ownership of artifacts but in consuming—and hopefully enjoying—a story. That done, they move on to another James Patterson or John Grisham or Dan Brown. While I don’t have the numbers to support this, I’d comfortably bet that far more books are bought in furtherance of the pragmatic vision than the romantic.

And here’s where we get back to those evil Lemurians and Gnomes. Pragmatic folks have no real reason to care about DRM. So long as the Lincoln Rhyme thriller they bought on Sunday lasts on their reading device to last until they finish it on Thursday, then their entire library of old ebooks of suspense yarns and spaceship adventures can vanish in an epic corporate dustup and they simply have *no reason to care.* Why? Because the pragmatic readers have gotten everything out of each book they want to get at the moment they turn that last page.

In fact, the whole of the romantic crusade against DRM is based upon the (likely mistaken) assumption that most of us want to do things with our books after we’ve finished reading them. We want to lend them to friends or we want to share them with our children. No matter what, say the romantics, we most assuredly do not want to *lose* them.

But the romantics are wrong, and the reason they’re wrong is that they’re still thinking of books as moderately expensive physical objects instead of the fleeting packets of entertainment most of them are. To see how strange this view is, think for a moment not about books but DVDs. You don’t see campaigns on the Internet calling the Netflix empire evil because its customers don’t get to keep the third disc of the first season of The Office they watched over the weekend. We don’t think of TV shows or movies that way because services like Netflix have brought the marginal cost of consuming them happily close to zero. We don’t complain that we can’t give that DVD away to a friend, because we give away recommendation instead—and let our friend check out The Office themselves, on their own Netflix account. With ebooks driving the cost of books down, giving away a recommendation begins to look every much like giving away a book.

The romantics don’t see it this way. With books, they overvalue ownership because books are special. Books are creamy paper between beautiful covers, with a magical smell and that exquisite texture of print under the pad of the thumb. So *not owning* them sounds abhorrent, even downright uncivilized.

And I agree with them. For some books. I love my set of first editions of James Ellroy. I cherish my hundred year old, leather bound complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. I’ll read both to my daughter at bedtime, when she’s old enough and if my wife lets me. But most books, to me, aren’t James Ellroy and they aren’t Edgar Allan Poe. Most books I consume are just that: consumed, enjoyed, and set aside or thrown out or sold. For *those* books, I needn’t worry about the plug being pulled by the DRM provider and I needn’t worry about being locked into a particular device. I can read each in the moment and then move onto the next.

Digital rights managed ebooks will eventually fade away, just as digital rights managed music has. But the fact that we must deal with DRM today shouldn’t be the enormous, hyperbolic, tinfoil hat concern it has become. Rather, we should see DRM as the sugar making the move to ebooks more palatable for publishers and authors, and the move to ebooks as a phenomenal, revolutionary development that will lower the costs of reading, bring more authors to more readers, and grow the field of books like nothing since the printing press. DRM, simply put, just isn’t that big of a deal.

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