The Nicomachean Ethics (First Impressions)

As part of my reintroduction to academic life, I'm going to take a class at the UW this quarter on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. The class hasn't started yet, and I'm not even sure if I'll be able to get in, as I'm a non-matriculated student and they get bumped to the end of the line. Still, I figured that no time spent reading Aristotle is wasted, so I picked up the Loeb edition off of Amazon, and it arrived yesterday. After Caedmon went to bed last night, I spent most of the evening reading.

It's really my first time trying to read classical (Attic) Greek, and as you'd expect, it's slow going, even with Rackham's English translation sitting on the right-hand side of every page. Aristotle's vocabulary differs significantly from the New Testament, and forms like the optative, which have almost no representation in the New Testament, show up on every page. In addition, Aristotle is very compact. Most of the time, Rackham's translation is almost more of a paraphrase – it makes specific interpretational decision by specifying subjects and objects which are merely implied in the original. For instance, at one point, Aristotle writes "εἰ δὲ πλείω, ταῦτα" (1097a), literally, "but if multiple, these". Rackham expands those four words to fifteen: "or if there be several such ends, the sum of these will be the Good."

Rackham's work represents a great deal of scholarship and study, and for a translation made in 1923, it's surprisingly easy to read. But to my surprise, there were occasions when I found the Greek easier, or at least, significantly illuminating. For instance, Rackham has a particularly dense translation of 1096a.20:

But Good is predicated alike in the Categories of Substance, of Quality, and of Relation; yet the Absolute, or Substance, is prior in nature to the Relative, which seems to be a sort of offshoot or 'accident' of Substance; so that there cannot be a common Idea corresponding to the absolutely good and the relatively good.

All the talk about "categories" of "substance", "quality" and "relation" are technical philosophical terms, and if you're not familiar with the whole history of discussion about these things, it's not entirely clear what they are. But Aristotle doesn't actually use these technical terms:

τὸ δ᾽ ἀγαθὸν λέγεται καὶ ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι καὶ ἐν τῷ ποιῷ καὶ ἐν τῷ πρός τι, τὸ δὲ καθ᾽ αὑτὸ καὶ ἡ οὐσία πρότερον τῇ φύσει τοῦ πρός τι （παραφυάδι γὰρ τοῦτ᾽ ἔοικε καὶ συμβεβηκότι τοῦ ὄντος）: ὥστ᾽ οὐκ ἂν εἴη κοινή τις ἐπὶ τούτοις ἰδέα.

A less philosophical but equally faithful translation might read:

But people use the word 'good' both when they're referring to what something is, what sort of thing it is, and what it's connected with. (Of course, the fact that something exists is prior to what it's connected to – something has a connection to other things only after it already exists.) But the net result is that there's no common idea sitting behind all these different ways we use the word 'good'.

My guess is that there's a medieval Latin translation of Aristotle lurking somewhere in the back of Rackham's mind, which keeps whispering words like substantia to him every other sentence or so.

Coding as Subcreation

In my last post, I mentioned the connection which both Lewis and Tolkien drew between magic and technology, based on Tolkien's distinction between Enchantment and Magic.

Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and speculator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practiced, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills. ("On Fairy Stories", p. 73)

Modern programming languages, I would say, seem to sit on the border between enchantment and magic, desire and control. The world in which programmers live is somewhere in-between the Primary and a Secondary world. On the one hand, writing code does impact on the primary world in ways that The Lord of the Rings does not. Software very nearly always attempts to control something, whether words or messages or advertisements, and in this sense it is more like Magic. The primary goal of software is generally neither beauty nor the arousal of Desire. As any commercial developer can tell you, most software is not all that beautiful and most features, it turns out, are not desired.

That said, there are important ways in which coding is closer to Enchantment than Magic. Like Tolkien's own fantasies, code is a world accessed entirely through language, and like a work of literature, it depends on its reception and use by a third party for its impact. Composing a page in HTML is a little like writing a poem and having the images appear in front of you; but it's even more like writing a poem and having the images appear in front of the poem's reader.

With the example of HTML, another similarity between enchantment and coding arises. While coding is not usually primarily focused on beauty, beauty is nevertheless an important part of a programmer's world. Sometimes this is only in the sense that a functional user interface should have something of elegance and simplicity to it. But sometimes, the code itself (not just the user interface it creates) can achieve an elegance of form which is reminiscent of Heidegger's description of a Greek temple.

The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. ("Poetry, Language, Thought", p. 42).

This may seem an exaggeration, but the comparison is apt in several ways. Good code has good architecture: like a Greek temple, it solves recurring problems in classic ways. But good code not only solves problems, it makes clear for the first time what the problem actually is. When someone asks you to create an application to solve a problem for them, it's normal that they don't really understand what they want. They know that they have a problem, but they can't define it clearly. It's only through the course of building the application, showing it to the person who requested it, receiving feedback, and finally in giving them what they wanted but never quite asked for, that it becomes clear what the problem actually was. Heidegger nods at this process when he says that "τεχνη is a mode of αληθευειν" – technology is a way of being truthful. "It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another" (The Question Concerning Technology, p. 13).

I should note, finally, that even Tolkien harbored some hope that the Enchantment which underwrote his subcreational art might eventually find expression in the Primary World. In his delightfully poignant allegorical short story "Leaf by Niggle", he describes what the reader must imagine is Tolkien's own life. Niggle, an artist with troublesome neighbors and unwelcome responsibilities, has a vision of a leaf, and tries to paint it, but soon discovers that this leaf is connected to a tree, and this tree to other trees. Before Niggle has managed to get more than a middling start on his painting, he's called on a journey, and through a sort of purgatory, eventually finds fulfillment in helping his troublesome neighbors. When Niggle is finally released from this purgatorial convalescence, he discovers, to his amazement and delight, that the leaf – and tree – and forest – and mountains – that he had only barely glimpsed in his painting, had achieved a reality of place and beauty beyond his imaginations. "Niggle's Parish," it was eventually called, and as the "Second Voice" in the story remarks, "It is splendid for convalescence; and not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains."

I don't know that the beauty or the truth of code will ever be useful, or very useful, as an introduction to the Mountains: its beauty and truth are more akin to physics than to literature. But all grace is gift, and the gifts of grace have been received in stranger ways.

Subcreation vs. Cocreation

As I've been walking through my books on technology lately, I've periodically run into the phrase "co-creation". I'm not entirely sure where this phrase comes from, but I've heard it associated with Philip Hefner and his work on a theology of technology. It's showed up in other places like this post from pomomusings, and this dissertation from John J. Hardt.

I haven't yet read anything by Hefner (though I'm confident I'll be doing so), but my very initial take is that co-creation is the wrong description for how our work fits in with God's work. Whether you're a Calvinist, an Arminian or a Pelagian, clearly there's some sense in which we cooperate with God. The real issue is how we describe that cooperation and how appropriate and helpful those descriptions are. The image suggested by "co-creation" is that we are somehow standing next to God, on more-or-less the same terms, and helping God in His work. (I'm not sure that this is the direction Hefner takes it, but it seems implied by the prefix.) From my theological perspective, that image leads in exactly the wrong direction. Indeed, it seems awkwardly close to the sort of "secular theologies" that I've never bothered to take seriously, because, well, they're so damned silly. Among other things, the image of "co-creation" fails to distinguish between the Hebrew words ברא (bara') and אשה ('asah): the first is used in the Old Testament exclusively for the divine ex nihilo and is used only with a divine subject; the second is closer to "forming", and can be used with either a divine or a human subject. To co-create seems almost pantheistic: it implies that God is dependent on human action, and when He acts, His actions are in some fashion parallel or coordinate with ours, rather than on a totally different level.

My preference is for the term "subcreation", which has its origins in J. R. R. Tolkien's writings. He describes it, for instance, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories":

[When an author creates a believable world] what really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (p. 60)

The idea that a human could be a "subcreator" was exceedingly important to Tolkien, and significantly influenced his understanding of the relationship between God and human culture. In his poem "Mythopoeia" (addressed to a still unconverted C. S. Lewis), Tolkien writes:

Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
Through whom is splintered from a single White
To many hues, and endlessly combined
In living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
And sowed the seeds of dragons – 'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
We make still by the law in which we're made.

In other words, because human beings are created in the image of a Creator, they have the right and the desire to create "Secondary Worlds", worlds which exist first in our minds and then in our art. We have used this right sometimes badly and sometimes well, but either way, it remains our birthright: "We make still by the law in which we're made." Even in Paradise, when the Iron Crown has been disenthroned:

Be sure they still will make, not being dead,
And poets shall have flames upon their head,
And harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
There each shall choose for ever from the All.

It is (fallen and unfallen) human nature to make, to create things. But any human act of creation (אשה) takes place using delegated authority, it takes place under God, not alongside God.

This leads to two key differences between Tokien's idea of "subcreation" and my understanding of how "cocreation" has been interpreted.

The first is that subcreation "chooses for ever from the All". In other words, humans can never create ex nihilo. Even in Paradise, we will create by selecting and choosing from "the All", from God. Just as the fairy-tale creator selects images and themes from "the Great Cauldron of Story" ("On Fair Stories", p. 54), so all human creation is, at some level, only a rearrangement of existing material or existing ideas. Both our right to create, and the materials of our creation, are provided by God. We do not stand next to God and create, but work under him, under his authority. Nor is what we create at the same level as God's creation. His work is to create the Primary World; to the extent that our work approaches creation and not merely formation, our right and responsibility is to create Secondary Worlds.

The second difference turns on the distinction Tolkien makes between Magic and Enchantment. Magic, Tolkien says, is based on the desire for power and control: it is "self-centred power which is the mark of the mere Magician." As Lewis puts it in The Abolition of Man, "For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating the dead" (p. 84). It is Magic in this sense which, I think Tolkien would say, sits behind the "cocreational" justification of technology. In contrast, the true mark of subcreation is Enchantment, which is about desire and not control. "In this world it is for men unsatisfiable, and so imperishable. Uncorrupted it does not seek delusion, nor bewitchment and domination; it seeks shared enrichment, partners in making and delight, not slaves" (p. 74).

Are Computers Things or Devices?

In his book Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann makes a crucial distinction between "things" and "devices". A thing, he says, is an object which exercises a "commanding presence": it is to some extent an end in itself and it requires an active and skilled response from us. A device, in contrast, is disposable, in the sense that it's irrelevant that the object be this object, and hence is valued primarily for instrumental purposes. "A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption" (Power Failure, p. 31). Borgmann would call the piano in our living room a thing, and the entertainment center in our family room a device.

I would add to this that the same object can be a device or a thing depending on how you treat it. To take one example, sometime around 1930, my grandfather ordered a fly rod from Sears and Roebuck. He kept that same rod, fished with it, repaired it, and tended to it for nearly 80 years. He recently donated it to my father for his "museum", the (large) room in my parents' house which my Dad uses to celebrate the material culture of his youth. My Dad mounted it on a background of black velvet, and surrounded it with pictures from the 1940's featuring that same fly rod.

In contrast, when my brother and I wanted to go fishing, Keith had his assistant buy four or five fishing poles and some gear, and had them sent up to his cabin. When we arrived, we took the wrapping off a couple of them, strung them up, strapped them onto our four-wheelers and took off; when we returned, we threw the two we'd used back on the same shelf where the other two (still in their wrappers) were sitting, and have never looked at them again.

Clearly, my grandfather's fly rod was a thing, and my brother's fishing poles were devices. I suppose you could argue that my grandfather, in attaching such importance to his fly rod, was more materialistic than my brother and I, who clearly attached no particular importance to ours. If so, it's a sort of materialism that is higher and not lower, more ethical and not less, closer to the divine stewardship we are supposed to exercise over the world. As C. S. Lewis says, it's possible to be below certain temptations.

But I got to wondering where computers fit on this spectrum between things and devices.

Of course, there are many people for whom computers are simply devices. They use a computer because it lets them send and receive emails, or check Facebook, or update their blog. Their computer has no commanding presence, and only instrumental value.

But there are many other people who see their computer as something completely different – the sort of people referenced in this xkcd cartoon, for instance:

There are many people for whom computers (and associated technologies) call forth precisely the sort of active, learned, practiced response that Borgmann associates with things. The open source movement can succeed only because there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who attach the same emotional value to their work on, say, the Linux kernel, as Yitzhak Perlman attaches to his Stradivarius. Some people, of course, create web sites only to make money, but many others do it out of a labor of love, for the sheer beauty of the thing (here, for instance). I don't know any programmers who write code for a living only because it's the easiest way for them to make money. Nearly all of them love the art of coding, read books about programming in their spare time, and engage in extensive arguments about the best way to architect a system. These debates are disparagingly termed "religious arguments", but I think the description is telling: programmers find a meaning and significance in their code that goes beyond its instrumental value.

In his computer software engineering classic The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks writes:

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and re-work, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures . . . Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

The typical explanation for why programmers fall in love with computers is control: geeks like to code because it allows them to inhabit a world without contingency. There may be something to that, but I think there's something more going on as well. Nothing human is that one-sided, and coding is clearly a human activity. Going with Fred Brooks, I think programming is better understood as another exercise of the imago dei, an attempt at subcreation by creatures made in the image of a Creator.

“…an account of…”

I received my MA in Theology from Fuller in 1992, and I've been formally involved in academic study only peripherally over the 16 succeeding years. Since I've jumped back into reading more theology lately, I've noticed a particular phrase that keeps showing up: "an account of". I don't recall this being nearly as widespread back in the early 90's, so I'm wondering where it's come from, and why it's achieved such ubiquity. I don't recall that Calvin, for instance, ever self-consciously gave "an account" of anything – and for that matter, I don't recall that more recent folks like Pannenberg or Barth used the phrase anything like as extensively as it's used today.

To give you just one example, in the 21 pages of chapter 11 of Hauerwas' The State of the University (2007), the word "account" shows up some 36 times, in settings like:

Will what I have to say about "the secular intellectual world" confirm the opinion many of you have that I do not have an adequate account of "the natural"? (p. 166)

Stout's account in principle does not require that Christians (or other traditions) abandon their self-7nderstanding in order to participate in Stout's democracy. Which is to say that there are possibilities in Stout's account that are not yet fully worked out. (p. 178)

Or two random examples from the previous book on my list, Brent Waters' From Human to Posthuman (2006):

What the shorthand 'modern' designates is a currently privileged account of the way the world is, while the shorthand designation 'postmodern' refers to the contestation of this privilege by insisting that no such account is possible. (p. 32)

George Grant provides a philosophical account of destiny for explicating these emergent and convergent qualities that are particularly pertinent to the context of a late liberal technoculture. Grant's account presupposes late liberalism's endemic historicism and nihilism, which was examined in chapter two. (p. 126)

I take it that that "account" functions in these settings as a synonym for "explanation", "elaboration" and "justification". To provide an account of an idea, a cultural feature, or a doctrine, I'm guessing, is to explain how it fits into a larger setting and how it relates to other features or ideas, to describe its historical sources, the structure of its internal logic, and its practical implications. And somewhere in there, I think you probably get around to arguing that the idea is true (or that the cultural feature in question is to be affirmed or criticized).

It seems to me that this phrase reflects an interesting epistemological shift, in that it seems to presuppose a post-foundationalist epistemology. A paper, article or book that advocates idea 'x' by "presenting an account" of it doesn't so much argue that 'x' is true based on reasons 1, 2 and 3. Rather, the author argues for the idea by explaining its significance, situating it within a larger world of ideas, and showing how it helps to explain those ideas, or makes them more interesting, or simply provides more interesting questions to ask. The world of discourse assumed by this phrasing doesn't seem to involve syllogisms or classical logic, but rather the sort of "confirmation holism" that Quine made famous. That's probably an over-generalization, but based on the sort of arguments I'm actually seeing presented, it doesn't seem too outrageous.

Given that the academy is nothing if not self-critical (maybe even self-referential), I have to imagine that I'm not the first person to have noticed this. Does anyone know of any research or thinking that's been done on this?

Deconstructing Socially Generated Knowledge in Realtime

It's been a fascinating couple of days. I've been too busy to post to my blog much recently, but I just couldn't help myself on this one.

A couple months ago, I wrote about "The Limitations of Socially Generated Knowledge", which dealt with the tendency of Internet communities to arrive at conclusions that, to speak colloquially, "just ain't so."

This last week, I've observed another highly inaccurate consensus developing in realtime – and again, while from a philosophical point of view it's fascinating, it's rather frustrating from a business (and accuracy, reality, and truth) perspective.

On January 2, security vendor Fortinet posted an advisory, warning users of a "Facebook Widget Installing Spyware". I will grant that the title of the advisory is at least 50% accurate: the advisory does indeed describe a Facebook widget. (Hint for those of you following along at home: the widget doesn't install anything, and Zango is no more spyware than the Google toolbar is.) If you ignore the title, and actually read the advisory, I have to believe that the bare facts described in the body were likely correct: after the "Secret Crush" Facebook widget was added to a profile, the next Web page in the process showed ads, one of which (for the reasons discussed in more detail below) could very well have been for a Zango application.

I should note that the security team at Zango, after much trying, wasn't actually able to reproduce the scenario Fortinet describes. Nor, best I can tell, has anyone else – including Fortinet. But that's not surprising. To understand why, I need to back up and explain more about how Internet advertising works.

If you visit a site (say, http://entrepeneur.com), you'll typically see a variety of different ads for a variety of different companies, goods, or services. Now, where do those ads come from? It would be horribly inefficient for a small website to maintain a sales force to sell its advertising inventory directly to advertisers – and it's just as inefficient for advertisers to directly place ad buys with thousands of small websites. People figured this out very early in the days of the Internet, and thus was born the idea of an "ad network" (e.g., DoubleClick, ValueClick, Right Media, DrivePM, and so forth). Webmasters who want to show ads on their sites sign up with ad networks, as do advertisers who want their ads to be shown. The ad network takes a cut and automatically places ads from advertisers on websites from publishers. They typically give advertisers some control over where and how they want their ads to be displayed, but it's limited, if only because the ad network ultimately has to trust the web publisher, e.g., not to put anything inappropriate on the page displaying the ad. And of course, it doesn't stop here, with just one intermediary: for many reasons, too complicated to go into right here, there are often lots of intermediaries between the advertiser and the final website.

So, this is how Internet advertising works. Zango, like nearly all companies that do their business online, purchases display advertising through some of these advertising networks, and our ads are displayed on thousands of different sites. And like other online companies, Zango can find it complicated to control exactly where those ads are shown. (Just ask any airline whose ad has shown up next to a news article on the latest airport disaster.) Don't get me wrong: we have standards, and it's against our code of conduct for any of our partners to display Zango ads on a social networking site that prohibits such ads. We do our best to enforce those standards, but our advertising networks have partners as well, and when it comes right down to it, they don't always know where the ad is being displayed. This isn't something nefarious about Zango: it's just how the Internet advertising industry works. Ask anybody.

The end result is that even though our security response team wasn't able to document it, it's not at all unlikely, a priori, that an ad for a Zango application may have been displayed by a Facebook widget. But of course, if a user clicked on the Zango ad, he or she would have been taken to our website, where we have sophisticated mechanisms for ensuring that every user receives appropriate notice and consent before installing the Zango software that provides free access to the Zango application. No user installed Zango who didn't have the opportunity to be very well informed about what he or she was installing. Period.

So these are the bare facts: some individual creates a "Secret Crush" widget that, like many Facebook widgets, is better at getting people to install it than at doing anything interesting or useful. Since this widget happens to displays ads, he hooks up with an advertising network to select those ads for him, and one of the ads randomly displayed was for a Zango application. Unless you have a blanket objection to all advertising in principle (an objection I can at least understand), or have an aesthetic distaste for silly Facebook widgets (a distaste I fully share), it's hard to see anything particularly scandalous in this. It's the way Internet advertising works, and there's absolutely nothing newsworthy about it.

But take a quick look at how this bare set of facts has been repeated and distorted, first in the original Fortinet posting and thereafter throughout the web and blogosphere. Here are just a few examples culled from literally dozens and dozens of posts, articles and conversations, nearly all reiterating (and some exacerbating) the same mistakes:

• 'Installs Spyware.' As I've already mentioned, the original Fortinet posting claims that the widget "installs spyware". It should be clear that the widget didn't install anything – the user did, if and only if he or she wanted to do so. Nor does it make the slightest sense to call Zango "spyware". If Zango is spyware, the term has no meaning. There is such a thing as spyware. But Zango isn't. I should also note that this one advisory aside, Fortinet acknowledges as much: their own security applications classify Zango as adware, not spyware.
  
• 'Adware Distribution Scheme.' Matt Hines, of InfoWorld, calls it an "adware distribution scheme", and later lumps Zango in with "badware". Throughout the article, he implies that the makers of the widget were specifically out to install Zango, which, so far as I can tell, is absolutely incorrect. (It certainly seems like the widget maker just wanted to show some ads and arranged to do so via an ad network; one of those ads happened to be for a Zango application.) Hines also goes on to confuse the Facebook widget with the Zango download, by saying:

  "The Secret Crush program also tries to lure people who download the file to pass it along to other Facebook members they know, according to Fortinet's research."

    That's not true, nor even what Fortinet's research said.

• 'Spyware' with weak notice and consent. Thomas Claburn, of Information Week, repeats the "spyware" charge and implies that Zango has weak notice and consent policies. (If he'd perhaps bothered to install Zango's software, he would have been made aware of his mistake – he doesn't appear to have ever done so.)
  
• 'Notorious' malware. InternetNews follows the original (spurious) Fortinet claims, adding that Zango is a "notorious adware distributor" and calls the application itself "malware". Like the original posting, this one fails to recognize that what's being described is nothing more than a widget showing ads; and it fails to acknowledge that any install of Zango software promoted in any rotating ad shown by the widget absolutely followed our strict and thorough notice and consent policies.
  
• And more silliness.
  
  • ITbusiness.ca calls the episode a "hack", an "attack", and a "threat".
  • The Malware Adviser blog calls it a "backdoor".
  • TechnoSocial calls it a "worm".
  • The Happy Geek calls it a "security threat" and a "worm".
  • AppScout calls Zango "an undercover malicious spyware program" and a "virus", and implies that 4% of all Facebook users had installed it.

And I could go on, but it gets boring. All this effort, all this indignation and pontification for . . . an ad? Wow.

It would be amusing how quickly the Internet arrives at a consensus if that alacrity wasn't so scary. This is admittedly a pretty minor issue in the big scheme of things – but take a few moments and ponder how the same dynamic is at work for much more important questions.

I have to add, as a postscript if nothing else, that PaperGhost alone seems to have recognized the insanity generated by Fortinet for what it is:

They [Fortinet] also posted up a screenshot that seems to show the application merely showing randomly selected adverts - not just an advert for Zango.

If that's the case, then this whole thing just puzzles me because it immediately looks more like

Install application > application opens popup advert > popup advert calls adspace purchased by companies to display random advert and less like:

Install application > GET JACKED BY ZANGO, LOL

...so, once and for all, can anyone who played with this thing - because I haven't - set the record straight?

In it's original incarnation, did this application

A) open a box for Zango and only Zango every single time it was tested, or

B) did it just happen to randomly show a Zango advert (out of a big pile of other things it could have displayed)?

Chris: Because nobody (at Zango or elsewhere) has been able to replicate the scenario Fortinet describes, I can't say definitively how the widget functioned when Fortinet did its testing. But, internally here at Zango, we can tell that the URL referred to in the Fortinet posting was for an ad network, not for a publisher, so the answer is almost certainly "B". In other words, Zango had no relationship with the Secret Crush widget maker, and he or she had no incentive to see Zango software installed.

The Limitations of Socially Generated Knowledge

For some years, I've been interested in studying "how we know things". In philosophical circles this is known as epistemology, though it has a somewhat more practical cousin called cognitive science. The whole discipline is wonderfully circular, since nearly the first question you have to ask yourself is, "How do I know that I know how we know?"

Over the last half century or so, there's been a growing consensus (though certainly not unchallenged) that most knowledge has a social or communal dimension to it. Some people even say that all knowledge-claims are socially constructed, or that any claim to knowledge is really just a disguised claim to power. But you don't have to go that far to recognize that most questions humans are interested in presuppose a plurality of humans asking the question. Still, while acts of knowledge must always take place against a backdrop of community, if knowledge is to be counted as real knowledge, in the end it must bump up against real things. Knowledge that is accessible only to a special community (whether that community be Marxists or Mormons or bloggers) will not last. Lasting knowledge both forms and is formed by a given community, but it must also reach out beyond the original bounds of that community.

One of the interesting ways in which this epistemological consensus has taken form is on the Internet. It's variously called "web 2.0", or "wikinomics" or "the wisdom of crowds," but the phenomenon described is roughly the same: using a widespread community and mass collaboration to generate knowledge. Wikipedia is probably the best-known example, but the same process takes place on thousands of forums, hundreds of thousands of blogs, and millions of email exchanges each day. People contribute what they know to a vast pool of information, and eventually, out of that sometimes maddening cacophony, consensus arises, conclusions are drawn, and very occasionally, work gets done.

I should state for the record that as a blogger and Wikipedia junky, I'm a huge fan of this, what I'll call "socially generated knowledge." It's wonderfully astonishing how well it often works. When I want to research a company, or need to understand an algorithm or mathematical concept better, my first stop is always Wikipedia; and I spend more time than my wife would like either reading blogs or contributing my own postings.

But my experience over the last several years has also brought home, quite clearly, some of the problems inherent with using mass collaboration to generate knowledge. In particular, one debate to which I've had a front-row seat illustrates quite clearly some of its limitations.

A great deal has been written about Zango in various online forums. Over time, a consensus has emerged about what Zango's software does, the value that it adds (or doesn't add), how it is generally installed on your machine, and how it is best uninstalled. In other words, this Consensus (it deserves the capital letter) can reasonably be claimed to represent the result of a wide-ranging, "web 2.0," communal search for understanding: socially generated knowledge at its most robust.

Here's the part that's interesting to me. When it comes to these issues, I sit in a rather privileged position, having supervised, designed or written a great deal of Zango's software myself. I actually know first-hand what Zango's software does, how it's installed, and how best to uninstall it. When it comes to knowing how Zango's software works, it's not a matter of community knowledge: I was there, elbow-deep in code, strategic decisions, debugging and implementation. And thus I happen to know from direct experience that much of the Consensus is simply wrong. And that's worrisome.

To put what I'm going to say into context, you have to understand that you've always been able to uninstall any of Zango's software by going to Add/Remove Programs. The steps you follow once you get to Add/Remove Programs have changed over the years, and we've simplified and standardized the process – but it has always been the case that if you go to Add/Remove Programs and you follow your nose, Zango will uninstall cleanly. (I encourage you to try it yourself, if you're so persuaded.) Furthermore, this is not only one possible way to uninstall Zango: it's without a doubt the easiest, and by a long, long shot, the safest. If you try to uninstall any modern application manually (by deleting files, registry keys, etc.), you run a fairly reasonable risk of screwing up your PC; and while a $30 scanning application is probably more thorough than doing it by hand, even they often fail to uninstall Zango completely or cleanly. They just don't know Zango's software as well as Zango's own engineers do. So that's the undeniable state of affairs: if you want to uninstall Zango, go to Add/Remove Programs. Period.

But to put it gently, that's not the impression you would get from a Google search on, say, "delete Zango". To show you what I mean, let's do just that, and take a look at the information out there about uninstalling Zango. This thread is typical of what you'll see:

Zango. What is it? by Y4 - 7/8/04 9:30 AM Hi, None of my spyware programs detected Zango.exe on my PC. This program loaded on my PC covertly. Completely unwanted....Desktop short-cut, and all. However, when I ran a McAfee scan it detected Zango as a potentially unwanted application, and listed it as a variant of "180solutions", known spyware! It even comes with an installer, that will reload the program onto your computer if deleted from "Add/Remove programs". The only program that detected it, and removed it successfully was McAfee. Has anyone else ever had the "Zango experience"? What the heck is it?

I suppose you'll have to take my word that much of what the posting describes is simply not true. Yet the contention that Zango reinstalls itself is posted as fact on numerous public forums, where it becomes the source for much additional "knowledge", and with the help of Google is referenced explicitly or implicitly by many subsequent posters.

This posting, from the same thread, similarly contains a great deal of misinformation:

Re: Zango. What is it? by Y4 - 7/8/04 10:04 AM In reply to: Re: Zango. What is it? by Marianna Schmudlach Marianna, I ran Adaware, and spybot on my PC. Adaware recognised the Zango.exe, but could not remove it. I tried removing it at start-up, but to no avail. I then ran spybotS&D, it too recognised the 180solutions variant Zango.exe., and removed it successfully, however, it failed to recognise the Zango installer, and at next boot-up, BAM! There it was again! That's when I ran McAfee8, and it detected, and removed both Zango.exe, and the Zango installer. My PC is now free of the pest. This pest is a tricky one. I've done a little research on it, and from what I've found....it tries to HiJack your explore.exe, and iexplore.exe applications. If the HiJack is successful, you would in turn delete your browser application if you delete Zango from "Add/Remove programs". This, in my opinion, is spyware nearing virus potential! BEWARE!!Thank you for your attention in this matter.

I can't swear that the scanning apps referenced didn't behave that way, because I didn't design them and I can't tell you for a fact what they can or can't do. (Though I do know that once they start messing around with a Zango installation, all bets are off as to whether Zango will still be able to uninstall itself correctly. We can write all the uninstall code we want, but if a scanning app removes that code, we have precious few options left.) But the post is most interesting to me in an epistemological sense for a different reason. The writer claims to have done "a little research", i.e., has drunk at the well of socially generated knowledge. I'm in a position to know that it's precisely this received knowledge which is most baldly inaccurate, and leads finally to the amusing (and completely untrue) claim that uninstalling Zango will delete your browser.

And so it goes. Forum postings like these are to be found everywere, but blog postings that encourage painfully manual uninstalls are common as well. Most egregious are the official-looking postings from various online security companies which insist (explicitly or implicitly) that Zango can only be safely uninstalled by shelling out $30 for their product.

To be fair, over the last year or so, some postings (here, here and here, for instance) do recognize that the best way to uninstall Zango is to go to Add/Remove Programs. Given that the process these posts describe is not only the right process, but also the cheapest and easiest by several orders of magnitude, it's rather astonishing how few and far between those posts are, and how long it's taken them to start showing up. And perhaps most troubling, despite quite a bit of searching, I have yet to find any post that explicitly corrects the Consensus. Nobody ever says, "Nah, you don't have to spend all that money, and you don't have to spend an hour mucking about with your registry. Just find Add/Remove Programs and follow your nose." Even those contributors who apparently know better don't seem to mind that the Consensus is quite wrong, and that's quite puzzling.

At some level, this rather shocking discord between reality and the Consensus calls into question the reliability of the entire "web 2.0" project. (Though please note that I explain "web 2.0" with a reference to the archetypal web 2.0 site – who said irony is dead?) In further postings, I'd like to explore the reasons why so much that is said about Zango is so inaccurate – and see if that can help us to understand better the strengths and limitations of socially generated knowledge.