My understanding of philosophy is simple: the love and practice of wisdom. Immersed as I am in the ancients and a few moderns such as Thoreau, I try to live a better life and to have a positive influence in the limited sphere in which I can be effective: to be a good husband, a good friend, a good co-worker, a good neighbor; to exercise financial prudence and mental clarity and physical health and environmental stewardship over my little plot of land; to help make my community a better place to live in and my company a better place to work in; and, at a more personal level, to achieve emotional self-control, to make the best use I can of my limited time on this earth, and to continually improve as a human being. This kind of self-goverance sounds so simple, yet in practice I find it continually challenging.
Beyond self-governance lies communal governance. My perspective on politics is again informed by the ancients, as well as by Jeffersonian localism (divide the counties into wards!) and by my upbringing in a town of 2,000 people with its New England tradition of local decision-making and town meetings. To my mind, democracy is literally people power: what happens when a small group of people decide to govern themselves. The current political arrangements in America are not democracy. The ancient Greeks opposed elections (preferring random selection of "representatives") because they feared that it would lead to oligarchy. And they were right!
One of the many problems with oligarchy is that tends to devolve into kakistocracy - rule by the worst. Abraham Lincoln once said (and I agree) that "no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." The sentiment seems quaint now, when the "elect" who purport to govern the people are some of the worst among us, not the best or even the good. The problem is more serious the farther that the government is from the people - in general I would put more trust in a town or county government than I would in a state government or certainly the federal government (I call D.C. the "den of corruption"). Indeed, my involvement in governance is limited to something like Jefferson's ward, in the form of the civic association in my neighborhood of ~250 households.
Thus when folks get all worked up about politics - by which in a presidential election year they mean national politics - I mostly shake my head and sigh. Instead of spending even a few hours a month reading and watching and debating and agonizing over my meaningless vote in the primaries or caucuses or general election, I would rather devote that time to better governing myself and to helping with the governance of a true community in my neighborhood. Perhaps someday I'll extend that sphere of involvement to the county I live in, but I see no good reason to give much attention to state or national or international affairs when it is so much more productive for me to devote myself to my own ethical improvement (which is the only basis for healthy political action in the first place).
Have you ever noticed those people who live in their own reality, and who go through life as if they're the center of the world? Whether their act is being cool or earthy, macho or sweet, they're essentially pretending their way through life instead of authentically living it.
Kurt Keefner noticed, too, and instead of shrugging it off he thought about the phenomenon for years and eventually wrote a book about it, entitled Killing Cool: Fantasy vs. Reality in American Life. I liked the book so much that I agreed to review it for Reason Papers. You can find my review here (eventually I'll post it on my website, too, but until then I'd encourage you to check out Reason Papers because it's a fine journal).
It was 17 years ago (January 4, 1999) that my dear friend Jeremie Miller announced the Jabber open-source project, which in many ways laid the foundation for the messaging systems that billions of people use today (e.g., huge services like WhatsApp and Apple iMessage got their start using Jabber/XMPP, even if some of them migrated to special-purpose technologies later on). Although when I got involved with the Jabber project in November 1999 it felt like I was late to the party compared to folks like Temas Muldwowney (contributor #2), clearly I've found plenty to do in standardizing and extending XMPP over the last 16+ years.
Few people get a chance to change the world once, as we did with Jabber. Even fewer get a chance to change the world twice, but starting today I'm doing exactly that by joining Jeremie and Temas and the other great people at Filament, an Internet of Things startup that is revolutionizing communication and interaction for the trillions of devices that will be coming online in the near future.
Indeed, the combined hardware/software stack that the Filament team is creating is even more deeply inventive than Jabber, and really takes the original Jabber ethos to the next level by enabling devices to be fully autonomous (without the need for accounts at centralized or federated services in order to communicate with each other). Plus the Filament technology stack is about much more than just communication, because it combines secure, private communication with cutting-edge methods for smart contracts and blockchain transactions to enable the exchange of economic value, not just messages. I like to think of this as the extension of voluntary exchange from the level of millions of firms (microeconomics) and even beyond the level of billions of individual humans (nanoeconomics) to the level of trillions of devices (what we could call picoeconomics).
During discussions with members of my new team, the potential of what Filament is building has repeatedly boggled my mind - and I think big in the first place! Of course, potential doesn't pay the bills, so I'll be strongly focused on deploying real-world applications, forging long-term business relationships, and laying the foundation for lasting success.
The hardest part of joining Filament has been leaving my friends at &yet. Happily, I will maintain an affiliation with the "yetis" as an informal technical and business advisor, contributing to the company's overall strategy with a special focus on realtime collaboration. I will also continue to serve the Jabber/XMPP community in several capacities, continuing some of the initiatives that Jeremie, Temas, and many others started way back in 1999.
That said, my primary focus now is helping to nurture the seeds that the Filament team is planting, and to change the world yet again on an even larger scale. I could not be more excited!
Because I spent most of my time in 2015 working at my day job and on the side researching the book I'm writing about Henry David Thoreau, I published very little in 2015 at the Monadnock Valley Press - really just A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen and the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Here's hoping I can do better in 2016. We also earned only $150.63, a 50% drop from 2014. I'll need to talk to our director of sales and marketing about that... ;-)
Somehow I managed to publish 15 RFCs at the IETF this year, clustered around security, internationalization, and messaging:
For what it's worth, 96 percent of RFC authors have published less than 15 RFCs in their entire career at the IETF. It's a typical power law distribution: 55% have published one, 16% have published two, 8% have published three, and so on. I've published 39 so far, which puts me in the top 1%. (Yes, I'm a one-percenter now!) To be fair, some of the specs I've published are fixes to or updates of older standards, so they're not all that novel.
I hesitate to guess how many hours I've spent working on industry standards at the IETF - maybe 5,000 or more. And that gets to the heart of the matter: standardization is usually less a matter of inspiration and more a matter of perspiration - specifically, the dogged persistence necessary to address the objections that seem to arise every step of the way. So perhaps this "annus mirabilis" is not so impressive after all. ;-)
As previously noted, I've been working to define interoperability between SIP and XMPP systems for many years, most recently in the STOX working group at the IETF. So we've published four different specifications covering various aspects of interworking, and today we've added a fifth: RFC 7702 on groupchat functionality. Big thanks to my co-authors: Saúl Ibarra Corretge and Salvatore Loreto! We're not quite done, though, because we still need to finish the document on signaling for managing multimedia sessions like audio and video calls. I'll be turning to that one next (well, that and fixes to the presence RFC).
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