8 ms·

This is a meme but it’s not a bad metaphor at all, and the Senator was unfairly maligned for using it. He was fairly maligned for being against network neutral

by isykt 3y ago

This is a meme but it’s not a bad metaphor at all, and the Senator was unfairly maligned for using it. He was fairly maligned for being against network neutrality, though.

b33j0r 3y ago
Jon Stewart really nailed that meme in by pointing out that Stevens was simultaneously earmarking online gambling, with specific carve-outs for horse-racing. If you’re around my age, you don’t need to use the Bing to picture in your head that graphic of horses being able to run through the tubes. (Jon Stewart also kinda made me and everyone I knew think Arby’s was terrible for a long time. With great memes comes… the responsibility to recognize that not everyone has Katz!) ;)
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
No such thing as unfairly maligning a politician in my opinion.
- ethbr1 3y ago
  'Al Gore claimed he created the Internet'? See e.g. "Al Gore and the Internet" by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/...
- andruby 3y ago
  All politicians are bad and politics in general too? That would be a grim and unconstructive view. The US is a country of 330M people, the world is a community of 8B people. If we want to be able to live side by side, we need rules and policies. It's always going to messy. I would love it if in the next few decades we improve "the game" and figure out better ways to incentivise the players towards common good.
  - barelyauser 3y ago
    8B ruled by less than 100,000. Would go as far as to argue less than 10,000. "The game" is brutal. The players only care for themselves. "The game" is as unfair as it gets. Most don't live side by side, they survive inspite of others. Competition is brutal. Got sick with cancer? Sorry, lose all "points". Want to buy X? Sorry, me (cancerless) will out bargain you.
    - rebolek 3y ago
      How did you come to that number? It looks really wrong but you certainly have something to support it.
      - barelyauser 3y ago
        Really wrong? Consider China. Consider Putin in Russia. Consider the current socioeconomic scenario in US. Jerome Powell (and others, for various reasons) makes decisions and millions have their lives affected. Power is very concentrated.
    - andruby 3y ago
      Yeah, I don’t like the game either. Not at all. How can we change it though? Looking at history, changes come through either (usually bloody) revolution, or through politics themselves. So unfortunately, someone needs to play the game in order to change it.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
    We don't want to live "side by side" which is why we have separate nations. Granted that concept is being degraded to mere economic zones in which fungible units can be cycled though until worn out.
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    One of the fundamental mistakes that I think people make is to anthropomorphize things which do not actually act like regular humans. Corporations are the most obvious one because corporations are made of people but do not actually act like regular people. If you put a black box around most corporations and someone asked you what was in it, you’d say the box contained a sociopath. I am not moralizing here, by the way. I am not claiming that corporations should be less sociopathic. Maybe they should be but we’ve had much better success in aligning sociopathy than in making the amoral, moral - see capitalism vs communism - so I think it’s an open question. Another group of entities which, while comprised of people, does not act in the way you’ve come to understand a human to act is politicians. The incentives to act in whatever way that is most effective totally dominates their behavior. A politician who does not do what the job asks (amass political power) will not be a politician for long.
- 234uitnui1 3y ago
  Unfairly maligning politicians makes it less useful to fairly malign them.
Lammy 3y ago
It’s a series of small trucks
- brewdad 3y ago
  Small trucks full of tiny packages.
dTal 3y ago
I think the ridicule comes from the fact that it had the feel of a regurgitated ELI5 explanation that someone had given to him. You can't exactly call it inaccurate, but it was a bit like hearing "an airplane is like a big metal bird" from the head of the FAA. (A sibling comment points out that calling them "tubes" instead of "pipes" reinforces this garbled-regurgitation impression)
234uitnui1 3y ago
There is a series-of-tubes metaphor that makes sense, but not his. >And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. He thinks the Internet is like a pneumatic tube, where too much usage means people are entirely cut off for a time. In truth it's like a water pipe. Too much usage results in reduced throughput to each user, but no one is even temporarily cut off. Networks avoid queues. A well-designed network will handle email with no perceptible slowdown even under extreme congestion. The Senator's metaphor predicts that email will regularly take days to arrive because of congestion. The standard pipe analogy predicts this will almost never happen. But really, the Internet is like a global packet-switched network of networks. We deserve politicians who can handle the truth.
paulddraper 3y ago
Agreed, how is the Internet not a series of tubes?
robinson7d 3y ago
I remember it, I feel that focusing just on that portion of the quote is a cherry-picked view. There was more to the quote that showed a misunderstanding of the system, which, at least in my circles, caused a lot of the mockery: > an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. Tubes or trucks: movie downloads were not causing emails to be delayed by 4 days, even back in those days.

by isykt 3y ago

This is a meme but it’s not a bad metaphor at all, and the Senator was unfairly maligned for using it. He was fairly maligned for being against network neutrality, though.

b33j0r 3y ago

Jon Stewart really nailed that meme in by pointing out that Stevens was simultaneously earmarking online gambling, with specific carve-outs for horse-racing. If you’re around my age, you don’t need to use the Bing to picture in your head that graphic of horses being able to run through the tubes. (Jon Stewart also kinda made me and everyone I knew think Arby’s was terrible for a long time. With great memes comes… the responsibility to recognize that not everyone has Katz!) ;)

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

No such thing as unfairly maligning a politician in my opinion.

ethbr1 3y ago
'Al Gore claimed he created the Internet'? See e.g. "Al Gore and the Internet" by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html https://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/...
andruby 3y ago
All politicians are bad and politics in general too? That would be a grim and unconstructive view. The US is a country of 330M people, the world is a community of 8B people. If we want to be able to live side by side, we need rules and policies. It's always going to messy. I would love it if in the next few decades we improve "the game" and figure out better ways to incentivise the players towards common good.
- barelyauser 3y ago
  8B ruled by less than 100,000. Would go as far as to argue less than 10,000. "The game" is brutal. The players only care for themselves. "The game" is as unfair as it gets. Most don't live side by side, they survive inspite of others. Competition is brutal. Got sick with cancer? Sorry, lose all "points". Want to buy X? Sorry, me (cancerless) will out bargain you.
  - rebolek 3y ago
    How did you come to that number? It looks really wrong but you certainly have something to support it.
    - barelyauser 3y ago
      Really wrong? Consider China. Consider Putin in Russia. Consider the current socioeconomic scenario in US. Jerome Powell (and others, for various reasons) makes decisions and millions have their lives affected. Power is very concentrated.
  - andruby 3y ago
    Yeah, I don’t like the game either. Not at all. How can we change it though? Looking at history, changes come through either (usually bloody) revolution, or through politics themselves. So unfortunately, someone needs to play the game in order to change it.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  We don't want to live "side by side" which is why we have separate nations. Granted that concept is being degraded to mere economic zones in which fungible units can be cycled though until worn out.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  One of the fundamental mistakes that I think people make is to anthropomorphize things which do not actually act like regular humans. Corporations are the most obvious one because corporations are made of people but do not actually act like regular people. If you put a black box around most corporations and someone asked you what was in it, you’d say the box contained a sociopath. I am not moralizing here, by the way. I am not claiming that corporations should be less sociopathic. Maybe they should be but we’ve had much better success in aligning sociopathy than in making the amoral, moral - see capitalism vs communism - so I think it’s an open question. Another group of entities which, while comprised of people, does not act in the way you’ve come to understand a human to act is politicians. The incentives to act in whatever way that is most effective totally dominates their behavior. A politician who does not do what the job asks (amass political power) will not be a politician for long.
234uitnui1 3y ago
Unfairly maligning politicians makes it less useful to fairly malign them.

Lammy 3y ago

It’s a series of small trucks

brewdad 3y ago
Small trucks full of tiny packages.

dTal 3y ago

I think the ridicule comes from the fact that it had the feel of a regurgitated ELI5 explanation that someone had given to him. You can't exactly call it inaccurate, but it was a bit like hearing "an airplane is like a big metal bird" from the head of the FAA. (A sibling comment points out that calling them "tubes" instead of "pipes" reinforces this garbled-regurgitation impression)

234uitnui1 3y ago

There is a series-of-tubes metaphor that makes sense, but not his. >And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. He thinks the Internet is like a pneumatic tube, where too much usage means people are entirely cut off for a time. In truth it's like a water pipe. Too much usage results in reduced throughput to each user, but no one is even temporarily cut off. Networks avoid queues. A well-designed network will handle email with no perceptible slowdown even under extreme congestion. The Senator's metaphor predicts that email will regularly take days to arrive because of congestion. The standard pipe analogy predicts this will almost never happen. But really, the Internet is like a global packet-switched network of networks. We deserve politicians who can handle the truth.

paulddraper 3y ago

Agreed, how is the Internet not a series of tubes?

robinson7d 3y ago

I remember it, I feel that focusing just on that portion of the quote is a cherry-picked view. There was more to the quote that showed a misunderstanding of the system, which, at least in my circles, caused a lot of the mockery: > an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. Tubes or trucks: movie downloads were not causing emails to be delayed by 4 days, even back in those days.