Archives for October 2002

Following up on Arnold Kling’s observation about non-general-purpose languages, Seth Schoen reminds us that Orwell’s 1984 featured a language called “Newspeak,” in which it was supposedly impossible to express subversive thoughts. Seth offers this quote from 1984:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English
Socialism. […]

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been
adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical
thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles
of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far
as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so
constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression
to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to
express, while excluding all other meanings and also the
possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. […]

Though I’m happy to grant Orwell some literary license here, I doubt that Newspeak could really exist. At least, I don’t see how it could exist as a language for everyday use. Yes, language can guide and channel thought in dangerous ways. But it’s hard to imagine a workable language that makes it impossible to speak frankly about politics.

In a previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer,” I asked readers for help in finding a way to explain to non-techies why non-general-purpose computers are so vastly inferior to general-purpose ones.

Many readers responded with good suggestions. But Arnold Kling’s explanation is by far the best:

Trying to design a limited-purpose computer is like trying to design a limited-purpose spoken language. Imagine trying to design a language that can express only some thoughts but not others.

This seems to be a nearly perfect analogy. It’s technically sound, in the sense that the instruction set of a computer is really a language. And it conveys accurately the computer scientists’ intuition for why general-purpose computers are so valuable.

Dan Gillmor notes my posting on almost-general-purpose computers, and says

Felten would have been rolling his eyes yesterday at the Agenda 2003 conference, where three members of the Hollywood establishment proved their absolute cluelessness about technology while confirming the prevailing Washington “wisdom” – the notion that we can somehow stop one kind of copying without preventing all kinds of legitimate uses of computers.

Gillmor isn’t allowed to quote any conference attendees, but he points to John Patrick’s account of the proceedings, which says:

Next was a panel from the entertainment and publishing industry leaders discussed digital media. The hole in the protection scheme is that most of the content is still analog. A DVD starts out as digital but the output of a DVD player is analog and therefore can be easily copied. Once everything is digital, then watermarking can be easily used to protect the content. There was a good debate about “fair use”. The panelists and audience questioners could not even agree on what the scope of “fair use” is. Listening to the debate makes it clear that this issue is going to take a long time to resolve. I have written about this subject in Net Attitude but based on what I heard today, I plan to write more about the subject. The basic issue is that many consumers expect that when they buy a CD or DVD that they should have the right to make a backup copy of it and also place a copy on personally owned portable players and PCs. The industry representatives claimed they want to offer many choices but that the more choice you want the more you should have to pay. I think most of the audience believes that the industry is out of touch.