Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

The shell game

shell game. A fraud or deception perpetrated by shifting conspicuous things to hide something else. (American Heritage Dictionary)

Burningbird points to Dave Winer’s post about Microsoft’s Palladium “technology” then sums up the Bush/Gates strategy:

While we give Bush et al high marks for “doing a good job”, our beloved president and his gang are selling this country to the highest bidder - in this case, Bill Gates and Microsoft. And as we let the Bush gang manipulate and discard the Constitution and our freedoms in order to wage “war on terrorism”, so now we’re allowing Microsoft do the same to wage war on hackers.

I searched long and hard tonight for some earlier scripting.com posts in which Dave Winer explained Microsoft’s Machiavellian strategy of manufacturing an artificial controversy in order to divert attention from a far more ambitious (and damaging) plan or policy. I wish I’d been able to find Dave’s essays; I recall thinking to myself at the time: “Yep, that’s so smart—of Microsoft to act that way and of Dave to draw our attention to it.”

And others are adopting Microsoft’s tactics. To explain how conservatives are publicly howling about the Pledge of Allegiance appellate decision—”but privately rubbing their hands with glee,” Salon’s Michelle Goldberg quotes Jamin Raskin, a professor of constitutional law at American University:

“There’s no doubt that the Republican Party is using the 9th Circuit opinion to change the subject from the ethical collapse of corporate America,” he says. “It’s classic Republican politics where the flag and God are used to replace issues of immediate concern to peoples’ lives. It’s the temporary triumph of cheap symbolic politics over dealing with the nation’s serious structural problems.”

But will installing Windows 2000 and refusing to buy Gates’ crippled computers be enough to stop the madness? And where is Steve Jobs in all of this?

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