No word yet from WMATA, but I did end up writing a script to grab NextBus's routeconfig data (download here). Then I tried to match each NextBus-defined stop with the closest one in the GTFS dataset. Some stats*:

• NextBus's dataset tracks 711 unique stop IDs. GTFS has 10,380.
• Using this function to measure distance, the average space between matched stops is 164 feet. The smallest is 11 feet. The largest is 9/10ths of a kilometer.
• 218 NextBus stops wound up sharing the same GTFS stop.

All in all, pretty bad — this level of data quality is clearly unusable. My GIS skills are weak; this may be my own stupid fault. I'll consult with some experts and see what I might be doing wrong. But the basic distance-matching idea is pretty straightforward, so I'm not terrifically optimistic. It's possible that data quality is just going to really, really stink — to be sure, this is not particularly encouraging. Here's hoping we can get a proper lookup table out of WMATA or NextBus. Otherwise I don't see a great alternative to manual intervention.

* These numbers ignore the routes that NextBus tracks but which GTFS does not; those are B99, F99, L99, NH1, P99, REX, S80 and S91 (they appear to be shuttles and the like). I haven't yet identified the routes that are in GTFS but not tracked by NextBus.

Tim was nice enough to write a tweet endorsing my article about the potential downside of Twitter's emerging political importance. But he noted that I didn't say much about what the alternatives are — fair enough! As I said to him in response, I was only too happy to have word limits save me from having to propose a solution. Even though I think the situation is unfortunate, at this point I suspect that there isn't much to be done about Twitter's rising political relevance.

But, y'know, time heals all wounds. I am convinced that Twitter's import as a cultural hub will decline. Twitter won't go away entirely, mind you — it's a genuine medium unto itself — but I think its true legacy is likely to be a frankly unbelievable extension, evolution and popularization of the capabilities represented by SMS. Multicast? Common use of symbolic delimiters like @ and #? Widespread institutional adoption? Two years ago, if you'd asked Verizon when SMS would be used this way, they'd have laughed in your face. Now the marketplace is going to demand this functionality — if not from Twitter, then from someone else.

But as I said, I think the conversations happening on Twitter will become less relevant, and the medium less vibrant. Actually, I'm beginning to think that this is an iron law of online mediums. This post (via Megan) helped focus my thinking a lot.

Here's how it goes. First, a network achieves viability — enough people are using it to send non-"hello world" messages that the community can sustain itself. Next, users experiment, publishing and republishing content that they find compelling. The system amounts to a collaborative filter, and the quality and novelty of the results are surprisingly good. At this point people begin to notice and discuss the potential for the network to have greater relevance — and, inevitably, those who don't understand that participation in the filtering activity is non-negotiable begin whining about taking the medium seriously when they see so much trivial content on it. Despite this carping, more users join the network and its value and potential importance begin to be more widely understood. At this point users change how they identify content worth publishing or republishing: rather than the first-order "how compelling is this?" they begin using the second-order "how compelling will other people find this?" Although they were excellent and determining what they thought was interesting and appropriate, they're comparatively terrible at determining what other people will like. Quality declines ("I blogged: del.icio.us links for 2009-07-02"). Worse, as users continue to try to shirk their collaborative filtering responsibilities, experimental uses of the medium are discouraged or otherwise become less viable. The system ossifies, and soon enough everyone is sick of having to check Facebook. Time for a new no-pressure medium for goofing off with your early-adopter friends. Rinse, repeat.

I don't want to oversell the preceding — I'm pretty sure that Clay Shirky accidentally scribbles more profound sociological observations about the internet during the course of searching for a working ballpoint pen at the bank. But this is my understanding of the situation, and by now I think we have enough data points to conclude that most, if not all online social networks achieve viability, blossom and stagnate (it may still be entirely possible to run a viable business during the stagnation phase, I should point out).

It'll happen to Twitter, too — it is happening. So let's start talking now about what conditions we should demand of the next medium-of-the-moment before we start moving our political institutions onto it. My suggestion for a place to start: open, free, and likely to remain so.

UPDATE: This is somewhat related — it's an example of what I mean by people withdrawing from the collaborative filtering process.

NextBus launched! It's exciting. I and a lot of other area developers are looking at how to take advantage of the realtime GPS data that NextBus collects to make the DC transit system easier to use. I haven't gotten too far with it — I'm just poking around — but the early word is that NextBus isn't going to make this easy.

First: they're claiming copyright on the location of metrobuses. They serve their data as XML, and each <body> tag looks like this:

<body copyright="All data copyright NextBus 2009. Allowed use is for noncommercial purposes only.">

Not great. But okay, whatever — whether this data is copyrightable in a meaningful sense is the first question; whether WMATA willingly sold off their bus locations is the second. But realistically, NextBus can apply whatever license terms on their service that they'd like, and can plausibly enforce them against commercial users. So that'd bring us back to where we are, which is fine.

But just because NextBus says it's okay to have the data doesn't mean they're going to make it easy. Your browser makes a lot of requests to NextBus in order to show a map, of course, but the most interesting ones are to http://wmata.nextbus.com/service/googleMapXMLFeed, a script that performs a number of different operations based on what querystring parameters it's passed. For instance, http://wmata.nextbus.com/service/googleMapXMLFeed?command=routeConfig&a=wmata&r=64&key=1424073267381 will get you a list of stops and route geometry for the 64 bus.

But if you paste that URL into your browser, you'll get this:

<Error shouldRetry="false">
  Feed can only be accessed by NextBus map page.
</Error>

Charming. But of course it works in the context of the map. So we need to figure out what the difference is. Here's a complete conversation between my browser and NextBus. And here's a specific request that worked for that URL:

http://wmata.nextbus.com/service/googleMapXMLFeed?command=routeConfig&a=wmata&r=64&key=1424073267381

GET /service/googleMapXMLFeed?command=routeConfig&a=wmata&r=64&key=1424073267381 HTTP/1.1
Host: wmata.nextbus.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060214 Firefox/3.0.11
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://wmata.nextbus.com/googleMap/customGoogleMap.jsp?a=wmata&cssFile=http://www.wmata.com/css/nextbus.css
Cookie: userProfile_rev1=wmata|A11|A11_A11_0|7067|8166&wmata|64|64_64_0|16797|7073&wmata|64|64_64_0|6454|16793&; __utma=222659997.501906468.1246378684.1246395595.1246496449.3; __utmz=222659997.1246496449.3.3.utmccn=(referral)|utmcsr=wmata.com|utmcct=/rider_tools/nextbus/arrivals.cfm|utmcmd=referral; userID_rev4=5534021; __utma=64696752.769952994.1246496428.1246496428.1246496428.1; __utmb=64696752; __utmc=64696752; __utmz=64696752.1246496428.1.1.utmccn=(organic)|utmcsr=google|utmctr=nextbus+wmata|utmcmd=organic; Coyote-2-407c7b2d=c0a80a66:0; JSESSIONID=53015434E8CF00D3FEC91D4B491FFA08; __utmb=222659997; __utmc=222659997

It actually can't be that many things. There's the set of session-maintaining cookies, the HTTP referrer header, and the user agent reported by the browser (or some combination). Spoiler alert: it's the referrer. So! Borrowing the referring URL from the headers (it checks for more than just the domain), we can use curl -e"http://wmata.nextbus.com/googleMap/customGoogleMap.jsp?a=wmata&cssFile=http://www.wmata.com/css/nextbus.css" "http://wmata.nextbus.com/service/googleMapXMLFeed?command=routeConfig&a=wmata&r=64&key=1424073267381" and get back this file.

It's got three things in it: stops; routes, which are ordered lists of stops; and paths, which define the shape of the lines that'll be drawn to represent the routes (because roads have twists and turns, connecting stops with straight lines is insufficient).

This is pretty much how the GTFS dataset is organized. So you might expect to be able to match up the stops from GTFS to NextBus. Well, here's a stop from NextBus:

<stop tag="5880" title="11th St Nw + H St Nw" dirTag="null" lat="38.90032" lon="-77.02657" stopId="1001159"/>

Here's the same stop from a fresh download of the WMATA GTFS dataset:

7591 / NW 11TH ST & NW H ST / 38.899812 / -77.027053

It's a drag. The IDs don't match. The human-readable stop names don't match. Even the latitude and longitude don't match. I mean, sure, they're close. But making these line up is going to be a sloppy, relatively expensive calculation. Now, true, it probably only has to happen once. It's not that hard of a problem. It's just that it's so unnecessary. Ah well. I've got an email in to Metro; we'll see if they can provide a cleaner solution than the one I'm thinking about scripting up.

UPDATE: Some thoughts on NextBus's javascript interface from 2006. A few things have changed since then, but from my initial investigation I'd say that not too much is different — just URLs, mostly.

An alternative to messing with the protected javascript interface is to scrape the HTML for the "next arrival time" pages. But a) this only gets you distance-expressed-as-time, which is lousy data compared to actual lat/lon coordinates and b) it's still messy, as "apparently NextBus hired a live bear to write their markup" (the author of that post does have his scraping code up on GitHub, though).

Phoebe was nice enough to ask me to develop my queasiness over Twitter's political ascendancy into an article for the Prospect. If you're interested, you can find it here.

Via Spencer, an interesting article about the Iranian protesters' use of Tor, The Onion Router. I'm a big fan of Tor, and have seen it successfully used to evade dictatorial regimes in the past (specifically the people running NBA League Pass). But it's probably worth pointing out Tor's limits as they pertain to the situation in Iran.

First, you really can't count on Tor for anonymity or encryption. The right way to do encryption on the internet is for your machine and the server with which it's communicating to agree on a cryptographic arrangement that begins with you and ends with it. If the server isn't expecting to receive encrypted content, it won't know what to make of any such content that it receives — that's kind of the point of encryption, right? So at some point Tor needs to decrypt your traffic and send it out onto the internet in its original, exposed form. Before it does that it passes it back and forth between who-knows-how-many nodes, concealing its point of origin. But hiding your IP address won't do you much good if malevolent actors get their hands on the eventually-decrypted content and it contains your email address, or Twitter login name, or whatever else.

And it's not too hard for them to do this. Tor relies on kind-hearted souls to run "exit nodes" — the spots where traffic gets decrypted and sent back into the plain internet. And if you run an exit node, you can easily choose to look at all of the traffic coming through it. In 2007 one clever guy did just that, and managed to capture a sensitive information being emailed by embassy staffers. Looking at the Tor exit node instructions, it doesn't look like any node-approval bureaucracy has been added since this incident (nor should there have been, in my opinion). So there's nothing stopping the Iranian government from setting up some exit nodes, grabbing whatever fraction of total Iranian Tor traffic lands in their laps, pulling email addresses and names from it and going after those people.

Nor is there any reason why Tor can't be blocked. SSL traffic — the most widely used, genuinely secure encryption on the internet (it's what protects your credit card number from snoopers when you buy something from Amazon) — is blocked in Iran. Now, given that Tor is working while SSL isn't, the latter is probably being blocked through the relatively crude measure of turning off traffic on port 443, which is the standard port associated with https:// URLs. But with a semi-modern firewall it's possible to block encrypted traffic regardless of the port — I've worked in offices that do this. That would effectively kill SSH, SSL, Tor and any other way of concealing online activities from eavesdropping government agents.

Actually, the government could do far worse. They could allow traffic through, but flag encrypted traffic to non-commercial sites for investigation. Or they could set up man in the middle attacks and rely on users to approve the certificate warning they receive. Or they could create redirects that send people to phishing sites that resemble Twitter and capture passwords but seemlessly pass tweets through to the real Twitter and then use the credentials to secretly arrange tweetups and the attendees all think they're walking into an underground storefront but then why is it so dark and the doors close and they're in THE BACK OF A TRUCK and it pulls away toward who knows where! OMG! Cut to our hero!

But that would be a lot of trouble. And for all of the conspiracy theories floating around Twitter about Iranian sysops planting hashtags to splinter the online protest's efficacy, the actual shape of Evil Iranian IT probably looks a lot less like the climactic scenes of Neuromancer. That's not to say that the import of the online part of these protests is nil — I've pretty well been convinced that my initial skepticism was too extreme. But it is to say that we should resist writing any definitive-sounding encomiums about the tools being used to get internet traffic out of Iran. The sad truth is that if the monopoly ISP is run by repressive theocrats with adequate time and resources, aspiring online activists are kind of screwed. To the extent the authorities care, anything that works very well is going to stop working soon enough.

No joke: I spend kind of a lot of time thinking about how to pull off stuff like this (you can see the finished product here). Using a microwave to smelt iron is totally cheating, though. As is division of labor, obviously.

It's great that this guy is specializing in cases from cyclists who've been in accidents. But it isn't really necessary. Believe me: if you get a police report filed about your accident (and of course you should — nothing makes an insurance agent happier), personal injury scumbags will wriggle out of the woodwork and plop themselves onto your voicemail almost immediately. When it happened to me I found it pretty annoying, but I suppose it's nice to know that cyclists' rights will be protected.

But a legal jihad against drivers won't change anything. At this point I'm convinced that the only way to make cities bike-friendly is to put fellow travelers (so to speak) into positions of power, like they've done in NYC.

ONE: The beginning of the end of the Registered Traveler program. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea behind this program — allowing the rich a means of escape from a vexing and arguably arbitrary set of collectively-self-imposed strictures has something of a history, and it's not a noble one. Props to TSA, though, if the WSJ writeup really can be believed: the article cites the agency's unwillingness to relax security standards as one of the things that made CLEAR/Registered Traveler not worth the price of admission for many would-be line skippers.

TWO: Via Caralyn, Christopher Weingarten on the present and future fortunes of the music critic. Points for his entirely appropriate level of occupational hopelessness; deductions for failing to make much of a case for the professional music critic's necessity. With modern publishing and search technologies, the too-many-voices argument becomes a difficult one to make, and, I think, a basically incoherent one when talking about something as inessential and universally accessible as pop music.

This isn't something I'm happy about. I have friends who are great music critics, and I'd love for them to be able to support themselves by writing record reviews. But this is sort of like saying that I'd love to see the market compensate my friends for playing Halo with me. It's clear that the costs associated with producing music criticism have fallen to the point where it's essentially a leisure activity. In a perfect world, this would be great: the resources expended to produce music criticism could be reallocated to more productive ends, and we could still be assured a steady stream of deep thinking about music (now with less market distortion!). In practice, those resources are likely to wind up allocated less efficiently — say, put toward debt service on a loan that financed the unnecessary sale of an alt-weekly to a clueless owner who will preside over its demise. (Woo markets!)

But we'll still have plenty of music criticism, and plenty of other good writing. I won't say something pretentious about writers writing because of some irresistible artistic compulsion. But writers will keep writing because they think writing is fun, so they'll do it when they can. And that'll be enough for the rest of us, because these days much of the writing they do will inevitably be free, our supply unrestricted. Just look at The Awl, a site run by people who perfected the blogosphere, then watched it blossom, pullulate, and choke itself to death. Now they're doing it all over again, because hell, it was pretty fun for a while there, wasn't it?

Okay, yes, Michele Bachmann refusing to participate in the census is a bit kooky. But I'm sympathetic. I started participating in the Census survey of household employment a few weeks ago (SPOILER ALERT: I still have a job). The very next day I began receiving unusually high numbers of calls from phone surveys. Pepco, private companies, and who knows how many other sample-seekers who I hung up on before identifying. It's leveled off a bit since, but there was a pronounced effect.

I know, I know: they're not allowed to sell my information. It's probably just coincidence. I mean, malfeasance by the government or its agents? The very idea is ludicrous!

And yet I remain convinced by the experience. And so I understand where Michele is coming from. If they're willing to sell my phone number, is it really so outlandish to think that the ACORN agents administering the census will be secretly sizing up respondent families' fitness in order to facilitate the involuntary harvesting of organs (and their subsequent redistribution to welfare recipients) under the coming socialized medicine dystopia? Of course not. Stay strong, Michele.

Yglesias links to Farrell; both are worth reading.

It's still not clear to me the extent to which technology is enabling intramural communication among the protesters, as opposed to simply serving as a broadcast medium between a few of them and the west. I'm very curious to find out, though, and have a few emails out to people running proxies asking how much activity they're seeing from plausibly Iranian IPs. At least one has committed to figuring this out; we'll see if he follows through.

One thing is increasingly clear: the idea that you can change the world from your computer has a strong allure. From the various alleged DoS attacks underway* to the wrangling over hashtags and profile data (based on what seems to be pretty tenuous speculation about the regime's filtering plans and abilities), a lot of narcissism is masquerading as activism. But then, this is the internet.

* These seem virtually certain to be counterproductive — how exactly does damaging digital communication empower the side without the TV stations in an information war? How are targets even being identified, except via the diktat of trusted-but-unverified Twitter users?

UPDATE: Austin Heap, who seems to be running the biggest clearinghouse for #iranelection proxies, has written an update sharing some stats. He's apparently filtering source IP (seemingly using this list) and reports 2000 connections/second. Modern browsers reuse connections for multiple HTTP requests, so that's nothing to sneeze at. I've asked him whether he's comfortable generating some stats on where the outbound traffic is going.

WELL, HELL: If the professional diplomats at the State Department thinks that Twitter is vital resource for Iranian protesters, I suppose I can't really argue otherwise. But it doesn't make me any happier about a privately-owned technology becoming a vital part of the infrastructure supporting political activity. I should add that Twitter as a company has been nothing but praiseworthy, from how they rescheduled their downtime to the openness represented by their API. But there are limits to any for-profit enterprise's goodwill. I would feel a lot more comfortable if #iranelection was occurring on a decentralized network (and yes, I realize there are immense technological hurdles to such a thing being practical).

Sort-of-recommended: Harper's Island, a CBS horror miniseries that Emily EDIT: And I! And I! began watching over the weekend. It's not good in the traditional/objective/subjective/plausible sense, but it's not all that bad. It's essentially a conventional horror movie spread over a thirteen episode miniseries. That lets the action ramp up at a pleasantly leisurely pace, but the long home stretch threatens to buckle under the weight of a series of red herrings and a body count that seems to climb simply because the writers don't know what else to do. But there are four more episodes left, so it's too early to make any definitive judgments.

Definitely recommended: Netflix's offering of Harper's Island as a streamable product as the episodes air. This was a little confusing — I couldn't figure out why the number of episodes in the series was growing (has I miscounted?), and last night Emily and I were left worrying that the first season had ended with a particularly irritating cliffhanger. Actually, though, it was just Netflix serving as the on-demand service that that Comcast denies to my Tivo-having self. And they say that a la carte TV service is impossible...

Look, I know I have a dog in this fight — as much as I like Twitter, I really, really bristle at the idea of a communication medium being coronated as essential while it's still a proprietary product of a single company (which hasn't yet set pricing!). I know I'm biased. But still, c'mon: you can't tell me that people aren't a bit overeager to write this story.

I think there's reason for skepticism about Ambinder's claims. My understanding is that cell service has been disrupted in Tehran since Saturday evening, and that net access to Twitter from Iran is blocked, making it only possible to access the site through a shifting set of proxy servers — a task that requires both technical expertise and which is typically impractical to do on a mobile device. Ambinder's vision of furtive Twitter revolutionaries users collaboratively helping one another dodge #machinegunnests seems like wishful thinking.

It does seem unquestionable that Twitter has enabled the coverage of the events in Iran to proceed with an immediacy that's novel to the medium. Partly this is simply because Twitter is currently enjoying a lot of excitement and attention from journalists; partly it's because the medium really does enable the centralized distribution of information on a time scale that was previously impractical.

But when all is said and done, the centralization means it's still relatively brittle when faced with a government keen on blocking it. Again: how are Iranians supposed to have been using the service? Yes, clearly some are. But how many, really? While it's been a fascinating way for all of us to learn what's going on in Iran, I still doubt that enough people in Iran have access to the site for it to be significantly enabling or shaping events there. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

Yglesias is fond of suggesting Silicon Valley's compensation model as a good alternative to the one that led the finance industry into distaster. The idea is that by using stock options to connect compensation to the long-term performance of a company rather than to its quarterly or yearly performance, we can make short-term risk-taking less lucrative than intelligent stewardship of a firm.

This sounds like a pretty good idea, and very well may be. But it's worth pointing out a couple of things: first, this may just be an apples and oranges sort of situation. It may not be the case that the sort of compensation structures available to a penniless startup are practically applicable to an enormous financial behemoth. I'm admittedly no expert, but I can imagine there may be problems.

Second — and this I can say with somewhat more confidence — the performance of the software industry is not such an inspirational success story that emulating it should be assumed to be a good idea. Spend three months reading TechCrunch or its equivalent; if you can make it through that time without killing yourself, you'll realize that Silicon Valley is incredibly inefficient, wasting vast sums of money on overhyped ideas that are stupid, unnecessary or just commercially impractical. There are very, very few firms that have created genuinely original technologies — technologies that Harry Turtledove would like to write about, technologies that may conceivably never have been invented if their creators' parents hadn't met. The bulk of the industry is made up of the proverbial million monkeys sitting at a million MacBooks; occasionally some Javascript comes out.

Some friends of mine have created a fake web startup. On their homepage (or twitter feed) you can find a simple mad-lib that changes every time you reload the page, and which goes like this: "[VAGUE, POSITIVE GERUND] [TECHNOLOGY A] with [TECHNOLOGY B]." This really is how the industry operates: through the mind-numbing combinatorial exhaustion of whatever technologies Google, Amazon, Adobe, Sun and a very few brilliant open-source developers can come up with. Some of this is valuable, even necessary economic activity. But a lot of it is just speculative activity which benefits no one other than the people directly involved — and which is ultimately a waste of resources. This should sound wearyingly familiar by now.

Now, it's not all their fault. The real problem is that software development is really easy — you need almost no capital, and there's an incredible wealth of existing technology that can be utilized. The bottlenecks to innovative commercial activity in the software realm are frequently external. These limits can be technological but not software-related (phone cameras needed to get good enough to read barcodes), cultural (Facebook couldn't exist until college students were wired enough to adopt it) or political (only a firm of Google's size and import could start scanning books and comfortably expect to find a way out of the orphan works problem without being sued into oblivion). And of course it's just generally tough to start a successful business (I think I can confidently say that the average internet startup is based on a somewhat stupider idea than the average non-internet startup, but I have no idea which is actually more likely to fail). I'm sympathetic to these guys: certainly, I can understand the impulse to paint yourself a visionary who creates fundamentally new possibilities, rather than as mere skilled craftsman using tools handed down from others.

But still, it's hard to look at the amount of investor money wasted on the web industry and conclude that its compensation practices are ones that should be emulated — particularly given that those practices are being abandoned now that the accounting gimmick that enabled them has been ended. Maybe it's preferable to have a lot of middle-class programmers blowing through investor money instead of a relatively few upper class finance executives doing the same — I suppose it is a more progressive transfer — but that's all that Silicon Valley's recent history seems to promise. The way to neutralize the villains of this bubble may not be to make them more like the villains of the last bubble.

I am, let's face it, a bit too well-hydrated to pretend any semblance of rhetorical structure. So let's just do this in context-free bullet point format, like the rest of our society:

• Indie rock beards: done. If I, on the cusp of my fourth decade, can see this, then surely the matter was actually settled in some Pitchfork staff listserv months ago. Capps has already accidentally stumbled into the vanguard. And now, in the blinding, beard-free light of day, it's obvious that this was just a conceptual hangover from the Year of Earnest Music Composed in Cabins. But now it's finished, and those of us with beard disabilities can rejoice. Temporarily, anyway — for razors cost money, and the unhygienic laziness of musicians is not to be underestimated.
• Harlem Shakes played a largely acoustic set, and mentioned offhandedly that they'd "lost" some equipment, conveying the impression that as consummate professionals they had recovered from larcenous adversity by composing off-the-cuff acoustic arrangements. The rock flute was deployed! And then the rock sax! And then the last two songs suddenly featured a drum kit and bass and electric six string, so, um, what?
• They're doomed anyway. Harlem Shakes is a very good band, but their timing is all wrong. If they were eighteen months out from the last time David Byrne or Clap Your Hands did something? Sure, everyone would recognize that these guys are excellent musicians who make inspiring music. But they aren't, so they won't. Amanda and Catherine are probably right that the next album will settle things, but at the moment, critics' self-satisfaction at their ability to name the group's influences is dooming the band.
• We — you and I — are never going to escape this musical moment. These fucking synths — these goddamn waxy, Miami-fucking-Vice synths... Stick them alongside modern percussive artillery and our entire generation (+/-1) is powerless to resist. MGMT, Justice, Phoenix — all are trading on this unfortunate artifact of our upbringing. No doubt it will repeat, too, as the tautologically corny soundtracks of future generations' childhoods are resuscitated by the bass-heavy trend of the moment, and that same stupid retro timbre will spawn era after era of not-quite-dance tracks waiting to be remixed into club smashes. There's no question that Passion Pit is writing itself into this history. But they do, occasionally, lean over the edge of it. And maybe I'm just a sucker for this — actually, I know I'm a sucker for this, for any hint of rock and roll catharsis, for just the sound of human voices reaching — but yeah, Passion Pit are capable of pushing beyond the easy rut they've inherited. They didn't care to do it often enough to make me stay for the encore, though.

But still: I enjoyed the show. Maybe I'm just getting old; these days it just needs to be loud, the people on stage just need to be feeling something. That's all it takes. Let's hear it for making a terrific racket.

Yesterday Apple announced a shiny new version of its signature mobile device. This prompted considerable acclaim. However, within hours of the announcement, new revelations emerged. It became known that — presumably due to the malign influence of AT&T (a company that, unlike Apple, is capable of wrongdoing) — the new iPhone would be sold under a nefarious scheme specifically constructed to line the pockets of those peddling it at a rate brazenly designed to cover the cost of each unit's production — and even more, if you can believe it!

As you might imagine, this has prompted considerable outrage, which has in turn spurred real grassroots action. And even if those online petitions and Twitter accounts somehow fail to force AT&T to start buying Americans free electronics, surely the tide will be turned by thoughtful essays like this one, in which the author explains why it's vitally important that companies do everything they can to accommodate the customers whose fanaticism renders them price insensitive and/or whose contractual commitment has already been secured.

Seriously, though: at $99 they're going to sell a staggering number of these things. People are actually just upset about the reality of handset subsidies. Well, good. They should be! There are many things wrong with these subsidies.

First, they're a particularly opaque form of consumer credit — you only have to read a few examples of the outrage alluded to above to see that most consumers haven't really internalized how they work. That's never a good thing.

Second, underwriting handsets forces carriers to lock down both customers and their phones in order to recoup the subsidy cost. By necessitating long-term contracts, friction is introduced to the market and competition is hindered. By requiring a hardware architecture that supports locking, carriers can more easily cripple phones' functionality. And since carrier locking reduces the reusability and resalability of handsets, more phones are discarded. It's a terrible set of incentives for consumers: every one or two years you're offered a new electronic gadget at (seemingly) below market cost! And if you choose to take it, your old handset's value is next to nothing, thanks to software restrictions imposed upon it. It's a recipe for electronic waste.

Third, the opacity of the finance mechanism at work helps support bad perceptions about the fair price of mobile data service. It's pretty clear that (given the bandwidth caps and speed limitations in place) mobile broadband has an artificially high price*. Admittedly, that's probably mostly because businesses are the main purchasers of mobile broadband, and they're less price sensitive than consumers. But this situation must be at least somewhat informed by consumers' expectation that any given mobile account will cost $50+ per month. The popularity of the subsidy scheme makes it so that for most cutting edge services, a la carte (or even month to month) service isn't an option at all — you have to enter into a contract even if you already own the device. Speaking as someone who has a bunch of devices and a strong desire to have them all constantly connected, this is pretty inconvenient.

But you know whose fault this is? Yours! Or ours, anyway. This country's consumers have pretty clearly signaled their preference for subsidized handsets, and aren't interested in hearing about the inefficiencies that those subsidies produce. I'm not immensely pleased about this collective decision, but that's the way it's going to be for the foreseeable future. The very least we can do is not whine about the inescapable consequences of this system — coming so soon after an economy-wide consumer credit implosion, these demands for free money (or at least a free extension of existing loans) are a bit much to take.

Incidentally, I do think there's some reason for hope — over the long term, anyway. Wireless standards will eventually converge thanks to the efficiencies of the market and the physical limits on radio bandwidth. Once that happens there'll be no reason to buy a new transceiver every year or two. Presumably there'll be a similar leveling off in demand for these devices' other capabilities, as handset manufacturers start to reach the sort of semi-stable compromise between power consumption, processing muscle and cost that microcomputer processor manufacturers have begun to find in the past few years (add display capability and size to that list for mobile devices, of course). I wouldn't expect it to happen for a decade or so, but eventually we'll start treating our handsets more like the watches they've replaced — as potential heirlooms.

* I can purchase daily unlimited GPRS traffic through Boost Mobile for $0.10. That's a very slow service, but of course costs don't scale evenly with the number of bits transferred. If a profitable unlimited data business can be run at that rate — including advertising, accounting overhead, bandwidth costs and infrastructure — then clearly 2.5/3G services (which typically cannot be purchased on a daily or even monthly basis) are being sold at a phenomenal markup.