In an odd yet revealing letter in today’s Financial Times, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel (now there’s an Orwellian job title), Peter Fleischer, scolds the FT’s fashion writer for suggesting that men should wear ties to work. The tie, says Fleischer, “constricts circulation to the brain.” Worse yet, it “acts as decorative camouflage for the business suit, designed to shield the middle-age male physique, with its shrinking shoulders and protruding paunch, from feeling sufficiently self-conscious to hit the gym.”

There is no place – or shelter – for the physically impure in Fleischer’s world. He writes:

Men should lose their “business attire” and wear T-shirts to work. Wouldn’t you like to know whether your business partners are fit? Why should you trust a man in business if he abuses his own body? … If your fashion editor can hardly imagine a better garment for men to exhibit their personality, power and masculinity than wearing ties, well, I work at Google. Our unofficial motto is, “Be serious without a suit.”

Praise be. Only the fit in mind, body, and soul should be considered worthy to walk the green fields of Google Earth.

From my column in today’s Guardian:

A group of prominent technology bloggers last month found themselves in hot water after they agreed to lend their words and names to Microsoft’s “People Ready” marketing campaign. The bloggers, all associated with the Federated Media advertising network, wrote brief statements describing how their own businesses became “people ready.” The statements appeared in Microsoft ads on their blogs and were also collected on a site promoting the software company. In Silicon Valley, shilling for Microsoft falls somewhere between worshipping Satan and torturing small animals on the scale of human depravity, so the bloggers came in for some heavy criticism …

Read.

So what have I been doing this summer while I haven’t been blogging? One thing I’ve been doing is overseeing the installation of one of those Sun Blackbox trailer computers behind my garage. Here’s the nifty time-lapse video.

Okay, I lied. The Blackbox was actually installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which is the first customer to put the data-center-in-a-box into operation.

Speaking of lying, check out the color of that Blackbox.

Clay Shirky:

The internet’s output is data, but its product is freedom, lots and lots of freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, the freedom of an unprecedented number of people to say absolutely anything they like at any time, with the reasonable expectation that those utterances will be globally available, broadly discoverable at no cost, and preserved for far longer than most utterances are, and possibly forever.

Kazys Varnelis:

The migration of the means of production back up to the web and the growth of social networking sites is generating a mass wave of consolidation and aggregation … We may be seeing a thousand flowers bloom at the level of content production, but control is in the hands of the few. And now, with Web 2.0 taking hold, we have software applications migrating to the Web. This is attractive for individuals since licenses are often free in exchange for precious demographic data that would otherwise be unavailable – hence no more need to pirate – and to corporations since annual leases can be more conveniently written off than outright purchases. But it also suggests that after three decades of the means of production drifting downward into our hands, they are beginning to slip away from us again. The meshworks are breeding new hierarchies.

From my column in today’s Guardian:

To be a successful software company today, you increasingly have to worry not just about writing code but about assembling and maintaining big, complex hardware systems. There’s an irony here. Since the arrival of the web nearly two decades ago, the pundits of information processing have told us that the future will be created not out of the atoms of the physical world, but out of the bits of the digital realm. The software business, conjured out of immaterial lines of code, has been held up as the herald and symbol of this transformation.

But large software companies are finding that, as more computing tasks move online, they have to compete not just on the elegance of their programs, but on their ingenuity and efficiency in buying and deploying physical assets – land, buildings, computers, and other gear – as well as managing the huge amounts of energy required to keep all the machines running. The management of atoms is becoming as important as the management of bits …

Read.

From my contribution to the Britannica Blog’s Web 2.0 Forum:

What’s happening here isn’t about amateurs and professionals. George Washington was an amateur politician. Charles Darwin was an amateur scientist. Wallace Stevens was an amateur poet. Talent cannot be classified; it’s an individual trait. What’s happening here isn’t even really about expertise or its absence. The decisive factor is not how we produce intellectual works but how we consume them …

Read.

From my latest column in The Guardian:

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Today, we seem to be operating under a new and very different dictum: the unrecorded life is not worth living. Thanks to digital technologies, we now have the tools to chronicle our daily actions and thoughts in the minutest detail – and to share the record with the world …

Read.