Author: brittblaser

One of the most interesting disconnects among the BloggerConners was whether bloggers are the vanguard of an exciting renaissance or is blogging just business as usual. This was a common theme at the conference, reverberating from the first session through the last. Heh, maybe I just go to sessions where optimism has a place at the table.

It seemed to me that the eldest attendees tended to be more optimistic and the younger less so. Chris Lydon, Jeff Jarvis, Dave, Doc (and I) see blogging as profoundly important. An exception to that observation was the ever-youthful Esther Dyson, who didn’t seem to buy the euphoria expressed in the session, on the grounds that the blogging “elites” may feel optimistic, but that would not be the effect on the rest of the world.

Such cautionary advice prompted me to observe that no one in the room had been part of the blogging elite when they started, but the effect of their blogging had a profound effect on them and their connectivity. Further, I suggested that our world is utopia, compared to the world of our great-great-grandparents; that the only thing sucky about our world is by comparison to the world we now dare imagine, so daring precisely because of how far we’ve come and the tools now available for further improvement. I then added one of my canned memes, that blogging is the coffeehouse conversations of the Age of Enlightenment, sure to impel us forward with the same positive force.

First Magic

Esther later blogged this:

The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible. But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to.

What?!? the candidates don’t read every word the earnest bloggers post? Don’t they care? Won’t he (or occasionally she, though not at Bloggercon) reply to at least one question a day? After all, he spends quality time with “regular” reporters…

In the blogosphere, there’s no shortage of airtime, but there’s still a shortage of attention.

And attention is the world’s fuel, not content. However, must a blogger be known to the BloggerConners to feel the blogging love? Blogging attracts people who want to publish their words and retains those with a continuing interest in publishing. When a few of those bloggers publish regularly about their Harper Valley PTA, they will feel as acknowledged at PTA meetings as many of us did at BloggerCon. If you have something useful to say, it will be heard and responded to and you’ll be honored in your own land, by enough to be gratifying. But, as someone reminded the Edwards supporter, you have to earn your links.

A notable exception to my unreliable perception of optimistic seniors and skeptical others was Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, who said it well in Sunday’s Political session, something like, “If you see what happens in Meetups, you conclude that [the blogging-political connection] is underhyped.”

Are the senior bloggers more optimistic in general than the younger? If so, might it be because we’ve seen so many dramatic changes already and have had a chance to calibrate the effect of technolgy? Regardless of the reason, I’m a confirmed optimist and likely to stay that way.

You say Dystopia and I say Utopia

Many at the conference seemed to think that we are clearly not now in utopia. What’s a utopia? Ideas are dismissed as utopian if they promise grand results relying on unreasonable expectations of human nature. A dystopia seems to be the result of (often accidental) structures purported to be for society’s good but which fail because of their dependence on humans being more charitable, law-abiding or civic-minded than they are. Such structures yield a society that is miserable for most of its members, with little hope for redemption. Bedford Falls vs. Potterville.

However, our society seems to be particularly at a loss for clues, especially when the propoganda is ignored. The NeoCons have had their way with us, and their model looks like naive utopian drivel, assuming as it does that wealthy people are inclined to create jobs with their tax cuts. No, they’re inclined to make safe investments in financial instruments that only incidentally create jobs, as in Hoover’s dystopia. It’s a shame the most grasping among us keep forgetting this lesson.

Given this disconnect, it’s time to design a civil society with highly granular productivity and mutual respect. Yes, that would be the Xpertweb meme. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Visibility Tech makes a difference

I live in New York City, where cabs never run a red light. This unlikely Giuliani-era civic-mindedness is not the product of driver training nor is it solely regulatory–the $150 fine had been on the books for years. Rather, it depends on an enabling technology. Most intersections have cameras recording the passing scene, and offending hacks get their photograph and $150 ticket in the mail. Thus the large body of Cabdom’s unthinkable acts came to include running a red light, just as mobile booking vans quashed subway turnstile-hopping, as Malcolm Gladwell described in Tipping Point, which exposes the conservative myth of civil benign neglect, which is neither civil nor benign:

…tipping points give the lie to conservative policies of benign neglect. In New York City, for example, one round of cuts in, say, subway maintenance is justified with the observation that the previous round of cuts didn’t seem to have any adverse consequences. But that’s small comfort. With epidemic problems, as with ketchup, nothing comes and then the lot’ll.

I wonder why conservatives, who cannot countenance an untidy home or dandruff flake on a serge suit, so naively neglect our shared space? Even the Bushes can’t spend all their time on Jupiter Island.

Just as traffic cameras put cabbies on their best behavior, so will Xpertweb’s transaction visibility and quality ratings cause all of us to behave better toward each other. Then we’ll put some real teeth into the conversation of the marketplace, rather than relying on the NeoCon’s wooly-headed, utopian vision of a functioning society directed from closed board roo
ms and government chambers.

10:35:17 AM    

Now that has to be the most common headline in the blogosphere today.

Dave Winer just said that the Dean campaign is only a start, dismissing it as no more than a start, that eventually the voters should write the campaign blogs, not the campaign itself. That seems to me to be true already with the Dean campaign. Matt Gross, the campaign’s chief blogger, is a blogger who just showed up one day at the campaign because he felt it ought to have a blog. So, whether or not Matt is a voter or a campaign worker is questionable. When I spent a week at the campaign as a volunteer worker, I discovered that even the paid staffers (by far the minority) functioned as volunteers–they’re voters who feel so strongly that they somehow find a way to work on the campaign full time for slave wages or less. And the campaign blog is written by several of the staffers who have become celebrities themselves. NYC Deaniacs enthused about getting their autographs at the Bryant Park Rally!

I’d like to clarify a huge misunderstanding about the Dean campaign, arising from not digging deep enough to get it how the campaign blog works: The real story of the Dean campaign is not the official blog, but the comments to the blog. The abundant, passionate and uncannilycomments are the fuel for this campaign. The threads they build there are the way this community maintains its community. And, importantly, they are half a million people who have explicitly declared themselves to be a community, which explicitly proves that this is precisely what Dave says it is not.

A Natural Law for Trolls?

I just called Dave on that issue, and his response is that there’s a natural law that if you have comments turned on long enough, the trolls will flood the place and make it uninhabitable, (especially, regarding this case, if Rush Limbaugh links to it). I opined that natural laws are routinely revised and that the Dean campaign’s success with comments requires us to update that law, if there is one.

Kevin Marks just pointed out that a differentiator is whether commenters are responding to a single item, which brings out the worst in us, or whether they expect to continue interacting over time. For the Dean campaign, the vast majority of commenters are committed to another year of building a presidency and the next 8 years helping to manage that presidency.

When a troll shows up, they thank the troll for reminding them to contribute to the Dean Troll Fund, and leave it at that. In other words, each of the commenters doesn’t feel required to respond to others, treating the comments tool as their Dean-oriented blogging tool.

Jim Moore agrees that the Dean comments are inspiring and are demonstrating the unexpected effect of comments that are both voluminous and civil. This new phenomenon deserves some serious attention.
11:46:25 AM    

Introducing the Blogs for Politics session, Dave Winer is reading his Tips for Candidates’ Weblogs from a month ago.

My point-by-point pushback on his suggestions is here.
4:18:26 PM    

Civil discourse must be just that, civil.

As bloggers, we’re inclined to be civil to each other, even as we flame those without a blog (Karl Rove being my current favorite). Listening to Chris Lydon’s interview of Jim Moore, I appreciated the suggestion that BloggerCon might promote activism:

What’s your hope, your ambition for BloggerCon?

I would love it if BloggerCon could showcase how activists of various stripes can be enabled by technology to join with others to shape a wiser and more creative world.”

How will we do it?

I think we do it by listening to each others’ human voices. I think we do it by taking our best, our most precious, but also slightly transgressing kinds of ideas and pushing them forward through blogging so we advance the frankness and the openness of dialogue. I think we do it by trying to live out values of dialogue and understanding and love on the web.

How might understanding have a role for activism? It might be by tempering the Scorched Earth tradition of politics. For that to happen, there must surely be a new way of talking about politics. Now that candidates must have a blog voice, might there be an incipient mechanism for a resurgence of substance over innuendo?

Wouldn’t it be interesting if candidates’ bloggers developed a shared aesthetic and perhaps even a kind of backchannel that promoted the kind of issues-based civility that characterizes blogging rather than the attack politics that characterizes broadcast politics. It might be a metaphor for the State Department promoting constructive engagement in opposition to ChickenHawk belligerence. You know, like the unwritten rule that we NEVER WRITE IN ALL CAPS.

If candidates’ bloggers are to be their foreign ministers, the meme might get started this weekend.

Roland on the River

Meanwhile, back at our crow’s nest overlooking the East River, Roland Tanglao is setting up the Xpertweb code on my PowerBook for our BloggerCon demo at 9am Sunday at the BOF session in Pound 201. We’ll demo through the break so you can stop by at 10:30 between sessions 1&2.

Xpertweb is a protocol for maintaining mirrored transaction data on 2 web sites, where the seller and the buyer are equally equipped to conduct business. The transaction progresses through discrete stages:

1. Discover a seller
2. Identify a product and qualify the buyer (buyer’s digital ID)
3. Specify delivery options, dates, etc.
4. Negotiate the details
5. Remark on work in progress (including change orders)
6. Invoice upon completion
7. Evaluate the transaction (by both buyer and seller)

There’s nothing dramatic about the process except that it’s not dependent on a central server so the parties to a transaction can manage their market conversation without an intermediary. Both user’s sites are equipped with tools for maintaining the kinds of explicit data types common to all transactions, plus unique data types for product specification.

9:22:27 PM    

Jim Moore writes today that the Clintons’ support for Clark is bad politics. In saying so, he has dropped an important clue as to why the Dean campaign is different and why that difference matters so much:

“Dean is the only real outsider in the campaign, and the only one who will attempt to reform the party if he wins the nomination.  Read “reform the party” as reducing the influence of big traditional party donors and money people . . .

What makes Dean threatening to the party elite is that he IS electable–and that he owes the elite little or nothing.”

Their lack of leverage over Dean is driving every other politician just nuts. And his freedom from traditional political power is THE political story of the first half of the 21st century. I hope that we bloggers and bloggees can put our heads around this, because every other technical, political and economic navel-gaze is inconsequential by comparison. Need I be more strident?

Sleepers awake! The Internet is hitting its stride, conforming to Paul Saffo’s rule that technology expectations are generally flawed: tech has less impact in the short term and more in the long term than we expect: “the amount of time required for new ideas to fully seep into a culture has consistently averaged about three decades for at least the past five centuries.”

The Internet’s first three decades are barely up and suddenly a Presidential candidate has the means to attract and bond with his constituents as Dean has, and prevail while owing nothing to the political machinery. Like open source software, the Dean campaign is more a result of constituents’ activity than the constituents are the result of campaign activity. That inversion is the point Jim Moore is making when he confronts the Clintons’ insider politics attacking Dean’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington run. Internet disintermediation at its most impressive.

What’s not to like about this populist hijacking (well, re-hijacking) of the political process? Don’t we the (majority of) the people benefit when we’re able to combine to elect our own candidate. If that’s so, why is it not more obvious that the Dean thing is a Good Thing?

But consider the downside. What if the majority of the people somehow take our country in a direction that the minority of the people don’t want it to go? Anyone who mistrusts majority rule is an aristocrat, and aristocracy, like monarchy, is a dead end.

This majority rule idea scares the shit out of most of us, perhaps because each of us suspects we’re in the minority–that somehow we’re at risk from the whims of the mob. And this is the inner challenge we need to face–to just get over ourselves. As we’re learning from the surprisingly good reasoning and openness behind most blogs and the comments to them, common sense is more common than we think. Perhaps we’ve just been misled by the aristocrats, telling us how stupid we all are.

Welcome to the Permission-Free Zone…

…The Twilight Zone of Broadcast Politics. Like a child’s mind wiring itself together, our dendritical connections are forming without permission, authorization or capital to support what our body politic wants to do. It seems that all we need is a set of neural pathways–the Internet–to form the web of common cause and mutual benefit that defines the combining of cells into a superorganism.

This is the point of Howard Bloom, biologist by training, student of mob psychology and author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain. He argues persuasively that families and tribes and beehives and nations–and you and me–are superorganisms, living entities composed of smaller organisms that have irrevocably combined. He’ll convince you that this combinatory urge is the norm in nature and that the Clint Eastwood syndrome, the notion of a successful existence isolated from society, is the stuff of fiction, not life.

Paul Saffo and Howard Bloom might say that the Dean surge is to obvious and right on schedule. I say that breakdown leads to breakthrough and that we are in the midst of a classic breakdown. This week brings more stirrings from the adult wing of the Republican party, saying that this administration has been as mismanaged as every other GWB enterprise: a Federal Reserve Bank Chair, the Cato Institute, the key Watergate figure, the CIA. Can breakthrough be far behind?

Jim Moore is the creator of the Second Superpower vision and originated the idea of people contributing a billion dollars to an Internet-based campaign. Now he’s illustrated the gulf between Dean and all other politicians. We’re at an inflection point which combines the populist medium with a candidate who thinks like an American. This is the kind of moment that history often leans on when forming a new pattern.

I’m looking forward to hanging out here for a while.

1:23:22 AM    

Maybe they’re just a bunch of losers in wolf clothing. The Bush family gives us no confidence they can be re-elected, a sure sign of loserness. Karl Rove may be about to be fired for the second time for leaking to Robert Novak, and fulfill Joe Wilson’s delicious vision of seeing him frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

When Rove leaked to Novak in 1992, he was fired by the late Bob Mosbacher, another Texas Republican but one who, despite his cronyism, looks statesmanlike next to Rove, who never saw a dirty trick he didn’t like.

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel this administration seems to have a death wish? Could they have designed a more disastrous three years? There’s ample evidence that they flubbed terrorist intelligence prior to 9/11. From where I sit in the cheap seats, it looks like every action since then has been to cover up that fundamental error.

It’s like another in Dubya’s series of flawed business dealings writ large. His career has been, essentially, a Ponzi scheme, where the next investor bails out the last one. The problem is that we the people have been left holding the bag, since the only investor left to bail him out is the U.N. community, and they don’t care who his daddy is.

The Republican party has an honorable tradition of representing the interests of people who care about the orderly provision of capital and business processes for the service of society. Someone recently told me that the party has been taken over by a cabal of religious fundamentalists, second-rate business people like Ken Lay, and world domination freaks and Zionists like Wolfowitz. People like that are losers by nature, doomed to spend their lives marketing themselves as powerful, astute, responsible strict fathers, since so many people respond well to the appearance of such a father figure.

Unfortunately, such a father figure is never more than a figure, for those men are so rare as to be irrelevant to the human condition. They are the male equivalent of Sophia Loren, still juicy and appealing at age however-old-she-is-now.

The reason father figures comfort us is that we imagine them through our childhood filters. No one can live up to that role, which we discover when we grow up and see that Dad was just a guy doing the best he can like everyone else. Most of us are probably doomed to seek the comfort of parents as we want to remember them rather than humans as they are. So, like a beauty with fine, limp hair, we know our life will be perfect if we can just find the secret government formula that will deliver us from a life without a Dad to take care of us. You could call it Lakoff’s Law.

Personal Axe

My resentment of George Bush is that he’s certainly a coward. He enlisted at the same USAF recruiting office in New Haven, almost exactly three years after I did. The difference is that I went along with the program while he served as many years as were interesting to him. Now that it’s attractive to the media to bury these yahoos, the public will be told all the well-known but hitherto unpublicized evidence of Dubya’s personal failings, which are well known to anybody who’s been around him (so I’m told).

Like his buddy Richard Mellon Scaife, Georgie’s a poster boy for why we need an inheritance tax. Bill Gates knows that the worst thing he can do for his kids is make them rich, so he’s giving his money to third world health. He’ll leave everyone better off, his kids and the world’s poor.

Now we’ll have a media orgy to remember. The adult Republicans will pick up the pieces from their long day’s journey into night and the country will right itself (left, actually), return to its reliable center and perceive again that there is a purpose for government and that taxes are just the dues we pay for being in the club.

11:32:36 AM    

Jon Udell has noted a new expertise shortage at IDG, in Ace travel agents available:

In my column a few weeks ago, I wrote:

Why, for example, does Expedia ask you to specify the number of children traveling with you, and even their ages, and then proceed to show you hotel rooms that can’t accommodate the kids?

When I’m traveling on business, I get to bypass this nonsense. I just call up IDG Travel and talk to Bruce or Michael. These guys can hack through the plane/hotel/rental-car system like hot knives through butter. It’s true they have access to privileged information, but I’m sure they could also make better use of public information than you or I. Their ability to recognize and exploit patterns is what makes them so effective.

Sadly, as of today, because of a restructuring at IDG Travel, I can’t just call up Bruce Powell or Michael McCarthy. But my loss could be your gain. If you know of a Bay Area opportunity for an ace travel agent, I’ll be happy to pass it along.

And thanks again, guys. You’ll be sorely missed.

This is a great example of the loyalty that buyers have for valued sellers. Jon had formed a bond with Bruce and Michael whose absence will cost him a lot of time and inconvenience. It’s also an indicator that a pleases buyer will not arbitrarily rate a good seller under the Xpertweb rating system.

Behind the Music

There’s a minor back story here. I had an email and phone exchange last spring with Jon Udell that I found depressing,

“I’m certainly interested in the concepts behind XpertWeb. I’m not sure I buy the implementation envisioned in the docs on the website.”

After my best attempt to explain Xpertweb to Jon, he was still unimpressed–testimony to my powers of persuasion. He continued to be skeptical of the Xpertweb requirement that each participant have and manage their own web site. I wrote at the time:

“But yesterday I couldn’t articulate the protocol’s plumbing and its larger promise to a guy who totally gets the Internet and believes it’s destined to connect individuals in unprecedented, useful ways. His commitment to the assumptions behind Xpertweb may precede and exceed mine, but he seems so sated with the failure of people to embrace small procedural changes that he can’t imagine a subculture of process-driven zealots embracing the ritual of an alternate economy, filling in forms to hire a plumber. That view seems to me to ignore our willingness to use a form to buy a $6.95 paperback. Certainly he can’t imagine the protocol growing beyond the early adopters and scaling through the use of their servers. Mitch says it’s exactly the position he took before he dug beneath the surface.”

Whether Xpertweb can work, fortunately is easy to disprove. You make it work and then it’s workable. Of course it might not work to force all those people to get and use their own Xpertweb sites but, like all innovators, I’ll just say I’m still working on it. As Dave Winer says about shitty software, “Still diggin’!”

BloggerCon Xpertweb Demo

Roland Tanglao and I will be attending Dave Winer’s BloggerCon, and will be demonstrating the Xpertweb tools at the Hotel@MIT. If you’d like to have a look, please contact me through the little envelope icon, or contact Roland directly.

10:58:38 PM    

Among the many reasons to blog, one of the greatest is to expand one’s reputation and, unless you’re Mother Teresa, a prime reason for improving your reputation–your personal brand–is to get more business. Any prominent blogger is implicitly available to speak or consult on the areas she discusses on her blog.

This motivation deserves more play than it’s getting. In commerce we discover how to value each other in the way that matters most: exchanging the fruits of our labor for someone else’s. Can there be any greater way to honor another?

We blog not just to connect more but to be worth more and to earn more.

What if there were a sophisticated form of trackback on our blog to aggregate the details of our offline transactions? This would extend our blog’s utility by presenting our real-world activities objectively so our trust of each other might extend beyond how we speak of ourselves. It would also capture how others speak of us, and explicitly how they rate us as they pay us.

Peer-to-peer like the Blogosphere

An Xpertweb page can act as a supplement to a web log tracking your words and another’s words when you do a transaction together. It’s a highly structured trackback that records your effects on others. Every time a buyer submits an order, any data saved on the seller’s site is duplicated on the buyer’s site, by the buyer’s trusted script, in the form of an order confirmation page. Then, as the transaction progresses, the mirrored data store is enriched, culminating with each party’s grade and comment, which is the point of the whole system.

All this data replicates to other sites in the same way that the worthwhile things we say are quoted on other blogs. The blogosphere’s triangulation of our posts is a part of its robustness and its reliability–we simply can’t reverse course too often or our personal brand is diluted. Xpertweb similarly captures and publishes our quality ratings. The hardest part of the system has been to make it as peer-to-peer as the blogosphere. It would have been more straightforward to design it with a centralized data store. But then it would have been too easy to succumb to temptations to charge for the service. Better it should be a protocol rather than a service.

In the agora, everyone can watch each other shopping. The citizens are on display like the melons.

BloggerCon Xpertweb Demo

Roland Tanglao and I will be attending Dave Winer’s BloggerCon, and will be demonstrating the Xpertweb tools at the Hotel@MIT. If you’d like to have a look, please contact me through the little envelope icon, or contact Roland directly.

11:14:22 AM    

Some interesting pushback from my post on Thursday. Sean Gallagher over at Rant Central has back-ranted my rant:

Well, then, the Eisenhowerian glove has been laid down. Is the government our last refuge from the opression of capital? As the government tries every day to slough off its responisbilities to the private sector, has the time come to reverse the trend?

I don’t think nationalization (that’s what it would really be) is the answer. I think proper stewardship is the answer, and the government has to take a more active role in kicking the ass of ICANN and its vendors when they step out of line with the public interest.

Since the Internet extends outside the US borders, I suspect we might have some problems putting it under government control. What we really need is an Internet like the US interstate highway system–built with federal money, the use of which is governed by regulations designed to promote public interest; but constructed, policed and maintained by the localities it passes through.

If the Commerce Department were to take over the registry of domain names, it would probably treat it like it does the Patent and Trademark Office–as a piggy bank to raid for other projects. What has to happen is that ICANN needs to be made publicly accountable, and made to reclaim its responsibility to oversee the master DNS, supported by royalties from multiple registrars and contract revenue from the federal government based on its adherence to public policy.

Sean’s absolutely right, and my rant should have been more clear. We need less Internet design, not more. I’m not advocating a 50s-era Highway Trust for funding Internet packet forwarding. What we need is a set of prohibitions on what we can’t do to the Internet. Perhaps this is another expression of my Minimalism screed of last month.

Rollin’ Down the Highway

I really like Sean’s Interstate Highway analogy, and it separately occurred to me when speaking with David Weinberger on the phone Friday afternoon. We spoke of I-90, running through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where David lives. It’s also the Massachusetts Turnpike, where they charge you a toll when you leave it, often by scanning a Fast Lane sensor on your car. It may help to think of our little Internet packets as cars appearing and leaving the Internet randomly, pursuant to the owners’ whims.

The Mass Pike really doesn’t care which car-packets enter and leave its collection system, as long as the fare is paid. The cars paying cash are like analog phone calls on a switched phone circuit. The carrier knows nothing about the who or the why of the traversal except its physical start and end. It knows more about Fast Lane cars, since it has a contractual relationship with each owner, limiting the rights of the parties to harm each other.

Presumably the Interstate Highway Commission also has contractual arrangements with the Mass Pike Authority. The tolls are charged because Massachusetts stretch of I-90 receives no federal or state funding (according to their web site), so it can charge tolls on the I-90 traffic that would not dream of paying a toll west of the Mississippi. However, there are certainly constraints on the Mass Pike Authority’s freedom to impede travel by people who are expecting an I-90 level of service, quite separate from any overarching notions of personal freedom. The Feds and the Mass Pike Authority might have a little chat if the Commonwealth started detaining travelers for 24 hours every 100 miles while examining their license at a Patrol HQ next to a $350 per night motel operated by the state. It would probably be a Federal case but not a drawn-out Constitutional battle before the Supreme Court. Contract law can be a lovely environment when you want to get to the heart of a disappointment.

Most of the “improvements” we might make to the Internet are degradations as significant as new toll booths or mandatory overnight stays. The reason such upgrades are suspect is because we really prefer the 1995 Internet to the one that powerful interests are now imagining. Our illusion is that the Internet is an unmanaged pipe, like a water main, into which we pour information and inquiries, and out of which we drink news and answers.

A Straight Wire with Gain

In the world of Hi-Fi, the perfect amplifier is called “a straight wire with gain”: no noise, distortion or unpleasantness, just a pure signal made strong enough to energize loudspeakers. That’s what we expect from Interstate highways and the Internet. The trick for the Internet is to instantiate a way of dealing that restricts the telecom companies from turning packet forwarding into a protection racket (“It’ll cost you to enjoy our new services, like guaranteed delivery”). Better they should handle it forever as a commodity routing project. Like the Mass Pike Authority.

I just didn’t “get” Lawrence Lessig’s cautionary statements that the Internet as we know it is at risk, presented in CODE and Other Laws of Cyberspace almost four years ago, and his every action since:

“Lessig’s chief message is aimed at those who view the Internet as some kind of democratic wonderland, a place of unfettered free speech, business competition, and creativity. Set the euphoria aside, he warns. Government and industry are already stripping privacy, free speech, and other liberties from the Internet in order to suit the needs of online commerce.”
          –The Net at what price? Aaron Zitner, The Boston Globe, March 19, 2000

As I wrote yesterday, the concern so eloquently described by Lessig and Searls has just been reinforced, even more urgently, by John Walker and Ernest Partridge.

My concern this Presidential election cycle is that the free trade of ideas and their stakeholders may be as threatening to politicians as to entrenched commercial interests. That’s why I’ve established the Free the Internet Contribution page at Dean for America. Dean is the only candidate with a vested interest in a free and open Internet, so he’s the only candidate we can trust to defend it against the establishment. If elected, he will see an open Internet as his best hope for re-election, so he’s our best hope for the Internet to which we’d like to become accustomed.
I suggest that we pay the equivalent of $2.74 per day for the next year to secure the Internet for ourselves, our kids and theirs. Aha! That’s $1,000. Fair enough. It’s a grand cause, worth a grand.

Starving Student Backlash

Jefferson Provost suggests that I’m impeding contributions:

Hi Britt,

Great idea, but I think you may be alienating your potential contributors. Setting the nominal contribution at $1000 and then saying, “contribute as an indicator of you clue inventory.” It makes it sound as if those who contribute much less than that are clueless. I’m guessing that’s probably not your intention, but it really makes it sound like you’d rather not have small contributions.

I’m a graduate student, and $1000 is 2/3 of a month’s salary. I sure as hell don’t pay $3/day for coffee. Why would I want to contribute anything, when you make it sound like those who can’t kick in your (totally unrealistic) nominal contribution are clueless? You should be saying “Every little bit helps!”

Jeff

The ringing truth that reinforces Jeff’s point is that this is the first time in several Presidential cycles that the youth vote will be significant. That will probably be the greatest deciding factor in this cycle.

Jeff, my intent is not to discouraged your demographic, the most important in this race, and I think Zephyr, Josh and Zack would concur. What I’m trying to do is to get my generation of its ass and throw in some serious shwag. There are a lot of us who talk about these issues and have strong opinions. I’m trying to get us to vote with relevant dollars. Jim Moore has written elegantly that the NeoCons are getting a hell of a bargain. They throw in about $200 million every four years and then get to play with about $6 trillion dollars until the next time. Jim rightly calls their investment “chump change“.

The question on the table is whether Non-Repubs are willing to make those kind of investments. We’re often long on rhetoric and short on contributions. Do you suppose that’s part of the same restraint that causes Democrats to be so much less strident in calling bullshit on the Repubs? Jim Moore suggests that we should be able to inspire one million people willing to throw in $1,000 to create a Dean war chest sufficient to transform American Politics. Righteous math, that.

Jeff, the news I’m trying to add is that the precious Internet we currently plan to leave to your generation could be as compromised as Our Bill of Rights has been since 9/11.

“The price of freedom is vigilance”, indeed. And some real cash once in a while. I hope some people like me choose to set an example for people like Jeff. This is the quarter to put in the cash and to make our statement.

4:47:24 AM