Author: brittblaser

Frank Patrick [1] sent this email to you through the Radio UserLand [2] community server, re this page [3].

Most bloggers are teenage girls…

…and most of the paper/time used in “real journalism” are devoted to ads, weather, sports, movie reviews, celebrity “news,” comics, stock quotes, fluff features, and pass-alongs from wire-services.

(Just something that came to me reading your recent posting about Orlowsky. It doesn’t fit in my blog.)

[1] http://www.focusedperformance.com/blogger.html
[2] http://radio.userland.com/
[3] http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/

 

9:52:36 PM    

On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 05:51 PM, David [1] sent this email to you through the Radio UserLand [2] community server, re this page [3].

Good story about the golf ball, pebbles, sand and beer. Where does it come from? Were you in the class? Great writing. You snagged me with the very first sentence!

[1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0105833/
[2] http://radio.userland.com/
[3] http://www.blaserco.com/blogs/2003/06/06.html#a145

Actually, David, it’s an email distro. Your appreciation for language may explain this lucid piece I found on your site:

What?

Bunker? What bunker?
Be quiet.

Treasury report? What Treasury report?
Be quiet.

Amnesia? What amnesia?
Be quiet.

Debt ceiling bill? What debt ceiling bill?
Be quiet.

WMD? What WMD?
Be quiet.

Press? What Press?
7:53:30 PM    

Like Mitch, I went to a Howard Dean Meetup last night, and you should when you can. Similar to Mitch’s experience, I found myself in a room full of angry but optimistic people–although our meeting was in the most crowded NY bar I’ve seen since the old days. Probably twice as many as at Mitch’s meetup.

<goodsign>The Republicans have done the impossible! They’re getting out the vote of passive non-Republicans and have solved the post- 9/11 NY bar depression</goodsign>

As I suggested here and here, the part of the blogging world that cares about policy should seek a few specific commitments from Dean on the issues that matter most to us: Fair Use, Unconstitutional search and seizure, Open Governance and a willingness to respond to issues that matter to those who are active in on-line democracy. Not a laundry list, but a focused emphasis on the things that matter to most people who take time to write online or read and comment online.

The obvious ones to hold such a meeting with Dr. Dean are Dr. Lessig and Doc Searls, but there’s probably no shortage of volunteers who know they’re qualified for such a mini-summit.

If Dean agrees to a coherent feedback loop, then people who care about the American Miracle (i.e., the Bill Of Rights) should spend the next year and a half making this the first Internet Presidency and the end of political business-as-usual.

Our commitment must be to help replace the money Dean would otherwise receive from the media who will cut him off when he endorses fair use. Further, we must commit to getting out the vote using the Internet, so money stops driving campaigns. When we calculate how that vision affects media’s profitability, we’ll understand how daunting are these demands.

Joe Plotkin

Joe Plotkin and his dad were there. Joe is the irrepressible marketing guy at BWay.net, host to the NYC Wireless meeting last week where Doc introduced me to Drazen Pantic. BWay is an ISP which gives responsive service and charges for it. They also offer DSL packages through Covad and have learned how to hate the phone company, or as Joe puts it: Hating Verizon is too simplistic. We resent their dominance because they hold hostage the public communications infrastructure — built as a regulated monopoly, the RBOCs are privatizing the benefits (promoting it as deregulation) while shirking the concomitant public obligations. It’s as if we built the Interstate Highway system and allowed the concrete contractor to own the tolls.

The real problem is that the RBOCs are allowed to be in a retail business while also being the monopoly wholesale provider of loops and other elements. There are anti-trust actions pending. One possible solution would create “structural separation” of the 2 functions — in which case, competitive providers would be treated as valued customers (to rent network elements) — instead of as competitive (retail) threats.

Joe and I are noodling around the idea of seemyvote.com, a domain I tied down in January:

#fleemer

seemyvote.com:

Politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly managing our elected toadies?

SeeMyVote would be based on our right to enforce full, fair and equal representation, establishing a protocol for translating individual hot issues into votes with teeth.

SeeMyVote would be a database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that, for instance, a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of political cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical because few politicians give a rat’s ass about abortion. They do care about the votes of people who care about choice).

This is the kind of data which allows politicians to explain to each other why they can’t support each others’ favorite causes. They all know they’re in government in order to stay in government.

Sample SeeMyVote Report:
“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn.

Those voter commitments have been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff, other Republican and Democratic National Committees and major media outlets. The data are presented in detail at http://www.seemyvote.com/fleemer.”

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on implementing this outrageous meme, Joe and I would love to hear from you.

George Morin

George Morin is a my-gen communications freelancer who was a Republican until he read enough history to learn how much blood was spilled to create the 40-hour work week, among other things. As a professional wordsmith, he’d like to help the Dean team craft its message, but he’d be happy to lick envelopes if that’s what’s needed. We huddled after the Meetup and wondered how we might contribute. There’s a lot of talent in this town, and it ought to be put to work on this campaign.

George and I are meeting tomorrow to tease out the idea of a Howard Dean NYC creative brain trust teaming up internet, print and broadcast pros who want to make a difference. The great thing about our political system is that every four years it foments new adhocracies of people who often end up running things. This is the first time the Internet can have a place at the grownup’s table, and it would be a shame if we sat around whining about what might be, when we’re now set up to help it be.

Chaordic Commonality – A Permission-free Zone

Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, has embraced the Internet the way Harry Truman embraced the whistlestop campaign, which he used to defeat another undefeatable Republican, Thomas Dewey, in 1948.

A May 22
ABC News article, Howard Dean raises $1M via the Internet:

Dean hit the $1 million mark in Internet fund raising last week, becoming the first 2004 presidential hopeful to announce he has done so. Dean supporters also are using the Internet to organize volunteers across the country.

Campaign manager Joe Trippi said the Internet has matured to the point where people are comfortable using it to donate.

Trippi concedes that unleashing all those volunteers isn’t without risk; it’s impossible to be sure all will be “on message” with the campaign.

“It’s an almost military structure at most campaigns,” he said. “All the orders come from on high and it’s very regimented and you know exactly how many supporters you have in one state … Most campaigns view the Net as trying to impose military structure on chaos.”

This new chaordic reality forces Trippi to embrace its risks which he seems inclined to anyway. This campaign may demonstrate that chaos is the bright light shining the way to the White House. No longer can a campaign stop George Morin and me from helping in our way rather than the old way. A campaign manager can no longer tell a self-appointed NYC brain trust to lay off, even if he were inclined to. It’s sure to drive the political apparatchiks nuts, but the Internet changes so much that even politics is up for grabs.

Maybe Dee Hock, Mitch Ratcliffe and their fellow trustees can help the Dean campaign embrace chaos as the best way to reel into the present a future we can only imagine.

Eisenhower Republicans for Dean

George Morin was talking to a friend who, calling himself an Eisenhower Republican, said that Dean sounded to him a lot like Ike. Is Ike the bridge this country needs to return to civil discourse? Consider:

You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that’s assault, not leadership.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

When you appeal to force, there’s one thing you must never do – lose.

When you are in any contest you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

We succeed only as we identify in life, or in war, or in anything else, a single overriding objective, and make all other considerations bend to that one objective.

There was a time when politics required the ability to form, question and communicate such thoughts. It was once a virtual requirement to have led men into battle and to earn your humanity, as Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated. He governed well by governing little, and led a life so full that he really preferred not to be president. It’s a shame we must send people to Washington who want to go, but if we need an enthusiastic ambition, Dean may be our best choice.

By then, George Bush may have demonstrated so well what we do not want in a leader that we’ll recognize one when we see one. And that may be his contribution to history.

2:54:05 PM    

Our homegrown digital ID function is the part of Xpertweb that Doc and Eric are most tuned into right now, so here’s some techie background.

Peering for Fun and Profit

Xpertweb users equip each other to use peering protocols. By peering, we mean that every participant has their own Xpertweb server, located on any ISP that offers PHP support. Xpertweb users have tools to set up a new user by using any FTP client to upload a script that sets up a new site. This seemed a pretty dramatic and excessive requirement when we first specified it, but blogging and grandkid picture hosting is making a personal web site less controversial.

Digital ID is very hard when you’re relying on a central server to authenticate people. It becomes trivial when each participant has exclusive control over their own website and easy-to-use forms to administer their ID info.

Peering means Peering

If you and I are peers, we allow each other to peer into our lives more than we allow others (ain’t English a fun language?).

Each Xpertweb user has an ID file (like, me.xml) on their site, containing the usual fields (required) and any other optional fields the owner might want to selectively expose to:

1. the world
2. other Xpertweb users
3. transaction partners
4. “blessed” Xpertweb users with established relationships
5. mentors
6. protegés.

Using the W3C XML Encryption spec, any of the owner’s data may be encrypted at the field level, and even the names of the fields/tags may be encrypted.

Trusting the casual visitor

All Xpertweb vendors want the world to know about their skills, reputation, products and, probably, thoughts and ideas on their blogs. Those are all published as broadly as possible, with skills and products organized into an Xpertweb index. The blogosphere is demonstrating that we crave notice more than we fear exposure.

However, Xpertweb vendors only want to transact with others having a proven reputation since, like a waitperson, the vendor’s compensation is subject to the buyer’s rating of their work. So here’s our homegrown digital ID sequence, assuming a vendor whose unique ID happens to be FFUNCH and a shopper with BRITTB as a unique ID (gross simplification in effect–unique IDs are hard but possible).

1. An Xpertweb-equipped shopper is attracted by FFUNCH’s reputation and clicks on a product link.
2. The product page asks the visitor to enter his unique Xpertweb URL.
3. Upon submitting the URL, FFUNCH’s site visits the URL and discovers there IS an Xpertweb site present with a properly formatted me.xml file at the root level and a script that says it’s ready to play nice. Only then does FFUNCH’s script learn that the visitor purports to be BRITTB.
4. FFUNCH’s script still doesn’t know if this visitor is BRITTB, so the script notes the current time, the visitor’s IP number, composes a unique ID for this contact and places a cookie on the visitor’s browser, something like:
        taskid FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754; IP 66.65.84.10 + some product info
        (a task ID = users’ IDs + the Unix epoch [# of seconds since 12/31/1969])
5. FFUNCH’s script directs the visitor to the URL presented
6. The script at BRITTB’s site asks the still-mysterious visitor to enter BRITTB’s name and password.
7. If the challenge is passed, we need a stateless way to confirm to FFUNCH’s script that this is indeed BRITTB.
8. BRITTB’s script looks in its buystuff/sellers directory for a subdirectory labeled FFUNCH.
         [If absent, it creates a buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH directory]
         It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in buystuff/sellers/FFUNCH
            … listing the now-current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info
9. BRITTB’s script returns BRITTB to the FFUNCH site
10. FFUNCH’s script visits BRITTB’s site and notes that the properly formatted file was created in the proper directory at a time shortly after the task ID creation, from a browser at the known IP number.
11. FFUNCH’s script looks in its sellstuff/buyers directory for a subdirectory labeled BRITTB.
          [If absent, it creates a sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB directory]
          It creates FFUNCH.BRITTB.1054746754.xml in sellstuff/buyers/BRITTB
             … listing the current epoch, BRITTB’s IP # and the product info

It may not be perfect, but it’s close enough for FFUNCH and BRITTB to proceed with a transaction, whether it’s reading a blog for $.06, trying a $15 shareware, ordering a $75 Afghani carpet or paying a personally negotiated $10,000 retainer.

Because each product has different requirements, BRITTB’s site can selectively expose needed information, like a physical address or website admin info.

If the Liberty Alliance has something to offer the world, me.xml is where Xpertweb users will maintain their Liberty ID, hijacked as a cooperative effort, as suggested by Andre Durand.

4:22:06 PM    

There’s been a fair amount of attention paid to the Chicken Hawk phenomenon–People in the Bush administration who never saw combat but who think combat is a swell occupation for the sons and daughters of people they don’t know. My purpose tonight is not to jump on that obvious and easy target. They’re just jerks, that’s all.

Rather, I’m concerned with the notion of gravitas, a sense of significance that one projects through one’s bearing, not necessarily based on one’s deeds.

“Gravitas” is a term that appeared on the political scene when Dick Cheney was anointed as Bush’s running mate in 2000. This conclusion was generated by a blue ribbon committee charged with deciding who would be the best candidate for Vice President. Many of us have forgotten that Dick Cheney was the chairman of the blue ribbon committee that recommended Dick Cheney as the VP candidate.

If you were a novelist, you wouldn’t dare to make this stuff up…

Pundits nodded sagely, just 3 years ago (can it be that recent?), noting that it was brilliant for the Bush campaign to add the serious appearing, tight-lipped Halliburton CEO to the ticket. Good counterpoise to a Yale frat boy whose crowning political achievement had been to make Texas so business-oriented that its deficit approached $7,000,000,000 within 2 years of his departure. (Yeah. A 7 followed by 9 zeroes.) I guess you’ve gotta build a platform on at least the appearance of principle.

My three regular readers may recall that one catalyst of my Bush resentment is that he and I raised our hands and swore to uphold the Constitution and to show up as ordered and do what we’d be told, at the same New Haven USAF recruiting office. The record is pretty clear that Lieutenant Bush subsequently failed to report for duty after finagling an assignment from Texas to Alabama. The assignment coincided with his oh-so-vital participation in a congressional campaign now remembered only by the candidates. He must have been a pivotal player–he was later to demonstrate his management skills by trading Sammy Sosa from the Rangers to the Cubs. Swell.

The Gravitas Inversion

I don’t take a lot of things seriously. I don’t possess Gravitas, whatever-the-fuck that is. As I navigate through my reality, I find much to laugh at and little to take seriously, except the spectacle of public “servants” fattening themselves at the trough of the common wealth. A sense of irony was my take before I went to Viet Nam, but it was hard-wired by the time I got back. We were the first wave of pilots to return from “Nam” and be assigned to the Strategic Air Command. We immediately noticed that all of the Test Flight officers who hadn’t been in combat were poring over the flight manual looking for semicolons to stump the crew members on the next exam:

Describe the navigation lights on the wingtips of the KC-135 aircraft: are they colored bulbs with clear lenses or clear bulbs with colored lenses?

Why would a pilot care about such a detail? Meanwhile, we were scheduling our next visit to the Stag Bar to trick each other into buying drinks by playing “Dead Bug.” What were they gonna do? Send us to Viet Nam? Hah!

Dead Bug!

My premise this evening pretty much revolves around the important ritual that pilots call Dead Bug! There’s a wonderful Dead Bug sequence in The Great Santini. Rent it.

Here’s the ritual. You go fly a mission. You land and repair to the Stag Bar. You order a round. The glasses become empty.

This is serious, far more serious than the fact that you just landed with a hole in your airplane, streaming fuel, #2 engine out, no oil pressure on #1. That’s just part of the job. What’s at stake here is that SOMEONE BETTER BUY A FRICKIN’ ROUND!

The obvious solution is that a seemingly mature officer, devoted husband, father of 3 and Defender Of Our Freedom, cries out DEAD BUG! at the top of his lungs and immediately throws himself and his chair straight back onto the floor, wiggling his feet in the air. Last guy on the floor buys. It’s a reflex test. Baseball players and pilots value fast reflexes.

Here, the game is demonstrated on the flight line by the oh-so-serious “Wild Weasel” crew members of the 333TFS, Takhli RTAFB, Thailand, 1968. The Wild Weasels were guys who flew around North Viet Nam in F-105 “Thuds,” hoping someone would fire a Surface-to-Air-Missile at them. Now the way you defeat a SAM is to immediately dive right at it as fast as you can! If it whizzes past your canopy at a 1,000 knot closing rate, it’s a successful engagement. Then you fire your missile at the ground station that launched their missile. The F-105 was called the Thud because of the sound it made when it dropped out of the sky, which it always wanted to do since it was basically a brick with wings. Cool. 2 or 3 hours of this kind of fun and a guy could develop a thirst…

And shed every pretense that anything else matters as much as hanging it out over the edge every day.

I’m reminded of the disconnect between seriousness of mission and seriousness of demeanor because Doc introduced me to the legendary Drazen Pantic Wednesday night. Drazen is the guy who brought the Internet to Yugoslavia when Miloshevic was killing people who did things like that–truly dicey times. Drazen’s picture is misleading. It makes him appear somber but in person he smiles easily and often. No obvious gravitas. Just a joyful appreciation for the passing scene. My instant comment upon meeting Drazen was, “You’re much better looking in person!“

Where’s the Beef?

This disconnect between reality and demeanor seems to me universal. Rent a late forties movie and notice how guys behave after returning when their buddies didn’t. They’re joking around all the time! Now fast-forward to the demeanor of our administration’s warmongers. They’re Oh so Serious… So full of the weight of the world… Such vital things to ponder and decide and, regretfully, put someone else’s kid in harm’s way…

I’m not alone among veterans in this insight. I got an email from a guy who was there when we coaxed (fly would be an overstatement) our burning C-130 onto the tarmac at Tay Ninh on 25 June 1968.

He agreed with my conclusion that you’d never follow a manager into battle, and that the Bush administration is deep-sixing the values that made our country great.

Another C-130 Pilot, John Robb, seems to agree. My conclusion is that if you never put you r ass on the line, you’d better look as serious and self-important as you can. But if you’re dealing with serious matters, including making ends meet in the kleptocracy John Robb describes, it helps to keep it light and keep smiling. John was landing C-130s by starlight in 1995, trying to keep Miloshevic from killing Drazen. Good show!

Da More I Steal, Demeanor I Look

It goes without saying that rich people who would rather control the country than serve her don’t really deserve our vote, no matter how grave and determined their demeanor.

12:22:39 AM    

Andy J. W. Affleck likes the fact-based politician meme:

Facts versus Influence

Escapable Logic may have nailed the answer to my “why do people still buy the bullshit” question:

…we’ve never had a fact-based politician and if you read or write a blog or software code, you’re committed to the outrageous notion that facts matter. For many people, facts don’t matter. The process of discovering, testing, discarding and describing facts is such a mystery to many that they’re not willing to trust it. Most of us, and certainly most people in power, are interested only in what increases our influence, which is rarely factual.

This rings true to me on a number of levels. Recently, the local paper here in Herndon has had a bit of a back and forth about the Bush Administration. The thing that my wife pointed out to me was how the anti-Bush letter writers produced facts and specific points to illustrate their position. The other side threw out things like: “Clinton lied” or “What about Whitewater?” or “Liberals who don’t want to stand up for the brave men and women fighting for freedom” and so forth. All of those are invective. They are not facts. They do not put forth an argument and then support it. They are purely attempts to influence (read: manipulate). Even trying to answer those statements moves the conversation immediately into a no-man’s land where no one can win. If you try to point out that what Clinton did or did not do has nothing to do with what Bush is currently doing (or that two wrongs don’t make a right, etc.) you end up in a long discussion about Clinton, the nature of morality, and why the liberals have no family values or some such nonsense. If you try to point out that being against Bush or the war in Iraq or the like has nothing to do with supporting to people in the military you get sucked into another vortex.

Can a facts-based politician win in this country? That would be a very interesting thing to see and experience. Maybe Howard Dean is the person to do it?

Andy has many thoughtful posts at Webcrumbs. Check them out.

Mitch, Dean of Misgivings

Mitch Ratcliffe is not so sure that all is swell in the Dean Camp. In Becoming what we don’t want to be?, he describes the attack dog tactics of some of Howard Dean’s supporters, who flame even a hint of negativity about their candidate:

I’m glad to see an aggressive liberal, particularly an anti-war liberal. But a campaign encouraging the attacking of comments made by people with dismissive one-liners is disturbingly like the Republican strategy these past 12 years and that style has reduced the level of public discourse to a flavorless radish paste, it’s bitter when you bite into it and not particularly filling–it will also back-fire with most liberals in the long-run, because we do believe in free speech and free thought (and as many folks know, I am not averse to an energetic debate, but one of ideas, not zingers). Frankly, I don’t want to be led by people willing to be as stupidly anti-intellectual as most of the conservative talk show hosts and commentators. Talk to people, don’t dismiss them–that’s the essence of liberalism.

Mitch is touching on the ancient issue of ends justifying the means, which the neoconservatives have raised to an art form. If one advocates a return to traditional values, why would you adopt politics which every previous administration would consider beneath contempt. I sincerely believe Nixon and his convicted Attorney General John Mitchell would not have stooped to the depths that Ashcroft and crew have, subverting the Fredom of Information Act (FOIA) in the interest of Department policies:

When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records.”

Do the Ends justify the Memes?

It’s a tough call. How far should Dean go to “Get my country back!”? How far should his supporters go? Perhaps Dean should treat this as a leadership opportunity to define and enforce a standard of behavior from his fans. But it’s not unusual for campaign managers to develop and defend some extremists to go toe-to-toe with their counterparts on the other side. The evidence that Mitch cites is from this accessible version of Ryan Lizza’s New Republic article from 5/23:

I am concerned about the tenor of the Dean campaign, which is shaping up like a war, and here is why: The New Republic in an article called “Dean.com” (it’s a password-protected subscription site) reports that the Dean camp is using the Web, blogs in particular, to go after critics.

Anyone who writes critically about Dean can expect his copy to be chewed up by this army of zealous Dean Internet scribes. When I wrote a piece recently that contained a few paragraphs about Dean, a member of the Dean2004 blog team filed an almost 2,000-word entry slicing my article up into sections with labels such as “true,” “false,” “inadvertently true,” and “foolish.” Not content with this, the Dean blogosphere recently established a rapid-reaction team called the Dean Defense Forces (DDF)–an e-mail list of hard-core Dean supporters who swiftly push back with e-mails, letters to the editor, blog entries, and phone calls against anyone spreading anti-Dean sentiments. “When he gets attacked, we’ll respond,” pledges the DDF’s organizer, Matthew Singer, a 20-year-old college student in Montana who once blogged about Dean on his own site, Left in the West.

It’s also possible that the referenced sections of Ryan Lizza’s piece were, respectively, true, false, inadvertently true and foolish. The New Republic is big J journalism, after all, as Mitch points out, and hanging on to its fragile franchise.

The Leadership Thing

I’d love to see Howard Dean go public to assert that his campaign should be superior in every way to the hegemony of small minded capitalists he is fighting on our behalf—in demeanor, logic and heart.

Then I’d like to see his team go forth among the people wielding calm logic and patient, reasonable dialogue to knock the livin’ shit out of the people who took our country away from us. On that point I’m archly conservative.

7:20:22 PM    comment [commentCounter (142)]

That would be Howard Dean’s list. You oughtta be. Not because he’s a Democrat or willing to be outspoken or a physician who understands exactly how you’re gonna be screwed when you or your family actually need medical care, or because he runs a state where the governor actually governs and which is prosperous without exploiting resources, while Texas is bankrupt despite its huge resource base and fouled environment, dead-last among all states.

As for media consolidation, here’s a clue from yesterday:

But never mind all that. You need to support Dean because he has said the most important thing that any candidate has ever said:

“I’m not unwilling to change positions based on facts,
  but I am unwilling to change positions based on polls.”

The reason his point is important is that we’ve never had a fact-based politician and if you read or write a blog or software code, you’re committed to the outrageous notion that facts matter. For many people, facts don’t matter. The process of discovering, testing, discarding and describing facts is such a mystery to many that they’re not willing to trust it. Most of us, and certainly most people in power, are interested only in what increases our influence, which is rarely factual.

So here’s a person who governs without the right to print money, who says he’s willing to listen to facts and make fact-checking a campaign issue. The other thing he’s doing is using the Internet as the center of his campaign strategy, ramrodded by his Internet-obsessed Campaign Manager, Joe Trippi:

When it comes to the Internet, no detail is too small for Trippi. Some campaign managers devote their energies to working the elite press or courting union leaders or wooing donors. But Trippi seems to spend an inordinate amount of his time checking Meetup numbers, posting to liberal blogs, sending text messages to supporters who have signed up for the Dean wireless network, and otherwise devising ways to use the Internet to build what Trippi envisions as “the largest grassroots organization in the history of this party.”

His team is so focused on leveraging the Net that they may win in 2004 because they have ways of getting out the vote of disaffected centrists. They’ll also use the Net to sow discontent among the authentic conservatives who have seen their civil rights purged by a big-spending, little guy-hating big-gummint administration that promised all the right things and did all the wrong things, from the viewpoint of authentic (pre-1990) conservatives. You know about authentic conservatives, don’t you? They’re as committed to the Constitution as the ACLU.

My logic is escapable but probable: Appropriate use of the Internet is the inside track to the 2004 election, and Dean’s team is the only one that knows what the track looks like. Appropriate use of the Internet isn’t fake emails or PR but is the use of meetup.com and blogs and Knowledge Management to organize consensus around people’s inclination to support a candidate who makes sense, not noise.

For about 24 hours I’ve been urging Doc Searls to get all over this. There are still nine candidates for the Democratic nomination, eight of whom are congress critters who have supported most of the measures that have gutted civil rights and fair use of published materials. Dean will wipe up the floor with them, but can’t yet be sure of it, so he and his growing team are probably willing to listen to the blogging world and to consider a blog-based administration.

Here’s my recommendation:

1. Someone arranges a meeting with, at least, Dr. Lessig, Doc Searls, Dr. Dean, and Joe Trippi. The agenda is simple:
   1. Will you go to the mat to return fair use of published works to the people?
   2. Will you sponsor a blog-based, blog-responsive administration?
   3. Will you promote a fact-based judiciary?
2. If those answers are public, unequivocal and satisfactory, Searls, Lessig and other Net thought leaders should pull out the stops and get behind Dean, our last best hope for an administration knowing that managerial capitalism is about to consume the seed corn that makes capitalism possible. The nutrients they’re snorting up are the major food groups of the American miracle:
   1. A free and informed electorate
   2. The freedom to oppose the majority opinion (which usually isn’t)
   3. Freedom of speech, and, implicitly, freedom from single-agenda broadcasting
   4. Freedom from unreasonable seizure and, implicitly, limits on fair use of purcahsed media

Listen for the Blog Horn

Dean is the first candidate to treat relatively unknown bloggers as a critical opinion-making constituency. “We understand the blogging community and have been active in it,” says Trippi. “A lot more people are seeing us on the blogs and other sites every day than on TV at this point in the campaign.”

…Last week, Dean even gave his first exclusive interview to a blogger, a rather well-done exchange via e-mail by the anonymous author of the blog LiberalOasis. The Dean campaign itself has an official blog that includes dispatches from the road, and Trippi also posts regularly to Dean2004.blogspot.com, an unofficial Dean blog that has become a hub of Internet organizing for the campaign.*

Like most emerging media, blogging tends to contemplate its own navel. But it’s probable the navel’s attached to something worth attending to. Blogging inspired the social software meme and is wrapping Knowledge Management around itself. By the time Super Tuesday hits, we’ll probably have a way to aggregate bloggers’ opinions and roll them up into a coherent sense of grass roots sentiment in ways never before possible. My gut tells me Technorati could tally up our common sense of reality by identifying political key words and associating them with positive vs. negative adjectives and adverbs.

So we shouldn’t support Dean just because he reads and uses blogs. Rather, we should get behind any candidate who:

1. Has a mind
2. Speaks it clearly and well
3. Proves it by blogging for the record, in a human voice

Blogger interest is just a start. The work part of this possibility is for bloggers and aficionados to engage friends, neighbors and fellow workers by proving that there’s a there there: someone who deserves our support because he’s actually committed to responding to facts, including proofs that most of we the people have a more than wee interest in doing smart things.

The Central Plank in the Platform

But let’s not get blindly behind this guy unless the centerpiece of his campaign is fact-based policy-making in a blog-based and blog-responsive administration. Then we may see a role for technologists in politics at least equal to Big Oil and Big Media.

3:32:37 PM    

Why the hell is it so hard to get people to put a little muscle behind things which are obviously needed and more obviously lacking? What you and I are missing is access to the right expert at the right moment.

Allen Searls finally got fed up Friday and fell off the wagon of cool detachment to share his frustration — that it’s so hard to stir up excitement for something that’s so obviously needed. Since Allen and I are passionate about the same thing, I feel his pain, as WC used to say. Allen says it better than I ever have (don’t smart people piss you off?). What we need, he knows, is a way of . . .

. . . using the web to find actual people in the world at large that you can talk to right now, about whatever you’re specifically searching for. There’s nothing like that yet. Nothing. People aren’t searchable. They’re the most important resource in the world, and they’re not searchable, they’re scattered to the wind. There’s no “people” tab at Google (and “groups” isn’t the idea at all). That person you want to talk to right now (and that wants to hear from you right now) that needle in the haystack of 6 billion, is out there, I promise, but you’ll never find them, because the magnet you need to do so doesn’t exist. I want to build it.

Actually, Allen has already built it. It’s called GlobeAlive. ‘GA’ isn’t perfect, but it’s the only web app I’ve seen that lists experts and provides an instant way to get to them. Believe it or not, Allen commissioned his own chat engine to link GlobeAlive seekers with GlobeAlive experts. Now that GlobeAlive has demonstrated its functionality, Allen has been seeking to upgrade it to version 2.0, by integrating it with the Jabber protocol and the several other improvements that GA 1.0 has demonstrated. Allen’s challenge is that he needs venture financing to build on his angel investment over the last three years.

Yesterday afternoon I encouraged Allen to hang in there and to draw consolation from the fact that his idea is just too good to be appeal to investors. If Tim Berners-Lee had looked for financing in 1990 rather than just inventing HTML, he’d still be putting investor packages together. The old saying goes that no one will steal your really good idea because they won’t understand it. My corollary is that not only won’t they steal it, they won’t fund it.

Allen goes on,

“I’m sitting in front of my computer thinking (and I’m not the first) “somewhere out there, right now, in the world at large, is the person I need, available right now– with the answer I need, the expertise I need, the inspiration, the conversation, the product/service, and yes, perhaps, the companionship or camaraderie I need, that I’m not going to find in a document… someone that would be more than happy to talk to me right now, if I could just tap into the searchable database of all the world’s available people, right here from my computer, or cell phone— what a better world that would be!” But I can’t. Forget it. There’s nothing like that. Nothing! And no one’s listening to me. Yes, I’ve built a beta site, but I don’t have the ad money, the programming resources, the connections, to draw and keep the critical-mass crowds necessary to make this thing work, even though I see the intense excitement it generates in our beta users when it does.”

Nor is there any shortage of people who want to field others’ requests:

“And on the other side, we need to remember that about half the population feels undiscovered (or at least not sufficiently discovered). Many people feel that too few people are looking for them to hear what they have to say, what they have to sell, what they specifically specialize in, what makes them valuable. Most people would feel stupid advertising themselves , and yet know damn well they are the foremost expert on something (such as our Seinfeld-episode expert at GlobeAlive), and they probably are, but besides their immediate network, the rest of the world doesn’t recognize them as such, even though the rest of the world needs them, they can’t fill that hole, because they simply can’t be found, at least not as easily as a web page on Google.”

Ah, the innovator’s dilemma. Nobody misses what they’ve never experienced, like a battered wife who can’t imagine leaving the relationship. To imagine a better future, we need a vision:

“The bottom line is that when we restrict our interactions to people we already know or the people that happen to be in the chat room or community we join, it’s like restricting our information-gathering to the books in our personal libraries at home, it’s a mathematical certainty that we’re selling ourselves utterly short. The island mentality is the root of this problem. There’s an infinitely better way of going about our interpersonal interactions. It would change the web by making it live ; it would change the economy by making it personal ; it would change the world by making it smaller ; and it would change you and I… by helping us meet.”

Read the whole piece. It will make you think.

Running out of Sugar in a Beet Field

I have a default action when I run into the absurdity of grand potential limited by unimaginative capital. I haul out my tattered copy of Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All and re-read the best single paragraph ever written on economics:

During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, milk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.(Skinny Legs and All, 1990)

Robbins is saying that we capitalists aren’t living up to our end of the bargain. (Yeah. We. Whoever has the time, bandwidth and inclination to read, write or discuss web logs, we’re part of the grand capitalist experiment. Even we foot soldiers in the trenches are part of the capitalist campaign).

In exchange for control of most people’s labor and brainpower, capitalism is supposed to find, develop and deploy talent, brains and energy and organize them in such a way that productivity and hope and prosperity increase in a crescendo of innovation and shared advancement of mankind and abundance reaching into every nook and cranny of humanity.

Oops, got a little ahead of myself there. It’s easy to forget there’s no “supposed to” in economics. There’s only a “just is.” It’s not written anywhere that people who’ve figured out how to control and deploy capital have any obligation to use it for the common good. It’s not even written that they must forego, like, 1% of their economic possibilities to trigger, l
ike, a 100% improvement in the common good. It’s not even accepted among capitalists that there’s a common good at all.

So what’s keeping Allen’s GlobeAlive from wiring us together better than conventional mechanisms? Some say that it’s hard to know for sure who we really are.

DIY DigID

One problem Allen runs into is the assumption that we’re years away from the robust reputation-enabled digital ID infrastructure that GlobeAlive seems to need to connect real people with real experts. If it happens sooner, there’s a tiny chance that Xpertweb’s modest proposal could solve the DigID shortage, at least for its half-dozen or so users.

Think of it as Do-it-Yourself DigID. It’s based on the key Xpertweb feature that arranges for both parties in a transaction/conversation/inquiry to have their own web site with cooperative scripting and a data file we cleverly call myid.xml. It lives at a predictable URL and contains all the personal info you might conceivably want to share with other parties, including Fname, Lname, address1, address2, city, province, postcode, xwid, etc. Revolutionary stuff, eh?

There’s also a provision for optional datatypes, any of which may be encrypted using the XML encryption standard. You choose which datatypes to fill in or other datatypes you may specify. Your Visa card number might be one, for putting money, and your PayPal email account might be one, for getting money. Those payment-based ‘put’ and ‘get’ actions conform to the widely adopted MTTP protocol—Money Talks Truly Powerfully.

So how can two Xpertweb sites with their cooperative scripts validate these people and their transactions? Five steps:

1. A person identifies a good or service from a proven expert, enters her Xpertweb site’s URL and clicks the submit button.
2. The expert’s site doesn’t know who entered the URL, so it sets a cookie on the visitor’s browser with the expert’s unique Xpertweb ID, the visitor’s IP number and the exact time the visitor clicked the submit button and sends the buyer to the URI purported to belong to the visitor.
3. The buyer’s site challenges the visitor for a private name and password.
4. If the visitor passes the identity challenge, the site creates a new task file, named by combining the expert’s ID, the buyer’s ID and the Unix epoch – the number of seconds between 1/1/1970 and the second the submit button was clicked. The file will contain a few basic data relating to the transaction.
5. The authenticated buyer is sent back to the expert’s site, where the seller’s script can see that the file has been created on the buyer’s site, initiated from the known IP number within a reasonably short period after the first buyer action, confirming that this is the person as represented. Then the transaction can proceed.

There you have it, homespun DigID. No complex standards, no centralized servers, just a couple of similarly equipped web sites that can tell if a current visitor is the owner of a site they claim to own. Sure it’s a lightweight protocol, designed for villagers authenticating each other for a few transactions per week. If someone wants to do something more complicated, they can, but they’ll have no procedural advantage over a plain vanilla Xpertweb site.

And that’s how I hope the Xpertweb tools can help GlobeAlive go beyond the beta stage and serve its members as Allen has foreseen. If Xpertweb or something even better can help Allen realize the vision he has for all of us, then there’s no limit to how many people can serve each other and make money doing so.

1001 Arabian Rights

Khaled Al-Maeena, editor in chief of Arab News, spoke in Salon last week regarding the future of the Arab world:

“On the whole if you ask any young person what he wants, he wants to be computer-savvy, he wants the Internet, he wants to work. We do not want to be mere bystanders. We want to be travelers on the road of life, on the road of progress.”

Let’s not underestimate the potential for all of us to be useful to each other and to deal in ways that bring out the “supposed to” in us. That’s a business plan to get behind.

12:24:20 AM