Author: brittblaser

I’m grateful anyone reads these rants. It keeps the design team motivated. Yesterday a reader sent a summary of this blog. He went to a lot of trouble, so I’ve posted it. Please note its heft, which should further deter you…

3rd party Blog Summary [620KB PDF]

8:31:17 AM    

What happens when the words of the people have real power? In an Obvious Society, that will be the case, though we’ll need to realize that the words of any one of us have as little interest for most of us as our office webcam. We will surely listen better. We’re already seeing that effect with blogs, where the dialogue is so much more reasonable than in the media circus.

In an Obvious Society, just as we’ll feel constrained from stealing, lying and bullying, we’ll be more balanced in our rants, since a conversation without respect, patience and nuance is just a variant on road rage. If we are to rise above whining about each others’ stupidity, we have to acknowledge each other’s core starting points as valid. You know—war vs. no war; profiling vs. not; right to choose vs. not; marijuana vs. not; etc.

I came across a couple of interesting essays last week. They deserve more than just a link, so please indulge me. They forced me to think through some realities I had not truly dealt with before. Let me know if any of this is illogical.

• Any one of us is less likely to be hurt by terrorism than we are likely to win the lottery.
• But some of us will win a lottery this year.
• We’re not in a war but we are in a street fight, with guys who will die to bloody our nose.
• An unacceptable number of us will be killed by terrorism in the next couple of years.
• If we don’t occupy Iraq now, the body count goes up—not because that’s where the terrorists are, but because we will not have been forceful enough to do so and silence the Arab machismo affect.

John Perry Barlow, acting counter to type, sounds like his own Op-Ed contributor describing the way Dick Cheney’s mind works, and wondering if the crazy guys in the White House may know what they’re doing. Ming is similarly uncomfortable with the means vs.ends issues here:

Sympathy for the Devil
I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was obscenely wrong about something as I am now. Subsequent events raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all…

I once knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get elected to his first public office as Wyoming’s lone congressman. I conspired with him on the right side of environmental issues…

With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest man I’ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you on a devastatingly brief tour of all the weak points in your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this distance. I believe he is personally indifferent to greed. In the final analysis, this may simply be about oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it that way. I am relatively certain that he is acting in the service of principles to which he has devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that is unimpeded by sentiment or other emotional overhead…

[There’s a] technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over. As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing [in 1982], if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision of implacable, irrational lethality that the Soviet leaders would decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation. It worked.

While I think that rock ‘n roll and the systemic failures of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism as did Dick’s mad [Mutually Assured Destruction] gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, Cheney didn’t look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and Reagan’s terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging psychological rather than nuclear warfare.

I’m starting to wonder if we aren’t watching something like the same strategy again. In other words, it’s possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing. This time, instead of trying to terrify the Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I’m right about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any more than the MX missile did.

First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that it’s safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops. Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words, they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed with either…

If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the latter doesn’t necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other. It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability can be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one that terrified us into peace during the Cold War…

If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I’d been in charge back in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes. Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method. Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas. We’ll probably know which it’s going to be sometime in the next fortnight.

By then, I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart of darkness and closer to the heart itself.

Now that’s an astonishing post by our Chief Cognitive Dissident, whom we expect to oppose every grasping move by the greatest empire in the history of empires. It’s nuanced, which you expect from Barlow, and shares some personal insight into one of the world’s chief players. Unlike most
of us, Barlow has a voice that’s heard, as might most of us in an Obvious Society with empowered dialogue.

One thing’s for sure, the Cheney et. al. strategy resonates with the teachings of biology in general and Howard Bloom in particular. In The Lucifer Principle (1995), Bloom introduced us to superorganisms and how unprincipled they are in rising up the pecking order. (You and I and companies and nations are superorganisms). In Global Brain, he teaches us that the growth of a superorganism—its only purpose—increases when its members are richly interconnected. Bloom’s lesson is that warfare, rape and torture will continue as long as the superorganisms (or just its leader!) believe they even might make a move up the pecking order. When the option for pecking order advancement is removed, peace reigns in the chicken coop, baboon troop or United Nations.

Then comes the problem of reigning in the snarly bastard ruling the roost. Barlow calls this “the Divine right of thugs.”

The blogging community is almost as tightly connected as Japanese schoolgirls. Clearly the third world is not. Third world machismo regards westerners as wimps. Arab males of the alpha, bravo, etc.stripe are guys who act with force and confidence in the world, silencing dialogue with brutality and administering a code of justice frozen in the sixth century. Revenge and unbridled world rage gives them a sense of purpose. They hold no political power nor are they connected to any significant cultural decision-making, but they have the power of life, death and genital mutilation over their families. They (and many NRA members) pity the weak, hollowed-out American male, forced to live in a world of subtle forces and endless compromises. These men bully their wives and families and neighbors. They may be no more the Arab male majority than are America’s assault weapons owners, but they are in charge of the Arab dialogue.

These are the people who hate the way of life beaming in on them from the Running Dog Satellite Service,. They will do anything to stop it and for them any day is a good day to die, for that is the manly thing to do. If you’ve ever felt road rage welling up in your chest, you know how these guys feel all the time.

My next insight came from the Christian Science Monitor, another reliable voice for peace and progressive values:

If antiwar protesters succeed

[Ed: To publish an unsigned opinion piece is an exception to the Monitor’s policy. But the views expressed here, if put with a name, could endanger the writer’s extended family in Baghdad. The author – known to Monitor staff – was born and raised in Iraq. Now a US citizen with a business that requires extensive world travel, the author is in frequent touch with the Iraqi diaspora but is not connected with organized opposition to Saddam Hussein.]

Since Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, started warning that a US invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of hell,” the retort that has been flying around Iraqi exiles’ websites is, “Good! We’d like to get out!”

It got me wondering: What if you antiwar protesters and politicians succeed in stopping a US-led war to change the regime in Baghdad? What then will you do?

Will you also demonstrate and demand “peaceful” actions to cure the abysmal human rights violations of the Iraqi people under the rule of Saddam Hussein?
Or, will you simply forget about us Iraqis once you discredit George W. Bush?

Will you demand that the United Nations send human rights inspectors to Iraq? Or are you only interested in weapons of “mass destruction” inspections, not of “mass torture” practices?

Will you also insist that such human rights inspectors be given time to discover Hussein’s secret prisons and coercion as you do for the weapons inspectors? Or will you simply accept a “clean bill of health” if you can’t find the thousands of buried corpses?

Will you pressure your own countries to host millions more Iraqi refugees (estimated now at 4 million) fleeing Hussein’s brutality?Or will you prefer they stay in bondage?

Will you vigorously demand an international tribunal to indict Hussein’s regime for crimes against humanity? Or will you simply dismiss him as “another” dictator of a “sovereign” country?

Will you question why Hussein builds lavish palaces while his people are suffering? Or will you simply blame it all on UN sanctions and US “hegemony?”
Will you decry the hypocritical oil and arms commerce of France, Germany, Russia, and China with the butcher of Baghdad? Or are you only against US interests in Iraqi oil?

Will you expose ethnic cleansing of native Iraqi non-Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkomens), non-Sunni-Muslims (Shiite), and non-Muslims (Christians, Mandaens, Yezidis)? Or are these not equivalent to the cleansing of Bosnians and Kosovars?

Will you show concern about the brutal silencing of the “Iraqi street”? Or are you only worried about the orchestrated noises of “Arab and Islamist streets” outside Iraq?

Will you hear the cries of Iraqis executed in acid tanks in Baghdad? the Iraqi women raped in front of their husbands and fathers to extract confessions? Or of children tortured in front of their parents? Or of families billed for the bullets used to execute military “deserters” in front of their own homes?

No. I suspect that most of you will simply retire to your cappuccino cafes to brainstorm the next hot topic to protest, and that you will simply forget about us Iraqis, once you succeed in discrediting President Bush.

Please, prove me wrong.

Different Voices, Identical Threats

In the fall of 1967, I was flying C-130s in Viet Nam and my fiancée was marching for peace in Washington. We didn’t see that as a conflict—more like covering both sides of the story. Nor did we feel any tension around this. I was there because I was expected to be there, and, having been born in 1942, I had grown up with the expectation of military service. She marched because our generation was working out a new voice and that view had to be sent to the politicians.

Empowered dialogue takes opposing viewpoints seriously. Though near zero, let’s assume that there are threats that need to be faced and wars that need to be fought. It’s difficult for me to even type those words, so don’t assume I present that lightly.

Opponents of this war need to acknowledge the need for the rare war when you cannot accept the continuing threat of attack. The acknowledgement makes for a nuanced conversation. People who revere their inner child must also respect their inner demon. As Deepak Chopra says, the inner dialogue is the saint and the sinner comparing notes.

Warhawks need to acknowledge the possibility that there are times when we shouldn’t project our power on others, even when they hold wildly different views. They have to stop thinking like missionaries in order to hold a nuanced conversation, which should not be avoided just because it’s more difficult than fighting.

Let’s be clear. We will establish the Pax Americana, as Jay Bookman wrote in the Atlantic Journal-Constitution last September. With luck, we’ll do it with no more than a fright display, as John Perry Barlow suggests and upon which the animal kingdom relies to keep the peace. If we don’t colonize Iraq now, we will surely do it after the next terrorist attack, and we’ll be a lot more belligerent then. The reason we will colonize Iraq is that we’re in a street fight that won’t stop until we put an end to it. It doesn’t matter that the terrorists aren’t in Iraq. The terrorists are watching what happens in Iraq to gauge where and how to attack again.

In a sense, we’re like Wal-Mart looking to expand our western heritage franchise. We believe deeply in our franchise and we feel threatened by the the band of militant little retailers out there who have resorted to assassinating our clerks. We believe they will continue to do so until we intimidate them as they were before we opened the store at the edge of town. As a superorganism, we really have no choice. We’ll grow or shrink. If we start to shrink, we’ll be attacked more and more because we’ll be more attackable. These are the facts of life on earth, from bacteria colony through super power. If you don’t believe it, read the book.

So what’s the hope for we members of the splinter group that believes humanity can rise above war? First we have to extricate ourselves from the back alley brawl with this hopped-up kid with a knife. We’d rather not, but we’ll have to use those expensive karate lessons to disable him and then get on with spreading the meme that violence is unnecessary. We may have to go to a lot of City Council meetings to hire more cops, change the zoning rules and get the scumbag owner of that sleazy bar run out of town. It’s not their tatoos we hate, it’s the lunatic fringe with the same tattoos as the rest, and everyone attacking us has the same tattoo.

And we also have to stay up nights re-wiring our economy so there are more opportunities for kids like these. Too bad there’s no hope for these gang members, though.

2:40:29 PM    

Mitch has had a run-in with someone who appears to be a legend in his own mind, but who probably would not thrive in an Obvious Society:

Richard Bennett posts inaccurately and insultingly about me.

For an Obviousness mind bomb, compare two posts. The first is from the Home Recording Rights Coalition (linked from BoingBoing by Xeni Jardin):

How Mr. Rogers Saved the VCR
In ruling that home time-shift recording of television programming for private use was not copyright infringement, the Supreme Court relied on testimony from television producers who did not object to such home recording. One of the most prominent witnesses on this issue was Fred Rogers.

The Supreme Court wrote [1/17/84]:

” Second is the testimony of Fred Rogers, president of the corporation that produces and owns the copyright on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The program is carried by more public television stations than any other program. Its audience numbers over 3,000,000 families a day. He testified that he had absolutely no objection to home taping for noncommercial use and expressed the opinion that it is a real service to families to be able to record children’s programs and to show them at appropriate times.”

(Excerpt from Mr. Rogers’ trial testimony: ) “Some public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the ‘Neighborhood’ at hours when some children cannot use it. . . . I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the ‘Neighborhood’ off-the-air, and I’m speaking for the ‘Neighborhood’ because that’s what I produce, that they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.’ Maybe I’m going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”

And then we have the reaction of Mr. Bennett to the passing of Mr. Rogers:

Our long national nightmare is over
At long last:

Feb. 27, 2003 — Fred Rogers, who for more than 30 years touched the lives of children and parents as host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, died of stomach cancer Thursday at age 74.

Thank God. Now we can raise a generation of children who don’t believe each and every one is “special” even if they never do anything special. Fred Rogers’ legacy is narcissism, nothing more and nothing less. His special effects really sucked, too.

Posted by Richard Bennett at 3:03 PM |Comments (0) |TrackBack (0)

Look at me! I’m Outrageous!

The miracle of the web and the obviousness beyond is that, as in meatspace, Who we are leaks through our words, speaking so loudly no one can hear what we’re saying.*  Mr. Bennett’s web site raises narcissism to new heights—his archive is labeled Richard Bennett’s Omphalos, The navel of the blogosphere, mother of all blogs, and vainest of the vanities.

His writings come off as look-at-me ad hominem attacks on, seemingly, everything he hasn’t personally authored. This inspired me to Google the possibility of positive comments on the blog. From a search for “fine” and “excellent” on Bennett’s site, I found only 143 hits, and only a handful as expressions of the quality of other people’s work. Most were references to the many recipes on his site calling for spices to be ground “fine”. Many others were user’s comments, yielding only a dozen or so that hinted at a positive rating of another’s work.

The surprise discovery from the search was the excellent curry recipe collection on Mr. Bennett’s site—21 tempting dishes.

These kinds of statistics will be obvious and explicit someday, and will allow us to route around those who say grand things about themselves and harsh things about others. Perhaps, it’s already working. Mr. Bennett’s site notes that he’s currently interviewing, and his resumé (pdf) indicates he hasn’t worked since last year. That alone would give you a negative attitude and the time to trash busy people with a positive agenda.

2:36:09 PM    

Mitch writes today of his frustration as a board member of the Chaordic Commons. This is a foundation formed by the organizer of VISA, Dee Hock, based on his insight that VISA came together and grew into the world’s largest financial enterprise because it combined the energy of chaos and order. Specifically, VISA is owned by its participating banks using a structure that balances the interests of the larger and smaller members. It holds no significant assets of its own, but exists to enrich its member banks.

The Chaordic Commons seeks to help organizations to employ those principles for their own success, and Dee Hock’s book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, provided some grist for the Xpertweb mill. Like VISA, Xpertweb is a transaction-processing (well, publishing) system, not owned in the usual sense, serving its users in an even-handed way. If Xpertweb’s virulence works as designed, its protocols could see global adoption as broad as VISA‘s, which is why it has no central function to slow it down. It’s a lot like rock ‘n roll while VISA is like a farmer co-op.

Mitch writes:

I have no idea whether the Chaordic Commons can or will survive or thrive, because after seven months on the board of trustees, I’ve never seen us do anything but deal with the process of communication rather than our real differences.

This is all especially ironic since Dee Hock thought of these ideas while building the largest economic entity on the planet, Visa. The ideas work elsewhere, but Dee always saw the power of greed, even if it was only the opportunity by some participants to protect what they already had by being more transparent and sharing resources. Every player in the Visa story was hoping for huge gains, not just a fairer environment for transaction processing. Nevertheless, the harmonizing of profit motive with representativeness and self-organizational models produced something great. All we have at the Commons right now is a non-profit struggling to find a meaning for itself. Since that meaning must emerge from a group of minds, we need to let go of the processes and wrangle a bit, because nothing in human history has come as easily as we would like and if we back away from the conflict through which we must pass to find what we have in common nothing will ever be accomplished.

Conversations are Markets

We in the information business want to believe that the world springs from ideas and that reason can sway enterprise. Actually it’s the opposite, which I hadn’t realized so strongly until I read Mitch’s description. Let’s riff on the ClueGuys’ point:

1. Markets are conversations.

I’d suggest the inverse:

1. Conversations are Markets.

The market precedes the non-campfire conversations. Until the Agora is up and running and moving the goods and shekels, we’re basically a bunch of gossips. But when there’s a product or service to design and produce, based on an inspiring (advantage-fueled) business plan, then we band together and do some, well, productive thinking.

Any board has trouble holding a productive dialogue if it has no pressing economic (productive) need for it. As I read Dee Hock’s book, the member VISA banks got something slapped together fast because they smelled money and, just as importantly, computer technology was so new they just did what made sense at the moment rather than hiring experts to study the opportunity. Actually, they did hire some experts, but Dee promptly fired them.

This sounds like a typical business is first and foremost rant, but that’s not the point. The point is that, until citizens are bound together through direct economic links, as in the Agora and farmers’ co-op, we’ll not have the clout to do for our nation what we think the managers in companies and the White House should do—organize resources on behalf of the nation rather than for their own interests.

Well, they are citizens, and they’re advancing the interests of the citizens they know best. The mass of citizens won’t have the power to enforce “fairness” until those citizens have the power to do so, collectively. Power is economic power, not the power of persuasion or moral rectitude or any of the other illusions that most of us would like them to be. There are no short cuts to wielding power. Unless there is a collective economic force which is palpable, pervasive, broadspread and even-handed, chaordically improving the allocation of productive resources, then there will be no counterpoise to Mitch’s dire prediction in his other post today:

This administration is out of control, is using warnings and hype to scare people and, I think, is capable of believing suspension of democratic mechanisms is necessary and even good for the people of the United States.

Doc is thinking about Cluetrain also today and wrestling with the impotence of words alone:

One of the questions I got from the floor during Q&A after my talk was “Where do you guys think you were wrong?”

Four years after we wrote the original [Cluetrain] Web site (and nearly as long after we wrote the book), I’m thinking that politics, democracy in particular (and regulation, too) is still remarkably free of influence by clues from citizens. Also that citizens still suck at clueing each other, blogs withstanding.
 
I did think, back in ’99, that “the end of business as usual” (our subtitle) would come sooner than the end for many other _____s as Usual. Education came to mind. Also politics and science. But politics is the big one. Why doesn’t more come out of our outrage?
 
Lot to think about there.

In 1999, the valley held the power of economics because even Washington thought the Internet was a tidal wave. The power has left with the money. The folks in Washington couldn’t be happier.

Grab Your Power or Grab Your Ankles

There are two major themes today: the incompetent and wrong-headed management of people and resources by the American management class, and the quiet but nearly total repeal of civil rights by an administration that sees itself as managers, not leaders. There’s no difference between the two.

It’s been 530 days since 9/11 froze us into meek submission to petty demagogues. Which way do you want the curve to arc in the next 530 days? If we the people do not build, deploy and populate our own economic and political web applications, then we’ll be in a worse place in another 530 days. Could we have imagined on 9/10/01 that our civil rights
would now be subject to the whim of whoever saw an advantage in violating them?

What do we want our reality to be like on 6/13/05? That June would be a good month to be free.

11:27:11 PM    

I’ve posted some pictures of the BeamPost hot spot I described yesterday, found in Asheville, NC. (and 2 out of 3 unblurry ain’t bad).

There’s something compelling about the tangible, official looking utility-pedestal presence of the BeamPost. It would be a pain to erect one in most jurisdictions, but it’s delightful to happen upon it unexpectedly.

3:45:32 PM    

          I once was lost, but now I’m found

An obvious feature of the Personal Flight Recorder (PFR) will be full-time geopositioning. This transforms our reality by eliminating a significant source of social frustration: showing up on time and knowing that you will. Isn’t that the real cause of concern when one is “lost”? It always happens when you’re on a schedule – meeting friends somewhere you’ve not been, arriving for the start of the game/concert/film/dinner reservation, etc., invariably a cause for social, not personal, frustration.

(My purpose here is not another tiresome Popular Science-type “tech in 50 years” treatment, but rather to identify significant imminent ubiquitous  personal technologies that will affect our culture in meaningful ways.)

Navigating uncertainly to a scheduled appointment carries a disproportionate anxiety level, and all of that will disappear with ubiquitous geopositioning. By knowing where we are, where we’re going and when we’ll be there, we can release this significant guilt/conflict over social requirements. Let’s review the particularly American kind of social guilt phenomenon.

We Americans hail from families of immigrants newly arrived, seeking approval from better-established immigrants deposited by the previous boat. Even the best adjusted of us have inherited a message of social inferiority from generations of moms telling generations of kids to fit in better, speak English better, display better manners, etc. I suggest that this heritage weighs on us more than we want to acknowledge at levels we don’t want to address. Any mechanisms that help relieve social insecurities are meaningful.

Takeaway: We’ll be capturing the video stream we witness while knowing where we are, where going, how to get there and when. The third leg of this empowerment stool is the logistical equivalent of blogging. Where we are and what we’re seeing will be selectively available, in real time, to anyone we care to share it with. Thereby, our social involvements will escape physical restraints, and moblogging rises to a third dimension.

That is the promise of the PFR equipped with personal geopositioning.

10:10:01 AM    

We’ve stopped in Asheville, NC, which seems to this former Coloradan to be like Boulder with prettier women. I was pleased to snag a parking spot and to find a decent eatery around the corner. Returning to the car to leave, I notice, directly in front of it, a crotch-high solid-appearing metal post with green lights labeled:

• Infrared Active
• BeamPost Active
• Ethernet Active
• Bluetooth Active
• Wireless Lan (802.11b)

The icing(s) on the cake: a PDA holder with IR port on one side, and, on the other, an IR software download port on the other.

BeamPost Front Panel

PDA Holder w/ IR port Git yur IR S/W here!

Sure enough, a WiFi hot spot called BeamPost shows up on the PowerBook, so we’ve settled into the very cute Europa Cafe adjacent.

From the Mountain Express News just 3 weeks ago:

Jan 29, 2003 / vol 9 no 25

The Internet unplugged

Will Asheville go wireless?
by Martin L. Johnson

Russell Thomas, president of the Asheville-based Natural Communications, has already set up one hot spot downtown, on Battery Park Avenue. His company’s Beampost [^] a roughly 3-foot-high, 6-inch-wide beige metal post that might be mistaken for a place to tie up dogs if it weren’t for the blinking lights [^] provides three different kinds of wireless service: 802.11b (currently the most popular), bluetooth (a higher-speed but closer-range technology), and infrared (used by Handsprings and Palm Pilots). Among the beneficiaries are tech-savvy customers at the Old Europe Coffee House, who can now sip java while surfing the ‘Net free of charge with their laptops.

Thomas is hatching plans to install more Beamposts around Asheville, thereby multiplying the number of downtown hot spots. That means more opportunities for free wireless Internet. Eventually, Thomas may start charging for the service (though it would probably still be far cheaper than the current cost of a high-speed Internet connection; Starbuck’s service, provided through t-Mobile, goes for $2.95 an hour, or a mere $50 a year [^] not counting the coffee, of course).

For the time being, however, Thomas says he’s doing this as a contribution to the downtown scene. “I love Asheville; I’m invested in Asheville. When I first arrived here [in 1986], there were tumbleweeds blowing down the street. Now it’s viable.”  

Like the Sam Adams Light commercial says, Yeahhh. That’s what I’m talkin’ about!!

1:43:11 PM    

It became axiomatic in the 90’s that no investor will support a project in Microsoft’s market space unless it seemed likely that Microsoft would buy it. A decade later we’re on the cusp of an extension of that doctrine: “Don’t invest in anything in the Open Source market space. Period.” Since all code is subject to the open source effect, does that leave any bets on the table? (There might be a Kapor Corollary to this rule, which might sound like:“The only fun in software is investing in world-class open source projects.”)

This evolution from a diverse software ecosystem through the 90s’ Microsoft-dominated system to an even less diverse(!) but open source software universe is due to the “Safest Bet” meme. This behavior recognizes that you use that solution that’s known to be best maintained and least likely to be abandoned by its patron. As unlikely as it is that Microsoft Sequel Server will go away, it’s even less likely that MySQL will. This effect will only accelerate.

Take Away: We’re just beginning to accept the robustness of the mysterious Open Source Energy Allocator. And its acceptance will grow until it’s the dominant force in software.

6:33:04 PM