Author: brittblaser

Is there any urge more basic than for your life to be of consequence? No matter how we define consequence, most of our instincts and actions seem aimed towards it.

Now consider that we are helping in the birth of a ubiquitous global network, for it’s not the “frozen” Internet Infrastructure that matters, it’s the connecting of most humans who wish to be, using words and gestures that seem natural to them (not yet, but real soon). We all know this is what we’re about, but it’s good to pause and wonder at our good luck to be at this place at this time.

I was reminded of this on the phone this afternoon with Doc. We got off on Infrastructure and what the “A” in NEA really means.

NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, Anybody can improve it. (Doc Searls)

A friend of Doc’s had resisted the A part of the slogan until he realized Doc wasn’t talking about the alphabet soup of established technical standards but the possibilities we’re now building on them that allow us to, literally, fashion any communications environment we want to, among any people we welcome to our party. Like web logs, f’rinstance.

Forging a Confederation

I used to live in Philadelphia and I’d walk around Old Town and I got it that the Founding Brothers were technologists in many ways. They too were dealing with an interesting bandwidth accident exhibiting unintended outcomes. England’s purpose for the Colonies, of course, was to get more stuff as cheaply as possible and to tax the colonists as much as possible. But bandwidth got in the way.

This was such a wild land that, for the better part of a century, the colonies were more isolated from each other than from Mother England. Gradually though, wagon trails were built and it became more convenient for the Carolinas to deal with Pennsylvania than with England. The other virtue was that the colonists, though profoundly different north-to-south, related to each other far better than to the Court of St. James and the East India Company. By the 1770’s, the differences could no longer be ignored. Like any network, the colonies paid closest attention to the highest fidelity signal.

What’s interesting is how few people set the direction for the American Experiment. Only the 56 white guys in Carpenter’s Hall understood what a leap they were taking with the Declaration of Independence. It’s not like they were being closely controlled by their state legislatures which were several days’ ride away. It was never a certainty that Tom Jefferson’s stirring Enlightenment-era declarations of individual freedom would set the stage for their conclusions. He did it because he could and he wanted to be of consequence.

Eleven years later, the 39 signers of the Constitution acted just as independently in setting down the rules of engagement for the people and their rulers. No one paid much attention to their secret work until they were surprised by the many changes the Constitution proposed. The fight over the document was fierce and the debate thoughtful, but they didn’t revise what the standards body had hammered out. So the twig was bent and that was the direction our nation inclined. In October 1788, the old Congress disbanded quietly to make way for an entirely new form of governance.

That was serious standard-setting. Today, under Doc’s Anybody can Change it doctrine, we’re sitting around lobbing ideas and code around, seldom realizing that we’re the delegates setting the standards for the world that will follow us. Relatively speaking, we’re even fewer than the four score or so men who did the real work of putting symbols on parchment. Some of the symbols we’re using are pretty arcane, but they set standards anyway, which will mold society as surely as did the Federalist papers.

As Dave Winer has told us so often, big companies don’t set the important standards. Instead, a physicist fires up his NeXT box and wham! the web is born. He does it by standing on the shoulders of giants whose names are unknown to any but the most devout. Sure, the standards are set by guys working for someone else, but they’re really holding their own congress, asynchronously but still intimate. TCP/IP, FTP, SMTP, POP, HTTP and all the rest were never the provenance of the employers of the originators, because if something’s important enough to make a difference, it will not be understood by management until it’s too late to derail it.

Now that the alphabet soup’s simmered long enough, its broth supports undreamt of flavors. RSS gets baked in (metaphor fart) and revised as necessary to be useful and use decides its fate. Sure, BigCos rattle their sabers at W3C.org, but what matters is only what web designers use and web users respond to. Even Jakob Neilson can’t herd these cats.

Writing the Human Code

Lawrence Lessig is at once the most impressive and human of us, but the laws-as-code he’s a bulwark against may not be the threat they seem up close. We’ll route around constraints and fashion our own definition of fair use. If our behavior is technically illegal, we’ll add these new transgressions to the laundry list of prohibitions we already ignore because we can, since we outnumber the tools in Congress. Eventually the rules we choose to ignore will wither away like last year’s copied tunes.

“Humanity [is on] a personal quest to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. On that quest, politics is simply a roadblock of stentorian baboons”  —Tom Robbins

“[Sony COO Kunitake Ando] startled everyone by speculating that in the long term, given the nature of Internet copying, record labels may not have a future.”   —Steven Levy

So a few will debate nuances no one else comprehends. Even fewer will lay down the words that free our progeny. What works will grow and the rest will wither, as it always has. Someday we’ll see that the Toms Jefferson and Robbins were right in seeing that as long as there are willing followers there will be exploitive leaders.

So instead we’ll follow our collective gut, add what we can, use what works and leave something better behind. Maybe this isn’t an apocalypse but a parenthesis and the age of hierarchy is an interruption in organic evolution as it’s always gone on.

Doing sensible things is what makes us consequential.

12:01:57 AM    comment [commentCounter (80)]

When both Ming and Jon Udell point to the same blog on the same day, ya gotta pay attention. Actually, they both point to Leslie Michael Orchard’s riff on Charles Miller’s complaint that he’s as tired as George Carlin, having to catalogue all his “stuff” on his computer:

“I no longer want to know where my files are stored. I no longer care. I have hordes of directories on my various computers called stuff, downloads and documents, and the effort that it would take to organise them into a proper hierarchy is just not worth it. The hierarchical filesystem is a really wonderful thing for programmers and websites, but it just doesn’t cut it for personal use. I no longer care where my files are stored.”

Adding to the outcry, my friend Tom Raddemann pointed out today, “With GigaHertz CPU’s, I almost hear the processor laughing at me as I struggle to do what it can do better.”

Who could argue with that? It’s crazy to need to drill down into an arbitrary structure, either to save it originally or to find it later. Charles wants his OS to save files by asking for a simple string to remember it by, for example, “Foocom project plan”. But I’m sure that the tiny hint we’re willing to provide at the Save moment is not what we really want.

Ming says,

I think that’s what I want too (he’s thought about this before). The thing is that the world we live in is no longer hierarchical. Any piece of information fits into a bunch of different structures in different ways, depending on what I’m trying to do. If I go and drop the item in a file in a folder in a filing cabinet, in the place that seems logical at the time, chances are I won’t find it next time I’m looking for it. So, yes, maybe there is no good way of easily storing it multi-dimensionally. Maybe the best is to store some concise information about the information (which is called metadata), such as date, person, relations to projects, interests, etc. and then leave it up to an efficient search engine to find things by those keys later on.

So there’s an argument to be made for structure. Of course, as we start to add a little structure, being human, we quickly make it hierarchical and start down that slippery slope of hierarchical data totalitarianism we all resent so much. (Shouldn’t we have people who take care of these things for us?) Where’s the intersection of good sense, ease of use and a satisfying way to really be on top of our stuff. I suggest those are not exclusive. Jon thinks it needs to be in the operating system:

Adding more Ptolemaic circles like that won’t really help. Leslie’s right: helper apps aren’t the answer. The OS needs to be deeply aware of various namespaces — the Mac’s systemwide Address Book is a great step in that direction — and then surface them into a common completion UI.

Maybe the answer is to assign the tags when you’re working with the content, not in that moment when you know you don’t want to lose whatever you’re working on.

Several years ago, I developed a system called MindShare to handle this problem for workgroups and their stuff. The challenge then and now is to have a bulletproof way to describe whatever might need to be found later. At that time, we didn’t have the benefit of XML, which is about to become the storage system for all our stuff.

Steal This Idea

But we did find a bulletproof topology for assigning metadata to business content strings. MindShare was based on the idea that, if something is worth keeping at all, it should be available fortuitously when we’re looking for things like it but may not even remember this item specifically. The universal topology for everything we need to keep track of is the IPIA coordinate system. IPIA says that the meaningful text strings in any file, correspondence, meeting, call, etc. can be classified unequivocally as an Issue, Promise, Idea or Appointment. You’ll never mistake an issue string from a promise received string.

And obviously our world is defined by promises payable and promises receivable. Making them explicit is a Good Thing.

Example You get an email or open a web page or write a letter. A series of widgets surround the message:

Who…Alan AldaBill BaileyCab CallowayDoris DayEphraim Englebartnamespace… Text Media Object Model   Hi Britt, Would it be possible to use MindShare to organize my train collection? I need to be sure my Diesels don’t get mixed up with my steamers. I’ll call you tomorrow at 1pm to discuss. Why shouldn’t we use the same categories on line and in our train display? I’m having trouble working with Igor – something about Frank’s stein. We can also discuss it at lunch at noon Friday at the Greenery. Issue Promise Made Promise Rec’vd Idea Appointment Address date… 1/21/03 1/22/03 1/23/03 1/24/03 1/25/03 time… 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 Company… ABC CBS GE IBM NBC Project … Trains Online Store Mentoring

Naturally, the system knows who the email is from, when it arrived, etc. and, as Charles suggests, provides those metadata tags as it can. Since the system already knows all your contacts and appointments, new ones can be added by clicking, typing or dragging them.

If something worth noticing is mentioned, it is always an Issue, Idea, a Promise Made, a Promise Received or an appointment, a special kind of mutual promise. Just highlight the text string and click the options. If your file or content doesn’t deserve all this scrutiny, then don’t do it. But, whatever you highlight, drag, click or, maybe, type, you can be sure your Model 2004 4GH XML-o-matic CPU will not require you to know where the hell your stuff is.

Marc Canter has been urging us to embrace MOM—a Media Object Model, that might look like this:

Who…Alan AldaBill BaileyCab CallowayDoris DayEphraim Englebartnamespace… Text Media Object Model   When Sunny Gets Blue.mp3 Artist Label Genre Composer other 1 other 2 date… 1/21/03 1/22/03 1/23/03 1/24/03 1/25/03 time… 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 Company… ABC CBS GE IBM NBC Project … Trains Online Store Mentoring

Someone, probably us, will add the text namespace options to Xpertweb transaction forms. But we’ll never do it at the system level. Since the IPIA namespace is as old as the Agora. I hope someone applies it.

11:48:11 PM    

Maybe we need a turn around artist. You’ve heard of these guys who go into a faltering company and bitch-slap them into profitability. They don’t have a great rep, but it’s a nasty job few are good at.

The problem with super-organisms is that they’re on their way to becoming real organisms, but they lack the full-on coordination tools, like a teenager in the awkward stage. Companies and nations are super-organisms that seem a lot more super than they are. When a company or nation is foundering, its internal fiefdoms start pointing fingers and avoiding blame. Sometimes the internal competition is killing the company faster than the company’s competitors. Make that usually internal competition does more harm than the competitors.

But, at a macro level, aren’t we seeing that all over our economy? Here’s Mitch quoting Marc Canter, founder of the core of what became Macromedia (Thanks, Mitch!):

There is an entire eco-system out there – surrounding the world of media. I helped create one of the leading tool vendors ‘in this space’ – Macromedia – but there are others as well (Adobe, Avid, Discreet, Sonic – to name a few) – as well as hardware vendors (Sony, Phillips, Samsung, Matsushita, etc.) all who profit from media in one sense of the other.  All of these companies have some sort of ‘grand media strategy’ that usually includes the end-users and developers committing to their platform, standards and/or ‘solutions’. But when it’s all said and done, at the end of the day, they all don’t want to work together.

They may begrudgingly commit or even create standards, but (surprise, surprise) there’s always some ‘hitch’ why this doesn’t work with that, or why we haven’t ‘supported’ that standard yet or why – for only $49.95 – ” you can get this little widget, which will convert these incompatible files – into whatever format we decide you can, so that you can use your own files ” – which you paid for or created yourself.

It’s a total scam - something we call ‘lock in’ in our industry. It’s time that these companies realized that open standards are the future. It’s time that we showed them how to be open and still let them prosper. There’s a solution to all this mess.

(In the world of media that Marc’s talking about, his solution is a common Media Object Model)

So I see internal managers missing their big picture, competing with internal groups they should cooperate with, and Marc and Mitch see companies doing the same thing, trashing their tools’ utility to support bizplans that probably won’t work anyway.

Then there’s this apocalyptic insight from Mitch:

U.S. indicator? Japan’s economy goes down, down, down
The Japanese economy slumped for the third straight month because industrial output (and demand) have slackened. And at the same time, attacking deflationary pressure in Japan is becoming a major political issue. I think this is a global trend and we’ll be seeing calls for the same kind of anti-deflationary actions in the U.S. within the year, even though this is stark contrast to the Federal Reserve’s policies of the past 20 years. The National Bureau of Economic Research says we are still in the 2001 recession or maybe just hitting the second recession in two years — either way, the pressure to drive inflationary demand-side economic forces is on the rise, as it is one way to address rising unemployment.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt for people to have a surfeit of opportunities unmediated by the kinds of managements that prevail in Japan and here.

How About a Common Task Object Model – TOM Tomorrow?

This blog’s favorite meme: managerial capitalism seems powerful because it rigidly constrains our choices, but in fact managers are simply not very good at their main job of growing the economy and deploying talent (you and I wouldn’t be either, BTW).

We don’t have the Task Object Model protocols in place to hook the Frommet Company’s new data widget to the instantiation tool from Nick in Portland, using a Flash presentation tool created by George in Ann Arbor. So, Frommet hires a new team to do the whole solution which misses the market; Nick’s tool never gets used properly and George goes back to letting his clients talk him into using Flash to piss off their web site users.

But, as Marc says regarding media, there’s a solution to this mess. Let’s make it simpler to find solutions and work outside the company than to develop it inside, following Joy’s Law advising us that the best expert for your most important project isn’t in your company.

A Task Object Model will be common when it’s trivial for someone to describe a specialized solution or service and to offer it openly and freely to those who are known to be skilled purchasers of such services (skilled in building experts’ reputations and paying well—the core skill of a sound economy). Obviously, that’s the Xpertweb goal, but I never thought of the Task Object Model metaphor.

It’s not obvious that Xpertweb might be a tool for companies to develop products faster and more reliably. One of the great problems with in-house development is that you feel you have to use the people you’ve already got and the tools they’ve already mastered. Naturally that rarely works for new projects because the in-house skills haven’t been developed yet, but they are out there.

Xpertweb is designed to let the most talented people use their own consultancies to do for many what they now do only for their employers. With a viable Xpertweb system in place, the most active and clever people will leave first, just as the most energetic water molecules leave your coffee first. In both cases, their escape increases the reservoir of inactivity left behind. Companies will see this first as a problem but it’s really an opportunity—to link together ad hoc development teams as skillfully as Hollywood does it to produce films.

1:50:36 PM    

On Tuesday, the Funch-man continued the thread we’ve been building about how we might release individual productivity from the constraints of capital that not only funds productive energy but, well, capitalizes on it. Capital, of course, is enthralled with receiving money while sleeping. It’s useful to remember that the Latin root of Capital means head. Apparently, being in charge of the resources is more interesting than deploying money to do something useful. It’s too bad the capitalists don’t just give us good head. (Hey. It was there.)

This isn’t an anti-capitalist rant, despite appearances. Everybody is enthralled with money-while-sleeping. Each age works to remove its most prominent scarcity and, having succeeded and therefore become irrelevant, holds on with its skeletal grip until the tendons dissolve, like Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The lack of capital in a society is an overarching problem that seems impossible to resolve, so it rightly captures a society’s imagination until it is solved. It is our current religion. The problem then becomes one of prying away the death grip of the previously indispensable technocrats and their clergy.

Perspective Here’s an illustration of what a blessing it is to have abundant capital: Hernando de Soto has written eloquently on the subject of hidden capital in the so-called third world countries, in The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else and The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. Aside from the remarkable coincidence of his name, it turns out that the current de Soto is a Peruvian economist whose foundation is discovering and cataloguing the trillions of dollars of undocumented capital lying around in the so-called third world countries that don’t have the infrastructure to identify it, document it, mortgage it and build an economy based upon it. In fact, their capital is illegal. (“The more people the ILD researchers talked to in the shantytowns and rural byways of Peru, the more they realized that it was not so much that the poor were breaking the law as that the law was breaking them.”)

Resourceful people in the so-called third world countries want homes and businesses like we all do. Since it takes a decade or so to wrest a business license or an unencumbered building lot from the bureaucracy, people just invest in their businesses and homes anyway, and not bad ones. But they are squatters and their capital is undocumented so it’s not real, right? No wonder these are “poor” countries. What would America look like if you subtracted the housing stock and small business from the resource base?

A virtue of de Soto’s important work is that it suggests how important and difficult it is to create the capital that we now enjoy in abundance. It’s hard to realize that we are standing on the shoulders of giants when the grasping descendants of those grasping giants can’t see the universal benefits of the universal abundance that’s the obvious next phase after the age of capital rationing we’re now leaving.

So here’s what Freeman says:

The real thing that would make a difference would be the information about how to organize people and resources efficiently and effectively, without needing investment capital and without needing managers. I.e. the knowledge of how to bring the elements into synergy, without requiring the one guy with all the money to be in charge.

I’d suggest that the knowledge of how to bring the elements into synergy must be instantiated into the edges of the system, specifically as a web application. “Capitalism” may connote to some a massive conspiracy of the haves vs. the have nots, but in fact, it’s just the process of alert people observing each others’ techniques and applying them to emerging opportunities. It’s a lot like viewing the source of a web page or mimicking an open source data architecture. It may not seem to be an edge-based system, but that was the genius of capitalism – spreading resources to the edges instead of leaving it in the state treasury.

We need a system that instantly rewards productivity because it is biased to move money from a confident buyer to a proven seller who is capitalized to respond immediately, as no corporation can. We need to leverage the existing capital stock that’s within 6 feet of you as you read this: broadband, a CPU, a reasonable chair and a world of ideas, techniques, possibilities and your wealth of experience.

Gift Withholding Tax

Above all, you, I and every other blogger and bloggee needs to put our gifts in front of each other, as Flemming suggested in Free Economy. What is the cost to society when we withhold what we might freely provide to others? It’s the general tax on our habit of withholding our gifts from each other. What protocols are required that would motivate us to lighten up, loosen up and share our talents as freely as do the open source folks?

For starters, we need to register with each other in a kind of economic blogroll. The blogroll I imagine would describe each of our skills and invite us to deploy them freely for others’ benefit, but with the understanding that, if found satisfactory, there’d be a reasonable payment made. The blogonomics I imagine would also cause each of us to publish our transaction details as readily as we already publish our discoveries, opinions and recommendations.

If blogs are conversations and markets are conversations, aren’t blogs markets? If so, we just need to enhance and standardize those little contribution icons we’re starting to see on some web logs.

Hell, we could even give the new Blogonomy a catchy name. How about “Xpertweb“?

1:54:25 PM    

If the problem with Managerial Capitalism is its ineffectiveness, then how ineffective is it? And how do we measure ineffectiveness anyway? Well, they pay economists way too much to worry about this stuff, but they’re usually wrong anyway, so why not have a go at it?

Flemming Funch, as usual, has wisdom to offer on this point, and calls it Free Economy. What else would you expect from a site declaring, An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up. He suggests that more abundance would be developed if people and companies concentrated on making their stuff free. It’s a fair point. Even though companies don’t have a stated goal to make things more free, that’s the obvious effect of managerial capitalism. Perhaps if freer stuff were their conscious intent, companies would do even better with their stated goals of market share, profitability and stock price.

If I look at the resources available to me, and I identify what I can freely share with others, and I work on increasing the number and variety of resources I can freely share, and others do the same, then we’d gradually be getting somewhere. Somewhere where a lot of what we need is freely and easily available for everybody. I’m not talking about whether I might take time out of my schedule to work hard for some charity once per week. I’m not talking about sacrifice. I’m talking about arranging things so that it is perfectly feasible and comfortable to give something away, without particularly being worse off myself.

The production of goods and capital is so efficient in the so-called first world that we’ve already achieved a lot of this, compared to the so-called third world. Take salt for example. Salt was so precious in the ancient world that Roman Centurions were paid in little bags of salt, not coins. It was their salary. They were said to be worth their salt. We’re already well down the road to free stuff and constantly prove that what is dear under one system is abundant in another.

Perhaps the core problem is philosophical or spiritual: we tend not to value what isn’t dear, so we don’t celebrate the abundance we already have. Or, paraphrasing Einstein, We pay attention to the things we can count but which don’t matter, and we ignore what matters but cannot be counted.

Digression…

So on Monday I was in the middle of riffing the above from Flemming Funch, the Masterful Ming, and I go to his site to check a detail, and there’s this embarrassing (but oh so welcome, give me more) admiration of my last post in his Inspiration category. I’m honored that he finds these rants reminiscent of the writing of John Perry Barlow, whom I quote repeatedly, and so should you. Barlow and I are both alumni of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, so maybe there was something in the water (I’m embarrassed to admit that I discovered Barlow only when I saw him on the cover of the alumni magazine.) He arrived the fall after I graduated, about the time I was swearing in at Dubya’s and my favorite USAF recruiting station in New Haven.

Here’s a sense of Wesleyan. A few years ago, I was visiting my favorite professor, George Creeger. I had been one of George’s series of student “slaves” who helped him restore 19th century houses and do odd jobs. More than most, I hung out at his home with George and Elva and Katie, Karl and Kit on summer evenings after my construction job. During this last visit, he pulled a book off his shelf and handed it to me. The book had been given to him by its author, another of his former students, and George thought perhaps I’d enjoy it. Which I did. The book was The Perfect Storm.

In the halcyon early 60’s, anything was possible, and Wesleyan was the epitome of that open potential. We were at a social turning point but didn’t realize it. Still an all-male college of about 1100 students, Wesleyan had the highest endowment per capita of any college on earth, a liberal arts curriculum that may not be reproducible today for any amount of money and a student body simultaneously adventurous, well informed but intellectually curious and willing to party on any occasion. My freshman dorm counselor was Bruce Corwin, my teachers, in addition to George Creeger, included Richard Wilbur and Norman O. Brown. I sat with Vance Packard at a fraternity dinner, because his son Randy was one of our pledges. I’ll spare you the prank played on them that day by Jim McInteer, who later took tea in Taos with Lady Brett just for the hell of it, pretending to be writing a thesis on D. H. Lawrence. While there, an authentic scholar called from town requesting an audience, but Lady Brett demurred, since she was having such an important talk with McInteer, the merry prankster of scholars. But at least Jim knew why Lady Brett was significant.

Just Give Us the Goods

OK. Back to our knitting. How do things improve, economically? I suggest that a key attribute of a successful economy is the Delight factor. That’s not just a New Age neologism, but an attempt to name the difference between what you pay for something and what you would have paid if you’d had to. In a freer economy, we’d expect the delight factor to be higher than in Roman times.

The secret of productivity is that experts can produce something for less than someone else will pay for it. But there’s always some other additional value. Economists talk about friction-free markets, where every seller and buyer is perfectly informed and everything is sold for exactly its fair market price. But the dismal scientists ignore the Delight Factor, where the buyer so relishes the transaction that the price is still not equal to its worth.

There’s not a lot of delight in commodities, but service-based products have the potential to delight and amaze the buyer (Midwest Express Airlines‘ wide leather seats and free champagne) or not (Sprint PCS‘ nonexistent customer service and, often, signal). What agency will help us grow the Delight Factor and, perhaps, our economy?

From The Peer Economy:

Corporations’ inability to keep people profitably on task is the key to the demise of the C
orporate Age. If you want to see people on task, stop by your local cleaners or bbakery. That’s where you find people who are close to their customers, sticking to their core competencies. They are blissfully unmanaged by overly creative managers dreaming up new line extensions to fritter away shareholder equity and their customers’ time.

The question is, how could the marvelous productivity of localized business become the engine of the next wave of democratic wealth? It happens when the global communications links forged by corporations serve the sole proprietor as well as the multinational corporations and interactive TV spuds they were designed for.

A ubiquitous Internet, unmediated peer-to-peer payments and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are the building blocks of the Peer Economy, where you transact directly with another and not their company, although you’ve never met nor will, each with absolute confidence in your security and total satisfaction. The Peer Economy provides mechanisms for wealth creation which cut across corporate borders and are aggregated in the very fabric of the Internet, not locked inside the balance sheets of contending companies and mutual funds.

So, if great granddad toiled in the old country for half an hour for the loaf of bread you earn in one minute, when will your child work 10 seconds for her bread? It happens as soon as the means of production are on task six times as much (usefully tasked, as defined by consumers, not managements). This includes people in addition to the robots and computers staffing the impending golden age of automated slavery.

The point is not how many slaves we have, it’s how much they and we are deployed on tasks which are truly useful to each other, unmediated by clueless managers.

Do we really ask anything more of each other than that, for the moment we serve, we be truly on task? Delight is the result of being paid attention to, not commoditized into consumerism.

12:34:53 PM    

We’re watching the death throes of Managerial Capitalism, and it ain’t pretty. MC, of course, is the era of managers who have usurped the traditional role of aristocrats and Puritans who at least acknowledged the importance of high principles. These managers have become the ruling elite of the so-called First World.

If you feel there’s an insatiable force sucking up your energy and your children’s future, it’s Managerial Capitalism. Corporate managers and their henchmen, the Wall Street “elite”, are the force to be reckoned with. Fortunately, they’re pretty paltry as humans go, and their days are more numbered than they appear. Why? Because they and the organizations they direct simply aren’t very good at their mission.

First of all, these are managers, not leaders. Leaders are people who know how to do what is done by the people they lead. Leaders expose themselves to the inconvenience of proceeding in front of the troops, Tom Hanks-style, rather than piloting a desk while others pilot less predictable craft.

<veteran’s_rant>The current manager-in-residence, George II, went through the motions of flying F-102s on training missions with the Texas Air National Guard during the Viet Nam unpleasantness, in a squadron noted for its population of the scions of the Texas elite. (He was admitted to pilot training ahead of a coupla hundred more qualified other rich kids, despite having flunked the entrance exam. As if that weren’t little enough, the record seems clear that he was too busy on a political campaign to show up for service when assigned to Alabama for his last year of duty. Can you imagine what Colin Powell, a real soldier, thinks of this guy?

My personal resentment may stem from the fact that I enlisted in the Air Force at the same New Haven office as George, about 3 years earlier. About a week before he enlisted, I was on the C-130 that evacuated the last Marines from Kham Duc Viet Nam (the one before us was shot down on takeoff, killing all 150 souls on board). A month after George started his USAF Adventure Camp, I got shot down at Katum, Viet Nam. The real world has real work to be done. Leaders do that work and teach others. Managers arrange the doing of real work.</veteran’s_rant>

The key to Managerial Capitalism is a shortage of capital, not its abundance. This view requires an inversion in how we think of economic eras.

Each age defines itself by its dominant scarcity. The age of agriculture arose when agriculture was less usual than hunting and gathering. The Industrial Age was notable when mass production was novel rather than routine. Industrialism’s handmaiden, Capitalism, became our defining modality when there wasn’t enough capital available to fund all the useful industrial possibilities.

Money is Free. Get Used To It.

But it’s the 21st century. The automobile, furniture, housing and appliance industries will put their goods into your hands for no money down and no payments for a while. (With housing, you’ll pay a little to rent the capital each month, but at 6%, the cost of capital is no more than the $500 monthly increase in the value of your $100,000 home.) Today, capital is, essentially, free, which makes it common, uninteresting and subservient to stronger economic realities. The next time you hear some old fart praising the virtues of capitalism, you’ll know you’re listening to someone who doesn’t get it that, when capital is free, Capitalism is passé.

John Robb wrote eloquently last week on the New Kleptocracy:

NYT.  Bush’s economic plan.  I think it is fairly ironic that the majority of the Republicans I know are people that make below $150k a year. They liked the Republicans because they opposed unrestrained growth in social transfer programs. Now, when it comes time to cut taxes to give back some of the money that had been arrogated by the government, the Republicans don’t even recognize that they exist. Bush is giving almost all of the tax cuts to people that make over $1m a year. I guess they think that the rank and file “working” Republicans are merely driven by social and defense issues and really don’t care about the pocket book. Poor schmucks.

Personally, I think we are speeding down a path towards a kleptocracy that is enhanced and accelerated by bad tax law and insufficient oversight. The mess we saw at Enron and Tyco were just the tip of the iceberg. It’s still going on everywhere. With Bush’s elimination of the inheritance tax, elimination of the tax on dividends, and other changes we are now going to see dynasties of kleptocrats. 

The thing everyone misses in this is that taxes on extreme wealth and inheritances keep the playing field of life relatively level. Also, regulation of economic behavior allows people that play by the rules to succeed. From everything I can see, we are in a place where a person who is intelligent, works hard, and follows the rules cannot under any circumstances make a significant sum of money on their own.

It’s interesting that John Robb is also a former Air Force C-130 pilot who put his ass on the line in Bosnia. Different war, same shit. (But note that Capt. Robb flew special Ops C-130s, taking guys with green faces into blacked-out fields on dark nights. Props to that boy!).

So here’s the irony: Every economic proposal we’re hearing is to increase capital! Like any age, we’re focused on the problem that we started with, not the one in front of us. Our economic problem is obvious: we don’t know how to inspire and deploy the energy and skill of our work force, so instead, we’re trying to put more money into the hands of the wealthy so they’ll invest it in enterprises which will be better equipped to do more of what already isn’t working.

If You Already Own it, You Don’t Have to Steal It

At the risk of being repetitive, I suggest again that society has always been based on the ownership of productive assets by those who are skilled in commandeering others’ productivity. That’s an obvious tautology and a simple truth—it has to do with your specialty. Most people are anxious for approval and believe that an honest day’s work will get them an honest day’s pay (actually, we don’t really believe it, but we want to believe it so badly that we ignore the contrary evidence).

There’s a much smaller group of people with a skill set that may be no more complex than being a Frito-Lay route man, who have as their aim the directing and accounting for others’ efforts. This managerial/capitalistic skill/entitlement nexus has the side benefit of enjoying substantial wealth based upon but only loosely related to the organization’s productivity.
Producing a widget does not pay as well as managing the production of widgets.

Owning the means of production was once the birthright of the aristocracy (or, as John Perry Barlow observed, the divine right of thugs), but th
e 1930’s invention of publicly accountable public corporations created the illusion of distributed ownership of the means of production. But how distributed was it?

Let’s pause to reflect on why corporations became, in theory, publicly accountable. When the 20’s started to roar, Wall Street was happy to take money from all those Joe Average rubes in the cheap seats, setting up a depression that cost the Republicans the White House and put a populist in the driver’s seat. That reaction created The New Deal, the SEC and a mechanism for transparent corporate governance. This was big news, and the transparency initiative held together, I submit, because the Great Depression and WWII drew people of all classes together into common effort, first for economic survival and then for physical and cultural survival.

But this period of transparency and protecting the public from corporate malfeasance lacked one vital ingredient—the public. The great unwashed retired from the game en masse, not to return until the 1990’s. Here’s a chart depicting the percent of US households owning mutual funds from 1980-1998. It’s presumably indicative of public ownership of all shares, perhaps even understated.

Despite a blip during the 1960’s Go-GoYears (great read—thanks, Tamara) the only investors were those pretty well equipped to play the game, not you or me or our parents/grandparents. Company ownership is a specialized game (as we were recently reminded) and usually it’s played by club members who are the aristocracy and like to keep it that way. Occasionally, the market news gets so good that the public assumes it’s a no-brainer (remember those eTrade ads?!) and begs to get in on the action. It would be unreasonable to expect securities brokers to resist the billions of dollars being waved in their faces. This is when the ownership starts to be shared with the common folk, who believe they deserve a place at the table.

When you already own the means of production, there’s nothing to steal and that’s historically been the case. The economic game only became a kleptocracy when the managerial aristocracy, having sold its right to own all productivity, decided to take it back again. Actually, it was never sold, simply rented out. When they take back what they can, it’s stealing, but to the managerial capitalists, it just seems like business as usual.

If we take nothing else away from this long-winded rant, it’s this:

Equity markets systematically move money from the less informed to the better informed.

The problem with Managerial Capitalism is not that it’s too pervasive and powerful (though it is), but that it is so poor at doing what it claims to do best—allocate people and resources skillfully and compellingly. This is the disconnect that should engage our passion, not the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that we usually devolve into.

More Romantic Economics

Imagine for a moment that enterprises worked the way you’d like them to: They would employ skilled specialists who knew how to locate and train people to do what they are natively useful for, and they would coach those individuals (you and me) toward a bright future of usefulness and prosperity.

Get over yourself! That’s not what happens under Managerial Capitalism. People are managed because they have a job, and holding that job is their profession. Productivity is something else. Perhaps Xpertweb will be a good mechanism for unleashing our bottled-up productivity. In any event, we are on the cusp of an age when some non-managerial, Internet-based means will be available to mediate between people with a skill and people who need that skill.

One thing’s for sure: that mechanism will be no worse than Xpertweb.

1:11:46 AM    

It’s like we have no idea what to spend our time on. In recent months, many seers, like Lessig, Barlow and others have asked why we’re not more exercised by the disappearance of America–details like civil rights, free speech, public domain media, freedom from unreasonable search & seizure, habeus corpus. You know, the stuff that mattered before the 2000 coup d’état.

The only possible explanation is that we’ve lost the collective ability to differentiate between what matters and what’s flashy. Today’s news tells us about the life-changing project that has possessed a group of bright people at GM working tirelessly around the clock for the last few months: spending millions to create a 1,000 horsepower V-16, $250,000 land yacht called the Cadillac Sixteen. As Alan Watts asked so long ago, Does it Matter?—Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality.

We all know, of course, that it’s the height of folly to decry the spending of other people’s resources on foolish or unworthy projects. Like pornography, folly is in the eyes of the beholder. But it’s irresistible to contrast the unilateral cancellation of constitutional guarantees with the rise of managerial capitalism.

Then there’s this gem from the Consumer Electronics Show:

Japanese video-game giant Nintendo will also have news, after titillating gamers for a month with the promise of a “megaton” announcement. Nintendo won’t give any clues, but the most informed forecasts have the company unveiling a new version of its Game Boy Advanced portable game player, equipped with a backlit screen to address one of the most frequent complaints about the megaselling handheld game machine.

Boy Howdy! A megaton backlit display to rescue us from lives of quiet desperation!

Then there’s this Doc-baiting analysis:

“Manufacturers will focus on new ways of consuming digital content so that it will really be ubiquitous,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with research firm Jupiter Research. “They’ve been talking about this for a while but they will work to mature their products so that consumers can more easily access digital content.”

Any time you hear consume and content twice each in the same paragraph, you can count on retribution from the seer of Santa Barbara.

Liberty Shits
(an obscure riff on Liberty Ships,
  the WWII transports that carried gung-ho kids to Normandy,
  …reputed to have been built in return for $1 profit per year
  …what a difference 6 decades make)

So here I am, playing around with this lukewarm screed I started this morning on our collective failure to pay attention to what matters, and I get an email from Mitch saying, “Listen up now, I’m onto something big!”
Naturally, I drop my single malt to rush to his post:

“the Liberty Alliance trumpets the first roll-out plans of its members while we people, whose identities they will be abusing, cower in the shadows like a Strawman, Lion and Tin Man waiting to sneak in to see if we can rescue innocence. Read this Infoworld story about the Liberty Alliance. Check out the press release announcing 22 new members of the Libery Alliance.”

“I challenge anyone to find a single example of a project that will give the individual control of their identity; instead it is all about hanging tags around our necks and tracking us, like the security systems at all those Web startups that have gone out of business. These top-down identity regimes will not produce an equitable relationship between companies who want access to our identities and each of us, the sovereigns of our personal information. Instead the dialog is going to end up like this: You [sheep] need a card to open this door. You [slaves] need a card to access this building. You [consumers, the wide-mouthed baby birds of the economy] need a card to be issued food from the cafeteria.

“We must own our identities and that process must begin from the edge and grow into the networks so that people end up in greater control of their personal information. What these projects describe is a world dominated by T2 and T3 identity in Andre Durand’s hierarchy . I cannot imagine anyone arguing that, if 802.11 wireless had been rolled out by carriers before it started growing organically, the results would have been revolutionary in any sense. However, we’re giving in on identity before the first skirmish because there is an assumption that only organizations give people identity.”

Brains and Courage and Hearts, Oh My!

So, in the face of a clearly untenable assault on our privacy and anonymity, how shall we acquire the brains, courage and spirit to defend ourselves against this further assault on our personhood? Since we’re not doing well so far, let’s drop back and get the big picture.

The Industrial Age invented Mangerial Capitalism, whereby a tiny oligarchy has usurped most economic and political power, since management is the only capitalistic stakeholder with a coherent interest in how things are run. I suggest we’re on the tail end of that cycle.

The internet is accumulating protocols faster than managements are adding success theories du jour. Based on Doc’s Nobody Owns It, Everybody Can Use It, Anybody Can Improve It (NEA) model, the internet is like a 6 foot 14-year-old, testing its strength and reflexes, learning how to kick a field goal without falling down. This gangly wunderkind would be a lot more promising if it weren’t the first expression of its species. Without an Alpha Centauri talent scout here to reassure us that this is gonna work out just fine, we’re wodering if the current dinosaurs will continue to rule our swamp.

The answer’s in front of us, but not top-of-mind. Haven’t all of us worked in a big company and witnessed how incompetent it is at doing what it thinks it does well? Don’t we understand the glacial inability of Microsoft, “the world’s greatest software company”, to respond to problems with its raison d’etre, software code? Don’t we see how much better the LAMP applications (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python) respond to issues as they arise? What are the missing element to transform all of us into open resources?

Put the Blame Ennui

Perhaps we’d understand how close we are to a solution if we remember how clumsy companies are. Trust me on this: companies are far more scared of us than we of them. It’s just that they’ve managed to camouflage the irritation we collectively feel about depending on them to allocate resources (Us) to extract resources from the Consumer Us. When we recognize and organize our voice speaking to ourselves, we’ll find it easier to take the small steps to finish the story we imagine but don’t know how to conclude.

T
he solution is NEA web applications. Design our culture, not widgets. If we don’t like the economy, design a better one (our mission here). If we don’t like the way the Electoral College works, design the Electoral Collage, the silent majority made deafening by broadcasting preferences derived from the most of us using a UI so compelling we won’t leave it alone. Even if things don’t resonate with the designers’ preferences, who cares? Once we establish our collective voice, we’ll learn to live with the elegance of equitable disappointment and the power of our own awakening.

Mitch is right to be alarmed. Let’s take up his challenge. Where are the issues-based tag structures to help us “roll up” our passionate web logs and comments into a coherent voice which we pledge to act upon in the voting booth?

In short, imagine something that takes us in the right direction, then make it more concrete until it amplifies all these voices. We just need a few more design studies.

11:41:03 PM    

From the installer for TypeIt4Me, a must-have OS X utility:

Please take your time to test it BEFORE paying for it, to save us both the trouble and expense of issuing a refund.

7:31:34 PM    

Like Doc said, “It’s getting real interesting now.” This Digital ID meme polyblog has been like pulling a string out of a sweater. I’ve been gnawing on the problem of reputation and identity since Mitch Ratcliffe pointed out that I was talking about reputation and everyone else was talking about DigitalID. I’ve thrown away a few thousand words, (aren’t you glad?) and am just beginning to get at the core issue that’s been troubling me: Digital ID has nothing to do with Digital Reputation, and we don’t want it to.

Andre Durand won’t agree with that, but I think it’s implicit in his work. Everyone’s quoting Andre’s 3 tiers of identity white paper, which led Doc to come up with his Mydentity, Ourdentity, Theirdentity model. Then I read Andre’s Anatomy of a Reputation and I finally got it (well, felt I got it enough to quit agonizing over my cluelessness). Andre has thought about this longer, harder and better than the rest of us, and has framed the conversation beautifully. Despite that contribution, I think Andre wants to tie reputation too closely with ID, perhaps because his PingID start-up wants to manage both of them for businesses and us, but more probably because we’re all doing it.

Let’s be clear: the only reason we’re jamming on this Digital ID stuff is that we’re working out how it affects us on the internet and, more personally, how we can cooperate to build personas that live on the net which have higher value than than the ones we can develop in our zip code. When I need a financial analysis, I need analysis, not an analyst. I don’t care what the creator of my solution does in his spare time with whom of which gender or species, under what influences. I just want someone who’s the Commander Data relative to my solution, not Jean-Luc Picard, idealized in every regard.

Isn’t that our grievance with managerial capitalism? Aren’t employees tired of having to act, look, vote, nod and grovel in particular ways, when the real assignment is to keep the network up? Every 10,000-job business would be better off with 30,000 ad hoc experts than with their experts at job-holding. The takeaway from that viewpoint is that a specialized task—real work—needs a reputation, an Ourdentity. The real-person carbon-based Mydentity may be necessary to hold down a job in finance, but not for buying financial analyses over the internet (is it consulting? an Excel template? a macro? do you care?).

As Doc points out tonight, “It isn’t who you are, it’s how you blog. . .’After all, who cares who you are?'”

Or, as my old buddy Jerry Vass tells his Fortune clients, “The buyer doesn’t care if the salesman lives or dies, as long as he doesn’t die on the premises.”

For those of us not in the business of selling Digital ID services to businesses:

Forget about linking Digital ID to Digital Reputation. There’s no there there.

Andre tells us in Reputation, “Reputations only really exist within the context of your interactions with others, and therefore, a reputation can be viewed as existing in the space between you and others.”

Like your shadow, your reputation is attached to you but doesn’t belong to you. When you want something real done, what you want is work performed under a terrific reputation that doesn’t get ruined during your assignment. The personality behind the reputation, unfortunately, is no more relevant to your task than the shadows in Plato’s Cave are related to reality. In the coming world of work-not-jobs, tasks will be parsed to expertise, rather than referred to the IT people for further study.

First Principles

To get my head around the possibility of a DigID-DigRep disconnect, I had to go back to our core dialogue, as inspired by the Great Hintchoochoo. The market is a conversation, the internet enables a human voice, peer-to-peer trumps B2C, organizations are dehumanizing, etc., etc. You know–all the truths we should review every morning instead of the market report.

But the Cluetrain truths led me into a confusion. In my longing for human voices in the marketplace, I’d somehow got the idea that my transactions could be truly like my conception of the old personalized Agora, but it can’t be designed that way. Unless you’re an ATM, meatspace has nothing to do with the marketplace. That’s not my or Xpertweb’s problem, so I don’t have anything to add to the Mydentity discussion.

Since Xpertweb is all about reputation, we need to understand how best to value each other. Here are Andre’s talking points from Anatomy of a Reputation, and how Xpertweb is hoping to develop Ourdentities based on those points:

Attributes of a Reputation

What You Say . . .Of all the ways to create a reputation, telling people what they should think of you is both the weakest and carries the least amount of weight in the real world. That said, what you say about yourself can serve to amplify a positive opinion of you if it is consistent with your actions (in their experience). Likewise, what you say about yourself can negatively impact one’s image of you if it is inconsistent with their experiences with you.

What You Do “Actions speak louder than words” embodies this attribute of an identity. Nothing serves to more quickly establish a reputation than one’s actions.

Which means: Aggregate your reputation by capturing every customer’s candid rating of the task you performed. Make that a quantitative and qualitative rating, collected before the tears of happiness are dry, so it’s got to be part of the invoice. Use only your customers’ words and numbers when putting your service or product before the public. If they like what your customers have said, they may look further, so your home page looks like this:

• “My 183 jobs have an average 88.6% rating. Click here for every task grade and comment.”
• Mission/Nutshell Statement: 43 words or so
• A longer How I Work for You statement
• Your even longer Exemplary Projects listing
• Your reflective Things I Care About statement, which feels like a web log
• Maybe a resume, but by this point, who cares?

What’s Pub
lic Certain elements of our reputation are public, that is, generally known by us (the owner of the reputation) and by others who know us. . .Generally speaking, we work to reinforce positive elements of our reputation and diminish negative ones. If I knew that I’d been branded a ‘tight-wad’ when it comes to paying my bar tab, I might over-pay in the future to counteract a negative impression of my reputation as being generous.

Which means: Publish every promise and every outcome. Xpertweb transaction tracking is optional, but when used, the metrics of the task are known to every successive customer or seller. As Andre suggests here, being observed improves one’s performance. It’s both common sense and a management theory known as the Hawthorne Effect since the early 1930’s. What better way to develop conscientiousness and competence than to give people a bully pulpit from which to strut their stuff?

What’s Private Certain facets of my reputation are private, and will never be known to me or others. Individuals who choose to create a new identity are doing nothing more than running from their reputation.

Which means: We can’t be certain of someone without a reputation. Once we have a metric for quality, published universally, it may become more risky to deal with someone without a documented reputation. But the flip side is compelling as well.

Xpertweb, like shareware, has a way to make it easy to build a reputation whether starting out or starting over. Deliver your benefit first and calibrate the price to the buyer’s rating. The prospective buyer knows it’s a riskless purchase (not just money-back-after-a-hassle but grade-based pricing), and has no reason to hesitate to let the seller show what she can do. If a failed Xpertweb user tries a new persona with a new mentor (perhaps offering more modest services), it might take just six months to establish a new reputation, just like the first time. Maybe this time will work.

This is the societal payoff from a system that recycles failure into new reputation opportunities. Our collective goal is not to banish failed first attempts to an occupational debtor’s prison, but to help anyone find a new skill or a better approach to a flawed skill.

What Context Lastly, while in real life and in every day conversation we do in fact attempt to summarize an individual’s reputation (e.g. “…she’s an amazing person.”), the fact is, our reputation is contextual and it is quite possible for me to have a positive reputation in one area of my life with individual A and a negative reputation in another area of my life with individual B.

Which means: When you understand the context of an expert, you can understand the expertise. One benefit is to recycle failure into success. Another is the opportunity to know where an expert comes from, by training and mentoring.

Every Xpertweb user has at least one unique ID. If Jim Franklin’s ID is ADCGEFH, then you know that Mary Billing, whose ID is ADCGEFHC has been mentored directly by Franklin–specifically, his 3rd protegé. Every ID reveals who mentored whom, published ratings let you know how good Mary is, as well as all others mentored by Franklin and his mentor as well.

The Digital Reputation
While historically reputations have been somewhat vague and subjective, in the digital world they are likely to become more objective, binary and long-lasting (all the reason to take them seriously). Biologically, time is a built-in eraser, allowing us to forget and move on. In the digital world however, where memory is cheap and caching the norm, our reputations are likely to become more persistent . . . Probably more important, in the digital world, our various reputations which are today disconnected are likely to become more connected, if not by us, then by others.

Which means: We get the best of both worlds. We’ll be able to deal with proven experts without risk, yet not force them to be more than the skilled specialists they are, allowing them to be fully human (i.e., flawed) rather than the perfect employee. Instead of working for their boss, they’ll be working for a customer. And not a consumer in sight.

Might reputation systems spark the productivity renaissance we expected from computers? People holding down a job are lucky to be on task a third of the time. Experts focusing their talents are likely to be productive half the time. That’s a 50% productivity jump for everyone attracted into a reputation-enabled craft.

11:51:59 PM    

Role-Playing Games are big, and the Xpertweb design study is focused on creating an open source economic role-playing game that publishes the scores of the players and also reports the details of each game they play. Like any such game, we expect a community to develop around the software, to the extent it attracts and holds the interest of enthusiastic evangelists.

Unlike the larger Economy it mimics (and can replace, if enough players go online), the Xpertweb RPG provides a coherent, unchanging set of rules for success or failure. This is because, in the capital-E Economy, the big money is won by changing the rules. In Xpertweb, the big money is won by playing the game according to the rules and coaching others to start playing.

Many of the RPGs have a secondary economic aspect, since player attributes and tips can be bought and sold. Xpertweb is designed to be primarily economic, with score keeping added to allow the players’ reputations to precede them in the field of play, which Xpertweb calls an Agora, or Market.

As with many RPGs, Xpertweb players may team up on a common enemy. Most teams will be two players, combining resources to subdue an impersonal problem, not another player or team, sort of like playing against the computer. Usually one of the teammates will be called a buyer, who brings the problem to the attention of the other player, called a seller. Once they team up, it’s a shared problem. After the problem is defeated, both players are scored, but the seller also is paid by the buyer for teaming up on a challenge that was just too much for the buyer alone.

The Role-Playing aspect is important, for each of us plays a role when we go out into the market seeking to sell something of value for more than it costs us. In the Xpertweb RPG, one person may assume several roles, if it’s useful for selling different kinds of services. For instance, a landscaper might cut lawns under one role and design landscapes under another one. Freed from the limitations of a single job at a single company, individuals can find what roles best suit them.

As with any online game, each new role must earn its own reputation from scratch. However, just as you can buy weapons and tips for many games, anyone can team up with a more skilled player to solve a problem for another player.

Where other RPGs award only points to success, Xpertweb players also send each other money, either at the end of each game or periodically, in exchange for reputation tips and data & tech support.

The game interface is bland compared to online games but, because it’s just HTML & PHP, it can easily be modified by the players. If the players need more graphical interest, maybe they can buy artwork with the money they win from playing.

12:52:28 PM