Category: Uncategorized

As the most belligerent country in the world, we routinely withhold our most belligerent options–we’re simply not going to nuke Iraq, for example (though a friend says that Cheney supports the “Nuke it, Pave it, Pump it” doctrine).

Imagine the United States choosing to be the strongest nation rather than just the most belligerent. Among nations as among people, strength is measured more by character than by mere force. This is not news, though each generation seems to have to learn it anew.

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

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

A strong America would be confident enough to open itself to its citizens and the world, by purposely forgoing the methods and superstitions typical of less confident nations. A stronger America would export prosperity and information, not just movies and threats.

Although I’ve never been a big fan of “branding,” imagine the benefits if a few experts burnished the tarnished image of USA™. The obvious starting place is to ratify good old American values, by treating the Constitution seriously. Then we might review the films and books that have most formed the American consciousness, and apply those re-discovered values to our government’s actions.

We could start with leading value-shapers like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. What would the Duke do with the pencil-pushing noncombatants who have hijacked the GOP and the government? Can’t you see Duke cleaning house at Abu Ghraib? Then he’d climb in his HumVee, go over and grab Bremer by the lapels and lay down the law: “We’re not gonna listen to that snot-nosed Yalie any more. Ya got that, Pilgrim?”

If Jimmy Stewart went to Washington again, he might hire David Weinberger as his speech writer. David has posted a rousing speech that he’d like to hear from a leader, if only we could find him one. He concludes with:

But we can take back our America. And it’s not just because we’re going to vote in November. That’s just the beginning. We can only take back our America because in our hearts we never lost it. We the people are still brave, free, just and full of life. Together, we will invent our new America, because that’s what we do. The always new America. We will lift up the world by joining with it and leading it as exactly who we are as Americans – Brave, free, just, and in love with life.

That, my friends, is our America. And we will take it back, because it is ours.

It’s Transparent, See?

Transparency: a manager’s nightmare. With transparency comes accountability and its twin scourge, responsibility. No manager wants to be subject to the kind of scrutiny that s/he imposes on the people at the next level down.

Leaders, however, welcome visibility because a leader’s genius is exposing the group’s core values and expressing its beliefs. Thus it is that our CEO President and his lame Board of Directors, managers all, want to clamp down on scrutiny of the operations of a country owned by We The People who have already decided to fire these guys in six months (mark my words, we’re facing a landslide here*).

Nick Johantgen (blog pending) called yesterday to suggest that soldiers’ cameras are the most powerful weapon threatening the American military. Adam Curry quoted a Chinese Proverb over the weekend: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.”

This is the effect that digital photography is having on our military. For ten years I’ve been imagining the impending revolution of the Personal Flight Recorder, archiving reality as it streams past us and saving it for personal use as we wish. With our PFRs, we’ll triangulate our collective environment so pervasively that fixed security videocams will be like pinhole cameras by comparison.

Someday soon, every cellular plan will include unlimited video capture through the wireless pickup in your ball cap or eyeglass frame. Police departments and public employees will use the devices to record their side of the story. Employees may call it intrusive until they find that they want to carry their own PFR. Sure, it will first be based on fear of getting mugged or some other unlikely event, but it will finally be about recording the interesting moments and transactions in your day.

The military’s obsession with Command & Control will ensure that all military activities will be similarly archived. Technology will achieve what Command & Control has never been able to: conform actions to public policy and ultimately, to our shared public sentiment about how Americans are supposed to behave.

This single evolution in form factor will cause mankind to re-engage the community that was lost when we invented privacy as an artifact of the Industrial Age. Every creature on earth lives in public except modern man, and the PFR will take us home again. When transparency is re-established in our society, common sense will once again be common.

• Last week, dining in a very fancy restaurant, I overheard a conversation at the next table. A modest-looking but well-dressed woman was telling a friend what it was like for her to be grilled by Congress for a Federal judgeship. She revealed her Republican allegiance, but of Bush she said, “I think he’s essentially a good man, but I’m not sure about his advisors. I would like to see him win.” I’d like to see him win is not the language of constituents on their way to victory.
• My father-in-law is a family farmer in Mt. Pleasant Iowa. He speaks for the working farmer as he tells you that corporate farming is killing the family farm and the spirit of people who love that way of life. He’s hated the Iraq adventure from the get-go and can’t stand the rich kid in the White House.
• A friend of mine, a self-made millionaire who knows far more than most college grads, has always been a Republican. He says he can’t stand to watch Bush on TV. Further, his corporate clients, at a personal level, feel the same way. He’s talked to country folk in the south and guys on Wall Street. The personal sentiment is the same. Only the Democrats think Bush is a force.

12:06:10 PM    

William Broyles writes in the New York Times that The U.S. should reinstate the draft:

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People’s Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it’s not worth your family fighting it, then it’s not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration’s handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

Broyles, who writes from Wyoming, brings more than a theoretical opinion to the discussion:

The longest love affair of my life began with a shotgun marriage. It was the height of the Vietnam War and my student deferment had run out. Desperate not to endanger myself or to interrupt my personal plans, I wanted to avoid military service altogether. I didn’t have the resourcefulness of Bill Clinton, so I couldn’t figure out how to dodge the draft. I tried to escape into the National Guard, where I would be guaranteed not to be sent to war, but I lacked the connections of George W. Bush, so I couldn’t slip ahead of the long waiting list. My attitude was the same as Dick Cheney’s: I was special, I had “other priorities.” Let other people do it.

When my draft notice came in 1968, I was relieved in a way. Although I had deep doubts about the war, I had become troubled about how I had angled to avoid military service. My classmates from high school were in the war; my classmates from college were not — exactly the dynamic that exists today. But instead of reporting for service in the Army, on a whim I joined the Marine Corps, the last place on earth I thought I belonged.

So Broyles tried out the Cheney Defense, whereby a rational person arranges serial draft deferments until after draft age, but Broyles didn’t push it as hard as our chickenhawk-in-chief. Surely it’s a coincidence that Cheney is also from Wyoming. Yet another Wyomingite, John Perry Barlow, has written eloquently of the dangerous perceptions of bomber pilots who, dealing death from above, cannot appreciate its horror. What was simply a metaphor for telecomic opportunism in 1995 is specific now:

“One of the liabilities of conducting a military operation that is so heavily based on “death from above” is that, even with our surgical new targeting abilities, we are dangerously abstracted from the consequences below.

My story was simpler. On graduation from college in the spring of 1965, my interest in flying trumped my interest in grad school, so I just volunteered for Air Force pilot training. It was the only way I saw to avoid the more threatening option of enduring Law School and all that it meant. From a combat standpoint, perhaps I was starting my affection for binary data: pilots usually live or die. Seldom are they simply injured.

Though I developed no love affair with the Air Force, I do treasure the experiences I was forced to undergo and master. Like Broyles, I was never injured significantly, suffered no post-traumatic stress nor even the survivor guilt he dealt with. I certainly never endured the stress of jungle life he did.

Like him, I served with and put my life in the hands of enlisted men who were not college types, for whom I likewise developed a deep respect. It also gave me a bully pulpit from which to ridicule people who want to send other people’s children into harm’s way.

Embracing the Unscheduled Hardship

In a restaurant on September 15, 2001, a quartet of twenty-somethings at the next table were discussing what everyone was. One of the young men seemed to take the terrorism personally: “It’s not fair! This is the part of my life when I’m supposed to enjoy life! What happens next?”

That’s a strong contrast with Joseph Campbell’s observation that the first half of an ideal life should be spent humbly: mastering the received wisdom and disciplines of one’s seniors, while the second half should be spent questioning everything and improving on conventional wisdom. By that standard, “advanced” societies have it exactly reversed. When young we are allowed to do what we naturally do: question everything and resist discipline when we have no judgment to form biases, and when older, equally irresponsibly, we fall into habits of rigid thinking and uncritical conservatism, our dendrites hardening with the arteries.

Broyles is suggesting what I wholeheartedly embrace: A national draft.

The only solution is to bring back the draft. Not since the 19th century has America fought a war that lasted longer than a week with an all-volunteer army; we can’t do it now. It is simply not built for a protracted major conflict. The arguments against the draft — that a voluntary army is of higher quality, that the elites will still find a way to evade service — are bogus. In World War II we used a draft army to fight the Germans and Japanese — two of the most powerful military machines in history — and we won. The problems in the military toward the end of Vietnam were not caused by the draft; they were the result of young Americans being sent to fight and die in a war that had become a disaster.

One of the few good legacies of Vietnam is that after years of abuses we finally learned how to run the draft fairly. A strictly impartial lottery, with no deferments, can ensure that the draft intake matches military needs. Chance, not connections or clever manipulation, would determine who serves.

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People’s Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it’s not worth your family fighting it, then it’s not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration’s handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

I like a broader engagement: All citizens should be required to do four years of service that requires them to master a useful discipline and teach it to others. The reasoning is not to provide cannon fodder for Pax Americana, but rather to leaven the military with a broad cross section of American stereotypes.

Obviously, only a lucky few of us would be drafted into the military, but that must not excuse any young person from doing something useful and understanding why. I suggest that young people be required to maintain a public journal describing what good they think should be done in the world, and how they are working on that cause. Applying Dr. Weinberger’s rule, every such blogger would be required to become famous for 15 people, or be found derelict in their duty.

We Few, We Lucky Few

William Broyle’s most telling memory of combat is of being driven so far past his limits that he learned that self-imposed limits are illusory:

To my profound surprise, the Marines did a far greater service to me [than his service to his country]. In three years I learned more about standards, commitment and yes, life, than I did in six years of university. I also learned that I had had no idea of my own limits: when I was exhausted after humping up and down jungle mountains in 100-degree heat with a 75-pound pack, terrified out of my mind, wanting only to quit, convinced I couldn’t take another step, I found that in fact I could keep going for miles. And my life was put in the hands of young men I would otherwise never have met, by and large high-school dropouts, who turned out to be among the finest people I have ever known.

Military aviators are taxed mentally and emotionally more than physically (though 12 hours of takeoffs and landings on steaming, postage stamp strips surrounded by triple-canopy jungle and anti-aircraft fire will soak your flight suit, hopefully with sweat). My personal boot camp had been Colorado Outward Bound School, so I also found that physical limits are merely mental, at least for a 20-year-old.

There’s almost a genetic need among young men (the only gender for which I can generalize) to experience overwhelming physical struggle with death as a palpable option. If our society were wise enough to impose universal usefulness on our youth, the ones undergoing military service would get the most from the experience.

As we used to say in 1968, it’s a shitty war, but it’s the only one we’ve got. With that as a young man’s spontaneous response to warfare, it makes a lot of sense to include the unwilling in this stupid enterprise.

Many Eyes Squash All Bugs

The problem with an all-volunteer military is that you attract only those who want to go to war and those for whom the military is the best job opportunity. The point of a military draft is not to staff the military with unwilling citizens, the point is to staff the country’s leadership with people who have served in the military. While it’s true that war is too important to be left to the Generals, it’s even more true that war is too important to be left to those who, like the current war gamers, admire it as a means to subdue inferior regimes and to refresh the military stockpiles.

Let’s draft the future leaders of the land into the military so their cynicism of the blunt instrument of war can leaven the enthusiasms of the ones who haven’t yet been disillusioned. Then their experienced eyes can debug policy to weed out the coding error called warfare.

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

11:18:08 AM    

Outdoor Screwing starts today!
10:50:28 PM    

Micah Sifry has a great insight over at Iraq War Reader: Bloggers are editors, not journalists. We bloggers are not reporting what we see, we’re editing what others tell us.

In my humble opinion, bloggers who write about current events and culture (as opposed to people who are mainly focused on their inner world or their personal spheres) aren’t getting attention and adding value to the democratic discourse so much because they’re behaving like journalists, it’s because they’re behaving like editors. Not that many bloggers are generating fresh reporting on events, as journalists or reporters covering a news story would do. (Not that I’m against bloggers being reporters, or bloggers correcting bad reporting by unearthing contradictory information.) But what many good bloggers are doing is filtering the news for us, the way a good editor does.

I was talking this over with my editor at John Wiley & Sons, Eric Nelson, and I think he hit the nail on the head. He writes, “Most blogs sort through the vast array of media, telling readers what’s important to know today. Like a editorial page or opinion magazine editor, they provide short ‘house’ opinions on major topics, but they mostly point the reader in the direction of several other experts, noting that these articles, wire reports, or opinion pieces are the current must-reads–and more importantly, trustworthy.”

In a word, what editors bring to the table is their sensibility. Of course, not all of the articles or news stories they select for our attention are picked because they are trustworthy. Sometimes, quite the opposite. But a good editor then tells us why that’s the case.

Micah drives to the hole and dunks it! This is precisely the insight that’s been missing from the media vs. bloggers dialogue. Micah goes on to imply that our new collective cultural editing is the global equivalent of the blind committee examining the elephant.

…the alchemy of the blogosphere–where we each read or hear about a few things and blog them, and some of us read several other bloggers and reinforce their choices with our own echoes or dissents–produces a pretty good zeitgeist watch. (Insert shameless plug for Technorati here.)

Blogging, then, is the equivalent of a police sketch artist. Even if each of us is handicapped and specialized, the sketch artist makes our collective effort holistic and insightful. (Extending the metaphor to demonstrate the Sifry brothers’ plot to dominate blogspace, Technorati is the artist’s indispensable index.)

…We’re all sniffing at the zeitgeist and trying to figure out which way things are headed. And partially because it’s become so easy to do, and because the people we had entrusted to do this for us haven’t been doing much of a job of this on their own, we’re doing it ourselves.

The Metaphor, Please

Open source mavens and groupies will quickly see the tight parallel between bloggers’ collective discernment with the open source development process, where “many eyes make all bugs shallow”:

The other space that bloggers are filling is in the department of truth-telling, or at least truth-claiming. Back to my wise man Eric. He says:

“Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the “truth” of a story. [I’d add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity, they simply report the he-said, she-said on how much some new initiative will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer. Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth a question no one else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, ‘If you believe me, then you can believe this.’ “

We bloggers are more than zeitgeist gazers. I believe we’re engaged in a collective design process by which human values are beginning to supersede corporate valuelessness, correcting an unintended outcome whereby ink-by-the-barrel was affordable only to the big pubs. The values–and outrage–that inform our posts are those of ethical individuals, reacting to the tapestry of inert sensibilities woven by Big Media.

Carbon-based persons hold strong beliefs, which they feel are self-evident. This is not true of charter-based persons–corporations–which, in their ceaselessly failing Turing Test, cannot bring themselves to speak in a human voice expressing human values.

What are we designing? I think it’s a society with a memory. Big media’s not much interested in the historical arc describing how we got here. Part of it may be the low level of cultural awareness of most reporters and certainly of the talking heads. Amateur writers though, working literally for the love of editing out the errors so obvious to them, instantiate thoughts and point to evidence that, once documented, is harder to ignore than yesterday’s newsprint recycled as today’s fish wrap.

Consideration of prior art was once a requirement for serious commentary, where each work presuming to be consequential felt considered the thread that preceded it. Arbitrary, ungrounded declarations were dismissed as a form of daydreaming, not as serious work. This requirement lives on in science and, happily, in computer programming and the welcome tyranny of standards-based engineering. Prior art has been abandoned by marketers huckstering old wine in new bottles and describing the trivial as startling. When news became marketing, those tricks were adopted. When marketing took over politics, appearances trumped statecraft.

Can We Go Home Again?

If we’re lucky, attribution-based blogging will lead our cultural dialogue back to the reflective candor that was natural when everyone in the clan or village witnessed the same truths and were constrained by their shared history.

3:04:40 PM    

Dave Winer points today to a stimulating USA Today article sure to gladden Jeff Jarvis‘ heart, about Internet adoption and blogs in Iraq:

Iraqis enjoy new freedom of expression on Web journals
By César G. Soriano, USA TODAY
BAGHDAD — A year ago, few Iraqis had ever had access to a computer, much less used it to communicate to the outside world.

Now, Internet cafes seemingly dot every block in Baghdad, and new ones open often. That has led to a new phenomenon here: bloggers.

“We suffered for years under Saddam Hussein, not being able to speak out,” says Omar Fadhil, 24, a dentist. “Now, you can make your voice heard around the world.”

Hence, the blog. Short for “web log,” a blog is a diary or journal posted on the Internet for all the world to read. E-mails can be sent to the blog, so it’s also interactive.

The article naturally describes the famous Salam Pax blog, now available in book form, (who’da thought?) and a photo album. It also cites two educated brothers, a dentist and a pediatrician, Omar and Ali Fadhil. They are pro-American and hugely grateful for the American intervention.

“We get threatening e-mails from Palestinians and Arab-Americans who write, ‘You are traitors. If I were in Iraq, I would shoot you,’ ” Ali says. Other e-mails accuse the brothers of being CIA agents who are writing from Washington, “as if the CIA didn’t have anything better to do than run a blog,” he says.

“My ideas are very shocking to people,” Ali says. “I tell people I am a friend of America, a friend of Israel. Some of my colleagues at the hospital think I am an infidel. It’s impossible to change a man’s mind, but you can only make him consider other alternatives.”

Digital Divide

The two brothers jointly maintain their blog. In America, they’d earn about $30,000, monthly between them but USA Today reports that the average Iraqi doctor earns $150 per month. The typical price for connectivity at Baghdad’s proliferating Internet cafés is $1 per hour. That means some people are spending the equivalent of $1,000 per hour to update their blog. Doesn’t the blogosphere have an award for that level of dedication?

Like many bloggers, the Fadhil brothers’ site solicits donations to help make ends meet. They’ve received more than $1,000, most of it from Americans. The money is wired to Kuwait, where friends pick it up. The Fadhils’ site gets about 3,300 visitors and a few dozen e-mails a day.

Maintaining the blog “is really a 24-hour job,” Omar says. “When I’m not blogging, I’m thinking about what to blog. I’m watching the news, discussing topics. It’s become part of our life.”

There are about 30 Iraqi bloggers in Baghdad, plus a few other blogs written by Iraqis abroad. Not all share the Fadhil brothers’ optimism. “You have your Fox TV. I am offering a counter response,” says Faisa Jarrar, whose blog is critical of the U.S. occupation. Her mixed Sunni-Shiite family began in December with a joint blog, afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com. Now, each of Jarrar’s three sons has his own blog. Raed, 26, Jarrar’s eldest, is studying in Jordan. Khalid, 21, and Majid, 17, are in Baghdad.

This is crazy. Broadband costs the US military nothing. They should be spreading GPRS or WiFi or WiMax everywhere, and handing out routers with the food rations. Hell, Linksys and Cisco could get a huge write-off by donating equipment for the Marines to distribute. Isn’t this called Yankee ingenuity? If the Iraqi wireless scene were data-friendly and cell modems cheap and plentiful, then the Iraqis might have a better use for the phones than for detonating IEDs.

Why kill people to pacify them when you can get them to sit down and engage each other constructively? Even if the Mayor of Salt Lake City is right, it’s worth it: he doesn’t support universal broadband because it causes people to get fat while they download music. At least they’re not shooting at us.

As Doc says, the three most important attributes of the Internet are infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.

Sister Cities

At the International session at Bloggercon II on Saturday, I wondered why bloggers can’t take the initiative by acting globally and locally? Why not revive the sister city program, but conduct it at Internet speed, mediated by bloggers rather than chambers of commerce?

This would be a pure grassroots effort, with groups of bloggers in US cities and villages “adopting” similar-sized cities in Iraq and then donating equipment and connectivity so that Iraqis can get on the Internet and blog sell stuff on eBay and do some phone banking and all the rest. Since Iraqi is essentially a U.S. colony, why not issue them U.S. charge cards? The US should insure card issuers against losses–as good a use of some of those 87 billion dollars as cluster bombs.

Naturally, we’d have to get somebody to translate some blog software into Arabic, as Jeff Jarvis is Jonesing for. Joi? Loïc? Ethan? Ferris? Anyone? (Shameless plug for Open Republic: This is precisely the kind of well-defined, small project that the Open Republic project would whip out its checkbook for. There’s nothing like a paying client to grab a freelancer’s attention!)

Bloggers donated a lot of the $40,000,000 collected by Howard Dean’s campaign. We might be equally motivated to address problems directly rather than supporting someone else in the hope that they will find a solution.

Just a thought.

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

10:20:19 PM    comment [commentCounter (282)]

Dave Winer points out that Arianna Huffington, the high-affect, Greek-born, conservative-turned-realist, LA-based, political author and force of nature, has a crush on blogs and the people who write them:

A Mash Note to the Blogosphere

I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve got a big-time crush. I’m talking weak-in-the-knees infatuation. But it’s not Brad or Orlando or Colin or any of the cinematic hunks du jour who have set my heart aflutter. No, it’s Atrios and Kos and Josh Micah Marshall and Kausfiles and Kevin Drum and Wonkette. Bloggers all. Yes, when it comes to the blogosphere, I’m a regular cyberslut. And I don’t care who knows it. Bring on the fines, Michael Powell!

Although I’ve only recently stuck my toe in the fast-moving blogstream, I’ve been a fan — and an advocate — ever since bloggers took the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story, ran with it, and helped turn the smug Senate majority leader into the penitent former Senate majority leader, a bit of bloody political chum floating in a tank of hungry sharks. Simply put, blogs are the greatest breakthrough in popular journalism since Tom Paine broke onto the scene. (emphasis added)

What Arianna loves about blogs is what societies loved about the press back when it spoke with a human voice. I’ve previously opined that our republic was the product of small printing presses, post roads, coffee shops and leisure time: bandwidth-powered conversations. The post roads, built between America’s major cities in the early 1700’s, were a disruptive bandwidth upgrade. It suddenly made more sense to converse with other colonists than to receive orders from Londoners, just as it now makes more sense to converse with each other in “print” than to passively absorb the media’s titillation du jour:

And then, in the New World, came a bandwidth revolution. Each of the colonies had started as settlements, divided from each other by an impassable barrier of wilderness. Their communications architecture was hub and spoke, a hierarchical command economy driven by old world masters who were the only source of the manufactured goods they needed to hack out a living from the forest. With time came expansion and roads and inter-colony trade and local foundries and mills and a slow realization that a very nice living could be had without reference to the masters now so far away. Physical distance was a metaphor for the attenuation of hierarchical control, and a clue that this newly flat society was giving more than it was getting.

The metaphors with our age are stunning and inspire us to pick up that old thread the Founders started and Emerson continued and Thoreau and Whitman and Clemens and Steinbeck and Kerouac and all the rest. We’ve been so busy lately that we’ve quit talking about ways while focused on means. But that hasn’t dimmed our collective sense of how we’re meant to live. To paraphrase what the rustic said about art, we may not know freedom, but we know what we like.

Somehow the Dean campaign dropped a little of this latent genetic sensibility into the nutrient pool called the Internet. Contrasted to the bushies’ assault on freedom as we like it and a radical foray into preemptive war, we seem to sense an unprecedented disturbance in our collective force, as if a sister blue-green planet had been obliterated far, far away.

(The other day I suggested to Ethan Zuckerman that it’s perfect that he looks like Ben Franklin. We agreed that the American revolution was the work of techies like Franklin and Tom Jefferson who invented ways to do things better, and that the small scale printing press was the blogware of the Age of Enlightenment.)

And this is precisely why Arianna has stars in her eyes – the blogosphere’s ability to consider an issue substantively and persistently:

The vast majority of mainstream journalists head in the direction the assignment desk points them. This often means just following a candidate around, or sitting in the White House press room, and then rehashing the day’s schedule for their readers or viewers. Bloggers are armed with a far more effective piece of access than a White House press credential: passion.

When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and refuse to let go. They’re the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to get them off a story is to cut off their heads (and even then you’ll need to pry their jaws open). They almost all work alone, but, ironically, it’s their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share their work freely, feed off one another’s work, argue with each other, and add to the story dialectically.

And because blogs are ongoing and daily, indeed sometimes hourly, bloggers will often start with a small story, or a piece of one — a contradictory quote, an unearthed document, a detail that doesn’t add up — that the big outlets would deem too minor. But it’s only minor until, well, it’s not. Big media can’t see the forest for the trees. Until it’s assembled for them by the bloggers.

Our blogalogue resonates with the founding brothers’ dialogue through our shared emphasis:

Hold the great ideas in your head; ignore fads.

These guys had all mastered the great books (well, through volume 36, Adam Smith). Their classical education was based on the notion of the classics, that some ideas are more important than others – that educated people have been conducting a great conversation for three millennia and we’re obligated to attend to them and hold fast that which is good. That you’re not educated until you learn the core body of thought and discourse that has stood the test of time.

Arianna was steeped in this body of work at Cambridge University. She bemoans the fact that the media doesn’t cover the important stories in a way that treats them as important:

Reporters for the big media outlets are obsessed with novelty
, always moving all-too-quickly on to the next big score or the next hot get.

That’s when it dawned on me: The problem isn’t that the stories I care about aren’t being covered; it’s that they aren’t being covered in the obsessive way that breaks through the din of our 500-channel universe. Because those 500 channels don’t mean we get 500 times the examination and investigation of worthy news stories. It means we get the same narrow conventional-wisdom wrap-ups repeated 500 times. As in “Dean is angry.”

It’s enough to make a girl swoon when legions of passionate writers come on line, almost overnight, to do the heavy lifting that the lightweight press refuses to:

All of which has made the blogosphere such a vital news source in our country — and has made me besotted with blogs. It’s a crush that I’m betting will quickly progress to going steady.

I only have one question: Does the blogosphere have an ID bracelet? I sure hope so.

Good News

Well, Arianna, a sizable fraction of the blogosphere thinks you’re a hottie and we’re ready to take this relationship to the next level. Your ID bracelet is being engraved as I write this. If you come to BloggerCon a week from Saturday, I’ll ask Dave Winer to present it to you. After all, he’s the father of the form you adore.

1:06:24 PM    

Open Republic helps activists grow their community, their support, their contributions and their political power. This is the entry point for the tech-averse political novice and a backroom operations guide for the tech-savvy political pro: Dean done right.

I believe some sage (Regis McKenna?) said:

Draft the press release before you design the product

The reason is familiar to any salesperson. They get deep into a presentation and they’re stopped cold by the dreaded objection #3a – the one that slows down most sales and kills half of them. If the engineers had only designed objection 3a out of the product, life would be good.

By drafting the press release, even 12 to 24 months before product launch, you’ll be forced to think about the product’s benefits rather than its features, and you’ll design a better product. You’ll think about benefits because you’re trying to engage editors and end users who don’t care about anything but what’s in it for them. You’ll answer why your darling is worth the brain damage of owning it.

End users never care about features – the engineers’ beloved blinkenlights – they care about the core utility of the thing. Most of our VCRs are blinking 12:00 because we bought it to play rentals, not to schedule recordings, and we have other clocks that keep working when the power goes out. Most people still don’t watch DVDs because every time they try to buy a player, the sales guy starts talking about 3:2 pulldown and their eyes glaze over. He thinks he’s selling DVD players, but he’s really delivering brochures.

Governance is about who gets to decide where the public’s money goes. A republic is a government where the peer-to-peer bandwidth is too limited to support a true democracy. A democracy is a government where any citizen who chooses to speak up has an equal voice with the other, equally vocal citizens. We are at an exquisite balance point between the presumption of insufficient bandwidth and wide open, wild west democracy.

Small-r republicans, whatever their party, get this instinctively. The easiest way for those in power to stay in power is to ensure that peer-to-peer bandwidth remains limited.

But middle class American households own most of the society’s money, the votes and now, the broadband connections. It’s a democratic bonfire waiting for the right match.

Phase II of the Open Republic concept won’t grow out of some foundation’s grand scheme for how politics morphs into governance, but rather because of an inevitable outbreak of citizen-provided governance, starting at the local level and bubbling up to the federal and global scales. It starts as we start providing the data governments lack and the political power [polis, L., the people] to speak to our governments directly, requiring governments to be responsive to us.

Politicians fret about such openness while government employees often welcome it. Doc’s recent reminder about this reflects my personal experience:

People get the best government they provide

Politics as Unusual is my latest SuitWatch from Linux Journal. It includes some mind-opening thoughts from my local friend Patrick Gregston, who knows local politics far better than I do. A sample:

Government isn’t the problem. People need to bring solutions to government. Government is dying for answers. Bring some and you’ll get somewhere.

I don’t have experience with the government stonewalling me at all. I experience interest and cooperation at every level, as long as I bring solutions and not only problems.

A lot of helpless people want government to solve their problems or to carry their spear on one issue or another. That reflects an ignorance of how the whole ecosystem actually works. If you’re constructive, you can participate in that ecosystem.

This seemed consistent with what I’ve learned from Phil Windley, too.

Last Friday, Doc quoted Gregston again:

Patrick Gregston’s maxim about the differences between business and government: Business is interested in outcome, and government is interested in output.

Phil Windley and I discussed local government responsiveness on Tuesday and agreed there’s a lot of service provided by people happy to be of service. It’s all about building and fixing the streets.

Creating Infrastructure

Like Patrick Gregston, I don’t have experience with the government stonewalling me at all, and I’ve spent a lot of time working with governments. Before I became a tech junkie, I was a Denver-area real estate developer. I’ve formed three metropolitan districts, closed two municipal tax-exempt fundings, annexed 1600 acres to a 90 acre town and made a lot of money changing zoning, installing utilities and building streets. I even patented a solar home because we couldn’t get natural gas service for a subdivision. You can get a lot done by filling out government forms, but it’s a lot like writing code.

One of my projects involved 120 acres on the Denver-Boulder turnpike, but without access. All it took to increase the value of our land 20-fold was to get four layers of bureaucracy, including the Federal Highway commission, to authorize us to build the interchange by adding an assessment to our land and other interested parcels. Add 15 years of brain damage and bam! Overnight success:

The difference between building a fence in your back yard and building an interchange is only a matter of scale: the interchange involves more permits, more layers of government, more zeroes and more financing.

No one at any level of government wants to prevent citizens from creating infrastructure. But you must be willing to help them work within the regulations. That means a lot of paperwork, patience and empathy. As Patrick Gregston says, they’re interested in output, which is a kind of throughput: Citizens fill out paperwork declaring what they want, and government processes it. Too bad businesses aren’t as responsive.

Self Full-Funding Prophecies

If you and your neighbors want to pave your country lane and it’s not in the county budget, you can get together, fill out some forms, and agree to higher property taxes in order to get your paving. I’m sure some cities now do that on the web and within a few Internet years government sites will support self-forming social networks to support infrastructure.

A few cycles later, the web of obligations and funding will be palpably depicted and managed on line by the citizens. We will make mutual commitments and government entitlements by the same logic: are dust abatement and fewer front end alignments worth the tax increase? That’s an economic decision, not an ideological one.

When that happens, government becomes a service we purchase like everything else. As clients of our governments, we the customers people will demand that our government web application become responsive and user-friendly. The way we’ve always wanted government to be.

Politics IS Governance

This is the interesting part. Historically, political campaigns have melted away on election night. What will be the relationship of the new political tools to the governing style of the victors? Political campaigns have learned to operate web sites to seek our active membership, our policy preferences, our voluntary contributions, our activism and MeetingUp.

Contrarily, governments would rather be left alone. But what happens to a campaign’s web presence when the campaign succeeds? Does it disappear? Or should we expect the online community to be active after the candidate takes office?

Doh! I’d never thought about this before. The web sites of dead campaigns live on! The DeanforAmerica DemocracyforAmerica web site and blog is now committed to electing Kerry and lives on; not surprising. But the Clark and Edwards blogs are still active, because
their community won’t let them die.

There’s no way a successful campaign will be able to shut down its community of winners.

And that’s the obvious destiny of an Open Republic initiative. It starts by paying attention to politics and helping political campaigns to use the new emerging activism tools. But these tools have an unintended consequence: They instantiate a campaign, giving it a life of its own.

Voters who have built a candidate with open source tools will be interested in open source tools that build a government.

6:30:54 PM