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…is nothing like under surveillance. Joi Ito indicates his support for the new noun, urging us to attend a conference on a major disruptor heading our way:
Sousveillance is hipspeak for inverse surveillance, which is still too hip to comprehend easily. The workshop’s site explains:
Inverse surveillance is the imminent device-driven tsunami whereby we commoners take back our commons. We will be using our always-on videophones to capture the passing scene. The result will be that our blanket, overlapping and corroborating public record captured by our high-res private devices will overwhelm the spotty, lo-res record of incidents captured by so-called public surveillance devices. Toward the Obvious RepublicThe rise of private video capture first captured my attention almost a decade ago. I call the device a PFR, for Personal Flight Recorder. Oddly enough, it ties in to where the Open Republic concept is sure to lead us, once open source tools open the Republic. The PFR is such an important development that it was the basis of an arrogant little series Doc convinced me to put together 13 months ago. What I was seeing everywhere was transparency unfolding where opaqueness has always been the rule.
Prophecy 1 · Personal Flight Recorder (PFR)This one’s especially dramatic because no one’s talking about it, but it gets the transparency Oscar since the PFR is inevitable, imminent, obvious, and requires no one’s permission. I’m amazed that we’re not addressing this change directly because, when you know the world’s about to change, it’s a good time to re-assess your deck chair arrangement project. If you can spell S-O-N-Y, you know what’s around the corner:
That inevitable sequence means that ours is fated to be a pervasively shared culture. Every action by the police will be captured (by their and others’ PFRs) and subject to public review. Any transgression, real or imagined, will be shared and, probably, published. The most noteworthy exceptions to “conventional” mores will receive the most attention. This will have a chilling effect on a wide range of undesirable activities:
Prophecy 3 • Personal GeoPositioning & Notification We’ll be capturing the video stream we witness while knowing where we are, where going, how to get there and when. The third leg of this empowerment stool is the logistical equivalent of blogging. Where we are and what we’re seeing will be selectively available, in real time, to anyone we care to share it with. Thereby, our social involvements will escape physical restraints, and moblogging rises to a third dimension. That is the promise of the PFR equipped with personal geopositioning. Prophecy 4 • The Obvious Society All the technical clues point to a transparent society that collectively knows as much about its participants as did the citizens of a 19th century village. The personal means for that transparency is the PFR with geopositioning. The supporting infrastructure will be the wireless mesh of repeating stations that we the people will build without realizing that we were supposed to wait until the telecoms got their act together. The icing on the transparency cake will be the broad adoption of Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags. These microscopic, essentially free passive transponders will be based on unique IPv6 identifiers numerous enough to tag every item on earth. The tech is being developed for retailers but its significant effect will be that eve In an Obvious Society, each of us will have one or more devices capturing the video stream moving past it and aware of the description and history of the material objects it is near. This is a world in which it is absurd to consider stealing a bike or snatching a purse. As noted previously, all this mutual observation and knowledge makes current security monitoring a small and irrelevant part of the collective knowledge of society. Peer Brother makes Big Brother irrelevant and kind of pitiful. But those technologies describe a transparent society. What’s an Obvious Society? It’s one where it’s obvious to we the participants how to indicate our needs and receive rewards for our energy, though there are billions of learning cycles between now and then. We’ve all observed how most web sites suck but that a precious few totally nail it. When I stumble on that rare web site that “gets it”, I’m amazed and relieved that there are any at all. Slowly, the way to make choices obvious will prevail. The relentless march toward Open Source software will hasten obviousness in all our choices, because the open source process nibbles away at poor code until what’s left is what we have agreed is correct. It’s stunning that the PFR is inevitable, imminent and destined to become ubiquitous. Extended by geo-positioning, the wireless mesh and RFID awareness, the PFR will expose what it sees happening around it and what physical items it senses nearby, perhaps including people. It forces us to become what we would have others believe us to be. The Obviousness Revelation
We live in the Age of Spin, where companies and governments publish what we want to hear and then do whatever they intend to anyway. Implicitly, they recognize right action, they just can’t live with it. When we can directly see what happens within view and earshot of each of us, actions merge with how the actors want to appear to others, and each of us gain some of the insight Emerson enjoyed. As our motives become obvious, so do we. But there’s another, equally important form of obviousness—an individual’s proper course of action. People yearn for obviousness. It’s why we sacrifice our freedoms and personal choice to the yoke of self-serving patriarchs and religious fundamentalism. It frees us from having to think for ourselves enough to make nuanced choices.
When obviousness is finally embedded into the socioeconomic interface, we can each become masters of nuance rather than slaves of mystery. Isn’t the aim of User Interface Design to allow us to master options more broad and subtle than previously manageable? The enabling technologies of the Obvious Society, while intriguing, are irrelevant. What’s critical is that it promises to free us from the smoke we blow up each others’ asses and, with a little bit of luck, make “isms” obsolete. The Open, Obvious RepublicWe don’t have to work on the Obvious Republic, Sony and Nokia and all the rest will take care of that. We just have to work on the Open Republic, but we can’t talk about where it’s going without understanding how it will be looking at itself. All the time. 7:37:50 PM |
Category: Uncategorized
Perspective Break
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I’ll delay the vision thing RE Open Republic, Phase II to reflect on Ellen Dana Nagler’s excellent post, Letting the Terrorists Win. She says that we let the terrorists win every time we factor their threat into our planning, and she catalogues the moments in her life when she altered her behavior because of terrorist activity: London in the early 70s, Paris in the summer of ’86, winter, 1991 and January, 2002. And Tuesday. Ellen’s is a candid, revealing and courageous essay. She describes her mother’s way of looking at the world:
And the pressures she felt in London during the IRA bombings in the early 70s:
The List in My HeadEllen is teaching us by example, admitting the habits of perception she’s not proud of but which might inform our own behaviors and perhaps free us from hatred and terror in our hearts, which is truly terrible, while confronting terror objectively, which is terrific. What we’re really reacting to, she’s saying, is the list in our heads. This is a recurrent theme for me, having placed myself in so many precarious circumstances, first as a clueless, grandstanding young man and later as a habit useful in combat. Here’s a repeat of something I published last August: About that Face SlapWhat if our 9/11 tragedy wasn’t? I hate to sound harsh about our losses, but has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes into buildings might not have been the logistical masterstroke of the century? I’m suggesting that there was an operational hole in our hijacking prevention system and that some passionate Arabs got lucky and managed to kill some of us. I’ve got about 2500 hours in a Boeing 707, and I’m sure that a couple hundred hours in Microsoft Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch off a 767 autopilot, turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that they did some actual flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant. There’s almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs killed a little over .001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week. Instead of panicking, we could have started locking cockpit doors, continued to keep guns off airplanes, and we’d have plugged that loophole. Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course, there’s a war on terror, but we’re the foot soldiers in that war, and we should acknowledge that some of us are going to get hurt. It’s a war, fer chrissake! I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and as most of us know, the airport precautions are more charade than anything else. We all understand that we’re not significantly safer than we were before. Feeling safer is not the same as being safer. What we might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness were part of our national makeup, would be to say,
That kind of thinking arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives flying into large mountains avoiding small bullets. I learned that lesson when I saw a guy do that very thing in Viet Nam, so clanked was he about the idea of someone shooting at him that he ignored the reality that airplanes and mountains are a bad combo. Yeah, yeah, I know, we can’t dictate market forces. But if OPEC can, we can. Of course we’d only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American people and if national security were more important to us than oil company profits. Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil Industry benefits from high prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob Baer points out in Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited by Salon,“the real war we should be fighting is not in Baghdad.” Small Minds, not Small GovernmentMaybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about small government, but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they were fixated on what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures, they’re unlikely to get more votes than last time. The opportunity the Bin Laden family handed the Bush family was to paralyze our culture so ordinary electoral logic would not apply.
These cynical points have been made by smarter people than I. I’m just riffing on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance of cynicism. The political cynicism we’re seeing is related to the cynicism of public companies and TV evangelists and the media. Our cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal values most of us hold, regardless of our politics. Instead, we’re gripped by the opportunistic economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as long as it increases stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues. Buzzing the MachineThis recurrent theme reminds me of an enjoyable lunch conversation I had on this topic with Jeff Jarvis at Etech in early February. The bright San Diego sun was smiling on our grateful faces and I lobbied for this notion that we somehow need to separate one’s personal fate from one’s actions, that the battle plan must be consistent and smart, not hostage to a few casualties. I believe our nation’s battle plan is to live according to the Bill of Rights, even if it costs some of us our lives once in a while. Today Jeff writes,
This is where Jeff and I diverge in how to wage war well. Rage hampers your ability to function in combat, and we are in combat. One prevails by respecting the enemy, not in seeing him as inhuman. Further, I’m convinced that no one is soulless, though many on both sides are deluded by fundamentalist leaders and happy to kill in their personal quest for meaning. Just as our vets have been to Viet Nam and met and hugged and wept with their former enemy, someday Iraqis and Yanks will sit down in Baghdad over sweet tea and grieve for the lost days of their youth, seeking to maim each other. Though we’re not at war with with ourselves, we must be antagonistic to our own errors. NFL teams review the game video and fighter pilots the gunsight film and grade each others’ landings because they’ve got past the idea that discovery is blame and that criticism is personal. The military has a lot at stake so it’s pretty comfortable with the idea that perfection is the absence of mistakes: their only hope is to get the mistakes out in the open and learn from them. If George Bush were a warrior, he’d get this, and he’d never have allowed Rumsfeld to fire General Shinseki for his foreknowledge that it would take more troops and money to occupy Iraq than the White House wanted to consider. Kicking the DogThe Iraqi war was a catharsis, not a strategy, the equivalent of kicking the dog after a bad day at the office. Does my analogy belittle the agony of all those families? Think about it rationally: our problem was in witnessing all that agony all at once, so dramatically, and dwelling on it for months. It built a dangerous list in our heads. Every life is precious but most end badly, with tubes and machines and grieving relatives around us. Multiply the affect surrounding those individual deaths times 3,000 and it’s probably the same as 9/11. Living fully and free is more important than a specious guarantee of domestic tranquility. The list of blessings in an open heart trumps the list of threats in a timid head. Our spirit is destined to celebrate the universal dignity of life and keep the hope that tomorrow, everywhere, can be a renaissance of understanding. 12:14:58 PM |
Vets Needed
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Thanks to Doc for helping Ethan Zuckerman and me advertise for Internet vets to vet the accumulating activism tools for our nascent Open Republic effort. Since all but my 15 readers have missed this groundswell, the back story is that a small bunch of us are looking for volunteers to serve on one of three blue ribbon advisory panels (your reward will be a blue ribbon and a certificate suitable for framing).
The PitchIf you’re interested in so serving, please comment below or send me an email specifying which board you wish to serve on. Naturally, each board will hire experts to do the grunt work, so your work is to be a grizzled veteran whom the foundation will honor and publicize for your wisdom and insight.
Don’t be shy! Step right up if you feel qualified and energized. For those who know that Ethan or I will be contacting you, well, this would be the time to make a great show of grace and noblesse oblige and step right up. You have been warned… 6:05:35 PM |
The Money got Their Attention
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The Dean campaign captured the world’s imagination because it raised so much money so quickly from so many people. We pay attention to money because it indicates that people are willing to back up their sentiments with more than words. It’s a crude measure of social worth, but it’s the metric that seems to matter the most to most of us. When millions of dollars are anted up by a self-organizing, grassroots movement, it even gets the attention of the big money guys, since their organizations work so hard for the money, and suddenly an unknown is making it look easy. As Jim Moore stressed so long ago, the few hundred million dollars driving a Presidential campaign is chump change compared to the trillions of dollars of budgetary power it so cynically buys. And the beat goes on over at johnkerry.com, where the fundraising pace is making believers of the old boys, at about $50K per hour. A Social SourceFourge with MoneyEthan Zuckerman and I spoke today about the Open Republic (OR) concept, noting how similar it is to his concept called Social SourceForge. Coincidentally, I’ve often described OR as a political SourceForge, with money to spend on good ideas. I’m beginning to see this space as tools for governance and how to use them, and here too, money can be the secret sauce. This is precisely Ethan’s vision and we want to be pushing this inevitability together, so it happens in 2004 rather than 2 or 4 years later. The best expression of the [working-titled] Open Republic would be a charitable foundation with a broad purpose:
Despite that grand vision, the operation of OR should be a based on a down-to-earth, practical charter:
The Electoral Cycle: the Krebs Cycle of DemocracyIf we’re so idealistic, why the focus on political tools rather than governance, which is what we really need to emphasize? About a month ago, it occurred to me that the individual campaign is where the action is:
Mini-Summit 2.0Last July, I hosted a little mini-summit here on East 43rd Street, where Zephyr Teachout and Zack Rosen met and we exercised our collective image-a-nation. Ethan suggested I do it again, but this time apply it to our shared vision of how the openRepublic concept might work. (I had no idea what prompted his suggestion. Only after we spoke did I come across Doc’s Vision aerie post about his visits to our pad where we mostly laugh at the passing scene but occasionally do serious work, like figuring out how to extend our WiFi service from the window of my study to Tudor City Park.) If we’re going to have a vision, there’s no sense wasting time on a small one. I’ll get into the mid and long term visions later, but politics is the most demanding fast-cycle environment you can imagine, and this is the year for enabling upstart politicians. So let’s imagine our near-term ideal client and what her needs might be. Misty Smith Goes to Washingtonthe problem Imagine you’re Misty Smith’s brother-in-law. Misty’s a popular and effective mayor of a mid-size midwestern city who’s being encouraged to run for congress against an entrenched incumbent. the problem is that Misty’s party has atrophied over the incumbent’s eight terms in office. You’re a well-connected attorney and Misty’s asked you to look into a congressional race for her and make a recommendation. It’s an assignment you wish would go away, but Misty’s as persuasive as you are loyal. Where do you start? some hope With a little research, you discover that there’s a non-partisan, apolitical openRepublic Foundation that hosts a comprehensive and comprehensible guide to the online organizing of campaigns. Further, you learn that this foundation has an expert advisory board that keeps its recommendations fresh and actually pays people to maintain a rich online guide to the various offerings. You’re surprised to learn that most of the tools are free to use at will. It seems too good to be true. revolution 2.0 You’re a lawyer, so you’re convinced that anything that’s too good to be true, is. But you dig into the details and discover that some people actually believe that free and effective activist software is the key to the next phase of the great American experiment in democracy. They believe that, even as printing presses and post roads enabled the first American revolution, so might Internet communications leverage the power of people to combine their ideals so that their millions of voices and small contributions aggregate into a force that drowns out the obsolescing grip of broadcast politics on the voting public. campaign in a box What’s interesting about the effort is that most of the online tools, whether developed by volunteers or contracted for, are free for you to download and use. They configure themselves into a suite of resources that some of the contributing programmers call CIAB–Cam money for nothing You have no understanding of open source software, since this is your first exposure to this strange concept, but you discover that these projects attract thousands of contributors around the world, seeing every bug and every chance for improvement. You’re floored to discover that most web sites, and even the Tivo in your den, are based on software developed for free by people who care more about their contributions to the common wealth than about their day jobs. You know that traditional capitalism says that this is impossible but it gives you a slim hope that the Pilgrims might have been right and that maybe the commons is not doomed to be a tragedy. This insight is reinforced by your discovery that Yahoo! and Google have leveraged free software into prodigious market capitalizations. In the case of the openRepublic Foundation, you learn that their blue ribbon advisory panel is backed up by two other panels of working volunteers coordinated by a small staff. free upgrades The first of these is the Innovations Board. They take a hard look at the current resources and describe projects that seem obvious: tools that need improvement and new tools to fill in the gaps that become obvious when you look at any set of separate tools that serve an end-to-end function, just as a word processor depends on a separate dictionary and printer driver. The openRepublic Foundation requests proposals for extending the suite of tools and even accepts grant applications from developers proposing solutions that the implementation board hasn’t thought of. quality control The other advisory panel is the Acceptance Group. They look at the tools built for the foundation and accept or reject them as fast as humanly possible. This is the core of the foundation’s growth initiative, because it includes the hard work of improving the user experience of neophytes like yourself. renaissance of hope After this cascade of revelations, you feel feel like a 16-year-old with a new driver’s license. Is it possible that someone as clearly unqualified as Misty – 8 years of experience revitalizing her city, beloved by her constituents, articulate, educated and wise – could actually have a chance against her clearly superior opponent who has mastered pork barrel programs, influence and wealth for a decade and a half? You hardly dare to hope but you see there is a way. The User ExperienceYou’re a lawyer, not a geek, so you’ve never heard of “the user experience” but you’ve suffered more of them than you wanted. You learn that the openRepublic Foundation is designed around you and Misty because every campaign, whether for an issue or a candidate, is driven by people with an incomplete set of skills and experience. The openRepublic Foundation is wrapping their innovations in a package that lets you understand what to do and when, with the least possible confusion and angst. You also learn that the foundation is focused on another user experience, which is the one where Misty’s client–a voter–visits the campaign web site and discovers a chance to be heard, to learn, to meet like-minded others and to grow the hope that there may be a way to deliver at least one congressional district from the desiccate cynicism of politics as usual. You’re up ’til 3:30 discovering what’s almost automatic that had never before been imagined. You go to bed energized by what’s possible rather than depressed by what’s inevitable. You even remember why you went to law school, so many disillusionments ago. You can’t wait to accept Misty’s invitation to run her campaign. 8:12:55 AM |
Perfection
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The Republic is dying of Perfection. Martha Stewart is going to jail because she wanted her investments to go perfectly. Mel Gibson’s vision of the perfect passion comforts those who believe that their lives can trace a perfect mythic arc if they only believe it strongly enough. Worst of all, the government is in the grips of ideologues behaving like a motorcycle gang because they imagine a perfect world of compliant citizen droids driving SUVs to 12-hour work days while their children subdue infidels all over the globe. A perpetual campaign against the messiness of diversity is central to that perfect world. Most people are not perfectionists. Many spent 2003 hacking code because they thought it might transform politics, and they were more right than wrong. They are the open source entrepreneurs of the governance tools space. Like all entrepreneurs, they are artists who create because they’re incapable of not creating. They will spin out a hundred disappointments for every blockbuster they produce and, like Linux for the desktop, the user experience will be frustrating to most users and especially for the neophytes who run campaigns. Like many entrepreneurs, they have no clue how they’ll turn their zeal into money. AccidentalismMost greatness is unintentional. Adam Osbourne once wrote that the microcomputer revolution grew out of the closing of Nasa’s Apollo project. Those talented young engineers just knew there was some way they could keep doing what they liked to do, so they took the notion of an integrated circuit and ran with it. They had no grand scheme but they knew they could make a difference. Did the Steves know they’d change computing forever? Did Henry Ford know he was inventing the assembly line? The list of accidental heroes is as long as the Great Books collection. Those we most admire from the comfort of perspective started with no clue about its ending. What they have that perfectionists lack is a hunch and no other way of behaving than creatively. These hunter gatherers take what they find and fashion new futures out of raw materials others ignore. DARPA created the perfect indestructible network and accidentally connected bloggers in Iran to readers in Iowa. NeoCon excesses have shown us how fragile the American experiment really is and some of us have a hunch how to fix it but not a detailed plan. We need to support the tinkerers who are cobbling together imperfect solutions to governance problems we didn’t know we had when Bush was just an improbable candidate. My suggestion from last time is what Ethan Zuckerman calls a Social SourceForge, providing a stamp of approval and great documentation for the least imperfect campaign software out there. I want to add money to the toolkit. A Role for a Perfectionist PatronUnfortunately, we’re all perfectionists when it comes to software usability. Campaign tools are built hastily, so they most need the enhancements that patient perfectionism adds to functioning code. If you made a project of cataloguing and describing the best of the imperfect campaign tools, you’d think of the most obvious ways to improve them. If you were diligent, your descriptions would include the best possible illustrations of how to facilitate solutions which would otherwise frustrate those who most need them: things like interactive online guides and step-by-step implementation charts for novices, suitable for hanging on the wall at a storefront headquarters. Your insights would inspire you to suggest improvements and your commitment and means would cause you to pay people to make the necessary improvements. You’d contribute those enhancements to the ecosystem and then go after the next most glaring omission. Much of what you’d sponsor would be to improve the user experience, since programmers are usually better at the drive train and wiring than the fit & finish. You’d also think of a thousand ways to extend the state of the art, which you’d cajole volunteers to do if you could, and pay people to do if you had to. It would be the perfect synthesis of baling wire design and patient perfectionism. Uncharacteristically for a perfectionist, you’d do this work fast, because it would all be worth it to add a single rational voice to government in 2004. I’ve been blissfully off the grid in Mexico, reminding myself why the industrial world wants to subdue the rest of the place so people of color can bring you exotic drinks with little umbrellas. 9:38:11 AM |
The Subsequent Vision
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I honestly believe that the Howard Dean campaign, during its ascendence, was the most important project on the planet. I can’t help thinking in those terms, since there are only a few days in our four score and ten years, so we ought to spend them on the most consequential projects we’re allowed to pursue. That’s why I spent a week each month at the campaign, and most of the rest of my days on the campaign. When I watched the CNN special on the Dean campaign Sunday evening, I was watching my friends, at a place that still seems to me like somewhere I could just drive to tomorrow, as I did so many times. But my harsh brain tells me what my heart doesn’t want to admit, that there’s no one to welcome me and ask me to stay up late to do something for them, there at 60 Farrell St., So. Burlington, VT. But Onward!We need a framework for developing the next generation of organizing tools. It seems to me that, if we release everything into the public domain, this development work will qualify as an activity under the requirements of the 501(c)3 statute that governs charitable foundations. I know that Zack Rosen and Joe Trippi are separately considering forming such a foundation. However, these things can take time to form and staff up and have an operating organization that donors feel comfortable supporting. It would be far better to find an existing organization that can take this on immediately. If so, this is what they ought to be thinking about: The Open Republic (“OR”) BackgroundThe Dean campaign galvanized the world by demonstrating that a community can be built around a campaign for change, and that such a community is more interested in giving money and time than politicians thought was possible. With the acquiescence of Governor Dean, the many software developers and projects he inspired are gathering their forces and going to work for other candidates and movements. Project StructureI propose a simple structure that is capable of exemplary results due to the nature of political software writers in particular and of open source contributors in general. Over the last year, political software writers have demonstrated their willingness to put other activities aside in order to make their contributions. Their idealism would have seemed unlikely if it hadn’t been demonstrated so broadly. They will respond to the need for a particular feature rapidly and will cooperate spontaneously with strangers to meet a deadline. It’s well known that open source code contributors are motivated by the attention and credit they receive from the open source community. Relying on those characteristics, it should be possible for OR to galvanize the political software space by praising great work, promoting its use, and by paying professionals to add to the body of political organizing tools. A Three-Stage ProcessTherefore, I propose a three-stage process as the operating mode for OR:
This structure will be most manageable if it is simple, so I suggest that each activity should be conducted by a small committee of volunteer experts, each committee meeting monthly. They may generate their own recommendations or they may hire contractors to do all or part of their work. By this means, OR will maintain a current list of the best resources to quickly launch a campaign, whether it’s for a President, a Representative or for a general purpose such as campaign reform or health care. Jeff Jarvis suggested yesterday that Howard Stern is organizing a movement and would be a candidate for the kinds of tools OR would be promoting. OR would maintain a current list of proposed improvements to its current recommendations, with RFPs seeking responses and grants outstanding, pending completion and acceptance. OR would constantly review and accept or reject submittals in response to its contracting work. All tools funded by OR would be released into the public domain under a best practices license to be determined. OR would encourage developers of political software to adopt such a license. The Hard PartI’ve made such a proposal to a candidate organization which was enthusiastically received until the issue of leadership came up. Surprisingly, the opportunity to have a positive effect on the American Experiment is not in itself enough to manifest the perfect leader for such an effort. It had never occurred to me that I might be that person. I spoke with Doc, David Weinberger and John McCarthy about this, and they expressed their support by saying that of course I’m the right guy. Presumably, they’re easier on new hires than I ever was. David was kind enough to suggest that, if I didn’t see the fit, I needed to take a course on self-esteem. This led to the obvious banter about pots and kettles. So I’d like to open the floor for comments, wondering if the OR approach seems practical and fundable, and if it’s an urgent enough project that I might lead the effort until the perfect candidate comes along. 8:32:31 PM |
Off the Air
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Circumstance spares you, gentle reader, from my lengthy rants this week. I’m finishing a chapter for an upcoming O’Reilly book on emerging democracy, and doing some actual work to assist the separate but friendly efforts at DeanForAmerica and ChangeForAmerica to ensure that the spark ignited last year is not extinguished by the water pail which the advantaged class keeps handy for populist emergencies. Meanwhile, here’s a quote from the cover story of the current issue of American Conservative magazine:
I’ll get back to overloading your RSS feed next week. Of course my hiatus may be evidence that I have nothing to say when Doc is out of the country, feeding me material… 8:51:11 AM |
A Lever Long Enough to Suppress the World
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Archimedes famously said that if you gave him a long enough lever, he could lift the world. Well, it works both ways. Using the long lever arm of mass media, a tiny core of politically powerful people controls the rest of the population’s choices, economics and future. Systems design is the study of how to balance inputs into and outputs from a dynamic process so that it optimally serves the needs of the highest possible number of users of the process. From a systems design standpoint, American politics is a disaster:
Last time, I suggested that there’s only a tiny sliver of the population zealous enough to be active in politics, and that it even takes a kind of zealotry to get out and vote. I don’t have the figures, but do any states have more than 1,000 full time activists? Sure, there are a lot of political hobbyists who will canvass occasionally or show up at a state convention and perform as directed, but by activists I mean those who live for or off of politics and do their party’s bidding whenever asked. My working hypothesis is that there are no more than 50,000 active political foot soldiers at any one time, less than.02% of Americans. Even if you think there are double or triple the number, the fraction is still vanishingly small. In turn, those few activists are manipulated by a tiny political elite which is probably no more than .001% of the population (2,862 politicians, lobbyists, journalists and business leaders sounds about right for the political power elite in our enlightened Republic, don’t you agree?). Clearly, Americans aren’t chatting each other up to get out the vote, but rather responding to the unfolding media messages in the same passive way they might discuss episodes of Friends around the water cooler. And, as Dave Winer often reminds us, it’s even worse than it appears. This tiny group of power brokers drives the agenda for a nation which the rest of the world depends upon for its very existence, in a protection-racket kind of way. This is a system that no conscientious systems architect would sign off on, but which most Americans meekly accept as how things have to be. Paul Boutin points out in an enlightened Slate article today that attracting new voters is the secret sauce for any winning candidate, and that’s what the Dean campaign did well, though no one has the statistics to prove it. Dean’s coterie of new activists were an energizing force that establishment Democrats cynically shut down as fast as they could:
It’s this mechanism that the Dean campaign didn’t get quite right in time to empower its true believers to evangelize ever larger circles of new true believers. Next time, I’ll suggest (and demonstrate) that the meatspace evangelism failure may have been as much a web design fault as a political process breakdown. 12:24:18 PM |
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Escapable Logic 