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I got a long and thoughtful message from Dave Rogers which deserves a public answer, with Dave’s permission:

Much as I enjoy your weblog and as many of your thoughts as I’m capable of comprehending, I’m wondering why you think the Obvious Society will be a good thing

I’ve read The Lucifer Principle, though I haven’t read Bloom’s latest book. I think he flogs the meme past all rationality, but I think social organisms (he calls them “superorganisms”) are a legitimate phenomenon that deserve greater study.

It is in that context that I believe the Obvious Society that you outline, and I agree that is likely to be the way the technology will go, is going to be one of the worst things ever to happen to human beings.

I wonder, have you ever lived in a small town? I have. It’s not exactly fun when everyone knows what you do, especially if you do anything that isn’t in strict conformity with the “norm.” Small towns can be oppressive for people who are “different.”

And what about parenting? How do we nurture notions of “trust” and “responsibility” with our children? I was an intrusive parent for my oldest daughter. I often kept the things I learned to myself, I just wanted to make sure I had some idea of what she was up to. But there’s no way I think I could handle knowing everything, and there’s no way she could have grown into the wonderful young lady that she is, if I had.

And what of citizenship? How do we nurture quaint notions like “trust” and “faith” and “honor” among ourselves as citizens? Why have any of those when we can simply rely on our technology to intrude into people’s lives and ensure they’re not doing anything we wouldn’t approve of?

The Obvious Society is the authoritarian’s wet dream. Knowledge is a form of authority, as I’m sure you’re aware. Giving people greater knowledge of what their neighbors and children are up to is giving them a form of authority without any real understanding of the responsibility that must attend that authority.

In superorganisms, or social organisms, people try to use authority to advance in the pecking order, usually at the expense of others. The world you describe is undoubtedly a better one for social organisms, they will be much more efficient at ensuring their constituent members’ efforts and activities are consistent with the aims of the social organism. But I’m very certain that it will be a terrible world for creating healthy individuals with a strong sense of individual identity, and a knowledge of the values that make life worth living.

I’m no luddite, but the world you describe is not one I welcome, nor one I would wish to inhabit. I am afraid we are already too far down along that path, and the rate is accelerating with the likes of Attorney General Ashcroft in control.

Earlier, on 2/25, Dave had written,

…let me point you to this little piece at Escapable Logic [The Obvious Society].

If there is a more frightening vision of the future, I can’t think of what it is.

Britt seems to believe human beings will use all of this particular technology in good ways. I’m not sure he’s ever lived in a small town. What he describes would enable the very worst of human nature to oppress and enforce conformity within the community. Suicide rates would sky-rocket. Hopefully, it will never happen; though I’m sure some fraction of it will to the extent that it will convey an advantage to one group. I can think of a half-dozen Twilight Zone episodes set in Britt’s vision of the future. I sure would hope I was Rod Serling…

Well, to kind of return to the religious theme: I suspect that technology is going to compel us to confront our spiritual problems in a way that nothing else could.

Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe.

David and I seem to agree that these technologies are inevitable and probably imminent. Is there any other information that might bring us closer to agreement? Let’s start with the expectation that Peer Brother will drown out Big Brother in a flood of personal video information that we’ll sort out among ourselves without government intervention. I’ve got my private web space here and David has his. We share what we choose to on our site, but not everything. Our captured video will reside in a similarly controlled repository. We can share whatever we want with whomever we want, when we want. As Personal Flight Recorders (PFRs) proliferate, as David agrees they probably will, our collective record will dwarf the records captured but ghettoized by the competing organizations using the cameras we see today.

The other softener in our disconnect is that none of us has any obligation to do any of this. At parties and locker rooms and home and perhaps church, our PFRs will be off. So we’ll be public when we’re out in public and otherwise I bet we’ll observe the kinds of limitations now accumulating around cell phones and smoking.

The Values Worth Living For

Let’s look at David’s core (I think) concern:

In superorganisms, or social organisms, people try to use authority to advance in the pecking order, usually at the expense of others. The world you describe is undoubtedly a better one for social organisms, they will be much more efficient at ensuring their constituent members’ efforts and activities are consistent with the aims of the social organism. But I’m very certain that it will be a terrible world for creating healthy individuals with a strong sense of individual identity, and a knowledge of the values that make life worth living.

Which are the values that make life worth living? If I had that answer, I might be a lot more decisive. Values seem to vary with the respondent and for each of us over time. John Ashcroft knows he has the values that make life worth living, but David and I don’t agree with him. I don’t know which values of the last two presidents I want to embrace, if any. What I can say with confidence is that there is nothing more human than being certain that one knows the “right” values, and that one’s “knowledge” of their rightness is unwavering. The value we both want to protect is our right to our own choices, discoveries, rituals and mysteries.

But within what framework might our choices be made? With no help from the Obvious Society, we’ve already abandoned a lot of freedoms. Our non-obvious society has done nothing to slow Mr. Ashcroft’s a
bsurd crusade against the real America he so obviously hates. In an Obvious Society, the video record would have laughed that sorry Bible-thumper out of the confirmation hearing. In an Obvious Society, we’d see Dubya arrested for his DUI and snorting coke rather than reporting for Air Guard duty as ordered. In an Obvious Society, youth will probably be a little more restrained. Perhaps it won’t ruin them for life.

David and I may have already lived in such a society. David is a retired Navy Commander and I was briefly in the Air Force. The visibility in an Obvious Society may be a lot like the visibility in the military, especially in combat, when you all live and work and horse around together. Like behavior on base, people in an obvious society are likely to be more formal out in public, but perhaps no more formal than people in the 1950’s.

Confronting our Spirit

I’m certain that the Obvious Society will, as David suggests, “compel us to confront our spiritual problems in a way that nothing else could.”

Now there’s a profundity I wish I’d thought of! What is our spirituality? My shorthand is that it’s our authentic self—the sum of thoughts, feelings and urges which spring from a deeper source than the face we put on for others. It’s the place we go when we give up being someone we’re not. What better outcome could we hope for than confronting our spirit? Perhaps we’ll even discern the distinction between spirituality and religiosity—how quiet and meek is the former and how petty and domineering is the latter.

Will it play out that way? I haven’t a clue, but I think so. I believe that deep reflection concludes that only closely held knowledge is “a form of authority” and then only if it’s owned by the authorities. Truly open, public knowledge is more like yesterday’s news—boring and toothless. To be effective, tyranny must hide reality rather than expose it. It’s likely that the Obvious Society is one where we collectively cancel government’s franchise on secrets and shame.

Further, our shared sense of fair play is more strict than our private ambition, else why would public officials work so hard at spinning their character? Being on stage brings out the best in us, if we can stand it.

The stink of money in politics is caused by the need for politicians to buy media time to present a false persona to the electorate. In an Obvious Society, it’s a waste of money and effort, since we’ll be clear about who each of us really is.

The Death of Privacy?

The question is whether we can stand being exposed to the rest of us while in public. It’s easy to forget that privacy is a recent invention, an artifact of the industrial age. It’s sometimes liberating but it’s not the usual human condition. All people through history and most people today live in full view of their family, clan, tribe, village. We’ll not abandon privacy though, since our living spaces sequester us far more than is possible in history and the third world.

But is the non-private life so bad? If you’ve ever seen third world villagers interact, you’ve noticed how cheerful they seem to be. Is it possible that our attempt to hide ourselves is a source of anguish? Here’s John Perry Barlow on life in Kabale, Uganda:

I also wonder how much of our world I actually wish on these people. They are desperately poor by our standards, but I don’t see any of them starving, and, taken as a lot, they sure seem a whole bunch happier than most of us Northerners.

People we see along the road smile and wave. I see them waving even from the distant fields, genuinely glad to see us. Their little gatherings are often doubled over with laughter at something someone has just said.

Imagine average Americans smiling and waving at a carload of passing Africans and you begin to appreciate how different is the vibe. Do I really want to endow other people with such blessings as we endure? At one point, we stop to take a picture and a boy walks past me, coming up from the fields with hoe over his shoulder.

“Hello,” he said brightly. “How is your life?” “My life is good,” I said, meaning it. “How is your life?” “My life is good, too!” he said, meaning it every bit as earnestly. He had no shoes. He was very dirty. He had probably been working for about 10 hours. Altogether, his family makes maybe 500 bucks in a decent year.

His life is good.

How is your life?

It’s a chilling prospect to be truly public in public, but it may be the best way to build ourselves a more liberal environment than the small towns David has escaped—the places that can paralyze its inhabitants into a lockstep conformity. Why might our world be more liberal? Because every voice will be heard, not just the voices of people who want to control others through politics and the religious wrongs. The current morality is skewed by and for those who have grabbed the lectern. Their values are broadcast by media whose members require access to the lectern, which they purchase with their complicity.

Most of our society has become more open than the little towns we remember, judging by the audience for the values and humor on film and in the video store. This blog tries to be a serious (not solemn) series of essays, but is anyone concerned when I proclaim the occasional holyfuckingshit for anyone to see? Not really.

Further, I’m convinced that small town morality and judgmentalism is as much a function of economics and boosterism as of firmly held mores. As access to online work penetrates those societies, your neighbor’s opinion of you loses its grip on your wallet and frees you to dialogue widely, as we are here. Interestingly, messaging lets you connect with like-minded, perhaps open-minded others a few blocks away, who may outnumber the self-righteous but, like oneself, are invisible.

I suspect there are are so many of us normal, red-blooded, slightly zany folks out here that, like the music collectors laughing at the DMCA, we’ll thumb our collective nose at the pathetically self-righteous minority and go have a beer, surf the web, play with our kids, do some yoga and not take ourselves as seriously as we’re told to.

We’ll learn together, Obviously, that an inquisitive, open-hearted, juicy and spontaneous humanity is the natural human condition, not the arid purgatory of artificial, fundamentalist “values”.

12:49:21 AM    

Mitch is back on the air with news that his son is just about recovered from acute appendicitis. Mitch has been offline since last Wednesday, so I’ve felt apprehensive. He had written that he was thinking a lot about how to be a Dad and therefore a human:

…if we start using this technology the right way, maybe he and other kids will grow up to spend more time with their kids. I remember going to the hospital a couple times around his age and not seeing my father for more than a few minutes at a time, where I slept by my son’s bed (or, rather, didn’t sleep). So, while we take care of this I appreciate your coming by the blog to check if there’s anything new.

The hospital has given me a lot of time to think about how we use technology, why I use it to work more rather than less, and so forth. I believe, looking backward and forward, that many folks have forgotten the emigrant ethos of making a better world for our kids. We dote on them more, but when you look around the hospital it is clear that a lot of what we do is create distractions — from pain, from life. There are Nintendo systems and geegaws and, yesterday, a Mardi Gras party. But what happens when we step out the door, kid in tow? Do we go back to work? Do we stay engaged? Do we work to make it better? I know, we all want our kids to go to college, but that is a sort of maintenance effort these days — like sending a child off to apprentice with the local printer or silversmith 200 years ago.

Everything about the level of connectivity I enjoy tells me there are powerful forces that could substantially improve my kids’ lives if they are put to use to make them participants in, and not just consumers of, the media in which we live.

My kids Brian and Kelly are in their early 30’s. They’re doing fine and living the lives they want (Brian’s a GIS specialist in environmental remediation and Kelly’s a yoga teacher/artist/poet/web designer). But from where I sit, their economic environment seems too iffy. I feel that our generation has let them down, so focused on our own path that we’ve left too many divots in the playing field.

Tonight on West Wing, they’ll replay the episode where Toby and Josh spend the night in a motel in Indiana and meet a dad taking his daughter to a college interview. They run into this dad in the bar because he’s avoiding telling his daughter he doesn’t know how to pay for her college. He and his wife have good jobs and are frugal but can’t do this vital thing for their daughter. They expect to work hard, but can’t it be just a little easier?

Can’t it be just a little easier?

Indeed. Everyone is working harder but most seem to me to be less sure of the trajectory of their lives. It’s clear we’ve mastered the trick of overfeeding ourselves and keeping a pretty good roof over our heads, but the level of effort to match our expectations seems so over-the-top that it clearly cannot be sustained.

Most of us lead lives that can’t scale.

Perhaps part of the problem is that our cultural flight plan has vectored us into the Bermuda Triangle. The 50’s offered unlimited promise; the 60’s, passion and enfranchisement; the 70’s, consolidation and a recovery; the 80’s a technical and financial renaissance; the 90’s an eruption of promise, wealth and unlimited horizons. Each decade seemed worth investing more time and effort to achieve what our immigrant forebears had wished for us.

But the market bust and our reaction to the 19 fanatics who got lucky have caused us to slip into a spiral of pessimism and doubt. As usual, these distortions have brought out opportunists who leap at the chance to turn public difficulty to private advantage. Meanwhile, most of the people who do the heavy lifting in our culture are wondering how their lives became so daunting.

Everything’s a Nail to Me

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so naturally I want to give our livelihoods a good Xpertweb whack. In looking at Andre Durand’s suggestion that individuals hijack the Liberty Alliance protocol, Mitch points out today that Xpertweb is one way to enable a strip-mall solution rather than nothing-but-net ideas. It’s true, and I hadn’t thought of it that way.

When I was a real estate developer in Denver, I built the Kipling Place strip mall. One of our tenants was Rocco’s Deli, owned by a former Johns Manville accountant from New Jersey. Rocco’s is the kind of place that would benefit from Xpertweb, and I think the accountant in Rocco would love the data stream that Xpertweb generates automatically. And from the customer’s point of view, if you’re looking for a Ruben sandwich, do you wanna go to the Southwest Plaza food court or to Rocco’s, whose Ruben is rated 97.4% with customer comments that make your mouth water? Fuggedaboutit!

Everyone wants to re-calibrate their future. That’s the same everyone who does all the work and the everyone who has all the money. There is no technical barrier to building a public economic utility for everyone, a place where everyone’s kids can find work and mentorship and build a reputation, and everyone can find certain satisfaction from vendors vetted by everyone else.

12:27:55 AM    

As I said last time, I didn’t “get” Xpertweb until I read the World of Ends Declaration. In making Xpertweb “WoE-compliant”, as Doc put it, I mimicked WoE’s point 8—based on Doc’s NEA construct:

8. The three virtues of the Xpertweb agreement:

    a. No one owns it

You can’t own an agreement. It lives at the intersection of your promises.

    b. Everyone can use it

Like the web, you’ll need some code and a little training, but that’s what Mentors are for.

    c. Anyone can improve it

Don’t like the rev 1.0 PHP business forms? Roll your own in Fortran. Only the schema matters.

The reason the schema is the big deal is that it does for economics what all the Internet’s equipment does for electronic transmissions—enforce an agreement on how to play nice with each other. That’s a bracing thought: unlike anyone else, Xpertweb people are subject to an overarching economic agreement enforced by forms and scripts conforming to their agreement.

As you’ve learned by now, the larger economy has no rules and few ethics. Like the wild west, people do whatever they can get away with—pretty much anything.

Let’s review what World of Ends teaches us.

Tale of WoE

Doc and the Doctor have reduced the Internet to its essence, which is how we can finally get it that the Internet is only an agreement. The parties to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol have agreed to distill our words and our longings into ASCII chunks of a certain size and format, and route them according to certain rules. You also abide by your agreement to do so every time you log on to the Internet.

What’s that you say? You don’t remember making that agreement? Neither do I. To save us all a lot of trouble, every Internet black box and switch and chip and router and software program conforms to the agreement called the Internet. If they didn’t, it wouldn’t. If a data packet doesn’t conform to the IP agreement, it’s not an IP packet, so it’s just ignored.

This is a big deal. We’ve come to a point in our culture that we can reduce our obligations to code so we don’t have to worry about breaking the rules.

Economic Rules For the Best of Us

You probably know better than I that a schema is a rule book for XML file structure and XML is a way to organize information so it’s readable by machines and people. By putting all Xpertweb data out in the open on its user’s sites, the Xpertweb protocols let all its users know about all its users. When people use the Xpertweb tools, they also use the schema’s rules, which are based on the standard Xpertweb Mentor Agreement. It’s a work in progress, but you get the idea.

And just as a packet isn’t an IP packet unless it conforms to the agreement, neither is a transaction an Xpertweb transaction unless its records conform to the schema and are present on the sites of both the seller and the buyer.

When we get all these tools hammered out, there’ll be two kinds of economy. The huge one we use now, with no stated rules, and the tiny micreconomy we’re designing here, with explicit rules for those who choose to abide by them, and a way to add others rapidly.

Then we’ll find out how many of us prefer to play by the rules.

 

10:27:58 PM    

…is how Doc Searls & Doctor Weinberger described the Internet effect when they launched worldofends.com this morning. The 10 points they have put together is like the Internet they describe—so obvious you say “Well, duh”. There is no surer sign of brilliance than describing what’s obvious but which has not yet been said. The actual phrase is:

Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.

WoE be to the managers who don’t hear their message. Our little design study is focused on a fertilizer to help flowers bloom wherever seeds find a crack in the pavement. I’m going to be crass here and leap onto the giant shoulders of WoE to get at what Xpertweb is about. Surprisingly, I didn’t really “get” Xpertweb until this morning.

1. Xpertweb isn’t complicated

You sell me something. I look it over and rate your work. Then I pay you. We both keep track of what happened so others can learn from our exchange. Think of Xpertweb as medium of exchange.

2. Xpertweb isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement

The agreement is that each of us will record particular facts about our exchanges and place identical records on our own web sites. When both our sites agree on the facts, they’re considered valid facts. If not, they’re suspect. The facts are in plain site, no one (nor Google) needs permission to see the record of any exchange.

3. Xpertweb is stupid

There’s no one behind the Xpertweb curtain and no curtain, because the Internet lets you have agreements without enforcers. There’s no central server, no Xpertweb Inc., no central greedpoint. When two parties identically publish their exchange according to the Xpertweb agreement, that’s an Xpertweb transaction. If they don’t, it’s not.

4. Adding value to Xpertweb would lower its value

You could build a company around the Xpertweb protocols using a central server and accounting and it would be great for a while. But eventually the wheels would fall off the wagon, as described in the HumanTech parable.

5. All of Xpertweb’s value grows along its edges

Xpertweb is as hollow as the Internet. If you can’t find an ISP, Xpertweb can’t help you since there is no Xpertweb. It’s just an agreement. Out on the edge of the Xpertweb agreement are its current users, each of whom has agreed to set up others with the tools they’ll need to understand and conform to the Xpertweb agreement. When they do, the edge moves out a bit.

6. Money moves to the suburbs

…because there’s no downtown for it to get stuck in. VISA is as hollow a company as there is, and it moves more money than any “real” company. If they re-coded their software as a web application and let each of their member banks host mirrored records of transactions, it would be even more hollow, and no one would have to pay processing fees. That’s how Xpertweb works. (OK, will work)

7. The end of capitalism? Nah, capitalizing on the ends

Our current model, managerial capitalism, depends on complex, proprietary accounting to maintain the franchise that management has acquired without asking. Every public transaction eliminates an otherwise private one. In a world of $400 CPUs, broadband and specialized skills, the ends are where all the talent is and where the work gets done (most Cisco products are never touched by a Cisco employee). Those ends are about to be equipped with the one thing that managerial capitalism has that no one else does—a way to keep track of who does what for whom and what they get as a result.

Accounting systems can now be inter-networked—distributed rather than concentrated. Squint at smokestack industry and all you see is vaporstacks.

8. The three virtues of the Xpertweb agreement:

    a. No one owns it

You can’t own an agreement. It lives at the intersection of your promises.

    b. Everyone can use it

Like the web, you’ll need some code and a little training, but that’s what Mentors are for.

    c. Anyone can improve it

Don’t like the rev 1.0 PHP business forms? Roll your own in Fortran. Only the schema matters.

9. If Xpertweb is so simple, why is it so hard to explain?

Everything’s difficult until you “get it.” Then it gets simple. What’s easier than finding an ATM on a website and driving over there for cash? Explain that to your great grandfather.

10. Some accounting systems we can abandon already

Companies are talent brokers. Their accounting/disbursement systems are the only lock-in keeping companies between customers and talent. Employees go to work for accounting systems, not management, but management doesn’t see it that way. When we all share the records, we’ll do things for each other today with confidence we’ll get paid tomorrow. And that’s the definition of an accounting/disbursement system.

 

 

9:54:52 AM    

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

3rd party Blog Summary [620KB PDF]

8:31:17 AM    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If antiwar protesters succeed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please, prove me wrong.

Different Voices, Identical Threats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2:40:29 PM    

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

Richard Bennett posts inaccurately and insultingly about me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our long national nightmare is over
At long last:

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

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

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

Look at me! I’m Outrageous!

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

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

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

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

2:36:09 PM    

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

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

Mitch writes:

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

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

Conversations are Markets

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

1. Markets are conversations.

I’d suggest the inverse:

1. Conversations are Markets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grab Your Power or Grab Your Ankles

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

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

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

11:27:11 PM    

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

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

3:45:32 PM