Category: Uncategorized

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

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

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

BeamPost Front Panel

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

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

From the Mountain Express News just 3 weeks ago:

Jan 29, 2003 / vol 9 no 25

The Internet unplugged

Will Asheville go wireless?
by Martin L. Johnson

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

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

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

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

1:43:11 PM    

          I once was lost, but now I’m found

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:10:01 AM    

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

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

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

6:33:04 PM    

Mitch points to Joi Ito’s draft of an essay on Japan’s deer-in-the-headlights economy and culture:

It’s great stuff and, I think, a presaging of a debate that will come to pass in the United States if we don’t reinvigorate our own system and introduce many more voices into the debate.

You see, as old corporations fight to survive in the U.S. economy, they do stupid things like invest in the election of presidents that increase the gap between rich and poor , support proprietary communications over public communications , and launch imperial campaigns to shore up the economy here at home. Pretty soon, you end up with the situation in Japan, where executives travel with entourages and  bully advocates of change while an entrenched Liberal Democratic Party does nothing but study change in order to squelch it .

All this happens in the name of investor returns, which do spur innovation. Old companies, however, are caught in the jaws of the innovator’s dilemma, sooner or later you are the target of innovation and face obsolescence. This isn’t about party or ideology, just the plain facts of our history. And these things always come down to a struggle between the old and new; it seems to me that when these battles happen in an active free marketplace of ideas, people are a lot better off than when they take place over bloodied barricades. Business people should recognize they need to lead this change rather than fight it , if they want to remain true to the roots of American success.

Given the global tide of deflation we’re looking at with mixed feelings right now, I would not be surprised to see a wave of 1848-style revolutions–not necessarily successful, but that do have an impact on the public discourse–around the world in the 2010s.

Tom Jefferson would be delighted:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

But I wonder about the nature of revolution in societies in which the protocols of privilege are so tightly woven into the tapestry of everyone’s livelihood. In the agrarian economies of 1776, the 1790’s and 1848, the revolutionaries were not employees, but farmers and merchants whose livelihood had been extorted from them and for whom revolution was their last resort. Modern societies employ those who probably should rebel but whose lives are bleak only in contrast to what they might be. They’re like the staff of a managed care hospital who think they’re in charge even though they are the inmates of the economic system.

In our world, the might-be patriots can’t see the difference between themselves and the tyrants. It truly is a meritocracy, so, at least in theory, any of us or our children qualify for admission into the Tyrants’ Club and that’s our fondest hope. It might be more like asking French revolutionaries to stop speaking French than to challenge the aristocrats.

Nothing but Net

The Internet really does change everything. What Marx called the means of production are, in this over-capitalized deflationary age, semi-public utilities—whoever needs the products of those means can have them for a song. It doesn’t take a lot of prescience to see that most business activity is moving onto the Internet. Whatever is left “out there” in 2010 will hardly be worth counting. Our farm-to-market roads and commercial arteries will overwhelmingly be net-based rather than physical or logistical.

When I was a commercial real estate developer, I learned that the best way to make a lot of money was to get approval for an intersection or a “curb cut” to serve previously inaccessible land. In the world Mitch and Joi are discussing, access will be via the net, not the Highway Department.

Highway departments, post-innovative companies and legislatures are such natural enemies of change and what is quaintly called “ethics” that they cannot nor will they ever lead change rather than fight it. As long as they can hope to intermediate between those with something to sell and those with money to spend, they will resist the change which might un-constrict our collective air supply.

But clink! the greatest unintended consequence in history has given the power of access approval to the engineers of the Internet, which wouldn’t be so bad for the established order if it weren’t for Searls’ NEA Law of the Internet:

Nobody Owns It, Everybody Can Use It; Anybody can Improve It.

The Internet is a watershed for infrastructure which, not so coincidentally, is one of Doc’s favorite topics.

Aristocracy has always been based on economics, typically through control of scarce resources and the allocation of them which, it turns out, is the very definition of economics. Remember the Troll? You know, the one who lived under the bridge and demanded payment to let you pass? Every person and business seeks a unique, unfair, troll-like competitive advantage. Those who’ve attained advantage hold on for dear life. That’s what’s going on now.

But what if there are multiple bridges over the creek? Plus helicopters, hovercraft, stilts, porters, etc.? What if the people over there deliver? What if the attractions on the other side of the creek are no better than the new ones built on this side? What if half the attractions are digital and most of them are in your iPod or Tivo? That’s the world of abundant capital and its offspring, deflation.

Deflation has always been a race among falling prices, falling incomes and paralyzed management. As my favorite economist, Tom Robbins, put it:

“During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’ It is akin to a starving woman with a sweet tooth lamenting that she can’t bake a cake because she doesn’t have any ounces. She has butter, flour, eggs, mi
lk, and sugar, she just doesn’t have any ounces, any pinches, any pints.”
                       —Skinny Legs and All

Robbins is describing trolls at work. Imagine a distribution system that routes around trolls. That would be us, re-designing the access rules.

We’re the anybody who can re-engineer the curb cuts. We can do anything we want and trade with anybody we want and, collectively, prevail upon the public utilities to produce more widgets or scooters or running shoes, since the marginal cost of production is, effectively, zero. Sure, management is currently frozen into unresponsiveness, but their public, productive utilities will not disappear when the rules are changed.

The Internet’s Neutron Econobomb will turn out the trolls but leave the infrastructure intact.

And it’ll be as relatively easy as shaking up the British Parliament with a fax server.

12:17:55 AM    

It’s reported that the following appeared on an RAF pilot training exam in the late 1950s:

“You’re flying at an altitude of 13,000 feet, with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth as your only passenger. Your canopy detaches from the aircraft and Her Majesty is forced out of the aircraft into the slipstream. What is the proper course of action?”

Answers ranged from diving the aircraft to catch the Queen to personally skydiving with an extra parachute to rescue her.

The correct answer:

“Adjust trim tab to compensate for loss of weight of passenger.”

12:23:54 AM    

Glenn Reynolds:

MOURN AND MOVE ON
       
       It was terrible news.
       
       But I felt almost immediately that this wouldn’t be another Challenger in terms of its mass emotional impact. There are a lot of reasons for this. The first is that we’ve already had our Challenger and most people now feel that we overreacted, taking too long to start flying again, and worrying more than we should about absolute safety. The second is that, post 9/11 and with a war looming, we’re a bit tougher about tragedies. We should fix the problem and get on with things, with a minimum of tear-jerking.

Maybe we’re all soldiers now—it can happen pretty fast.

The Right Stuff Way

Two years out of college, I started losing buddies to enemy fire and to military aviation itself, where small errors compound fast. Interestingly, none of us walked around in the kind of dramatic funk you’d think from watching TV. Instead, we became Buddhists. Oh, none of us knew we were Buddhists, even though we were avoiding Asian bullets and mountains. What we did is focus on doing things the Right Way and never thinking about the threat.

Doing things the right way isn’t as dramatic as talking about who has the Right Stuff, but it’s what actually goes on in military aviation. Whatever the threat, the challenge in military aviation is to remember all the right procedures (most of which are reflexive) and to not let your feelings about a threat overwhelm your ability to perform. The threat is never the enemy, it’s error. You can’t control the enemy so thinking about him is a colossal waste of time. What you can do is follow the procedures that have been fashioned from the mistakes of thousands of dead aviators and close calls. More accurately, you don’t actually do the right thing, you avoid doing the wrong thing. Aviation in general and military aviation particularly is based on benos, as in, “There’ll be no more of this, and there’ll be no more of that.”

(It turns out that doing the right thing requires an odd blend of confidence and humility. Confidence so you know you’re capable of doing the right thing, and humility so you know that the fatal error is present in the slightest inattention. For a dramatic example of the role of error in aviation, consider the story of the greatest air disaster in history, where a publicly acclaimed, right stuff kind of guy impetuously killed himself and 537 others, and didn’t even have to leave the ground to do so.)

Glenn Reynolds’ point is that, like all warriors, we have better things to do than to dwell on the casualties of action, since now we’re all in the mix ourselves. The threat is unimportant. What’s important is that each of us do our assignment well whatever that assignment is. What we think about our circumstance is the stuff of daytime soaps. What matters is whether we’re doing our assignment as well as we’ve been trained and as we’re capable. As we used to say, “It doesn’t matter whether you crash or not. What matters is whether you strike the ground at the proper angle of attack.“

It sounds like the old stiff-upper-lip advice, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. Being a Buddhist or warrior is not some airy-fairy new age indulgence. It’s a matter of clarity of purpose and a sense that one matters but that fear does not.

Get Over Yourself!

On 9-11 plus 4, I was at an outdoor cafe in Philadelphia, where the mood was as subdued as you’d imagine. Some young people at the next table hailed a passing cyclist, who paused to chat with them. Shortly thereafter, I heard the young man say, “It’s not fair! This is supposed to be the best time of my life! I’m just so depressed I don’t know what to do.” I can’t say if he lacked the right stuff, but he sure seemed to be approaching his reality the wrong way.

Since soldiers, aviators and Buddhists acquire detachment from the threat, why don’t Americans develop a cultural bias for that healthy kind of detachment? Why worry about what’s unlikely, when you can do something that directly improves what’s here-and-now? Were we to collectively embrace the wisdom of the warrior, we too would sluff off the distractions that cause us not to be present to the important work we each have. Those distractions compete with the benos that must guide our actions—specific, known mistakes of those who’ve gone before us.

The Enemy

Detachment seems the opposite of what we might call the jitters. What causes jitters? Any emphasis on what might go wrong rather than known ways to avoid past mistakes. The enemy is any force that emphasizes those worries.

The troika whose product is the jitters is the alliance of organized religion, politics and the media. In a world of important work and vital compassion, we humans invite distraction when we listen to voices whose agenda is to describe threats so terrifying that we dare not ignore them. Their livelihood is the rape of our minds, our innocence and our capacity to do the right thing in our real lives—you know: the ones we conduct with each other.

A perfect example is the Homeland Security Threat. When we’re told that we’re in danger but we’re not told what to do to protect ourselves, then we’re being treated like children. If someone purports to be in charge but can’t say how you can contribute to the challenge except by paying attention to them, then that person’s goal is our attention, our praise, our eyeballs, our vote. For sure, he hasn’t anything useful to say to us.

5:49:09 PM    

The key to any federation is understanding who’s in it and who’s out. The Digital ID federation concept sounds attractive, but doesn’t include the customers, whose voice and stake in the game are like American Indians in post-Civil War America. Just because the federation issues get ironed out doesn’t mean they’ll do us any good.

But were we to assume that everyone controls their own web space, we have the foundation of an authentic federation.

Self-hosted Identity

Ming discussed self-hosted identity on Monday, worth repeating verbatim:

James Snell talks about being in control of one’s own identity and storing it on one’s own site, like as part of one’s weblog:

“A discussion on Sam’s blog got me thinking about self-hosted identities. Ideally, I should be able to put together a file, discoverable through my weblog, and digitally signed with my private key that contains all of the personal information that I want to make public. When I go to any type of forum (like a weblog) or to a commercial site (like Amazon), if they want my information, they would do what Dave suggests and put a “You know me” button on their page. When I go to the site, I click on the button, the site asks me for the location of my identity file. They download the file and extract the necessary information.”

And he follows up here and here . We need that, of course. I’m tired of having entered my information on dozens of different sites over the years, and it being mostly outdated and forgotten. Much better that it is on my computer.

This is a more sophisticated form of the federated ID solution we baked into our microeconomy. The first step in letting people control their ID is to bite the bullet and require everybody to have their own web site. That seems like a big step, but it’s shrinking daily. Blogging is one of the best reasons to cross the website divide, and identity is pretty close.

Xpertweb users assume their transactions are as public as a public company’s. If you want to do a transaction “off the books” you won’t want to do it using your Xpertweb persona(s). But for most transactions, transparency solves far more problems than it raises.

The Xpertweb protocols have no need to expose the buyer’s financial information. Payment is made after the sale, through a trusted third party managed by the buyer, since the final price is dependent on the buyer’s rating of the transaction. The only data needed to start the transaction is how to get the product or service into the buyer’s hands. This inversion of the transaction—caveat emptor becomes caveat vendor—solves most of the difficult problems of identity theft and its handmaiden, Digital ID.

So Xpertweb’s ID need not be as complex as Snell’s thorough treatment, but the approach is perfect. Maybe we can convince Ming or James Snell to help out on this feature for our open source microeconomy…

The key to Xpertweb’s usefulness will be the ease of using the forms, and having all the buyer’s relevant data filled in automatically is a great start.

Blogging for Dollars

An Xpertweb page is basically a web log that keeps track of your words and comments of course, but extended with a commercial form of highly structured trackback. Every time the buyer submits a form, any data saved on the seller’s site is duplicated on the buyer’s site, by the buyer’s trusted script, in the form of an order confirmation page. Then, as the transaction progresses, the mirrored data store is enriched, culminating with each party’s grade and comment, which is the point of the whole system.

In the agora, everyone can watch each other shopping. The citizens are on display like the melons.

10:51:59 AM    

Adina Levin reconvenes our conversation nicely:

Adina Levin (email, 1/29, 10:30am est)
I’m a little late on this, but I love what Mitch blogged on the topic, here:

” …we only recognize leaders in retrospect….Rosa Parks was a person who just got tired of the way thing were, the injustice she and her people experienced every day. And all she did was refuse to comply with the injustice and viola, she was a leader.”

There’s that, and there’s more. Reading the autobiography of Nelson Mandela… there were many people involved in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Mandela started as a lawyer and politican among many others in the movement.

What struck me about the book is the prodigious amount of care and thought Mandela took to think about the messages and tactics he was trying to communicate, and the effort to connect with the interests and cares of the different individuals and groups he was talking with. It makes for long and rather tedious sections of the book as Mandela creates and delivers and revises speeches, year after year. It’s like listening to Yo Yo Ma practicing five hours a day.

Following Mitch’s point, leaders emerge from a community, and they become leaders through the hard work of organizing and communicating with others. Television seems to change the picture. Television seems to anoint a leader — someone with a firm gaze and a strong jaw who says simple things over and over again to arbitrary questions. TV skills are important in a TV age, but we need people who have the first kind of leadership, sparked by a desire to change the situation, and honed by very deliberate hard work and practice.

6:18:07 PM