Category: Uncategorized

Each of us is a raindrop on the windowpane, pure but with a heart of soot, full of potential to join with others. As we run into each other on the way to the bottom of our life of pane, we merge and gain power. Is the force we gain the force of the original drop or is it a collective force which only appears to be the original, grown large? When a third drop is absorbed into the first two, themselves just joined, is its shimmer diminished by the larger gleam?

The River

Barnes had once visited the headwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota. He was fascinated by the creek coming out of Lake Itasca. A few yards downstream, it met another trickle, smaller than the trickle next to the Mississippi River Source monument, and the combined trickles together were called the Mississippi. So it continued as each slightly smaller tributary added to the stream’s volume. After major acquisitions at the confluence with the Ohio and the Missouri, the trickle was a serious piece of business.

Barnes considered the Mississippi monument a shrine of major importance, for it symbolized his entire career. Barnes was nothing if not ever alert. All of his alertness was to insure that he never started a conversation whose outcome he did not know in advance, with someone not quite so powerful. Everyone he spoke with needed him worse than he needed them, and so he accumulated assets and cash flows relentlessly as he tumbled downstream. “That’s what’s wrong with these Ivy Leaguers,” he thought, “they’ve never visited the source of the Mississippi. If they had, they might understand business.
                       —”Alpha,” a work in progress

The Question

Mitch is beating the leadership conundrum again. He points out that leaders may not set out to be, but become leaders by doing something they simply can’t not do. The issue last week was connectedness and the possibility of 10,000 MLKs, RFKs and Ghandis. Last week Dr. Weinberger suggested that perhaps only a strong individual can rescue progressivism from the trash heap of current politics.

There’s a lot of despair among so-called progressive liberals, who seem to have been blind-sided by the power grab the conservatives spent 20 years engineering, accomplished with blow-job politics and anointment of the runner-up by the high priests of our judiciary.

The over-arching conservative agenda, as Doc’s friend George Lakoff teaches us, is Patriarchy—a strong parent model for society. Patriarchy is the sponsor of fundamentalism, which makes a lot of us rightfully crazy and which directly sponsors blowing people up as needed.

The controlling liberal agenda is what Lakoff calls the nurturant-parent model, but I think of it as node-parity—every node in a system has equal value, must be respected and nourished, and the links among the nodes are more important than the brilliance or dysfunction of any single node, or all of them. This makes the patriarchists crazy.

I suggest we don’t have time for a single leader because the culture lacks the traditional handles such a leader might pull, so no “charismat” is likely to appear.

Those who seek a systems-based rather than ideology-based culture (who sound like but are not exclusively liberal) need to realize that new tools have been accumulating to do so, invisibly. These tools have been quietly put in place even while fundamentalists were using the old tools to load the PTAs, city councils, courts and Republican apparatus, equally invisibly.

Collectively, the new tools of power are called the Internet. But we who seem to most believe in it are still not using it as we might. I’m convinced it’s because the real uses of the Internet are not yet clear to us.

We’d like some short cuts to universal rationality, but there are none. If we believe in the network, use the network. If not, we should go to work for a political party.

Anybody Can Improve It. But How?

Some say that, despite initial expectations, the Internet is not leading us toward populism. How might it? We need to become expert in creating virulent populist data tools—web applications—that make it worthwhile for thousands, then millions of people to express their political preferences in ways that overwhelm traditional means of organizing opinion and resources. Imagine a distributed web application that elicits and aggregates political values so effectively and broadly that representatives feel compelled to consult it to understand their mandate specifically:Vote the People’s Will or Die.

1. Compelling. Expressing your opinion must feel so urgent that anyone who sees the web site will chime in. At first, this may be driven by novelty and the early adopters. It must be reinforced by the concern of the many that, if they stay out of the accumulating data, something they have or want will be denied them.
2. Easy. No one uses a web site that isn’t easy.
3. Public. The results of the accumulating preferences must be available to the most casual observer and the most exhaustive researcher. Cast it so it’s the authoritative source for pollsters, commentators and pundits.
4. Scalable. A central site might not hack it, and the public dialogue is too important to be hostage to the shifting fortunes of an initially enthusiastic ISP. Some day we’ll have a way to manage data using grid computing or a napster-like structure. If not now, when?
5. Engaging. Get people to make personal (not astroturfing) remarks to develop their sense of voice and power.
6. Threadable. Tag remarks and portions thereof so like minds have a reason to stay connected and maybe, just maybe, listen to unlike minds. So might begin a slide into reasonableness and open thinking. Let’s discover how alike we are.
7. Hopeful. Demonstrate that we can lock arms and build, again, a government of, by and for the people.
8. Presentable. Individual opinions must be aggregated and depicted graphically so the weight of accumulated conviction is sliced and diced multiple ways: visible and obvious. A Kartoo-like depiction of issues and preferences seems useful.
9. Committed and Promising. People who express their opinions need a way to parse those opinions into immediate, effective commitment. Let users link opinions to legislation as it moves through congress and to legislators.
   “If you vote for x amendment, I promise to vote against you.”
10. Forward-looking. Most public debate is hand
    -wringing over what’s done or too late to change. Create contracts among people, linking future votes and donations to impending legislative actions.
11. Collaborable. Mitch and Dave came at the leadership issue from different ends, but collaborated nicely without losing their viewpoints. Bloggers do that.
12. Value-Neutral. The purpose must be to expose private opinion to public scrutiny. All remarks should be archived and then, once exposed, watch reason creep into the blogalogue.
13. Opportunistic. Bribe people shamelessly: let those who make remarks vote on each other’s remarks. Let people reward those who make the best remarks. Find someone to spend $1,000 a day for 1,000 days. Juice is power.
14. Meme-Based. Only a powerful central idea will get attention and infect other minds. Today, safety has infected our populace, so we’re acting out of cowardice, not strength. When we return to acting from strength, we need to discuss the difference between strength of character and military power. Maybe the meme is,
    See My Vote! It matters. I’m more interested in being involved than I am in a secret ballot. Secret ballots are for wimps.

I’m a design guy. If there’s a known problem, I like to imagine a specific solution and wonder about implementation. The above is obviously the talking points for the Electoral Collage notion I floated last fall and repeated last week. Who knows if it’s possible? Does it matter?

Last week I reserved electoralcollege.com and invited anybody to use it. On reflection, the name seems too cute and vague to be memetic. The core concept in this web application is that, when the electorate feels so powerful and confident that it gives up its right to a secret ballot and goes on record to such an extent, the vote is a formality. I like the idea of See My Vote!

If you’d like to do something with seemyvote.com, let me know. I’ll trade it for an action plan. I’m pretty busy with the microeconomy meme.

5:00:03 PM    

Just in from our favorite monarchy, via Cory Doctorow:

FaxYourMP, an amazingly effective tool that lets Brits slashdot their Members of Parliament (and has been instrumental in killing the RIP Act and the national ID card campaign) is run off an aging server in someone’s spare room in a London flat. Yesterday, the flat’s ceiling caved in, and Yoz had to drive around London to get the government back up and running.

Holy crap. Just imagine that. Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks’ worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog.

Also, the flat they relocated the machine to is one that I crashed in last June, while Richard “GNU” Stallman was crashing in the flat below (a total, mind-croggling coincidence). I configured the WiFi router. There are some really hot politico-nerds in London, and no doubt about it.

1:13:00 AM    

I’m caught in a blog/email crossfire of brilliant minds so let me share the unexploded rounds:

Mitch fired the first volley.

Mitch Ratcliffe (email, 1/23, 1:40pm est)
David’s essay finally ignited a rant I’ve been contemplating for a while…. http://www.ratcliffe.com/bizblog/2003/01/23.html#a780

Doc’s quoted it too but here’s more. Better you should read it all:

The Age of Connection
David Weinberger has an important essay at Greater Democracy on the meaning of connections, the What that flows over the things people keep focusing on.

Until now, our connectedness has depended on centralized control points that have been the gatekeepers of our economic and political networks. To speak to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a broadcast networks. To sell to everyone, you had to be one of the few with access to a global distribution channel. To achieve office, you had to be one of the few with access to corporate coffers and national media….

We are not in the Information Age. We are not in the Age of the Internet. We are in the Age of Connection. To achieve the ideals this country was built on — equality, freedom of speech and thought, the basic fairness that let’s people determine their own destinies — we need everyone connected to everyone else.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, too. Reread Democracy in America over the last week and it seems to me that, with the Bush Administration taking so many clumsily totalitarian steps toward the destruction of its political party, and with the Democrats in almost total disarray and cowering despite Bush’s immense gaffes on the international and domestic fronts, it is time for just one thing: people must elect themselves to make a change.

It is a horrible prospect that the U.S., an immensely connected country, might become submerged by the limits on connections being imposed by the government (granting greater media consolidation a clear field for the final push toward One Big Voice; a spectrum as private property approach to wireless; Total Information Awareness; closing our borders and driving out students from overseas, etc., etc.).

Individuals need to rise up and seize the power they have always had and been urged to forget. Beyond voting, we need to organize and actively debate everything, from the sidewalks in our home towns to the bills before Congress and the ad hoc rulings from the executive branch. We need a parallel government that forces the attention of politicians back to the people and away from the monied interests.

We should use the connections to establish parallel governments at every level, until the governments adopt the dialog by default, which they will do, because American government is still by people and for people at its roots. There are good people in government, and a lot of snails and weasels, too. Give the dedicated civil servant and the earnest legislator a constituency and they can change things in weeks, even days. Decisions can and will be made based on the will of the people through informed and open debate.

In one of those coincidences, David Weinberger and I were exchanging email yesterday about the future of network communications. In it, David expressed real fear and lamented that we haven’t seen our Dr. King, that we need one desperately.

In fact, we need 10,000 Martin Luther Kings, 10,000 Andrew Jacksons, 10,000 Abraham Lincolns, 10,000 Teddy Roosevelts, 10,000 H.L. Menckens, 10,000 Ida Tarbells, 10,000 Bobby Kennedys, 10,000 Thomas Jeffersons, 10,000 Ben Franklins, 10,000 Walt Whitmans, 10,000 Edward R. Murrows. And they should all be arguing with one another and with the “mainstream” thought leaders vociferously. We need what Tocqueville called “birthpangs in progress” to keep the nation astir in order to create as many new movements and collaborations and opportunities as possible.

With connections, we have the power to be the great country we are, but only if we break out of the bonds of waiting for information, waiting for an opportunity to talk, waiting for an opportunity to start a business, waiting for the next election to deal with our frustrations about what the government is doing and, then, only in the abstract. The United States was born in action and we need to return to that heritage NOW.

David Weinberger (email, Jan 23, 3:52pm est)
Mitch, Of course I agree with you. But I also disagree. Sure we need everyone to be a leader. But I think we also need *a* leader, someone who stands for us. Having a leader is like having the right myth. (By the way, we need the right myth, too.)

Mitch Ratcliffe (email, 1/23, 6:26pm est)
David, And, of course, I agree with you. With a caveat: Leadership evolves from a collective effort. Dr. King wasn’t the first or most prominent of the civil rights leaders and there was a vast discussion going on amongst blacks and whites that he stepped to the head of. Lots of little leaders make big ones emerge.
Also, there are a lot of problems right now, not one big one like fighting for civil rights for blacks, which later coalesced with the anti-war movement. The very soul of the nation is under attack from virtually every direction, from inside the borders and outside, which means that we need massive mobilization of will on many fronts.

Doc Searls (email, 1/23, 6:26pm est)
Who’s willing to be a martyr? I mean this literally. Think Ghandi, MLK, RFK, et. al.
Not sure she or he are out there.

Mitch Ratcliffe (email, 1/23, 7:16pm est)
I would happily give my life to make a better world for my children. We all have to think that way. All of us.

Doc Searls (email, 1/23, 10:12pm est)
We do. And yet we don’t.
Because most of us with children can hardly imagine their childrens’ worlds improved by the removal of a parent.
Yet children need heroes. And heroes take risks. Tough stands.
Heroes are also, by definition, if not by statistics, rare.
Not an easy subject. Glad you brought it up.

Mitch Ratcliffe (email, 1/23, 7:16pm est) Doc,
I don’t think the issue is whether a particular
person would die for
their children, but the principle that we must improve our world. Any
immigrant can attest to this.
After all, MLK, RFK, Medgar Evars, the kids at Kent State had no idea
that they would be sacrificed for their causes, they merely recognized
the possibility and went ahead anyway.
Interesting about heroes — the word has been tremendously cheapened by
our current president. It seems like anyone who happened to be awake on
9/11 is a hero according to Shrub.

Marc Cantor (email, 1/23, 12:15pm est)
OK here’s my 2 centavos:
I sat and watched my middle son up on stage tonight. As the tears welled
up, I realized that not only how proud I was of him, but how much of myself
had rubbed off on him. I can’t say I didn’t intend it to happen that way,
’cause I did – but it led me to ponder – differing agendas, different
people’s lives and how to get people to cooperate together.
In the old days – when business was warfare, the victor, bully or Mafia
member – got their way and all else followed (or just went away with their
tail between their legs.)
But if there’s one way to typify the world we’re in today – it’s fragmented,
over populated and noisy. Redundancy runs rampant, contrary efforts are the
norm and even simple linkages, cooperation and what we used to call
‘collaboration’ is hailed as a victory.
I remember when software was architected, refined and solid as a rock. Now
it’s thrown together, simply a single feature and everyone wonders why
they’re not making any money from it.
It’s really not too hard to get people to cooperate – you just have to show
them the benefits of their actions. Linux is good because X, Y & Z.
Life is sort of like a giant pseudo code algorithm:
    If – you do this
      and
    If – we do this together
    THEN – all this cool shit can happen
    else – status quo
    end
So I not only nominate Mitch to be a hero and leader, but I will also humbly
accept the draft nomination. This convention has no 2nd round votes, smoke
filled room negotiations or favorite son tickets (though if there EVER was a
favorite son – It’s Doc!)
My father was and still is a politician in Chicago and let me tell you –
it’s ugly out there. Better for us to hide our heads in front of our
screens and use technology as a revolutionary tool.
And though I don’t know Britt, Adina and David – I nominate you too. But
each of us has to get REALLY good at each little Island domain we choose to
lead, and then create bridges between our Islands.
🙂
__________________________________________

Here, Here!

I’m as willing as the next guy to fly a burning airplane into the ground for God and country, but let’s not off ourselves too fast—we need to keep building mind bombs for this noble effort. However, should we get it in writing from, say, 33% of Americans irrevocably committed to thinking and cooperating and conducting heated, civil, fact-based conversations, I bet the five of us on our little email thread would gladly lay down our lives.

For we are here to be of consequence.

Martyrdom is probably no more necessary than it would have been for Gustavus Aldus (inventor of the saddlebag book) to sacrifice himself for the vision of books for every school kid—better he should work on the form factor. The heat we feel right now feels like the friction of unused gears crunching into place.

Just as the Age of Enlightenment may have been the product of unexpected leisure and caffeine (produced on the breaking backs of aborigines everywhere), now also we have an explosion of reasoned debate by people who are learning systems-style thinking from their computers and web publishing tools.

How many of us have felt so usefully engaged since college? Except now we know what we’re talking about. Peaceniks are dialoguing with warbloggers, and all of us having to stand by our archived words. What a remarkable counterpoise to heated rhetoric! How like a civil Town Meeting.

Systemic Influence

In the marvelous 1990 film Mind Walk, Sam Waterston, John Heard and, most importantly, Liv Ullman walk around Mont. St. Michel, trying to figure out why political leaders can’t make rational decisions. The film is based on The Turning Point by physicist Fritjof (Tao of Physics) Capra and is directed by his brother, Bernt Amadeus Capra. Ullman, a disillusioned physicist whose laser research has been turned into weapons technology, describes how illusory is the physical world and why we all need to start thinking about the systems that make up our reality, and not just political imperatives.

And sure enough, here we are a dozen years later, forced to think in terms of systems, causes and effects, which may be why our heads hurt so much and we can’t find our footing in our current milieu. It’s because we’re just lucky.

I’m convinced we’re at one of those rare historic inflection points, where the formerly reliable center can’t hold and, without the benefit of our imminent history, we flail around wondering why our life isn’t as stable as we think our parents’ was.

Inflection points are like the high school chemistry experiment involving a super-saturated salt solution. Heat a beaker of water short of boiling, add more salt than it could dissolve if cool, then let it cool. Sharply tap the beaker of liquid and clink! it grows salt crystals until it’s all salt and no liquid. A disorganized state spontaneously organizes itself into a structurally coherent crystalline lattice.

This happens periodically in our history:

•  All power and property is owned by the king and Magna Carta!
    …Monarchy tilts down the slippery slope toward rule by nobles and, God forbid, landless riffraff.
•  God, and therefore man, is at the center of the universe and Copernicus!
    …We’re a minor planet on an inconsequential sun.
•  The Universe is elegant clockwork with all problems solved and Planck!
    …Nothing is what it appears to be and matter constantly disappears here and reappears over there.
•  The British Empire demonstrates to the ages that northern Europeans are destined to rule the world and Gandhi!
    …No colonial power can expect to hold its empire together.
•  Governments and centralized media control all messages to the passive populace and Internet!
    …Every damn fool is talking with every other fool and working out their own future.

“People must elect themselves to make a change”

That’s the secret, isn’t it, Mitch? We’re like young adults suddenly aware that we can run the show and scared of what we might do. It doesn’t feel
right to let go of the illusory stability that got us here. Our leaders and bosses may have feet of clay, but they’re the only foundation we’ve known.

The solution Mitch offers is to take back the country, not by rising up, but by raising our voices in concert. The best current example is moveon.org, which seems to be forming a pretty well-funded little political party catalyzed by Clinton’s inability to keep his pecker in his pants (Clink!). Is this a great country or what?

But this self-organizing force needs actual crystallization for it to be taken seriously. For that purpose I propose again that, by converting our right to a secret ballot into (Clink!) conspicuously threatened votes, counted and documented before elections, we can give our representatives no choice but to dance to the newly tangible strings of their puppet masters, declared and committed voters:

ElectoralCollage.com

In the western world, politicians who need our votes are acting like they don’t. They’re behaving like the RIAA, pretending they can treat their customers like thieves. Why do we spend so much time worrying about the RIAA and so little time directly managing our elected toadies?

An online Electoral Collage would be based, of course, on our right to actually vote and to enforce full, fair and equal representation, but the Electoral Collage would see suffrage as a wireline protocol, with other, behavior-based protocols lying on top of voting, like the HTTP overlay on the IP open standard.

The Electoral Collage would be a massive distributed database of real people who have abdicated their secret ballot to advertise their real-time responses to current issues and current outrages. The database would use a kind of namespace to match issues and outrage with politicians and their current actions. Voters would link their next vote with their current values and beliefs so that a politician’s cynical work against choice would publicly guarantee my wife’s vote against him. Combined with other uppity women, some politicians would see that this particular form of cynicism is foolish, at least in his district. (Cynical because few politicians give a rat’s ass about abortion. They do care about the votes of people who care about choice).

Sample Electoral Collage Report:
“The Fleemer amendment to HR 419 has caused a plurality of Mr. Fleemer’s voting constituents to commit to vote him out of office in November. Based on commitment data from 73% of registered voters, It appears that Rep. Fleemer will lose his seat by a 9% margin unless his amendment is withdrawn.
This data has been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff and is summarized at http://www.electoralcollage.com/fleemer."

 

I don’t know if I’d give my life for that capability, but I have registered electoralcollage.com. Why did I register the domain? Because I could! Just another example of Internet NEA at work

If someone has the chops to build the web application, they can have the domain.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back to work on our little microeconomy. Because I can.

12:22:30 AM    

As usual, I’ve had trouble wrapping my head around the Digital ID discussion. Last time, it took me 3 days to say something, which must be a first. Now Andre, Doc, Mitch, Eric and the rest of the Digital ID brain trust are discussing Andre’s thoughtful article at Digital ID World.

Finally I’m beginning to get it. I think. Although the following is purposely cynical. The Digital ID initiative is a new form of  the failed Push technology.

There’s no such thing as a federated Digital ID and there won’t be.

The various records about you are currently owned by others, not by you. That’s because you don’t own any data and never have. Data about buyers and employees is always owned by sellers and employers and never by buyers and employees. Since a company is no more than its data, no company will give it up to support the righteous quest for standards and interop and all the rest. Sure, they’ll talk about it and go to seminars and purse their lips and seem to be interested, but, when it’s time to fish or cut bait, they’ll just donate a little chunk of historic data to the Digital Yellow Pages and keep right on hoarding their own, far richer, more current dossier on you.

“So what?” you properly ask. Surely that doesn’t invalidate the DigID initiative. But data hoarding is the core of the problem because the Digital ID resolution (whether 1, 3 or 27 phases in the future) won’t substitute a unique ID for the others, it will just add yet another digital record of you to the multitude already out there, and not a very good one, at that.

There’s no way this incremental ID will be more accurate than all the rest, because no one will guarantee the accuracy of what they supply. It’s just another kind of credit report. Doesn’t the following describe what we’ll have if Digital ID ever happens?

Lots of mistakes are made.
The sheer size of the consumer reporting industry is mind-boggling. According to the Philadelphia Federal Reserve, there are more than 1,000 consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) in the country. You’re probably most familiar with the three biggest CRAs – Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Two million credit reports are ordered each day and two billion pieces of information are added to these credit files each month. The average consumer’s credit report is updated five times a day. Computers or not, when you’re handling that much information, mistakes are going to happen. But how bad is it?

Understanding how prevalent errors are depends on who you listen to and what their biases are. We’re aware of four studies that have been done, all of which point to either serious errors in credit reports or problematic inconsistencies in credit scoring across the Big 3 CRAs. The overall consumer reporting system is very important to our economy and does far more good than bad, but it’s undeniable that serious errors are made pretty regularly.

(Disclosure: written to get people to buy a fool.com online course, but probably accurate)

What will happen when (if) the DigIDialogue gets to the point that it’s serious? Will the huge credit reporting industry let some tech startup(s) wrest their franchise from them? That’s what’s being proposed here. Hell, this has as little likelihood as Microsoft giving the Windows source to the Russkies (ya gotta love irony!)

So what’s the answer? This DigID meme stirs up so much interest that something deep is going on, even more than the usual excitement that can be generated by really smart, intelligent, attractive, energetic young men describing a non-existent enterprise that might get some funding from equally high-functioning other white guys with money.

I suggest our overarching interest is from 2 opposing forces:

  Most of us hate the idea of being no more than a blip in someone’s data.
  A few of us love the idea of creating an industry that federates Digital ID.

We want to be of consequence! That primal urge, contrasted with our daily reality, is as painful to us as MP3s are to the RIAA. Consider these truths:

• No seller cares about your kids’ Little League record.
• You’ll be missed about as much as your dead school buddies.
• The buyer doesn’t care whether the seller lives or dies
  — as long as he doesn’t die on the premises.
• In an economic (non-village-based) world of willing followers and exploitive leaders,

  We are the hollow men
  We are the stuffed men
  Leaning together
  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
  Our dried voices, when
  We whisper together
  Are quiet and meaningless
  As wind in dry grass
  Or rats’ feet over broken glass
  In our dry cellar

  Shape without form, shade without colour,
  Paralysed force, gesture without motion; 
                             — T.S. Eliot, 1925

Digital ID in its myriad existing and future forms doesn’t replace or represent you or me. Digital IDs are fictional symbols, personas if you will, that have been created by companies to substantiate bookkeeping entries which they alchemize into assets at the bank, in the stock market, at the country club and to inspire employees.

Customers aren’t you or me. Customers are data events that, referenced to other supposedly valid data, pass the auditor’s test of which collective fictions are acceptable to the capital markets during the current reporting period. Customers are as evanescent as the money supply.

Economic/Cultural Romanticism

Might there be any way to make digital ID human? (Thanks, Doc!)

NYTimes.com, January 21, 2016

Congress today passed the Carbon Life Form Digital Identity Act (CLFDIA) by an overwhelming vote, prohibiting any entity recording or archiving information of any kind about any carbon-based human persona. This is seen as a strategic win for President William Sterling who had
made the legislation the centerpiece of his Sociolibertarian/Independent agenda, and will sign it using his digital signature at a ceremony at Davos.

Experts agreed that all the technical requirements are in place to support the bill’s implementation. It’s estimated that 78% of AmeriEuro adults now control their own web-based Digital IDs, as do a staggering 94% of people between 13 and 21. The bill requires anyone who wishes to transact over the internet, through the mail or within the EuroDollar Community to maintain a web-based DigID site supporting biometric validation.

Economists downplayed the significance of the legislation, calling it largely symbolic, since the bill does not affect transactions among Algorithm-Based Personas (ABPs), which comprise 86.3% of the GDP. These self-perpetuating digital entities will continue to transact with each other, exchanging digital services for digital money, even though their creators, whether human or corporate, are no longer involved in maintaining the entities’ algorithms.

It is believed that the first ABP was the No Iraq, No Way meme, started in 2003 and which still is collecting donations from the many pacifist ABPs still active. The ancient precursor to the NINW meme, the Stop-the-Taliban-Now meme, functioned briefly in the early 1990s but failed because there was no mechanism at that time to automatically fund meme support infrastructure.

2:34:35 PM    

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

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

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

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

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

Forging a Confederation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing the Human Code

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

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

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

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

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

Doing sensible things is what makes us consequential.

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

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

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

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

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

Ming says,

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

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

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

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

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

Steal This Idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:48:11 PM    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s this apocalyptic insight from Mitch:

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

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

How About a Common Task Object Model – TOM Tomorrow?

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

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

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

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

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

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

1:50:36 PM    

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s what Freeman says:

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

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

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

Gift Withholding Tax

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

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

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

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

1:54:25 PM    

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

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

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

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

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

Digression…

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

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

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

Just Give Us the Goods

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

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

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

From The Peer Economy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

12:34:53 PM    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money is Free. Get Used To It.

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

John Robb wrote eloquently last week on the New Kleptocracy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Romantic Economics

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

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

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

1:11:46 AM