Category: Uncategorized

Texas Humor

Someting very funny happens ever day. Perhaps the core sin is in not noticing the irony. A very Republican friend sent me this:

Three Texas plastic surgeons were playing golf together and discussing surgeries they had performed.

One of them said “I’m the best plastic surgeon in Texas. A concert pianist lost seven fingers in an accident.
I reattached them and eight months later he performed a private concert for the queen of England.”

One of the others said “That’s nothing. A young man lost both arms and legs in an accident. I reattached them, and two years later he won a gold medal in five field events in the Olympics.”

The third surgeon said “You guys are amateurs. Several years ago a yuppie cowboy who was high on cocaine and alcohol rode a horse head-on into a train traveling 80 miles an hour. All I had left to work with was the horse’s ass and a cowboy hat.

And now he’s President of the United States.”

2:17:26 AM    

Circular File

Sometimes reasoning becomes so circular that you wonder if the speaker was listening. Here’s a circular argument I felt forced to embrace the other day:

Tamara: “Why must we have a closet full of cables?”

Britt: “Think about it dearest, would you deign to live with a guy who was so clueless that he had no boxes of cables? How could such a man even claim to be part of the great computer/Internet Renaissance? No, I’m sure if you reflect on it, You’ll feel blessed to be married to a guy with so many adapters, cables and connectors.”

Tamara: “But the problem is that you don’t use them. You just go out and buy a new one every time.”

Britt: “Well, of course. Otherwise, how could I have a closet full of cables?”

Social Circularity

Scott Rosenberg cites an equally absurd circular argument for killing Social Security, Tripping on their own feeble arguments:

In the end, there’s one thing I can agree with the conservatives on: Social Security is only as safe as the lawmakers in Washington allow it to be. Sowell & co. say we must fear because we can’t trust the government to keep Social Security afloat. But the government he is telling us will betray Social Security isn’t in the hands of the “liberals” upon whom his finger points. It is the Bush administration that has endangered Social Security, and it is the Bush administration that now wishes to end Social Security as we know it. It may get its way. But let’s make sure the American people understand who’s responsible for the ensuing debacle.

Read the whole thing.
8:21:54 PM    

CivicPace

Are the online activist tools developing at a fast enough pace? In the world of activist toolmakers, there’s been a dialogue the last few days, ever since EchoDitto’s COO, Harish Rao posted an assessment of the activist tool space:

the progressive movement is screwed (technologically, at least)

Tonight, Nicco and I had dinner with Dave Winer. We talked about our podcasts, and a little bit about what we’re up to. Our conversation was at a cheap Italian place, over dinner. The conversation quickly turned to the core business of EchoDitto, and one of the main issues that we face:

There is no good (i.e., comprehensive, inexpensive, and easy-to-use) web platform that does content management, blogging/podcasting, credit card processing/fundraising, bulk email management, event management, metrics & reporting, CRM, and voterfile management (yes, all of these things should be integrated) properly. Now, there are several solutions and vendors that have some of the pieces. But none of these solutions are comprehensive, and they certainly don’t play nice with one another (i.e., data sharing is non-existent).

Frankly, we progressives are screwed unless we solve the technology problem (the lack of a decent integrated web platform), because technology should be the least of our worries. Topping it off, we don’t have a lot of time.

I think we should create an inexpensive (i.e., open source) platform ASAP that draws the best features of all the products out there. And no, I don’t think that it’s bad business to open source software, especially in nascent markets.

Zack Rosen and Dave Winer commented on Harish’s statement, and Harish followed up with Parts II and III, concluding,

But, we still have a problem. Important political campaigns for the next cycle (and I’m talking 2006, not 2008) have already started. We’re about a year out from the Dean campaign, arguably the most technologically advanced of the time. And, frankly, we don’t have a lot to show for it. It’s imperative that we talk about this problem, and find a solution.

A Spirited Response

Yesterday, at the Personal Democracy Forum, Michael Cornfield noted Spirit of America’s support for citizen journalist coverage of the Iraqi election, and PD’s editor, Micah Sifry noted that the Spirit of America site has a strong set of tools for its members (Disclaimer: Micah and I are working on a few initiatives together, and I act as Micah’s tech support for his switch to Mac):

[Editor’s note: Online political activists of all stripes might want to take a look at the back-end tools created for members of SpiritofAmerica to manage their own relationship to the project: a nifty “member dashboard” allows people to select their specific areas of interest, track their donations to specific projects, create an activist team, schedule events, or find out about local events created by others in the network. If that sounds a little like the tool set built by Howard Dean’s Internet squadron, it’s not a coincidence, as one of the key developers of SpiritofAmerica’s back-end is Britt Blaser, who spent a week a month in Burlington in 2003, helping the Dean campaign with its Internet activism. He discusses the thinking behind the design of the SpiritofAmerica site on his blog, here.]

I recently reviewed most of these tools for a client and discovered that the Spirit of America suite is the strongest in the social networking functions I care so much about, no surprise. But I was surprised to learn that the SoA admin function is in a class by itself.

It set me to thinking. Even though it’s not open source, and wasn’t specifically designed for political campaigns, the Spirit of America tool suite may be closer to what Harish wants than most others. I look forward to re-connecting with Harish, both socially and regarding where we go from here.

11:18:35 PM    

The Commons of the Tragedy

Dan Gillmor, unplugged, in his new post-Mercury blog (you have added Dan’s new feed to your aggregator, right?), contributed this:

Tsunami and Citizen Journalism’s First Draft

I was getting ready to write a long piece about the South Asia catastrophe’s effect on citizen journalism, when the Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing called to discuss it for a piece he was writing. He quoted me at length in his piece, and captured the important points. I called the tsunami horror a turning point, because it brought the grassroots front and center in an even more powerful way than occurred on and after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Read Steve’s piece here.

We used to call mainstream journalism the “first draft of history.” Now, I’d argue, much of that first draft is being written by citizen journalists. And what they’re telling us is powerful indeed.

Steve Outing’s excellent article reminds us that progress is uneven, marked by inflection points:

…the tsunamis changed the media landscape. They thrust into the limelight an army of accidental journalists. Perhaps as a result, now is the time when citizen reporters will begin to join the ranks of journalism’s working class in informing the public — not as professional equals, yet in some ways as important in the grand scheme of news.

Good-enough means of news production are now in the hands of the people. The well-heeled Phuket tourists possessed all the technical means needed to hook up a small feeding tube to the media beast. The difficult thing for the media beast to accept is that this new source of scoops is more than just a broad distribution of media tech. An amazing number of people are thoughtful, effective writers, just as skilled as the stringers whom the beast might be able to find, or field, on short notice. The distressing fact is that good-enough reporting means and skills are more broadly distributed than are Big-J journalists.

Middle Aware

Middleware is the general description for all the (mostly) invisible software workhorses that make our e-conomy and our e-culture possible, connecting data and infrastructure to our user experience of reality. Dan Gillmor’s point deserves to be embraced and extended: not only is much of the first draft of history being powerfully written by citizen journalists, so are most of the subsequent, middle, generations. This middle phase defining of history, just after the first draft, is the most interesting to me. As the old saying goes, “As the twig is bent, so the branch is inclined.”

Let’s call it recursive journalism: the amazing detail and clarity possible when the blogosphere gets on a story and combine our individually flawed viewpoints into a coherent and relevant representation. Once we put something useful on the record, the recursion cannot be ignored, no matter how the pros wish the amateurs would leave history alone. The last time we figured out how to do this, we called it the scientific revolution.

Here’s how Arianna Huffington described the vitality of recursive journalism last April:

I remember being on a panel around the time of the Lott affair organized by the Hollywood Radio and Television Society. It was filled with a number of familiar talking heads, including Larry King and Sam Donaldson. We were discussing the good, the bad, and the ugly of mainstream journalism. At one point I launched into a rant about all the stories that I felt were important but were not getting covered by the big media outlets.

My fellow panelists, on cue, leapt to the defense of their mainstream brethren, pointing out that many of the stories I mentioned had, in fact, been covered on TV or by the big daily papers.

And indeed they had. Sometimes in 90-second news packages and sometimes even on the front page of The New York Times — above the fold.

But that, until the rise of the bloggers, was that. Issue noted. Let’s all move on. Reporters for the big media outlets are obsessed with novelty, always moving all-too-quickly on to the next big score or the next hot get.

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

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

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

It’s amazing that the physical “hard news” is 24 hours away from being fish wrap and that a gazillion little bits of magnetism are able to present and maintain for us evidence of our perceptions, seemingly permanent, our history unfolding, never to disappear from due consideration as we write the 2nd through n drafts of history.

It’s even possible that there’s life after history’s middle drafts for we citizen-scribes. Will the definitive last draft of history – perpetually updated – be our responsibility as well?
7:00:32 PM    

Connected Campaign Conundrum

Doc and I did not discuss this coincidence. I wrote most of the following rumination on December 18. Along the same lines, in Read On, Doc said yesterday:

I’m a believer in connected democracy. I think smart electorates get smarter than most politicians, and most political organizations. I also think we need politicians and political organizations that understand, organize and take advantage of connected citizens.

Looking back at the 2004 election campaigns, I see Connected Democracy 0.15b. Early beta stuff. Interesting tests and demonstrations of connections and conversations and organization at work, but nothing close to what we need, or will have, eventually.

We live in interesting times. As the Cluetrainers have taught us:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Translated into Politicalese:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to produce democracy with blinding speed. As a direct result, the “governed” are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most governments.

I believe there’s a discovery process at work whereby people will learn that we can join together to effect political change by governing directly, early and often. The key is for candidates to focus on governance, not politics, and to make the voters’ collective will both broad-based and explicit.

Setting the Bar

We always fall short of our goals. This causes some of us to lower the bar and others to raise it. If you want to achieve great things, you need to make sure your goals are towering but that you’re comfortable with falling short of them.

If you aspire to elected office, you can follow the herd and aspire to winning 50% of the voters + 1, or you can start governing early. Governing early gives you a chance to do the heavy lifting in public, rather than just describing what you’ll do for people if they trust you. When you govern early, you take control of the conversation so that winning the vote becomes a milestone, not the end of the effort. Your viral community can start to make a difference during the election, because it’s the only time the incumbents are listening. Voting becomes a way for your partners, the voters, to make your and their governance directly applicable to the bureaucrats and the political toadies.

A web-based community is a great way to aggregate and express the will of its participants. If you aggregate enough willful participants, you can aggregate yourself right into office.

Count the Votes Early, and Start Governing Now. Politics the Web Way.

Rather than quaking in fear that their web site won’t be sufficient to defeat the Big Bad Incumbent, politicians should be relishing how their web services can uniquely deliver the miracle the Dean campaign hinted at. The almost accidental triumph of the Dean campaign was to register voters as members of the campaign’s web services. It seemed only natural–most web sites seek to know who’s visiting. But from a political viewpoint, it was huge, though it didn’t go far enough. In meatspace, supporters evolve from citizenship through registration to going to the polls to pulling the right lever. I suggest that the great untapped vein of political gold is hosting those evolutions, explicitly, within the candidate’s online community.

If the Dean campaign was rev. 0.15b, Counting the Votes Early and often should get us up to at least a public beta. Here’s how I see the flow of voter aggregation robust enough to hijack most elections:

  1. Attract people to register at the site.
  2. Connect them with each other
    ( just as you connect with me by clicking that little envelope icon on this page)
  3. Give them a personal page to state the values that matter most.
  4. Ask them to declare their commitment to vote for this candidate on Election Day.
  5. Every 30 days, have them ratify their commitment to vote.
  6. Pay an accountant to maintain an audited report tallying the committed votes.
  7. Get each committed voter to attract her social network to also commit.

When the right candidate coincides with the right set of web services, the feature set of Politics 1.0 will be set. I think it will look something like this (PDF version):

Are Americans ready to break the bonds of Broadcast Politics?

More specifically:

Is the Internet-connected population a sufficient constituency for building a Connected Campaign? Could such a campaign defeat the most sophisticated, expensive effort that a well-heeled broadcast politician might mount?

Last summer, a potential candidate asked me:

“Is it possible to remove ego as the primary attribute of a campaign , and instead conduct a campaign online and word-of-mouth so powerfully that even the opponent’s ads work against the opponent’s appeal?”

Not only is the answer yes, it’s probably inevitable. If Dean was at 0.15b (and Kerry at 0.09b), how could an unequipped politician, incapable of demonstrating explicit trust, stand up to Version 1.0?

So far, web communities have been more passionate about iPods and Linux than they have been about governance. That’s probably because there are so few web communities concerned with the the process of governing; most rant about the governors, which is a waste of breath.

A Political Sure Thing – On Line and Out Reach

I’ve come to an outrageous conclusion: Some day soon, an underdog candidate’s engagement and collaboration services will grow a viral community of interest to deliver an avalanche of votes as impressive and unexpectedly as an e-voting windfall. Further, the subtext of this people-powered takeover of politics will be that it encourages ego-suppressed candidates interested in good governance, not a politician-who-would-be-king and his courtiers.

How will the voters know that a candidate’s ego is in remission? They’ll recognize an authentic voice expressed in blog posts and comments and podcasts which project an authentic personality into the agora of public esteem, rather than using ad copywriters to project an ego into the ether of non-reality TV. Blogging is a personal skill that’s prime to become a requisite for politicians, because it can be as good a megaphone for them as it is for ordinary citizens who are using blogs to project themselves in the universal struggle for acknowledgement, armed only with their inimitable reasonableness, curiosity, candor and irony.

All those attributes are anathema in politics today, but fashions change, including the skills that elevate one to public office. 150 years ago, you had to be an orator to be President. You
may have noticed that’s no longer the case, plus ça change, plus c’est la même-chose. The thing that’s staying the same is the affection of the voters for anyone who comes across to them as authentic, interested and responsive. Broadcast politics and Lee Atwater’s ghost have, for the moment, made Bush seem like such a person; never has the kleptocracy had it so good. Radio and TV overwhelmed politics by allowing rulers to control the news cycle and now we have the backyard fence effect that blogging can bestow on anybody. A blogger is like someone you talk to over the back fence: after a while, the mask falls away and you’re left with an impression that coincides pretty well with who they are.

The method is straightforward: Create web-hosted, viral, issues-based, self-funding communities so engaged in re-designing governance that they share a foregone conclusion that they will vote to install their own power. The goal is to motivate unprecedented numbers of people to stand for hours in the rain if they must, to vote for the team that represents a movement about them, not the candidate. Based on small donations, publicly audited, we’ll know the stink has gone off politics, and we’ll learn that a community-based online campaign can’t be outspent.

No politician has been bold enough to really listen to the voters because none of them, including Howard Dean, really get it. I went to the mat with Dean’s policy “experts” to allow supporters to make explicit policy recommendations, but they refused to have the candidate be subject to detailed voter preferences. (Similarly, Dean was uninterested in a Soldiers for Dean web site because it he didn’t think it would generate donations. D’oh!)

The voters have never been allowed into the game of high-stakes politics because the candidates’ trusted advisors would rather rule in defeat than be a smaller part of a larger movement.

So the trick is to host an online deliberative body (often called a government) of, by and for the people. As soon as they realize they have access to decision-making that’s truly not politics as usual, they’ll jump in and recruit their neighbors, one begetting five, begetting 25, etc. When those thousands–the most connected and committed–reach out one more circle, into meatspace, the election is locked up.

The people will do it, starting small, if we give them the community-building tools, if we listen to their interests, if we document their connected campaign’s passion for their views and if we document the growth of their circles of committed voters.

It sounds straightforward because it is. It sounds impossible because no candidate has really listened to the people.

Postscript: The Elements of Connected Power

There are three elements to winning a Net-centric campaign:

  1. The Core Message
  2. Engaging the voters
  3. Explicit, interdependent commitments among the voters

Dean’s Triumph: 1. Message & 2. Engagement

The Howard Dean campaign taught us that:

  1. The right message, amplified online, can attract support as never before.
  2. People will engage each other online to express their passion in the real world.

Dean’s Failure: 3. Not linking up the committed voters

The Dean campaign failed to make explicit the vital connections:

a] between the campaign and the voters
b] among the voters themselves

The intent was there, but no one got around to building the linked-up “$10 Campaign” that Jim Moore and Joe Trippi were so excited about in October (Oops!). As a result, the Dean effort was an impressive extension of broadcast politics, but perhaps no more meaningful than the introduction of direct mail fundraising.

A candidate can’t and won’t shake the hands of a million voters but he can speak to them with his authentic voice and touch them as never before. And then they will reach out to, and recruit, each other.

If, for instance, NYC elected a connected mayor, it would be because someone masters the third element and forges explicit commitments among voters, who then collaborate to support the campaign: commitments which Get Out The Vote (GOTV) as successfully as the old system of ward bosses and precinct captains who really knew where the votes stood, long before election day..

Think about it:

Why should a Connected Campaign in 2005 have less data on
real votes in real precincts than Tammany Hall had in 1880?

The way to build and extend a community of committed voters is to inspire the most active voters to get their teeth into meaningful activity beyond campaigning: voters so motivated that they go way beyond the GOTV strategies of most campaigns. These activists are willing to commit their votes early and publicly and to affirm them when asked. They’re also willing to infect their friends with their enthusiasm.

The result is an auditable pool of committed votes expanding at web speed to more than the last majority, and to do it months before the election. With that out of the way, the winners-in-fact can concentrate on governing with a real mandate, not mudling through with 50.001% of the vote.

Crossing the Chasm

This must be a campaign irrevocably committed to online activism driving real world activity. Unlike Howard Dean, the leaders of the Connected Campaign need the self-discipline to stay the course and not succumb to traditional politics as soon as their real power becomes palpable. Geoffrey Moore’s seminal book, Crossing the Chasm, taught us that an enterprise must often abandon all it knows and embrace new behaviors to reach promising heights looming across an unfamiliar passage.

The Connected Campaign must trust totally in the linking power of the grassroots to accumulate, support and deliver 1,500,000 committed votes. Like any other business, the acquisition of those votes must happen in an orderly way over the course of the campaign, not as a nail-biting miracle received passively on election night. That means that we count our votes early and often as we accumulate them and–literally–depict our power online for all to see, as it grows like a weed in plain sight.

It’s Not the Internet, Stupid!

Every campaign’s message must be about real-world communities, not abstract Metcalfian “networks”; about people, not the Internet. The loudest voices in the Dean campaign were tech savvy, most connected to other techies–a weakness the Kerry campaign capitalized on by concentrating on each state’s old-fashioned Democratic apparatus. The Connected Campaign must downplay the Internet as a phenomenon, but use it as naturally to deliver the votes as a kid rides a bike to deliver papers. Fortunately, a lot of regular folks take the Net for granted, use it spontaneously, and don’t need to rant about the Net to use the Net.

The Digital Divide and the 80-20 Rule

Techies are smart people who like computers but the rest of us are not, so we must assume that 80% of our base is not connected. The best argument against Net-centric politics is that most voters are citizens, not techies. Even if we exchange digital photos with relatives, we think the Internet is an advanced TV with too many
controls and private channels. But the right tools in the hands of the most-connected activists equips them to reach out to many others, perhaps five times as many, whether or not those five are online.

Like outbound sales reps, our most-connected 20% can use our online outreach tools to connect with the people around us: neighbor, paperperson, bus driver and grocery clerk, to deliver the majority of the votes that will transform politics forever. That will be the perfect storm Joe Trippi dreamed of.

2:09:44 PM    

Coffee! Free Land!


The web logging ferment is lighting up a few corners of the Internet, invisible to most but a harbinger of real change. This ferment reminds me of what I’ve read of 17-18th century coffeehouses and the discovery of the New World. Do you suppose we’re collectively fashioning a second Age of Enlightenment?

My take is that the cultural shift of the 18th century (the decline of monarchy, the rise of Federalism, and the inevitability of one person/one vote) had 2 major precursors. The first was the coffeehouse conversations conducted among educated non-aristocrats (a recent book on coffee credited caffeine with waking Europe from a centuries-long alcohol-induced slumber. To be fair, boiled water drinks were the only safe beverages in pre-Evian Europe.)

The second factor was the availability of free land for the offspring of serfs in the new world. The cultural landscape would never have shifted without surplus real estate and intellectual capital – there certainly was no abundance of investment capital. And the affluent would have never allowed anything to slip out of their own holdings. The new landowners were called freeholders. It’s the dream the US was built on, and it still strikes a chord in the heart of anyone who imagines personal freedom:

160 acres, good water, timber and meadowland. No taxes.

Coffee! Cheap Broadband!

Fast-forward a couple of centuries. Coffeehouses are back in fashion and the conversation is blogging its way around the globe, but the land is all locked up and so is control of most of the capital. (Surprisingly, the capital is actually owned by households, they just haven’t learned to control its allocation.)

A lot of that capital is used not for concentrating land, steam power, factories and ex-serfs, but rather for placing CPUs, T1 lines and Aeron Chairs next to small teams of smart people who come up with ideas they email to Asian contract manufacturers. This investment strategy is taking place in an office even as those engineers’ homes are equipped with later-model CPUs, broadband, OfficeMax chairs and a burning desire to stop working for the Man. Often the engineers’ kid is a better programmer than the dad and is even more appalled at the prospect of working for the man. At some deep level, both of them believe that information wants to be free.

Instead of free land, we have almost free connectivity and web sites that anyone can use to offer their 21st century produce to the public. The digital farm-to-market roads are under construction just as customers are discovering that the big brand companies can’t produce what they want: software that’s pliable, hardware that’s durable and support that sustains them. They already have all the materials needed to collaborate without the overseer, they just lack the CollaboWare. I can’t imagine better raw materials for a socioeconomic revolution.

Doc and I have been discussing one form of CollaboWare, called Xpertweb. Xpertweb has a simple strategy – enriching the data footprint that a transaction leaves behind. It’s free CollaboWare and there’s no startup trying to cook the idea into a stock valuation.

Today’s companies report just one kind of data – price, but they sometimes call it cost. (price paid, price of all the costs & expenses, and the difference between those prices, called Earnings). That’s all the sellers in our economy care about, and they’re the only ones keeping the data. It’s also the only fact keeping your portfolio above zero.

What most of the people in the market (customers) care most about is quality, not price. That’s why they’re called customers – people for whom something must be customized. They’re unwelcome, demanding critters in our consumer economy.

If you’re in the customization business, you care about two things, quality – the customer’s satisfaction with her customization and the quantity of her appreciation – usually money, but often also a product review she shares with others.

Wall Street has built the most involved and expensive circle jerk in history as it lures our best and brightest into the degrading job of rating companies’ net profit this period vs. their net profit next period and last, and reading the entrails of those unwieldy organizations & supply chains to determine which one will better improve their revenues and, just as important, how the other high priests will report their own divinations to the eager congregation of equity worshippers.

Xpertweb’s core idea: the simple act of adding qualitative data points to the sole quantitative datum will allow us to reclaim our right as customers – those cranky people for whom things must be customized – rather than the consumers we’ve become, meekly ingesting whatever we’re fed so the suppliers can scoop up the cash we shit out the other end.

With all this computing power lying around, Xpertweb proposes to add 2 customer-satisfaction data points to price: amount of satisfaction and a description of satisfaction. The amount of satisfaction is a simple grade: 1-99%. The description is simply a few words saying how happy (or not) you are or aren’t with the service you got.

Quality is Brand One

Quality ratings do directly what corporate “branding” tries to do, but can only do indirectly: associate a company with your personal sense of quality. Given a choice, most of us will rely on proof of quality over a series of branding messages. The best proof of quality is the opinion of our peers who’ve gone this way before.

The result? A way to for any of us new freeholders to build a reputation out of a series of satisfying transactions. This is a way for the producer to prove the quality of his produce when the marketplace is virtual. In a small way, it could take a little business away from the big guys. But if it delivers just one great transaction into our day, maybe it’ll take our mind off all the consumerism we’ve been trained to master.

(Originally published 8/31/02)

12:16:26 AM    

Conducting a Civil Society

Fuck You! (Strong letter to follow…)
That was a telegram we sent once in the early 80’s when we wanted to bust somebody’s balls, back when I was a real estate developer in Colorado. Our sense was that, when you’ve got someone by the nuts, their heart and mind will surely follow. I was often accused of being an attorney as I personally prepared and executed the contracts, zoning documents, financing agreements and property descriptions needed to upgrade the land we’d optioned or (heaven forbid!) purchased.

In those days I wore expensive suits, red suspenders (we called them “braces”) and I always stood alone before the City Councils and County Commissioners, doing what most developers hire attorneys to do for them: Transform unzoned, worthless land into zoned properties with designated areas for commercial, apartment, industrial and single-family uses. It was modern alchemy: you walked into a municipal hearing owning a worthless option to buy a worthless field and you walked out with 120 acres worth $1 per square foot (x 43,560 sq. ft. per acre–you do the math). It was a heady experience and a galvanizing phase in my life.

I recall that time because I’ve had a lot of experience with lawyers and public officials and with people who use their corporate shield to do things they’d never do personally. And I want to embrace and extend an idea Jeff Jarvis came up with.

Yesterday, Jeff sounded a call for bloggers who are lawyers to defend those among us who do what we have a right to do and therefore attract the attention of humanoid ciphers, attorneys, working for corporate drones who perceive copyright as an excuse to rent the fabric of civilization as we know it–and as a civil society should be conducted:

The latest case: Jason Kottke did some great reporting and posted audio and then a transcript of Ken Jennings’ loss on Jeopardy, the worst kept secret in Hollywood this side of Michael Jackson’s weirdness. Sony lawyers contacted Jason, first telling him to take the audio down, then telling him to take the transcript down (even though the same details were reported in the Washington Post). Now Jason — a pioneer in this ‘sphere, a damned Davey Crockett of blogging — is thinking about giving up the blog. He’s feeling the chill.

You’ll all remember when Robert Cox felt a similar chill from The New York Times’ lawyers until (a) he got some help from pro bono lawyers from blogs and (b) saner souls prevailed at The Times and they came to a swift and civilized agreement. Nonetheless, we know that Robert, too, felt the chill. We all do when lawyers descend upon us. Civilians can’t afford the fight. And that’s just the point, of course.

How could that audio excerpt and transcript–free PR–constitute a jeopardy to the fat cats who happen to “own” the “rights” to the sounds uttered that night, for which everyone was paid obscene amounts of money? These intimidations are promoted by the inhouse and outhouse lawyers because it costs them nothing. Why not up the ante?

Jeff’s hope is to inspire a Blogger’s Legal Aid Society to defend bloggers, and it shouldn’t take more than six months if everyone works hard at it. I’m not as moderate as Jeff and I’m much less patient. I want to rip these drones a new asshole. Every cohort of our society is exercising power as never before and we–the bloggers who really have the power–have no response to litigation. Wake up bloggers! We hold all the cards. We buy our ink by the TeraByte!

Let’s do what bloggers do best. Out the fuckers! There’s a list of names hiding behind every one of these pissant actions brought against one of our own. All of their names are easily discoverable. There are corporate officers, listed in 10Q’s and 10K’s. There are attorneys and partners and judges of record ruling on all these foolish motions. They have work and home street addresses, club affiliations and, if we’re lucky, discoverable dalliances. There are a thousand bloggers for every one of these ciphers, a googleplex of data about most of them and more to be gained if someone bothers to hire a PI or dig into it, all of it public knowledge, but unavailable to the public record until we act.

That a lawyer’s call would quiet Jason Kottke’s voice is an affront to free speech and a violation of something far more powerful–our collective outrage. What do we bloggers do better than anybody? We know how to google and to describe and to crosslink and to hang on to facts like bulldogs. As the N’Yawkers shouted at the Green Goblin as they pelted him from the 59th Street Bridge:

YO! You attack one of us, you attack all of us!

Any action we resent deserves to be exposed. Is our overreaction fair? Of course not! Given the overwhelming weight of our collective attention, it’s incredibly unfair to those who, until now, have held all the cards. They have status to defend, reputations to uphold, power to secure.

Why do you care?

Fisk ’em!

These lawyers are paper tigers.

  • Who, specifically, contacted Jason?
  • What did the letter say and who signed it?
  • What’s the name of the law firm and who are its partners?
  • What other cases are they currently arguing?
  • Before which judges?
  • What actions have been brought against the firm and its people?
  • What have they been accused of, by whom?
  • What will we find when we follow their money?

File something with their bar association. We may not be big individually, but we are mighty in the aggregate. Jason can’t be everywhere but we already are.

Confronted by our awesome aggregated conversation, conjecture and conclusions, blackbirds wheeling on a whim, they will fold their briefs (perhaps soiling them) and retire, trembling, to the sidelines. My suggestions:

  1. If called by a lawyer, calm your mind and lower your pulse.
  2. Ask politely that they put it in writing.
  3. Take the letter to your city or county’s Public Recorder’s Office.
  4. File it for the public record for a small fee.
    (you may enter anything into the public record, even a movie stub).
  5. Scan the letter and post it online as a GIF and a PDF.
  6. List the official record number.
  7. Let us do the rest.

None of this is fair to the lawyers who do this because they’re only doing their job. Tough noogies. In every transition of power, force is projected by the rising elite against the old, and careers and reputations are lost and individuals are hurt. It is the way of nature. The question is, are we bloggers willing to discover and expose the words and identities of the individuals, having no fear of retribution, who threaten our friend Jason? We’re certainly willing to track down every other detail that interests us, why not when one of us is attacked?

The exercise of real power is never fair. In the last year there’s been a shift of power to citizen journalists who simply examine the public record and report what we’ve learned. We must
rise up now that they have come for Jason, for they will surely come for us next.

“Never give in — never, never, never, never in nothing great or small . . . Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
—Winston Churchill

12:29:34 PM    

Since you Asked, Frank…

Frank Paynter has asked why we blog and, like blackbirds wheeling together, bloggers are showing their respect for Frank by flocking to answer.

I started because Doc Searls and I were having marathon phone calls, enjoying our echo chamber. As Dave Winer had exhorted him, Doc pushed me into blogging, perhaps just to get us off the phone.

I have a genetic need to work out my thoughts, hopes and resentments on ‘paper’. So my blog does for me what legal pads once did.

I keep blogging because I’ve met so many great people like you through this medium. I’m amazed to be introduced to a blogger I’ve never met, and our conversation picks up where it left off.

Out of the threads of our now-shared thoughts, hopes and resentments, we’re making a quilt of our common sense of how things should work. Each individual piece of our quilt stands on its own, but collectively a better picture emerges than any tapestry one of us might weave alone.

But enough about me. Whadda you think of my latest post?

Thanks for asking this question, which seems to be blogger flypaper.

8:28:41 AM    

Kid Heaven


In 1954-56, shortly after they filmed Miracle on 34th Street, my father was the manager of the Fifth floor of Macy’s Herald Square. At that time, his floor, an entire New York city block, had only two departments: Toys and Sporting Goods. My Dad. I don’t recall making a big enough fuss over that with my friends.

The 5th Floor was where Santa Clauses listened. Not just The Santa Claus, because there had to be more than one to handle the crowds. So there was a maze which the kids wound through, subdivided into many queues. My dad hired the Macy’s Santa Clauses. 9 full time, 5 part time and 4 Saturday-only.

My dad was very high up in planning the Thanksgiving Day Parade. The first planning meeting was the Monday after Thanksgiving. It would have been the day after Thanksgiving, but that was their biggest day of the year. In 1955, I think it was, the union men who walked with the ropes that held down the big balloons threatened to walk off the job, without the balloons. My dad was one of the executives assigned to walk along with each teamster to avert disaster. Sitting in the VIP bleachers, I was proud of him, standing ready to spring into action to save Mighty Mouse from disposal by the irresponsible union men who would not be content with the fair terms that nice men like my dad arranged for them.

Macy’s looks much the same and it even has some of the funky old wooden escalators installed by Otis, probably in the 1920s. But toys aren’t as profitable as clothes and perfume, which they annoyingly spray in your face on the first floor. Macy’s has become a real estate deal, with many departments rented to the brands they sell.

But that’s not how it was in Kid Heaven. Happy Thanksgiving.

5:56:10 AM