Escapable Logic

                                    holiday update

FADMINISPHERE The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

ASSMOSIS The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

BLAMESTORMING Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

CUBE FARM An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people’s heads pop up over the walls to see what’s going on.

OHNOSECOND That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you’ve just made a BIG, uncorrectable, mistake.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE The fine art of whacking the shit out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

SALMON DAY The experience of spending an entire day swimming up stream only to get screwed and die in the end.

SEAGULL MANAGER A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

SITCOMs (Single Income, Two [or Three] Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

6:56:05 PM    

Surprising news from our week in Iowa: People in the heartland may be as appalled by the No Secure Home initiative as people on the coasts. The first hint was an article by Charley Reese, a Southern Christian conservative, with his take on the Homeland Security Department:

The new Department of Homeland Security will merge 22 federal agencies and 170,000 federal employees into one monstrous bureaucracy. It will not make America safer.

After all, the key agencies most directly involved in fighting terrorism are excluded. They are the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department, not to mention the National Security Agency. So, if the most important intelligence agencies are left as separate agencies, what do they hope to accomplish by consolidating less-important agencies?

It’s bad enough they picked a name George Orwell might have thought of, but they are overselling this to the American public. It will take many months, probably even years, to actually put it together, and it is a rule of thumb in government that the bigger the bureaucracy, the harder it is to manage.

Furthermore, you can count on the fact that in this long process of consolidation, the individual agencies will have their work disrupted. So under the most optimistic projections, the immediate effect will be less efficiency and effectiveness, not more. I hasten to add, of course, that only God knows how the Immigration and Naturalization Service could possibly be more inefficient and inept than it already is.

So, OK, I’m like old Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia. I can’t think of anything good to say about this new monster bureaucracy. The only cheerful thing I can think of is what a British aristocrat, who hated us, said more than a century ago:

“God looks out for fools, drunks and the United States of America.” I sure hope that still holds.

Sounds like common sense.

Funny how you can use a phrase for, like, forever and still learn a new meaning for it. “Common Sense” has always seemed to mean something like horse sense – the lowest common denominator opinion; a kind of base line body of knowledge obviously valid but so diffuse as to be meaningless.

But this week I suddenly get a more interesting, cultural sense of the term. It’s our collective sense of how things ought to be, ever in contrast to how they are. Charley Reese taps in to our common sense of how governments should be designed in order to show how crazy this new level of bureaucracy is.

Wherever you are on the political spectrum, the Homeland Security Department’s scope and intrusiveness is an affront to your sense of what Washington should be doing. True conservatives shouldn’t buy this tar baby and liberals shouldn’t either. Perhaps our common sense of what’s sensible will join to dismantle this turkey before it plucks us. Are there other indications that the people aren’t so far apart on the overreaching security-industrial complex?

The Little Magazine That Could

I have low expectations for midwestern regional magazines distributed in motel rooms – my superior attitude toward them is disgusting, anticipating the hunky-dory school of journalism and Let’s-get-us-some-more-bidness boosterism. But when I picked up a copy of Midwest Today at the Best Western Long Branch motel in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I was attracted to its end page, The Update and the Low Down. Five short essays I would have devoured in my favorite Blog Rolls:

1. A listing of recent wins by clients of Tom Daschle’s lobbyist wife Linda: L-3 Inc.‘s flawed bomb-sniffing devices, which the FAA is required by the Congress to purchase; American Airlines‘ opposition to safety regs, while still nabbing $583 million in bailout grants. The author, Jon McIntosh, notes that the Daschels have refused to release their tax returns.
2. A Teddy Roosevelt quote: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” (Of course, Teddy wasn’t the kind of guy to sit out a war, and took a fanatic’s bullet in the chest).
   The quote is cited in contrast to a warning to Ohio State University students that they were subject to arrest and expulsion if they even silently protested instructions from George II. OSU’s Richard Hollingsworth, who surely has better things to do, “urged” the students to give Bush “a thunderous ovation“.
   Police, threatening arrests, escorted away those who silently turned their backs. Is this how you want your kids to be trained to think for themselves?
3. Al Gore was subjected to extra screening on his way to and from a speech in Madison Wisconsin. “Just wanted to harass him, I guess.”
4. Chekhov would get it: The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (“It’s what’s for dinner“) is controlled, according to small ranchers, by multinational companies and large factory farming operations, and collects $1 per head sold – the “Beef Checkoff” fee. “Checkoff dollars are used to to position poor quality, heavily processed products in direct competition with pure, American beef,” according to Steve and Jeanne Charter, who were fined $12,000 by the USDA for refusing to pay 250 Checkoff Dollars recently (the USDA could have fined them $1.25 million). A South Dakota Judge has ruled the fee unconstitutional, so the NCBA is appealing the ruling, presumably paying attorney’s fees with Checkoff Dollars. Maybe it’s about why the USDA acts as collection agency for the NCBA.
5. A review of High and Mighty: SUVs, the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles, and How They Got That Way. This was the most surprising entry of all, quoting the author, Keith Bradsher of the New York Times: [SUV drivers] “tend to be people who are insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors or communities.”
   Whew! Even I found those judgments over the top, but apparently not Midwest Today.

That got my attention, coming as it did on the heels of Charley Reese’s anti-imperialist sentiments the day before, so I looked through the articles. In addition to tips on antique hunting and affordable elegance, I found:

• The Fight to Save Big Muddy -How America’s longest river is endangered by poor water management practices, mostly the Army Corps of Engineers “The Corps of the Problem?“
• The Gathering Storm – Could We Be on the Verge of Another Depression Like 1929? Robert Kuttner notes that,
  “What deregulation has produced is an economy and a culture rooted in conflicts of interest.
  “The SEC already had the power to police most of these, but when Bill Clinton vetoed Newt Gingrich’s bill that made it almost impossible for investors to sue for securities fraud, Congress – with the support of many Democrats – passed it over Clinton’s veto.”
• Merge and Monopolize [apple] The FCC’s Michael Powell is on a Deregulation Binge. Includes a chart of consolidated st
  ation ownership topped, of course, by Clear Channel’s 1231 stations in 190 markets.
• End of the Church Age? A rant against radio evangelist Harold Camping, whose megamaniacal crusade is to usurp local churches as HE becomes the voice of God over his 38 stations and 107 translators.
• Grant Wood Not Be Amused How the artist’s family is using copyright to block the reproduction of American Gothic on the Iowa U.S. quarter. However, a judge had had thrown out the family’s right-of-privacy claim in 1981, so the Quarter commission is pressing on (so to speak).
  “We suspect the bohemian Grant, who delighted in bringing art to to the masses, would unhitch those bib overalls of his and bend over to give [the family] a moon shot to rival NASA’s.” (Let’s hope Disney stays out of this).
• Alarm  over logging old-growth forests in the Black Hills and elsewhere.
• The World Health Organization’s findings linking fertilizers to Alzheimer’s.
• Concerns over recently approved nuclear waste caravans planning to pass within 1/2 mile of 50 million Americans.
• Public Being Misled by food producers’ new authorization to label irradiated food as “pasteurized.” Iowa’s Dem Senator Tom Harken added the provision to an agriculture bill recently. Agribusiness PACs contributed $192,138 over the last 3 years.

I’m not just commenting on how little I had to do last week. There’s a bright light here. If we, like the constitution, relish free speech, right of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, etc., we need to band together with those we may previously disagreed with, the way Virginians and Bostonians fought side by side so long ago.

Band with Your Brothers

If you’re as sick and tired of being sick and tired as I am, we should try an experiment. Let’s each reach out to someone on the other end of the political spectrum and find the important things we have in common rather than the trivial ideologies that have separated us.

We are being held hostage by bureaucrats and politicians and CEOs whom we wouldn’t consider for odd jobs in our little operations. Why should we submit to their agendas?

It’s not Republicans vs. Democrats or conservatives vs. liberals, it’s us vs. THEM. People vs. big organizations using people’s money against people’s interests. If you’re against big government – as you should be – then also oppose companies big enough to influence governments.

The current administration is oppressing all citizens with its own version of big government – in the most virulent form we’ve ever seen – bureaucracies that Republicans won’t try to dismantle. Without the Republicans’ traditionally trustworthy counterbalance against big gummint, we may be facing the darkest time in our history.

As Charley Reese pointed out, FDR, the legendary big-government guy, had about 15 people on staff while fighting his world war. George W’s got 3,000 bureaucrats directing the biggest military of all time and he still can’t find a 6′ 4″ Arab on dialysis. Isn’t this a good time for less government, fewer intrusions and more candor?

Now that’s a project for our Common Sense of how our country should operate.

9:34:47 PM    

I lost count during my hiatus, pondering the things to appreciate. Since Breakdown Leads to Breakthrough, the current times are an orgy of gratitude if you like breakthroughs as I do. To be thankful, we need to be working on the right things, as is happening so much in the web world, rather than on the wrong things, which has been perpetually the case.

There’s a current forked meme that I hope we let go of so we can put our energy into some ideas more useful than these old illusions:

• Companies need to start acting ethically – like they used to!
• Politicians need to start acting ethically – like they used to!

I enjoy reading rants by Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and John Robb among others, pointing out the excesses and stupidity of businesses and their political tools, screwing the people who are their consumers while taking care of their real customers. These smart guys still believe we should expect something else from companies and their toadies.

Like love and war, business and politics have never had a standard of fairness nor will they ever. The media have always exhorted politicians and businesses to be fair, so we (via our parents) assumed there must be a way they could be.

Let’s stop barking up that tree.

Corporate “Ethics” the Mistaken Identity

There are two kinds of people under our legal system: humans and corporations. The law grants corporations the same rights and legal protections as humans. If a human hurt as many people as did Enron, they’d be ostracized at church, school, club, work, etc. People are hard on their peers, but companies aren’t, and that’s the problem.

That corporations are treated as people is a legislative accident, as explained so skillfully by Marjorie Kelly in The Divine Right of Capital, which tracks the legislation which inadvertently declared them to be persons.

Her larger point is that we place a hugely disproportionate emphasis on the rights of the entities which nominally “own” a company – its shareholders – to the detriment of all other stakeholders – customers, employees, the economy, the environment. All property once belonged to the king but the world was able to move beyond the divine right of kings doctrine. She wonders if we might move beyond our current worship of the “divine right of capital.”

Written before the full force of the corporate meltdown, Marjorie Kelly’s point is even more potent today, with an even darker implication:

Holy Shit! Corporate equities don’t even benefit the shareholders! The corporate structure seems to favor only its elite stakeholders – investment bankers, brokers, auditors, bureaucrats, etc. The form fails at the only justification for its existence – that it provides capital for innovation and growth – since we know that small groups and the open source movement are far better at organizing for innovation.

With its primary rationale debunked, how long will it take to innovate a new organizing force that won’t dissipate its participants’ vitality, creativity and savings? The corporate structure has changed little since the days of wooden ships and iron tyrants. Don’t we imagine that a self-organizing force might be supported by the Internet? Surprise! Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock did in 1979, calling it the adhocracy, which is how most creative projects are developed today – movies, music and non-Redmond Internet software (maybe even Redmond, if you count temps).

Fighting for Survival

Our conception of companies as big bad wolves is part of the problem. Any company that really believes it has a lock on profits and market share behaves like a benign dictator – as public utilities and banks once did. But when any organism feels threatened, it will do anything to save itself (as will the chieftains who know they may never again lead another company).

Companies spend about 5% of their time plotting the takeover of the world, but 95% of the time struggling for survival, as they see it. This is what isn’t obvious to outsiders. They cannot afford to be less than ruthless, because every fiscal quarter holds the threat of do-or-die, not the promise of everlasting benevolent rule.

What would you not do to prevent your family from being turned out into the streets? For those who have risen to a  visibly elevated status – CEO, bishop, Representative, etc., demotion to the wretched life the rest of us live is the end of life as they know it, so they’ll do anything to hang on. Once that line has been crossed, defeat or exposure is a double threat, since there’s an impeachment or indictment in the wings.

Sound extreme? Why do you think Dick Cheney disappeared? Don’t you think his conflicts of interest are actionable? How about George II?

Saddam Hussein is out of options. He can’t stop being “evil” because, if he’s ever caught, he’ll be reduced to a sub-human, from his viewpoint. You know, someone who can’t execute people for fun.s

The Only Answer Left Standing

Sherlock Holmes famously said (and Commander Data reminded us) that when you remove all the possibilities which are untrue, then the one that is left, no matter how implausible, must be true. The implausibility that we must accept is that there is no way to redeem the corporate mechanism. Like trying to save a gangrenous limb, society must amputate this hopeless form of organizing work and resources.

Once we see an alternate way to organize resources, corporate structures can blow away like dead leaves. The open source movement is pointing in the right direction. My regular rant readers will recognize my regular answer – an even-handed transaction  system with distributed data and no central greed point.

I’m thankful this weekend that things have broken down to such a sorry state that the obvious breakthrough is on the horizon.

7:49:31 PM    

Doc Searls insists that the Internet is a place, not a distribution channel. He and the rest of the Cluetrain authors (our clue trainers?) see the Internet as a place, not a content pipe, and specifically, as a marketplace, and he reminds us that markets are conversations. I am Doc’s eager disciple in that assertion, but not all conversations are markets. Only conversations about value are markets.

Doc also cautions us that consumers aren’t customers. Customers are those irritating people whose approval the business lusts for, while consumers are the invisible people whose approval is only incidental to business operations and values. In his current Creative Commons interviewby Lisa Rein, he illustrates how consumers are not the customers of the media business:

“Consumers of commercial TV have no economic relationship whatsoever with their local NBC station, with the network, or with the producers of shows. All the “content” is just bait. Chum on the waters. The commercial broadcasting marketplace is a conversation that exists entirely between the media, advertisers and intermediaries such as advertising agencies.“

That set me to thinking about the many other cases where the people I deal with in a transaction see me as a consumer and not a customer. Who is my contact working for – me or someone else?

Employees work for their boss, not for the customer. Most businesses have so many little transactions that it really doesn’t matter to them if they lose somebody’s business. So if an employee pisses off a ‘customer’ because of a company policy, their boss will invariably honor their decision. If I’m passed up to a supervisor, I may get satisfaction, but I’m more likely to be told that I just need to understand that company policy is immutable. Sound familiar?

Like commercial broadcasters, such an operation has customers, but they aren’t you and me. Their customers are their distributors and, more distantly, retailers or product reps. Often the heart and soul of management is owned by Wall Street Analysts, not the consumers of the products.

The farmer’s customer is the co-op or the meat packer. If that customer needs green tomatoes for easier shipping, that’s what the farmer produces. If livestock must be stoked with hormones and antibiotics because of the way the jobber handles the product, that’s what the farmer does.

A Nation of Shopkeepers

In 1967, I arrived in Taichung which was then a sleepy little town in central Taiwan with no large enterprises, just streets full of tiny shops. To American eyes, it looked like there was not enough commercial critical mass to make it economically viable. Finally, we concluded, it worked just because they sold stuff to each other.

Napolean famously derided the English as “a nation of shopkeepers” – presumably in contrast to the superior French. At Waterloo in 1812, of course, the English canceled Napolean’s franchise.

In a nation of shopkeepers, most interpersonal transactions matter to the participants. Perhaps a nation of shopkeepers has a higher cohesiveness than one where transactions are arbitrary or taken for granted – in short, where purchasers merely consume rather than customize – by conversation – their choices. Certainly, our nation has historically been driven by a culture where conversations in the marketplace mattered to the participants. The evidence is only anecdotal, but certainly it feels like the sellers’ people don’t care as they once did. If they don’t, it’s because their customer is their boss, not the person across the counter or on the support line.

So, if a nation of shopkeepers and their customers confronts a nation of marketers and consumers, do the shopkeepers have an edge?

All Talk and All Action

What’s the most dynamic segment of the computer industry? Open Source!

Holy shit – Open Source is onlya conversation! Is software that no one buys even part of the computer industry? If you need ratification of Cluetrain’s gospel that markets are conversations, just consider that this vital phenomenon is all talk and all action but no money.

We haven’t developed the vocabulary to credit the open source dynamic for what it is rather than a puzzling aberration of hackerdom. Once we have the vocabulary – a way of measuring quality vs. cost – we’ll elevate open source to the pinnacle it deserves: the most productive process in an economy obsessed with productivity.

Is this Internet Place a Market or a User Group?

Internet product conversations rarely involve the producing company, which denies product flaws by not discussing them. The users trade rants and workarounds for those few products good enough to ridicule. Until the producers participate, the marketplace conversation is short circuited – not a market, but an after market. And we’re not customers but a User Group.

So we need to transform this after-the-fact bitch session into that elusive marketplace conversation that our Clue Trainers are exhorting us on to. Einstein once said that we value what we can count but doesn’t matter, instead of valuing what matters but can’t be counted.

Naturally, Xpertweb proposes to add to our counting tools the grades and comments for each transaction, so we can start to value what really does matter. And to always deal with people who work only for the buyer.

2:39:12 PM    

I’m in Iowa City with my nephew Greg Gholson. He’s a terrific young man with a world of potential, who loves the Internet and who makes great grades. I’m encouraging him to start his own blog, so we can all hear his thoughts as he navigates 7th grade.

Send me an email to Greg, using the link to the left. I’ll pass it on to Greg so he can hear from some of the smart people on the web.
11:47:09 AM    

7:08:36 PM    

Thanks to Andy Fragen for replying to my plea for help on the discussion group. After doing a complete re-install and copying the latest weblogData.root, etc. and re-publishing, the site still didn’t work, and all my archived content was still missing.

The issue was that I had failed to update my ftp info in Prefs, so it was no doubt publishing to my UserLand space, not here.

I guess it’s time to go write an essay….
7:21:07 PM    

Who knows where the phrase came from, but it’s interesting that we think it’s Islamic; or maybe Christian. Actually, the protocol is built into all species. If you meet someone who’s not of your clan, kill him or run from him seems to be the rule. Many tribes have a term that translates as “human” and another word that means the opposite. It turns out the first term refers to tribe members and the second to non-tribe members.

Howard Bloom, in The Lucifer Principle, describes how cuddly a nest of rats is. They snuggle and preen each other like a litter of kittens. But drop a rat from another nest in there, and they tear the newcomer from limb to limb.

The harsh but interesting experiment is to take one of the nest mates out, clean off the scent, and roll him around in another nest’s materials until he smells like one of the others. You guessed it: drop him in with his loving kin and they tear him from limb to limb. Death to the strange-smelling-carrier-of-my-genes.

Bloom uses the story to demonstrate the beginnings of the meme as a support system for the selfish gene. It’s a reasonable enough marker to make the hostilities manageable, except for the occasional meddling researcher.

The Inclusion Revolution

I’ve suggested before that we, the inclusionists, are the interlopers here. We’re inclusionists because we’re computer/Internet/blogging people with real problems to solve and we need real help from each other. If you need to get your server back up, you’ll take help from anyone. If you disagree with someone’s sound bite, her blog may let you in on the quality of her thinking, and you’ll begin to see your similarities hidden among your differences.

When you’re troubleshooting, the enemy of your problem is your friend.

Troubleshooting doesn’t have much of a history. It’s not clear that prehistoric humans even possessed consciousness, if you buy Julian Jayne’s point of view. In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, He argues convincingly that, until about 22,000 years ago, the halves of the brain didn’t communicate so well, so their world was not causal but inspirational. When Homer describes the gods speaking to the Greek warriors, Jaynes takes it literally: the voice came from outside the brain the warriors normally used. If you’ve ever tried to manage a rigorous data or IT project through an organization, you know that most of the forces acting on its design are about turf, image, wishful thinking and ego as they are about listening to the technology.

Now that most of us have to deal with computers and complicated systems, we’re developing new skills. The adoption seems glacial, but it’s happening.

In his current InfoWorld article, XML for the rest of us, the ever insightful Jon Udell describes the enabling technology for developing useful XML schemas to map Office 11 docs to company needs:

…you can bind one or more XSLT stylesheets to the [Word] document, each of which can generate WordML styles and formatting.

The XML expertise needed to create schemas and XSLT transformations is scarce today. Once Office 11 hits the streets, its mainstream applications could arguably commoditize those XML skills more quickly and broadly than have Web services technologies.

Naturally, my ears prick up at the mention of carbon-based solutions, since that’s the world Xpertweb wants to support.

Shared Problems, Shared views

The nearly atrophied visionary within me has a sliver of hope. What if a public utility, Find-The-Expert, were developed, available to all and decentralized enough to be as scalable as the BIND DNS protocol. What if the mere availability of the right expert at the right moment unearthed a mountain of expertise to contain the reservoir of confusion that technology never promised but delivered anyway?

What if Udell’s recruits for building WordML XSLT transformations and WiMedia’s need for circuit designs and HP’s need for printer drivers and our useful web logs could be found and indexed and groomed and rewarded and partnered with to master these technologies that have made us so efficient we don’t have weekends any more?

If enough of us emigrate to a virtual workspace on the Internet, solving common problems to realize common dreams, we might learn that people are not believers or infidels, but rather children who become parents.

4:24:13 PM    

It looks like a religious war. Muslims of all stripes, secular and fundamentalist, railing against the United States hegemony (and its Israeli partner), willing to do desperate, suicidal acts to force everyone to read the Q’uran and to stone Debby the next time she does Dallas.

But it’s not. It’s a war over mental protocols that’s as old as life on earth. In Global Brain, My (unwitting) mentor Howard Bloom describes two kinds of personalities: Conformity Enforcers and Diversity Enhancers:

Conformity Enforcers are the key to any successful life form: bacteria, slime mold, rodents, and humans. They’re also the key to successful superorganisms – bacteria colonies, rat nests, human families, tribes, nations, Republicans and Democrats. Without 99.9% conformity, nothing would be stable enough to work – physiology, language, economics, traffic, software, TCP/IP, HTML.

Diversity Enhancers are the key to progress (sometimes called evolution – ssshhhh) – why we no longer walk on all fours, how the individual cells of slime mold learned to come together to be slime mold, but only when necessary. How so many Americans learned to loath racism and why Islam fundamentalists can read better than their ancestors could before Muhammad told them the Qu’ran was important.

It’s a weak argument if you’re a fundamentalist because you don’t believe in evolution, so why take an interest in a distinction based on it? We can address their objections later. The rest of us seem to need some intellectual footing in this quandary over whether to colonize Iraq. Like quantum states, both viewpoints are valid and both must be present for our culture or any superorganism to thrive.

Like any blog, this writer and my one remaining reader have agreed to conform to rigid protocols. Twenty-six specifically shaped symbols are arranged according to ancient rules and interspersed with modern symbols (“<b><i>symbols</i></b>”) and then moved across glass and wires according to rules so strict that only computers can enforce and carry out the requirements.

If you tire of all this rigid discipline and escape to a virgin wilderness, you’ll find yourself conforming to rules even more rigid, imposed by elements and predators so exacting that a single misstep can be deadly. So the next time we congratulate ourselves on our radical non-conformism, we might remember that the most edgy behavior is played out on the thinnest margins of our collective habits. Mike Moore has more in common with George Bush II than he has differences.

Conversely, the self-satisfied suburbanites, businessmen and politicians who insist on their narrow vision are blind to the radical inventions that make their existence possible. Most of us, if transported to 1776, would side with the British, as did most of the successful people of that time. Like heirs to industrial age fortunes, the beneficiaries of past innovation resist most innovations.

All of that is biological, enforced by our ROM-based DNA and reinforced by our RAM-based upbringing. The only thing interesting about those distinctions is that so few of us are willing to acknowledge our need for conformity and diversity. Until we collectively get behind both needs, there will be no constructive engagement.

On Wednesday, John Robb pointed to a terrific video of Bill Clinton addressing a group at Berkeley. After the predictable love-in stage of the award ceremony, Clinton spoke of the greatest current threat to the world – the insistence, by people who know they have all the answers, to the right to change everybody else, or subjugate them. Because of the zip codes I’ve known, I’ve met a lot more Christians like that than Muslims. Such fundamentalism is their threat, not their ideologies, which are just details.

Clinton suggested that we need to emphasize what we have in common rather than our differences. Jay Leno would probably point out that he may mean that no politician should be outraged at lies from another politician, but the point is valid. Civilized people understand that they don’t have all the answers and it pisses off their own people. He cites the fact that Gandhi was killed by a Hindu and Anwar Sadat by an Egyptian. Much abuse is domestic, raging at the diversity enhancers.

The only problem is that such appeals don’t work and never have, since we’re wired to discover and attack differences.

However, where jawboning is useless, economics has a chance. Sellers are willing to ignore their differences with buyers and buyers are grateful to those who solve their problems. Those are functional relationships, so we should concentrate on them, rather than their opposite which are, I suppose, dysfunctional relationships.

Perhaps that distinction lies at the heart of the rage that patriarchs, fundamentalists and conservatives feel toward people who question their rigidity in the bright light of the Agora, as Socrates did. Out there, you can’t yell, “Because I said so!,” which works so well with family members who don’t go to school to think for themselves. That’s the real problem fundamentalists have with scientific education, television and the devil’s own work, the Internet. The catalyst is satellite TV, not religious beliefs. Get a bunch of Christian and Islamic fundamentalists together and they’d have the rules written and the world carved up as speedily as did Hitler and Mussolini.

So naturally, I see an Internet-based peer-to-peer economy as a candidate to get the patriarchal fundamentalists’ followers to admit that they were just mouthing the words so they could get the attention of the influential patriarchs. Once the hierarchies are marginalized by open source transaction web forms, people will do directly what they thought they needed the patriarchs for – reach better markets for their energy and engage their genes for usefulness.

 

11:05:38 PM    

Dean Kamen’s Stirling Engine

Dean Kamen gets a lot of press. He’s one of those off-scale smart guys, which causes many of the rest of us to celebrate when it looks like he’s going to stumble. His Segway “scooter” got attention for being a paradigm-shifter – maybe because it can turn on a pair of dimes?

This evening on 60 Minutes II, Kamen unveiled the Stirling engine that has been written about since summer. One version is designed for the 3rd world, running on charcoal or wood chips, generating electricity and 10 gallons of UV-purified water per day. Here are some Kamen quotes I got this morning off the blog of Aaron Swartz , another off-scale brain, 16 years old, who named Kamen one of his superheroes. I had a hunch he’d be revealing the Stirling tonight. Here’s what he said about it.

Stirling Engine

It’s no surprise the same people who need electricity need water. So instead of plugging it into your home, you can plug your home into it. Give 4 billion people transportation, communication, electricity and water. One problem: these people have no money. Need a really good invention so we can solve this positively. They need to be a resource, not a consumer. Look what happens when everyone knows exactly what they don’t have and can’t get.

Education

We need to create demand and show kids what’s real and important. Instead, they suffer from obscene distractions: rock star, basketball player. Their only other choice is flipping burgers and selling dope. Most of the country is women and minorities, but their sum makes up less than 11% of all technical jobs.

Average kid doesn’t know a scientist or an engineer. Don’t believe any are women or minorities or have fun. We need to convince these minorities to participate. The rock stars and sports players aren’t going to do it. All you technologists get an A+ for doing great things but a D- for being socially responsible. So we need the Olympic Committee of Smarts. FIRST. Kids doing things with real adults that do things that are important. Kids have the advantage, since it’s not what we don’t know that limits us, it’s what we know that isn’t so. Have to show the kids that it’s every bit as fun as shooting hoops but there are a few more jobs available.

It took off. This year we had 17 cities hold regional events. Big cities. We are creating demand. But we’re missing mentors that understand technology and can show kids that science isn’t middle-aged men in lab coats. We need your support. You’re all busy. If you’re not busy, I don’t want you. But you need to participate.

Your technology isn’t going to do what you think it will. Answering machines were supposed to make sure we can talk to everyone, but now we use them to screen calls. Cell phones were supposed to connect us to everyone, but instead they separate us from the people in the same room. We won’t solve the digital divide with more technology.

The most important thing we can invent is inventors. If we keep having more people with less resources the world is going to be an ugly place.

The Mentor Engine

Kamen’s putting as much energy into his mentor-based Education program – FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Xpertweb is also designed to be a low-energy engine that uses common resources, but to generate mentors, not water. Where Kamen wants to inspire inventors and engineers, we’re more interested in everyday folks doing something, anything, for other people. Kamen rightly believes that, given our current economic structures, we need lots of technologists to bring down the cost of getting useful inventions into third world villages.

But what if some part of the economy routes around our current economic structures? Xpertweb opens that door, but it doesn’t care what people do, as long it’s of real value to others.

I wonder when an Xpertweb user in the US will mentor someone in Bangalore. I wonder how long it will then take for a software engineer in Bangalore to mentor his contractor into Xpertweb.

You could not design the convoluted sequence by which a contractor’s sister in a village outside Bangalore uses the Xpertweb forms and PayPal to sell her exquisite scarves in Des Moines.

10:47:34 PM