Tag: import100207

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Jefferson would be delighted:

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

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

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

Nothing but Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12:17:55 AM    

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

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

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

The correct answer:

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

12:23:54 AM    

Glenn Reynolds:

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

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

The Right Stuff Way

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

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

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

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

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

Get Over Yourself!

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

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

The Enemy

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

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

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

5:49:09 PM    

Adina Levin reconvenes our conversation nicely:

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

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

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

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

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

6:18:07 PM    

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

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

Self-hosted Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging for Dollars

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

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

10:51:59 AM    

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)]