The Zipless Accounting System (thanks, Erica Jong)

An obscure deliberation where our resident mad scientist defines what an accounting system does, in order to describe an instance of  a non-managed, decentralized accounting system.

Because people like money without strings attached.

Open Source – the Impossible Dream

Open source software is an economic anomaly: it shouldn’t be possible. But then, neither should soccer moms. According to economists, all work must be compensated through a managed accounting system or it doesn’t count as real work. Twelve years ago, this point was questioned by Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost business writer, in The Age of Unreason. He pointed out that an immense portion of the useful work in a society doesn’t show up in the GDP*, performed by people who aren’t paid for what they do.

*

Ever notice that, like the DJIA, the components of the Gross Domestic Product are constantly adjusted, presumably to comprise a market basket of improving indices? Einstein said something like, “We pay attention to the things we can count but don’t matter, and ignore the things that matter, but that we can’t count”

Handy’s point is that we need to be purposely unreasonable in order to do the most-needed things. For support he cites Shaw:

George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, as I must add, to the unreasonable woman.

Unreasonably, not only is Linux gaining ground against capitalism’s poster boy, Windows, and a patchy open source web server (Apache) delivers 66% of the world’s web pages, one of the world’s great software architects, Mitch Kapor, formed the Open Source Applications Foundation last week. Its purpose is to spend no less than $5,000,000 to give away a first class Personal Information Manager. The OSAF web site received 91,000 hits on its first day so obviously something’s going on here. Dan Gillmor thinks this may be just crazy enough to work.

Like Kapor, huge numbers of smart, well-employed people are staying up nights to create something worth giving to others. We on the Xpertweb team may not be in that category, but that’s certainly our purpose here.

Why do economists think this kind of activity is crazy? Maybe it’s because our culture hasn’t developed the vocabulary to put this new gift economy in perspective, though Eric Raymond has described its proportions in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

When people work within unconventional structures to deliver a product that competes well with products developed under conventional structures, then the structure they use must be acknowledged as relevant. Open source works very well, but it routinely ignores people with money, preferring acknowledgement from the hacker community as its currency. In that sense, it’s aristocratic, though our culture’s taste runs to the democratic. Mitch Kapor is a well-intentioned patron of the software arts, but a patron nonetheless.

Once Kapor’s software is released into the public domain, it will certainly be more responsive to user requests than, say, Microsoft’s code juggernauts, but it’s still not subject to free market forces. How does a real customer, clutching real but limited plastic, get someone to build me that obscure little feature I want? I know there’s someone who can do it before their morning coffee, but where is the democratic market engine to find and reward that hacker?

This is important because, like all artists, programmers like money more than they want to admit.

This design study is exploring that unconventional market engine – one that’s not yet been tried, much less proven effective. Otherwise, this would be a report and not a design study.

Open Resource: If It Looks Like a Duck…

We call it Open Resource. We imagine an unconventional structure which gets people to do things for money, yet leaves out the central feature of all the productive enterprises valued by those dismal scientists called economists: The Accounting System.

I’ve previously suggested that no one has yet figured out how to move money without a central accounting system, but that’s precisely what Xpertweb proposes to do. First we need a test for what a central accounting system does, so we can know when we’ve developed its features, which are technically trivial, and left behind its drawbacks, which are legion.

If any set of buyers and sellers reliably move funds according to published rules, they are implementing an accounting system, whether or not it’s centralized. If, in addition, those participants establish formal financial relationships whereby they reward activities that promote their collective goals, then those helpful activities are rewarded through an accounting system.

It’s a binary question: If the participants reliably and reproducibly match their payments to their promises, they constitute a collective accounting system that’s as effective as any managed centrally. If not, they don’t have an accounting system.

Armed with our test, we may be able to design protocols which inspire people to move money around as effectively as SMTP and POP3 inspire people to move words around.

2:40:14 AM    

Enough with the book reviews, already. Let’s get back to our design study.

Where were we? Oh yeah, Xpertweb: Peer-to-Peer viral microeconomy meme intended to attract loyal adherents by an unprecedented even-handed transaction protocol with superior open source e-commerce protocols, delivered using the subversive strong attractor developed by the open source movement – actually doing what it purports to do. Make the tool simple enough to use that your neighborhood butcher, baker and candlestick-maker can use real e-commerce. You know, like those burka-selling women in Afghanistan and Iraq:

1. Every transaction gets a 1-99% grade and a written comment
2. Payment is made only after the grade is given
3. A low grade from the buyer may reduce the payment
4. All buyers’ and sellers’ grades – given and received – are recorded
5. Sellers may decline requests from buyers with a poor grading record
6. No way to control the reports accumulated by the network
7. Each Xpertweb user is mentored by a power user for training and support
8. User pays mentor up to 1% of any transactions, based on the mentor’s support grades
9. User pays another 1% to the mentor’s mentor.
10. User pays another 3% to the 3 mentors in the support chain above the mentor’s mentor.

Oh. Had I left that last part out? The Xpert Web is based on the formula described in the HumanTech story on September 28. At HumanTech, each employee trained other employees who trained other employees, etc., and they all were graded by their clients for every temp assignment and were paid fees based on the population. Our hero Jeff Greenberg worked there for about 5 years and earned as much as $42,000 per month before management dismembered their Golden Goose.

Xpertweb is designed around the same algorithm with a twist: there’s no central accounting system to spread the money around. Instead, it depends on the aggregate actions of peers communicating with each other – an open resource analogy to the communal activities behind the open source software movement.

Carrot Yes, Stick No

Xpertweb proposes to decentralize what has never been done without a central accounting system. It’s designed to inspire, not direct the movement of  money among peers according to a set of published protocols.

Accounting Systems move money by putting it all in the hands of a central management. Employees are electronic records which have the right to receive money according to a formula which management may change at will. Behavior is compelled from participants because the accounting system owns the buyers’ money and controls the movement of every penny to employees and suppliers. As we know, management pays itself well to manage their accounting system.

Xpertweb records the events of a peer-to-peer transaction, whether it’s a sale or mentoring. The most important events being promises. At the end of the transaction, each party grades the other’s actions compared to the promises. One of the promises is to pay buyers and mentors as agreed. The data build an expanding web of money promised and money received.

Can it Work?

The design question is whether the web of promises so woven moves money as reliably as your average managed accounting system, dependent as it is on nothing more than the promises of its participants.

If you believe that most people are as effective (when their actions are public) at moving money when promised as are managers of accounting systems, then you have a bias for the Xpertweb protocols.

12:19:13 AM    

Howard Bloom is a disturbing man. In The Lucifer Principle, he demonstrated what Richard Dawkins simply stated in The Selfish Gene. The Lucifer Principle tells us why people can’t help doing stupid, evil things: Our genes invented you and me as mini-experiments in their drive to take over the known universe. Saddam Hussein is driven by the same imperative.

He also demonstrates that evil things are not necessarily stupid and stupid things are not necessarily evil. In fact, the term evil means nothing in a gene-driven world. His points are interesting at this moment because our republic is about to realize its imperial destiny by colonizing Iraq for oil and air bases. Most bloggers think that is a stupid, evil thing. Genetically, it’s just business as usual.

Here’s the truth we have to deal with:

• Nations, like companies, are intrinsically ruthless. You might sacrifice your life to pull your neighbor from a house fire, but nations and companies never do that for each other. Why expect anything different?
• Nations and cultures are superorganisms, like the collection of bees called a hive and the collection of surprisingly self-sufficient cells called a human.
• Like organisms, superorganisms always know where they are in the pecking order (remember grade school recess? That’s how life is in every pecking order).
• Individuals in a superorganism (you and I) depend on the superorganism’s status in its superorganistic pecking order. If your family or company or country or religion is rising in its pecking order, you’ll feel energetic and purposeful. If it’s falling, you’ll feel listless and confused. That’s the source of the energy fueling Islam and the ennui our culture is experiencing.

I Hate This Shit!

This stuff is contrary to everything I believe about how life should be lived: that strong people deal gently with each other, their strength affording them the luxury of equanimity, their reason energizing their actions.

But that kind of reasonableness also demands reason when confronted with the inquiries of Bloom, Dawkins, Blackmore and others. How can reasonable people reconcile the biological and anthropological record with our urge for a more humane existence? Denying the record would be like a fundamentalist denying natural selection because it’s not mentioned in the Bible.

Where’s MY Superorganism When I Need It?

I want a new superorganism – a culture – that reflects my values and beliefs, and I want that culture to take over the world as soon as possible. I want freedom from want through economics based on abundance, not scarcity. I want young people raised by adults confident enough to be gentle, reasonable and informed enough to mentor them skillfully. I guess I want to live in Jean-Luc Picard’s world. Above all, I want patriarchy and fundamentalism to be a distant bad dream. Is that too much to ask?

It certainly is if you’re doing well under the current system. Our best and our brightest are doing very well under the current system, so they’re not likely to be much help in this renaissance of reasonableness. We who would promote this dream (if there is a we) are probably not the best and the brightest, or we would have given up on these Victorian notions long ago. No matter how compelling our logic and our blogs, we’re not going to jawbone our culture into adopting reason and gentleness as its theme, so e-thepeople, moveon.org, and EFF need a different approach – writing our politicians is useless.

The Internet Really DOES Change Everything

But we the true belivers are not acting like we’re believers. Where are the web applications to achieve the things we say we’d like to change? How are we going to leverage the power of open source into a disciplined mechanism for attracting people who hunger for reasonableness and a virulent new Pax Internetae that sweeps undesired protocols before it and unreasonably imposes its intractable standards of reasonableness? Are we prepared to wage peace aggressively?

Doing What We Do Best – Develop a Language, Hack some Code

Who gave us bloggers and bloggees the right to be passive, scared and directionless in the face of cultures clashing over ageless hate and the illusion of scarce resources? Let’s get off our collective ass and try to do something, even if it doesn’t prove out. Why do we need permission and capital to do this stuff? Here are some design studies I’d like to see taken up:

P2P E-Commerce
That would be this Xpertweb Design Study. It’s based on a new Open Resource economic model, connecting peers around the globe. From the Xpertweb perspective, the greatest threat to world peace is the lack of a P2P linkage between faceless Islamic women who know how to make their own Burkas and prosperous western women who buy their Burkas for outrageous sums to demonstrate their solidarity with their Islamic sisters. And, of course, introduce a subversive new source of woman-controlled capital into the Arab World.

Anonymous, Reliable Internet Banking
We need a P2P system for people to store and control whatever bit of capital they can raise over the web, perhaps through Xpertweb. PayPal’s doing great but its FDIC banking partner didn’t pan out. But there must be an open source way to concentrate spendable cash in cyberspace for those Islamic women and others so their masters can’t extract it and buy guns or whiskey with it. This feels like a feminist project. Any takers?

An Electoral Collage
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 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 beca
use most politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about abortion. They do care about voters 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 the amendment is withdrawn.
This data has been communicated to Mr. Fleemer’s staff and is summarized at http://www.electoralcollege.com/fleemer."

C’mon, e-thepeople, moveon, etc. How about helping us help ourselves?

Culture-wide Blog-based Knowledge-Logs
Let’s take all blogs’ RSS feeds and slice and dice them to aggregate our combined sensibilities.
1) Create a mechanism for people to identify and define the issues they care about, and the major positions that surround each issue.
2) Inspire and help bloggers to structure their RSS feeds to expose which issues they’re discussing and where they stand on each issue.
3) Let bloggees indicate where they stand on each issue as they view it. Compile all these data points and let a million flowers bloom.

Alan Kay famously said that “it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” And, one assumes, than fighting it. Every invention starts with a design. Why not design the web applications that might take us in the right direction?

7:07:04 PM    

Howard Bloom’s Global Brain suggests that the blogging community is a self-organizing superorganism thinking like a neural network, promoting its central meme. The blogging meme would be something like,

The world is full of experts who will teach me most of what I need to know if I read their posts regularly. I will also get to know them better than if we worked in the same office for years. They give me insight, candor, depth and humanity available nowhere else.

But there’s something even more important going on. Bloggers (I think) are exposing their personal thinking to others’ debugging in the way that programmers do, and to an extent that only open source programmers do. That’s a big deal. Consider the thoughtful, respectful dialogue around Doc’s Blogo Culpa over just a hint of conflict of interest. Look around your office or PTA or condo board and see if regular folks in meatspace routinely expose strong opinions for which they expect, even demand, debugging. I’m not seeing it out there. Are you?

Who We Are and Aren’t

People who blog expect suggestions that range from helpful to inflammatory. We do it because our collective purpose is so important and because we believe in the scientific method. There have always been disciplined thinkers but it’s never been a widespread pursuit. Managers and leaders and parents and priests are rarely interested in a partnership seeking the best way to reach a goal. I guess you’d call it collective debugging. It’s the defining characteristic of the part of western society most worth preserving.

There’s a large and growing group of people who suppress collective debugging:

Fundamentalists

Fundamentalists are proud of their resistance to thoughtful discussion. Collaborative debugging vs. Fundamentalism is the war we’re engaged in, not America vs. Terrorism, Palestinians vs. Israelis, North Koreans vs. South or Islam vs. Everybody Else. The sooner we understand the core nature of the deeper conflict, we can start some real life-saving.

On September 15, 2001, the distinguished British scientist, Richard Dawkins wrote:

  Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. “Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.
   It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

But fundamentalism lies even deeper than religion. It describes any group that relies on a single creed with no allowance for discussion of “foreign” values. The Crips gang is fundamentalist, but not religious, like the cult around the Jonestown massacre. Examples of secular fundamentalism are everywhere – supporters of the O.J. acquittal, the Ku Klux Klan, most forms of patriotism, liberalism and conservatism. The problem is that science and the scientific method have reached a critical mass and a global presence. (Of course we’re not very good at disciplined thinking. The point is that we think we should be, and we try to recognize it when it shows up).

The common thread of fundamentalism is lazy, uncritical thinking. If you defer all choices to a received text, even if current, you’re abdicating Choice – the greatest gift god gave you.

The religious right’s support for a war to “defend our way of life” is an irony you’d never put in a novel. Our way of life – democracy itself – is about being able to live your life as you want while not harming others, a bear hug of diversity.

It Takes Real Faith

Just because Copernicus won the sun-centered universe debate does not mean that society bought into his methods. Patriarchy has ruled our lives forever and has a few good generations left in it. The key to patriarchy is absolute alpha male dominance of the household dialogue monologue. TV drives a stake through patriarchy and that’s why autocratic rulers are nuking up as fast as they can. They can’t stand a world with television. And the Internet? Fuggedaboutit!

The point of accepting Copernicus’ and other scientists’ views is the greatest act of faith possible. Real Faith is when you understand just enough of another’s guesses and investigative methods to trust what they report back to the rest of us. Real faith lies in trusting your annual report to 50 million lines of code built by people you’ll never meet under conditions you’d never endure, using circuits that would not work without quantum physics. Or boarding an airliner with no clue as to what Bernoulli’s theorem is about.

Real faith is not the simplistic regurgitation of an inspiring ancient text for parables to inform our daily actions. Such texts are seductive for their simple-mindedness but not very useful for taking responsibility for your actions in a world that must include diverse views. If we condone killing those who think most differently, do we then support killing those who think a little less differently?
(Doc – That sounds pacifist, but it’s not.)

People of Faith, Infiltrating From Within

There are fundamentalists everywhere. They haven’t infiltrated our democracy to tear it down from within, they’ve always been in control because they are the natives here.

We are the infiltrators with our notions of healthy diversity and a method to arrive at a truth that hasn’t been written down yet. All the hallowed texts were penned by followers of rabid iconoclasts and we are their proteges, fighting the same fight with the same kind of people: patriarchal lazy thinkers with little faith in others’ ideas and observations. They’re pissed because we’re driving a conceptual wedge between patriarchy and the young disciples they want to automate. As it has always been done.

It’s our meme and we’re sticking to it.

10:51:34 PM    comment [commentCounter (32)]

Dave Winer’s map for the way out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death:

It’s the software, dummy#:

Let’s pop the stack back to the 70’s when we did technology in Silicon Valley. Software, software, software, that should be our mantra.

Most software users would say Dave’s got it wrong. There’s not too little software, there’s too much. All the enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers who want to learn and explore new applications and scripting languages and preference panels have already done so. How many apps can one person master? I’m a maven with about a dozen software apps and conversant with another couple of dozen. I’m the go-to guy for most people I know, and most of them are way younger than I am. And I feel incredibly incompetent when confronted with a software issue, but I soldier my way through it. What do the regular folks do?

In Dave’s fondly-remembered 70’s, every new piece of software was new and compelling. Perhaps because there were so few of them. It’s like wiring your stereo. It starts as a receiver and 2 speakers and morphs slowly into a component system – you’re able to grow your dendrites at the same rate as the system. But software got away from us a long time ago.

So I’m as put off by new software as I am by late model car engines. The investment of time and energy in a new app seems like just too much hassle. It’s not an age thing – I don’t know many people 25 years younger than I who get excited about software, even if they’re in technology. Perhaps especially if they’re in technology.

I can’t pop my stack back to the 70’s, so how can the software industry pop consumers’ stacks? This is the real problem. You know what I want? I want Commander Data. I want him in my coat closet, using no resources until I have a question and then he activates, solves my problem and goes back into stasis (he might be expletive-activated). Because he’s Commander Data, he does everything almost immediately, so I’m willing to pay him a lot per minute. I’ll bet that’s what you want too: an expert on the software you’ve got, not more software to be inept with.

Carbon-based Solutions

My Commander Data exists, it’s just that he’s in the form of a few dozen skill sets, each possessed by thousands of people whom I could IM or web to, if I knew how to connect with them. For every problem I’ve got, there are lots of folks who are as good as Commander Data for that specific problem and who would be happy to help me out, especially if paid, say, $1 per minute.

They may be at help desks, but rarely, and the irritation threshold is just too high there. I need an index of “amateur” experts with proven track records who are available immediately for high per-minute rates which I only pay when I’m satisfied, which means they have to be confident that I’ll be reasonably satisfied. So we also need a reputation engine in addition to an expert index. They need to be “amateurs” for the same reason that the best bloggers are amateurs, as Dave is the first to point out.

With a decent market for instant expertise, more than software support becomes available. I’ll find wizards at Excel who can whip up an analysis by noon that would take me ’til Christmas. So why would I buy Excel? There will be online bookkeepers who’ll make my copy of Quicken irrelevant. Etc. and so on. Customers for expertise are not customers for software. If you’re in the software business, this is a nasty vision, but what other outcome is more likely? We know we’ll figure out how to link up consumers with experts who know how to do the things that software publishers wish everyone would like to learn.

If this vision is correct, the software industry will find itself at a crossroads as dicey as the one faced by the RIAA. How many experts are needed to do the specialized tasks of, say, a thousand people? Way less than a thousand is the clear answer. Do companies want their people struggling with Excel analyses when they can outsource the expertise for a fraction of the allocable resource costs? You guess, but from here it feels more like the Dreamweaver market more than the MS Office market.

Maybe the answer is Xpertweb. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. From here anyway.
7:06:21 PM    

I’m re-reading Howard Bloom’s brilliant The Lucifer Principle. Bloomis a biologist who’s interested in how neural networks (like the Internet) function, and how they are working at every level in nature, from slime mold through rats, toads, chimps and humans. The Lucifer Principle describes the biological mechanisms behind Bloom’s quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were  necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

or, as some sage said,

Behind every person, the saint and the sinner are comparing notes.

The point of neural networks is that they reflect the architecture of the Internet – lots of relatively low-power processors cooperating to exert an intelligence greater than the sum of its parts.

In The Lucifer Principle, Bloom describes 5 concepts which dominate biology, including humans. Together, they explain why we cannot keep from doing stupid, evil things:

1. The principle of self-organizing systems Replicators – bits of structure that function as minifactories, assembling raw materials, then churning out intricate products. These natural assembly units (genes are one example) crank out their goods so cheaply that the end results are appallingly expendable. Among those expendable products are you and me.
2. The superorganism We are not the rugged individuals we would like to be. We are, instead, disposable parts of a being much larger than ourselves.
3. The meme A self-replicating cluser of ideas. Thanks to a handful of biological tricks, these visions become the glue that holds together civilizations, giving each culture its distinctive shape, making some intolerant of dissent and others open to diversity. They are the tools with which we unlock the forces of nature. Our visions bestow the dream of peace, but they also turn us into killers.
4. The neural net The group mind whose eccentric mode of operartion manipulates our emotions and turns us into components of a massive learning machine.
5. The pecking order The naturalist who discovered this dominance hierarchy in a Norwegian farmyard called it the key to despotism. Pecking orders exist among men, monkeys, wasps, and even nations. They explain why the danger of barbarians is real and why the assumptions of our foreign policies are often wrong.

Five simple ideas. Yet the insights they yield are amazingly rich. They reveal why doctors are not always as powerful as they seem, but why we are compelled to believe in them nonetheless. They explain how Hinduism, the religion of ultimate piece, grew from the greed of a tribe of bloodthirsty killers and why nature disposes of men far more casually than women. They shed light on America’s decline, and the dangers that lie ahead of us.

Above all, they illuminate a mystery that has eternally eluded man: the root of all evil that haunts our lives. For within these five small ideas we will pursue, there lurks a force that rules us.
                                           – quoted from The Lucifer Principle, pp. 10-11

Go buy the $13 paperback version through Bloom’s Amazon Link. If you’d like one reader’s reaction, read on. My thinking is so influenced by this book that it colors most of my perceptions. For one thing, it causes one to stop bitching about one’s circumstances. You don’t have much control over your circumstances, nor do your tormentors. Once you get over feeling sorry for yourself, you get it that your job here is to be profoundly excited about your petty, inconsequential endeavor and to get as much support for it as you possibly can. If you don’t get enthusiastic support of others for your efforts, change your efforts because, without human support, you will literally make yourself ill and you’ll wither and die early. Your and my immune system will rebel if our peers and loved ones don’t literally embrace us and our work.

This book is a tour de force and should be required reading for anyone who is part of the neural network called web logging, whether as a writer or reader. The blogging world seems to generate as many words about it as we bloggers write about our other interests. This must be a powerful meme that is probably building its own neural network. Notice that many astute bloggers are already calling for mechanisms to consolidate our burgeoning collective so its collective archive is as searchable as one of our RSS feeds.

Did you catch that line about America’s decline? In this 1995 book, Bloom described the real dangers that fundamental Islam poses to the withering American civilization. The chapter is so prescient that it’s now available online, along with photos from Bloom’s apartment of the burning twin towers.

American Decline?!! Can he say that in Public?

Bloom did say it, in 1995, and his case is airtight. He demonstrates that we’ve been in decline since 1973 and any honest reader will be forced to agree with him. The reason one is forced to agree with him is that he uses real metrics – not vague impressions – to show that we’re behaving just like the Chinese empire when confronted by the Europeans, the Aztecs facing the Spaniards and the English upon the rise of the Germans and Americans.

It also answers Larry Lessig’s important question – why aren’t we Netizens up in arms over the travesties being perpetrated in Washington by corporate toadies and religious zealots? The reason is that thinking people have given up hope and are suffering from a collective depression. The best and brightest who may be the only ones who might lead us out of this dark political era are asleep at the switch, presumably watching The West Wing, imagining how we might also act like Toby and Sam and Bartlett, if we could only muster the energy.

Interestingly, Bloom implies that he would wholeheartedly support war on Islam, since our diverse culture is intrinsically superior to Islam’s autocratic despots and the people they mis-lead; that small bands of passionate, technically inferior fundamentalists routinely conquer advanced, sophisticated cultures which are distracted by inward-focused debates like whether or not to profile airline passengers.

While warning against characterizing evil, Bloom suggests that only people as self-righteous as the Bushies might have the will to colonize Iraq and divide to conquer the dead-end evolutionary branch called fundamental Islam.

The sad part is that they might never do it if it weren’t the biggest oil play they’ve ever seen, boy howdy!

If you’ve not been seduced by howardbloom.net or the book itself, I’ll give you my Cliff’s Notes version of his five concepts, starting tomorrow.

6:00:43 PM    comment [commentCounter (29)]

For the two of you who follow this blog (who are you people, anyway?), it’s obvious I’ve been missing a lot of posts. It’s just part of our reader deflection program. Actually, I’ve been out of town for a week, working off the PowerBook, thanks to the pointer from Rob McNair-Huff on moving radio from one machine to another. My only connectivity is WiFi at the nearby Starbucks/TMobile hotspot, so it’s not like I can post any time I want.

I ran into the now-well-documented beginning of the month Radio bug. It was just a matter of updating the Radio Root, which I tried to do from the bug report page, but that wouldn’t work. And then I got this curious cascade of Radio ills. I couldn’t get to my local home, even after multiple restarts of Radio, Explorer, Mozilla, PowerBook, etc. It seems to work only if I’m connecting at Starbucks, and only intermittently. Well, good enough, it’s really all a miracle, anyway.

6:05:06 PM    

Last night went way past midnight, thanks to my new Sony Ericsson T68i Bluetooth phone, HMH-30 Bluetooth headset and a new installation of Jaguar, iCal, iSync, D-Link Bluetooth adapter, import the desktop’s address book’s VCards over the Airport. Amazingly, it really did just work, once it dawned on me that iSync won’t open umless my iDisk is active. There’s no advisory to that effect: iSync just gives 2 bounces and subsides – certainly in the full release it will offer to open your iDisk for you.

The effect of all this yumminess was much like my first experience with Airport on a portable, that sort of Christmas morning feeling that technology always promises and rarely delivers. The T68 has built-in speech (well, waveform) recognition so you can say a person’s name to dial it. That’s not so unusual I guess, but it also lets you set up a “magic word” which will wake up the phone to listen for which name to dial. My magic word will be, naturally, “Computer…”. I guess I’ll go with a Jean-Luc intonation rather than Scottish, but it’s a close call.

My next Christmas treat will be to sit in Bryant Park, surfing the NYC Wireless Web, talking to the air. “Magic word” is accurate, since it’s a constellation of technologies sufficiently advanced to seem magic.

Perhaps the most magic part of this is the miracle of leaving Sprint PCS at last and discovering the terrific service that Cingular offers. For the moment, at least, this company is as clueful as Sprint is horrible. It’s also great to say goodbye to that annoying bitch Claire – the artificial voice who stands between you and somebody who might actually do something for you.

Signing up with Cingular was like getting cell service from your uncle’s general store: “Sure, you can change service plans any time you like – up, down, all prorated,” said Brian Trainor, the helpful, sharp young account exec at Cingular’s company-owned store at 40th and Fifth Avenue. Sure enough, while I was there he took 2 calls from previous customers and solved their issues so fast I didn’t feel neglected.

“How do I do change plans?”

“Just give me a call, and I’ll do it while you’re on the phone, or call customer service. Or just email me – the address is on my card. I check it all the time.” That may be the most clueful sentence ever spoken.

“So if I’m going out of town for a couple of weeks, and it looks like I’ll be going over my prime time minutes, Just call and notch up the plan for a few days?”

“Sure – and customer service, or any of us here in the store can tell you how close you are to your limit.”

If you’ve suffered with Sprint for years, this is like drawing a Get Out of Jail Free card. I’ll spare you the painful details, but I felt like I was in the scene in As Good As it Gets when Jack Nicholson sends Helen Hunt a personal physician to check out her allergy-ridden son who’s never been well. The new level of skill and responsiveness was like winning the health care lottery.

That I’d be surprised by good service is testament to how skillfully Sprint had lowered my expectations to the vanishing point. Their service sucks, they over-bill you, apparently by design, a support call takes forty minutes minimum, and I just assumed there’s no other way to run a cell service. CIngular obviously doesn’t care how much they charge you each month, as long as you want to be their customer. We’ll see if their service holds up after their NYC launch is complete.

That set me to thinking about how promising technology is, how overwhelming it is to set up and how underwhelming it often is in practice. What are the mechanisms that cause companies to universally overpromise and underperform?

Forward Looking Statements Promising a Beta Tomorrow

Large companies have no choice but to hold up their stock price as long as they can, any way they can. To do so, they have to get you to buy something new which means a service or product long on promise but short on testing. When describing these new offerings they often feel obligated to add the warning, “This announcement may contain forward-looking statements which may not come to pass.” Or something like that to placate the SEC.

So they’re really in the business of making products which will make forward-looking statements seem plausible. That means that their well-paid people are the ones who can come up with plausible initiatives that plausibly support plausible forward-looking statements. Once committed to the new product, the organization has no choice but to believe in it with all their heart – it lets everybody feel there’s a brighter future ahead.

So we the customers are forced to be consumers and beta testers of untested products backing up unrealistic promises to . . . . Wall Street! Doc Searls points out that the customers of the media are the advertisers and we are the eyeballs they promise to deliver. Is it possible that the real customers of a companies efforts are the Wall Street analysts, and we’re just the credit card debt they promise to deliver?

6:04:14 PM    

…As Mary Jenkins exclaimed to Jeff Greenberg in the HumanTech story. HumanTech’s management formalized a  compensation system at the heart of most large companies – you’re paid based on how many people you supervise in the command chain beneath you. It’s called Span of Control:

When given enough levels of hierarchy, any manager can control any number of people – albeit indirectly. But when it comes to direct reports, the theory suggests entrepreneurs must respect managers’ inborn limits.
                                                                      – Entrepreneur Magazine, Jan. 2001

Those inborn limits are consistently about eight people. Successful managers delegate to no more than about eight direct reports, who in turn manage another eight or so, out to the edges of the organization. Everyone is paid based on the population beneath them, not, as we’ve learned, based on the company’s profitability. Since the constant ratio is about one manager to eight people, the size of the organization – and the CEO’s compensation – is based on how many 8-person levels there are.

So organizations are hierarchical and pay is hierarchical and command structures are hierarchical. If you wanted to found the next big success story, you’d plan to hire eight people and grow until you had to hire another 64 people for those eight to manage, then another 512 people for those 64 people to manage, etc. When you had succeeded to the point that you had five levels of management, then you’d have almost 30,000 people in your company, and your compensation would be some small fraction of all those workers’ average salary, times the 30,000 employees.

If your average worker earned $40,000 per year (sound low? the math says that 7/8 of them are at the lowest pay level), then you might be receiving 1% of 30,000 employees’ salaries, or about $12,000,000 per year. That sounds typically outrageous but, well, typical. It seems that most companies are based on the same algorithm as a multi-level marketing scheme, like Amway or Mary Kay.

In other words, it’s a chain letter! If managements sound cynical, you should see the workers.

Desperately Seeking the Right DNA

The only problem with your success formula would be how to get your people to do consistently valuable work and get your marketing and sales departments to represent and quantify that value to your customers, and get your organization to respond quickly to new opportunities and let go of old ones just as quickly and be sure you hired skilled people exactly when you needed them to respond to opportunities. Good Luck!

Some organizations have the DNA to do much of this well and most do not. Why not? Because most people don’t care about the company’s silly Mission Statement, they care about their pay check.

Why do most people come to an organization? Dreams? Hopes? Challenges? Recognition? Sorry, it’s the money. The most interesting thing about a company is its likelihood to spit out cash regularly and to look like that will continue for a while. If you’re not convinced, ask the kids’ mom what a company is for.

We don’t go to work for a company – We go to work for an accounting system. If we could find a reliable accounting system outside a company, we might go to work for it.

Xpertweb’s viral expansion plan is based on real mentors doing real training and getting 1% of the prices paid or received by their trainees. The mentors are also expected to find their own trainees – four to eight of them. But mentors are not expected to supervise their trainees. Instead they get automatic reports on the grades and comments each trainee earns or gives as they sell and buy. The mentor’s only concerned if the trainee disappoints someone who’s a proven fair grader. Otherwise, the mentor is busy herself, buying and selling under the peer-to-peer protocols she was taught by her mentor.

The formula is just like the example company: train four people who buy or sell $1,000 per month, and collect $40 per month from them. Inspire them to train 4 each, so another 16 people are sending you $10 per month. Keep the growth happening and in a couple of years you’ll have 1,364 people sending $10 per month into your account. Where’s the accounting system? It’s distributed among the web servers of all those participants and their mentors, each of whom has formally committed to do work they get good grades for, and no other kind.

It’s not a centrally managed accounting system, but it has all the characteristics of one, except there’s no way to change the rules. An accounting system is a money allocation system that causes people to do work today in reliance on a future reward.

People learn who to trust and who to avoid, so they work or purchase today in anticipation of compensation next week. They also form a confidence that their trainees will forward the required 1% fee every month. As those responses accumulate a history of reliability, they will be relied upon.

And that growing reliance is the basis of any ambitious microeconomy.

11:55:24 PM