According to the recent FCC compromise ruling, the telcos still have to share their lines for now, allowing independents to sell internet access on their phone lines. But the Baby Bells will get to keep a monopoly on higher-speed fiber connections they install.
This is like issuing a contract to build roads, and giving the road-builder perpetual control over who travels the roads. Can you imagine if the highway system worked that way??
It may be fair to ensure the road-builder can collect toll revenue to pay for the cost of the road. It may even be reasonable for the government to collect taxes and issue bonds to pay for all or part of the fiber build-out, since this is infrastructure, like roads and sewers, that benefits all of society, has a long payback period, and is expensive to build up front.
It seems pretty outrageous to grant local phone monopolies perpetual control over the “roads” they build. This under the guise of deregulation, where deregulation means “give the monopolies what they want.”
Austin Blog or the A-List?
David Nunez has a very funny write-up of the Austin Blogger’s meet-up at Spider House last night (perhaps you had to be there to appreciate the write-up, I dont’ know.)
As I said in David’s comments, Instapundit may get millions of readers, but we get to hang out and be silly and do creative projects. A-list, who needs it? Community groups have all the fun.
Software Ants
Steven Johnson has an interesting and insightful take on the ant analogy in the “emergent democracy” conversation.
To me, when you’re talking about emergent democracy in the online world, the equivalent of the ant is not the individual human, it’s the software. The atoms of human action are indeed incredibly sophisticated ones, but the atoms of software that enables those actions to connect in new ways are much simpler. It’s more like: “follow this link, connect this page to other pages that share links, look for patterns in the links.”
The software ants follow simple rules to find and gather the patterns created by human decisions and human actions.
I like this. It’s an example of the “Google principle”. The Google algorithm is great, not because the computer determines which web pages are important, but because the computer gathers and adds up millions of pieces of information about which pages humans think are important.
Seder “happening”
Thinking about Marc Canter’s blog post a few days ago about a online haggadah”.
It would be interesting to use the happening infrastructure for a distributed seder.
People could call in and participate, by phone, chat, and hypertext haggada.
As in the “electronic democracy” event, a moderator could use the “hand-raise” convention in the chat space to call on people to participate on the phone, making it easier to moderate a group phone call.
The interleaving of chat threads would be an online version of the interleaving of conversational threads at a same-place seder. If the happening had a wiki back end, people could add commentary as they read the haggadah, and could transcribe and edit the chat into future haggadah material. These are contemporary instantiations of the techniques the Rabbis used to put the original Haggadah together.
Following up on Marc’s site, he’s been talking with Philippe Scheimann who seems to have thought of the idea too.
I also have some sympathy to Tom Shugart’s comment — there are advantages to the traditional, “unplugged” seder. The food and wine, and seder plate wouldn’t be the same, with individuals holding a plate of food and a glass of wine next to their laptop (and the traditional spills would be more dangerous!)
“Everyone who contributes to the telling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt is to be well-praised.” Or [green-card] and [thumbs up], as the case may be.
Ants and Jane Jacobs
To continue the “ants” discussion…
When people talk about the how bottom-up, emergent systems are superior to top-down planned systems, they often quote Jane Jacobs.
In “Death and Life of American Cities“, Jacobs writes about the lively, crowded, haphazard streets of her Greenwich Village neighborhood, and compares them to the planned high-rise developments and efficient elevated highways of her nemesis, developer Robert Moses.
In the 50s and 60s, developers like Moses swept into run-down urban neighborhoods bearing a vision of “cities of the future,” demolished the houses and stores, and replaced them with sterile projects that turned into slums worse than the neighborhoods they replaced.
Jacobs explains why the organically-grown neighborhoods are better than the planned developments. The variety of newer and older structures help the neighborhood support a diverse population — elderly folks on pensions, young folks starting out, families with children. The mix of commercial and residential properties helps keep the neighborhood safe, since the neighborhood is populated day and night, weekdays and weekends. The sidewalks and front-porches enable people to stroll, chat, and look out for each other. By contrast, the un-inviting plazas and parking lots surrounding high-rise buildings are often deserts where the ill-intentioned can prey on the unwary without being observed.
Simply by observing local norms, people extend the neighborhood by inviting their elderly parents to move in, buying and upgrading a ramshackle storefront, and sweeping their walk. These activites aren’t centrally planned, individuals don’t get permission to do them, and, in sum, they add up to pleasant and safe neighborhoods.
But looking at Greenwich Village as an example of ant-like emergent behavior misses a lot of the story.
There is a large substrate of of social and cultural structures that enable these unplanned activities to create a pleasing and diverse order. The neighborhood has sewers and clean running water. Without these, the city neighborhood would harbor endemic infectious diseases. There is a fire department which protects the block if a single house catches fire. There are people with the technical and project-management skills required to design and repair plumbing, heating, and electrical systems.
A colony of ants couldn’t create Greenwich Village. Neither could a tribe of hunter-gatherers. There are underlying levels of infrastructure — some of which require planning — in order to enable the higher-level decentralized behavior.
In order to facilitate decentralized, unplanned human systems that work, it’s important to think about the ordered infrastructure patterns — like sewer systems, and ordered nodal activities — like designing an electrical system — that are needed enable the larger unplanned pattern to emerge.
Ants and anti-ants
In the “emergent democracy” happening, several participants drew analogies between emergent human behavior, like building cities, and the emergent behavior of social animals, like building ant colonies.
Several of us, include me, were vehemently opposed to drawing the analogy between humans and ants to closely.
Liz Lawley discusses this in her blog:
Key among [the concepts we discussed] was the rallying cry among several participants that “We are not ants!”
What does that mean? Well, we were discussing Steven Johnson’s book Emergence, in which he discusses the emergent behavior/intelligence in environments like ant colonies. The problem, several of us noted, is that ants do not have much self-awareness, while people do.
Here’s the expansion of the anti-ant position the I posted as a comment to Liz’ blog:
Liz, I was one of the anti-ant people.
The relevant distinction, I think, isn’t just that people have self-awareness. Consciousness is the starting point that makes human actions and decisions more complicated than those of ants.
The atoms of ant action are simple: pick up crumb, bring crumb to ant colony.
The atoms of human action are more complicated: identify people and groups interested in opposing Total Information Act, encourage people to persuade local congressperson.
The atoms of ant decisions are simple. Crumb smells like food. Pick up and bring to ant colony. Crumb smells like poison. Do not bring to ant colony.
The atoms of human decisions are more complicated. Safety doesn’t just mean avoiding crumb that smells like poison. Safety requires decisions in complex areas like “police work” and “diplomacy”.
Ants organize based on instinct and pheremones. Humans organize based on instinct and pheremones overlaid by complex cultural systems.
Organization tools that assume people are like ants will provide people tools to take very simple actions — vote yes or no on a question that someone else has articulated.
A politics that assumes people are like ants is likely to be totalitarian — manipulating people using instincts like greed and fear.
I think that any theory and support system for emergent human system needs to take into account the intelligence and complex behavior of the nodes in the network.
Haggadah online
Marc Canter writes that for the last three years, he’s been composing and using an online haggadah for his family’s seder.
I vowed that no more trees were going to get cut down for Passover. You see I was raised a secular Jew and Passover was the only holiday we really celebrated… So despite the assimilation the rest of the year – Springtime was always the time to be Jewish. This meant that the first night we ate as an extended family and the second night we always attended our community seder – put on by the South Side School of Jewish studies in Chicago – our ‘religous
Since it was the 60’s – we added she with the he’s, talked about Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement along with the Warsaw Ghetto and in general celebrtated revolutionaries throughout the ages. The tradition of adding to and changing the seder was predominant.
So when it came to my own seder 20 years later – here’s what I realized: I helped give birth to the multimedia world and I was gonna put my Matzah where my mouth is……but when we assembled all these PCs around the table, guess what? Nobody could keep in sync with each other! So we had to devise a way for us all to stay together and enable remote access to the seder. This evolved into a truly on-line version……
Collaborative, hyperlinked media are contemporary instantiations of the traditional genres, which are based on conversation and the interpretation of referenced texts. Discussion groups and hyperlinks, in other words.
Emergent Democracy
I participated last Friday in a “happening” organized by Joi Ito on Emergent Democracy.
The “happening” was an international phone call supported by simultaneous live chat and wiki-based project space. Ross Mayfield wrote a great colophon about how we used the tools.
The simultaneous chat reduced the stress of a long-distance teleconference, and enabled a higher-bandwidth discussion. We’re using the wiki to store references and to be a persistent project space going forward.
The conversation had two main themes:
* ideas about how emergent democracy could work
* creating tools to facilitate emergent democracy.
Pete Kaminski eloquently summarizes the key conversational threads:
* what are/are there architectural rules for emergent group-forming?
* how does weak tie/strong tie connectivity create emergent intelligence?
* learn from town meetings, mass media, talk radio, blogspace
* need to have local goals, but scalability as goals slide around themselves
There’s a version of the discussion that I find exciting and promising, and a version that I find troubling and less credible.
I’m excited to experiment with tools and techniques to help groups form, to amplify the signals from distributed groups, and to help groups move from discussion to action.
I’m a lot more wary about approaches that assume that political action will somehow “emerge naturally” from distributed groups of individual actors, in the same way that flocks of birds emerge naturally from simple behaviors to follow at a given distance and preserve line of sight, and termite mounds emerge naturally from termites dropping the next grain of sand near where they stumbled onto a grain of sand on the ground.
Human governing behaviors at the level of complexity required to implement systems like coalitions and policies and constitutions don’t happen automatically. People make them happen.
Networking tools and technologies can lower the activation threshold for starting groups, taking action, and combining into larger groups of influence.
Emergent Democracy won’t happen unless we — the node in the network — take delibrate steps to organize and make it happen.
The project space for follow-on work is here.
New startup!
As you might have guessed from the topics of conversation, I’ve been working on a start-up in the social software space. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation in the public internet, using tools like weblogs and wikis. We’re bringing these to corporations behind the firewall.
The pattern of adoption feels like the early PC era — champions discover a new set of simple tools bring them to the workplace, under the radar of central IT and corporate purchasing.
The first version of the SocialText website is here.
The team is fantastic — some folks I’ve admired for years — smart, competent, experienced, nice people. The group is distributed — Ross and Pete in the Bay Area, Ed in Ann Arbor, and sometimes Greg in NY.
We stay in touch by phone, email, and IM, and collaborate largely by wiki, which is egregiously fun. It feels like improvising together on a whiteboard, except you’re not in the same place at the same time, you have a document draft when you’re done, and you’re building a knowledgebase as you go.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email (contact info in sidebar at right), and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it.
Password implants
In recent months, I’ve gotten involved in a number of interesting and exciting projects.
Trouble is, they all involve sets of logins and passwords. Some have assigned logins and passwords, so I can’t use the usual combinations. Even before the new set of projects, my standard procedure for infrequently-used services had degenerated into to using the hint and getting a new password every single time!
I have completely scaled out of the creaky password management methods I’ve had till now.
I need a forearm-based implant that stores all my passwords, so I have them with me, whether or not I have access to any particular computing device.
Or maybe something a little less extreme.
How about a bracelet, with an LCD readout and a scroll-wheel that you can use to select System:Username:Password combinations?
There could be fashionable versions (precious metals, licensed characters). There could be simple versions, like medical alert tags, that guys could feel comfortable with.
Anybody know a good cyborgification service. Or a designer and contract manufacturer?
Or a better idea for managing more passwords than my simple brain can hold?