It's the typical geeky hysterical edge-casing trying to make a larger political point, but it's pretty suspect.
He's claiming that Apple "bans journalism" critical of religions:
“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the
IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that
includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a
religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple
bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize
religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that
shows where drone strikes have been.
Really, Anil? "A lot" of software? What on earth are you talking about?
Probably this, the intifada app. That's all. There likely isn't any other use case of Apple "forbidding journalism".
As for the drone strike app, they may have decided that if the US government declares them secret, there is no sense in facing a possible lawsuit over it, I don't know the specifics. Plenty of people report on drone strikes. Again, probably some of the news apps that *are* allowed on the phone contain this reporting.
My comment:
re really blocking “journalism”.
That sounds like an overheated exaggeration that is basically trying
to exonerate anti-Israel hate speech (or perhaps some other crude hate
war game against Muslims or something) that really wouldn’t qualify as
“journalism”.
They’re right that if you want to express your hatred for religion, a
book is a better format because you can capture more nuances and make
your arguments.
What is the “journalism” of any sort — about religions or any topic —
that would fit into an app? Obviously, they don’t mean news apps, as
there are articles in the New York Times or on the BBC which will
contain critical comments about Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, for
example. The apps carrying these op-ed pages or news articles are not
blocked for their content, obviously — which is journalism critical of
religion.
What Apple means specifically is the intifada app, that crudely
propagandized the violent Palestinian movement against Israel, and
denigrated Israel and Jews.
There may be others that involved such crude hate speech in the form
of the externals of the app itself, not the content it might bring.
Apple, as a private company, is going to create some standards of
taste and against hate speech that aren’t going to fit your own
extremist politics. Good! If you want a different mobile company, go to
CREDO. Maybe they have an independent app store where you can still get
the intifada app.
The key is having a market with pluralism, so that those who feel
they absolutely can’t live without hate apps can get them. The opposite —
where “progressives” could force private corporations to include
extreme political content they endorse — would not be freedom.
The train station in Soligorsk, Belarus, Morozov's home town. Photo by El Bingle.
I'm reading Evgeny Morozov's book To Save Everything, Click Here -- and it's both boring and fascinating because it's like deja-vu all over again -- I've written on exactly the same topics myself for nearly ten years, usually as a dissident surrounded by geeks who relentlessly hated and bullied me.
It's filled with the hypothetical hystericals that he castigates geeks for -- he's adopted this as a literary style worthy of Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin. For example, he tells us the horror of something called BinCam that can document our garbage and put it up on social media so that -- in theory -- our neighbours or the vigilant state could examine our detritus and tell whether in fact we were recycling sufficiently or perhaps not even eating correctly.
The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotes. Nobody has BinCam. BinCam isn't anywhere installed in such sufficient quantities as to cause anything like the ruckus Morozov imagines. That's because nobody wanted it -- maybe a few "quantified life" geeks experimenting did. Or if it did get installed, it was not with the privacy-busting social-media-shaming factor, but with more of the mundane city planning capacity to tell where the garbage pick-ups could be deployed, to save energy and time and money.
It's filled with name-dropping and citation-dropping that most people won't recognize. Couldn't we ask whether in fact the theory of "flow" comes from Plotinus and not Heraclitus? Oh, and let's not forget my favourite quote from Heraclitus (I think): "Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own private understanding".
When you have intimidating stuff like the invocation of Plotinus and Pliny, nobody might dare to say the obvious: but Evgeny, there isn't any software that has a message TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE. It doesn't exist. It's a sort of fable you've made, like your other fables.
Real software -- the ubiquitous Windows of the proprietary and much-hated Microsoft, on which everything is based -- simply says SAVE -- SAVE "as is", so to speak. Or you get the choice: "SAVE AS" -- and you *chose* then. Silicon Valley may not be as world-changing in its aspirations as you wish, at least without giving some agency to users! I can't think of a single application that actually says "TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE". Can you? Is this on a Mac or something? If it doesn't really exist anywhere, isn't that telling? It *might* -- it almost sounds as if it does! But it doesn't! (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
So yeah, I've been writing about the issue of the Silicon Valley hustlers for years and years on this blog and at Second Thoughts. But it's not like I'm vindicated with the appearance of the Sage of Soligorsk on the scene -- because it's like looking at the same landscape through a kaleidoscope, where everything is shifted 25% and skewed.
Each time Morozov is criticizing the same thing I've already criticized, and where he could point out their collectivism and -- dare I say it, technocommunism -- he shifts, and starts calling them some other name. Randians. Schumpeter-trumpeters. Or crypto-followers of some crazy Polish guy. Who in fact is no different in his scientism and socialism than H.G. Wells or Maxim Gorky, or for that matter, at the end of the day, Evgeny Morozov.
Oh, well, I get how it works, instead of working as a low-wage OSI worker for years on end, I should have been born in Eastern Europe and become a Soros fellow!
Still, for the record I'll note that I covered this topic back in 2008 when Morozov was still playing at being a Soros fellow or something, waiting for Lenny Benardo to give him research tips. (It's perhaps telling that Lenny Benardo absolutely refuses to speak about Belarus with me, because I might keep pointedly asking about the Soros mess-ups and question the priorities of grant-giving, whereas Lenny probably never has to talk to Morozov about Belarus, ever, because Morozov doesn't "do" Belarus, his homeland.)
Except to write his book at his parent's dacha there. Oh, the hissing samovar! The buzzing bees! The jam made by babushka from wild raspberries! And the skewering of Silicon Valley between sips of barely-diluted zavarka.
The kind of skewering I did without the summer house for years -- for example, confronting Jeff Jarvis both on his blog and in person about his "bill of rights" favouring collectivist ideas. Or having a long drawn-out battles about "gamification" back in 2008, when Jane McGonigal first appeared with this awful idea that "reality was broken" and that we had to gamify it to fix it, or the creepy TED talk about Jesse Schell sparked this debate in 2010.
Is Morozov going to mention that McGonigal worked for the Chinese government during their Olympics?
I had to sit through the vilification of being told even by a friend, Raph Koster, that my non-gamer culture and the culture of gamers (ostensibly superior) was the source of my problem with gamification -- and shunned because I dared to say that the deified Richard Bartle had social engineering-socialism in his games. I had to sit through legions of fanboyz villifying me because I dared to question the wackiness of McGonigal. Read it, it's truly extraordinary, in light especially of how much safer it has become now to criticize Jane.
With SL, Rosedale took the idea of reduced "coordatination costs" to come up with this idyllic notion -- never put in practice:
By putting up a page where thousands of people can cast a fixed number
of votes to prioritize (or modify) a fairly specific work list of
features and changes for upcoming versions of Second Life, we are
further blurring the boundaries between the ‘company’ of Linden Lab and
the residents of Second Life. We are asking for help (and I suspect
comitting ourselves substantially to what we hear) in what is generally a
very private and hallowed process – the setting of development
priorities.
Ultimately, Philip and his successors shut down the voting tool because people either asked for priorities the company, mindful of their competitors in the gaming industry, didn't think should be coded; or they didn't like some of the things asked for because they went against their geek religion; or they would prohibit the compay from being sold to marketers (i.e. IP masking). And this is how the whole Internet will go, as Second Life has often been used as a prototyper, deliberately or simply using its virtuality as an affordance for petri-dish work.
Back then, I asked whether a theory from efficient firms from 1937 was exactly the time period to be mining for ideas...In fact, the Taylorism that migrated into Stakhanovitism and later the Kaizen method in Japan was what we had to worry about -- was collectivizing everyone with open source software merely a way to reduce transaction costs for firms and ensure oligarchy for them, communism for the rest of us? You know, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." So I had critiques like this one about the Leninism of the Linden Tao.
Now Morozov has produced a 16,000 word piece for The Baffler -- you wondered who they were going to get to write on tech after their co-editor Aaron Swartz killed himself. It's too long for a magazine piece and too short for a book, so it's a pamphlet of the sort socialists and the Catholic Church still specialize in -- where the author is erudite, wordy, didactic, and exasperated with the unbeliever.
Here's the nutshell of my critique of O'Reilly and his invasion of the State Department and government in general with his "gov 2.0" and even "civ soc 2.0":
Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and
lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know
about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see
something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the
arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on
to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society
that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.
It means monetarizing things for a few consultants -- like one man and
his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that
the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the
expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open
source in general).
It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and
necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of
compensation elsewhere.
But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap
means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more,
*because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was
ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.
Indeed, despite his enormous study of the subject, Morozov hasn't really touched on the corrosive effect of the "Code for America" stuff invading cities all over the place, a debate I took on in 2010 here.
And Morozov barely discusses the pernicious evangelist role of Alex Howard, who insists, against all common sense and logic and reason, that he is a journalist, and not a propagandist or public relations agent -- as I did here, after a lot of discussion on Whimsley, where Tom Slee confronted Howard on the entire "gov 2.0" racket which is exploited by conservative governments (and leftist governments, too, I might add, as Obama has abused it) to hand out consulting contracts to cronies and pretend to innovate and avoid hard topics.
(Of course, I haven't read the book all the way to the end yet, so maybe that's to come).
I'll come back to do a more thorough book review when I can, in which I explain that funny twist that happens with every single critique -- where Morozov misses the moment to recognize something as in fact "Soviet," shall we say, or collectivist, or socialist -- and then declares it something else. For example, you have to wonder -- how did he get through his critique of Clay Shirky, whom he skewers, without ever mentioning his seminal "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" -- which might really be re-titled, as I've written repeatedly for years, "The Group Members Are Our Own Worst Enemy". And to miss Shirky's one big forray into foreign policy on the webzine of the same name, from his areas of expertise in Internet culture, where essentially, he tells people to forego their Twitter revolutions until the advance guard tells them it's okay, because they've become sufficiently mature for democracy -- an ideology Nazarbayev would be proud of, and in fact invokes (and maybe that's how he was able to win over Jimmy Wales).
For now, let's just look at the things hidden in the 16,000 word piece about O'Reilly.
Morozov decides O'Reilly is a Randian, because he's for entrepreneurs forging their businesses in the face of conservative big, ostensibly backward, proprietary-software companies. I guess Morozov never studied the role of the peredovik in Soviet culture and the winners of socialist competitions.
Ayn Rand, of course, is as Bolshevist as the Bolsheviks she countered, and she got that way having to counter them fiercely, but she's a product of her time and copies their revolutionary methods. The rigidity of her ideology; her hatred of religion; her relentless ideological struggle with other sectarians or the slightly-politically-incorrect within her own circles -- these are all products of the Bolshevik age we still live with. If someone worked harder in the collective farm of open software and also figured out how to make money with the $39.95 manuals to actually work this "free" stuff and also charged big speaking fees, they merit a spot in the Soviet Union of Constructors, not a blast as a Randian or hypothetically an exaggerated capitalist.
O'Reilly's earlier nods to Microsoft or to a hypothetical "choice" between open and proprietary software, even defending it as an intellectual freedom, was only tactical and only present 10 years ago. Today, Code for America culture adherents deride as "vendorocracy" any proprietary software that a municipality runs, and as we see from Cyrus Farivar's uneven critical examination of Code for America on Ars Technica, somebody making a zippy little startup with open source software and getting the city contract ahead of others is the "good guy" whereas those other contenders are evil (or companies that *should* be contending if you still kept a free-market competition system and competitive bids at city hall instead of ecstatic free software cronyism).
O'Reilly peddled that line only tactically for a time, like the pro-abortion crusaders used "choice" for a time until they could change their causes' title to "women's health" and beat any critic as wishing the illness of women and waging a war on women. So O'Reillyites at State today would describe as backward and fearful of technology and consumed with FUD anybody who suggests that an older vendor with proprietary software not as caught up in the giddyness of 2.0 might be better for security or privacy.
But here's the thing about Evgeny -- he loves open source software. He himself is not for the intellectual proposition of choice between types of software, even tactically until the Better Day comes. In this Baffler essay that many will read and write about as "a critique of the open source software culture" that is invading everything (and thinking it can even use the sectarian principles of agile software production on governance of people in general), in fact, Morozov roots most vigorously for just that -- in a more pure form unalloyed with any capitalism
Morozov is more of a Stallmanite that Stallman. He pretends to admit that Stallman is obviated by being preoccupied with licensing schemes at a time when "the cloud" has obviated them.
Of course, "the cloud" has done no such thing, as proprietary cloud software can exist; private firms deploy their cloud magic even with open source in ways they don't publish; and big companies still fiercely fight over what the standards of cloudness will be. At the end of the day, the cloud is just other people's computers, not your own. There should be a new study of server farms and server farm politics underneath the cloud, that Morozov hasn't gotten to yet.
Stallman isn't about license schemes, really -- he's more of a cultural coder than O'Reilly precisely because he hasn't converted his empire, still very active (with the friends of Bradley Manning, for example) into a cash cow in the same way and therefore has more street cred. The Stallmanite ideals -- that everything has to be free, that bugs are shallow to the thousands of eyes let in to see that software, in fact is something Morozov exhuberantly proclaims, with this telling paragraph:
Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that
patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for
treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as
something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open
up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to
keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a
world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading
or biometric identification presented no major mysteries
Now that's just sectarian clap-trap of the sort we thought Morozov was supposed to be critiquing, not embracing. See what I mean? There's a strange technno-determinism of the sort Morozov is supposed to be denouncing if he believes that "if only" we could see the magic code that enables traders to use the speed and amplification properties of the Internet to move markets perilously (to their own profit and sometimes to the detriment of countries), why, we could somehow cure the faults of capitalism. But the Internet is merely (sometimes) a capitalist tool, and the real problem for Morozov which he most decidedly disdains is capitalism and free enterprise and free markets themselves. Sure, capitalism should be regulated even in a free society with free enterprise -- and it is, and the debate about "how much" is what politics is about. Here, I suspect Morozov thinks that "transparency" on the kind of software some capitalists have made good use of will somehow enable a naming and shaming (or industrial sabotage?) effort or an "equalling of the playing field"...or some other socialist fantasy.
But in a free world, you have to ask why traders can't have proprietary software that gives them an edge in trading fast, and if your real problem is capitalism itself, this particular facet of it really isn't the issue; and if your real problem is that you just want to regulate some of the fiercest aspects of capitalism that can be destructive, you've never explained why you couldn't do this with organic law instead of transparency of the code to those putative million eyes.
As for biometrics, something that states from South Korea to Turkmenistan are using now -- while gas-rich Turkmenistan may not be able to supply clean water and jobs and even gas to all of its people, especially in remote areas, it has seen fit to rush to apply the latest scientific methods to create a biometric passport of the future -- and control its citizenry.
Knowing the software code that probably the Chinese wrote for the Turkmens or knowing the code of what might be implemented in the US won't change anything -- what's at stake here is the will of the government, its undemocratic nature, and its resorting to organic methods of control as well as electronic.
Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley-orchestrated collectivism -- yes, he does come up with an actual critique of collectivism now in rather a cunning way -- is that it is soulless. It's not "true" collectivism. That's because all it is, really, is a zillion individual actions -- clicks on likes, or retweeting of messages or copying of memes or whatever the individual act is -- without any sense of camraderie or joint purpose.Says Morozov:
This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more
than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You
are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to
comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such
distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting
on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group
belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power
changes hands.
If you hold up a mirror to this paragraph to see what, then, Morozov might find ideal, not only might he himself disappear, but you see the yearning for collectivism nevertheless straining through as an ideal: It would be great if we did have collectives, just better, more meaningful collectives! It would be great if they actually democratically participated! It would be cause if they had a sense of solidarity and group belonging! It would be even better if they had a "political dimension" and actually took power! Hey, let's Occupy Wall Street with that!
I'm not talking about libertarian survivalism here and the lone individual on the range -- I'm just criticizing bureaucratic socialism. Really, how does Morozov's "better" group with solidarity differ from, oh, the Leninist notion of "democratic centralism" (the Politburo can debate, but nobody else) or Central Asian notion of the kuraltai (very free group debates with even the powerless included until the power-possessors decide after sifting out what they see as "the voice of the people" and then ruthlessly silencing all further debate) -- or Chinese "self-criticism" circles?
Morozov is still celebrating the group and its dynamics; he doesn't have a vision of the protection of individual rights or the protection of minorities, or how to change the group afterward, when it becomes "its own worst enemy", i.e. strays from the rigid ideal that may have been once "collectively" decided. What is the theory of change that really constitutes democracy, not just a glorification of "participation" that leads us to "participatory democracy" where the cadres end up deciding everything? Because not everybody participates. Because not everybody can or should have a stake. Why should a bunch of jobless students get to overthrow the stock market?
So I'd make a sharper critique of this Silicon Valley "collective intelligence" stuff than Morozov by pointing out --again -- the pernicious thinking of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which is really about how straying group members who revolt against non-democratically decided goals should be controlled -- or Beth Noveck, who thinks you can't have "here comes everybody" (which Shirky himself disavowed later) because you get people who aren't appropriate or are off-topic or are too stupid -- which is why a network of self-selecting experts under her guidance and filtration is the best kind of collective. You know, "the cadres decide everything," as Stalin put it so well. And he should know; despite being called "rude" by Lenin, he was eventually able to take over everything just by performing the simple task of keeping the minutes for meetings (and shaping them subtly) -- sort of writing the code for the group, if you will...
Of course, there's plenty of sense of joint purpose to go around among the Internet socialists on their campaigns, but I've generally found that the groups like Moveon or Daily Kos or Organizing for America are cadre-run, with the masses seldom having any real choice but to enthusiastically "like" and retweet what is peddled to them by a few cunning intellectuals at the top of the pyramid.
Morozov should be troubled by the bureaucratic socialism of Moveon or Center for American Progress, too, but never is.
And for him, the ideal of the collective still shines goldenly on the yawning heights:
As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of
specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on
their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or
use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the
use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of
concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared
public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or
contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any
disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at
“hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no
cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the
open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not
to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That
politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is
not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through
the prism of open source software.
Again holding up the mirror and thinking about the shining heights, you see the recipe for the real Better World:
o challenge the entire system of capitalism -- it's time, comrades!
o have the code contributions disturb the system -- how about apps to name and shame every contributor to the mayor's campaign and dox them?
o take on issues much bigger than potholes -- why not march and demonstrate right in front of Jamie Dimon's house?
o don't go home to your bedrooms after your hackathon, camp in a tent on the square
And so on. In other words, Morozov is merely annoyed that O'Reilly, like the 1970s head shop owners, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of the SDS 1960s, began to profit from the sale of bong pipes and posters and black lights, is derailing the Revolution by selling open source software as something grafted on to capitalism -- at least, capitalism for some people in Sillicon Valley.
He castigates O'Reilly for seeming to "hate" protests -- by which he means, again, O'Reilly's actual cooptation of the antagonistic group dyanmics so often available online into "patch or GTFO" coder culture operations. He then picks anodyne things to work on -- a park -- rather than anything that might substantively challenge either politics as usual (which Morozov seems to believe is "bought out by corporate interests) or the socialist theories of the 1960s and 1970s (Ilyich) that rule the unions and the schools and are profoundly challenged by schemes like school vouchers.
Interestingly, O'Reilly mentions the Moldova Twitter protests in that piece positively -- up to a point:
The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of
people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as
with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!
He might as well be Lukashenka (never challenged by Morozov) telling the intellectuals to stop babbling in the cafes in the city and help bring in the potato harvest. Time to stop complaining and work, comrades! Patch or GTFO! In fact, the Twitter protests didn't lead to solutions of protracted problems caused by the Russians, like Transdniester.
Morozov's critique of O'Reilly, if he weren't burdened by his own idealistic vision of collectivism, could involve calling out the cadres who decide everything in gov 2.0, whether the Sunlight Foundation or the latest Google staff or collectivist academics installed in various White House agencies. That's what I do. Morozov doesn't, because his target is conservative Western governments that get in the way of old-time socialism, and to some extent, the Kremlin's agenda -- like the Cameron government in Londongrad. Hence gripey paragraphs like this:
At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government”
and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the
Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data,
is on the record stating
that open government is “what modern deregulation looks like” and that
he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government
released a white paper on “Open Public Services”
that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for
national security and the judiciary, all public services must become
open to competition from the market.
Market competition might be a good thing -- say, in competing for software contracts. I've often wondered if that enormously expensive boondoggle on the time-clock software for the City of New York was open or proprietary software, and what that story was really all about -- even if it turns out that the software is proprietary, the notion of the endless chain of experts required to keep it working because people can't be empowered to run it themselves normally seems to be at the heart of the problem. And the problem with New York City is in fact that it has outsourced to nonprofits and religious groups too much of the work of managing difficult populations that it needs to keep under one roof and monitored and kept transparent to the public far, far more than it does.
If you can get through the 16,000 words, you will be left with this: unadulterated worship of Stallman -- indeed, a fresh appreciation of Stallmanism with all the zeal of a new convert:
Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software,
many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As
technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999,
while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw
something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s
rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman
didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince
ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell
it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to
proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical
social movement, not a complacent business association.
But...go back to that socialism part. That was what was wrong with it in the first place.
I noticed that there was one of those "promoted tweets" showing up in my feed from something called @meanstinks.
This account with its more than 26,000 followers isn't something you might figure out right away, but it's basically a marketing campaign by Secret deodorant against bullying -- sort of a public service campaign.
Since launching the "Mean Stinks" program, which has also included a
publicity tie-in with "Glee's" Amber Riley and an iAd campaign launched
last month, Secret's already strong sales growth kicked up a notch. The
brand had momentum anyway, with a current streak of 17 consecutive
quarters of share growth, according to P&G. Sales are up 8% to
around $250 million in channels tracked by SymphonyIRI for the 52 weeks
ended July 10, but they're up an even faster 9% for the 26 weeks ended
June 26, a period affected by the "Mean Stinks" campaign that launched
in January on Facebook. Secret, already the leading U.S. deodorant, saw
its share rise 0.6 points for the past 52 weeks and 0.7 points for the
first half of 2011.
So...social media "engagement," even encouraging people to give $1 to an anti-bullying charity -- is really about improvement of the bottom line.
I find this creepy. And remember, I'm not the socialist around here, I don't hate corporations or business. It reminds me of humdog's famous article "Pandora's Vox" which I critiqued as being too anti-capitalist at the time -- from her first days at the Well, she chronicled how all of us online personas were being milked for all our thoughts and hopes and dreams to be exploited in marketing campaigns.... I guess I had never thought of how bad it could get, even though I remain a supporter of capitalism and think overall, Carmen (Montserrat Tovar in Second Life) was too socialist...although she came back to her religion towards the end of her life...
In any event, I don't like the anti-bullying campaigns because they are too vague, too shallow, and too baggy -- they can apply to almost anything anywhere. When bullies are everywhere, they are nowhere. Often, "bullying" seems to mean something about hating gays -- but then that means if you question anything about the way that some aggressive gay activists are pursuing their cause by boycotting or trying to silence other groups they don't like, why, you're the "bully" then -- even if what they do would be classified as bullying in anyone else's hands.
Sometimes bullying is about somebody being "different" in school -- but it's a sliding concept that can differ from state to state or situation to situation -- whatever someone decides who can get the news media -- and more importantly, social media -- on it. Sometimes it's really serious, cases culminating in suicide - horrible situations. Other times it seems to erode the significance of the need to fight such serious cases by being merely something "mean" said on Facebook. If bullying is everything from humiliating a rape victim to causing somebody to commit suicide, to causing somebody to get their feelings hurt because of a failure to like something on Facebook -- how can we combat it? We can't -- we can only helplessly fall into the hands of managers who will be sure to follow every twist and turn of the party line on this matter...
These campaigns and their witless boosters on social media are awfully manipulative and shallow and stupid. I see the campaigns as kind of an open source meme that are now being both exploited by corporations (like Procter & Gamble) to use in faux "public interest" campaigns that are merely sales campaigns, and also exploited by the counterculturalists like Anonymous, which makes much of "bullies" now in their own reputational laundering exercises. (If you ever wanted a really good definition of online bully, you'd have no further to look than 4chan and the behaviour of all the creeps like Weev -- and yet recently with the Steubenville #JusticeSec campaign, Anonymous was pretending they lead the charge against "bullies" -- which can include anyone who criticizes their past or present vigilantism.)
To Anonymous, and to Procter & Gamble (and they are symbiotic), everybody is a victim of a "bully". There are bullies everywhere! The P&G account @meanstinks claims there are 2.1 million bullies in America (!), and that's where I had to ask: but where do you get those numbers?
I never got an answer, although somebody said "Parent Magazine" -- like that's a source?!
There are about 100,000 public schools in American, and about 33,000 private schools. So that would make 15 bullies per school! One of those scant-looking new accounts with few followers -- those accounts you suspect are made by the gadzillions by the propagandists who run these campaigns from either P&G or Anonymous -- said "that number is low". I tried to think of every school I'd ever been in myself, or where my children or relatives have been in. I just couldn't concede that each of these schools had "fifteen bullies".
So...nonsense. The number is ridiculous, ill-defined, and it's all stupid. Who are these bullies? People who don't get with either the totalitarian Anonymous program or the ad agency's superficial campaign to sell deodorant?
It would be better if people could identify more the behaviour or methods of bullying -- you know, what Anonymous and Adria Rich had in common in last week's scandal -- than decide certain people are to be labelled as "bullies" and then ostracized "from the community" (which is bullying itself).
I knew it would take only about 6 tweets before these anonymous and unaccountable personas would lable me a bully merely because I questioned these crazy numbers -- and the entire craze of making kids feel like they are victims and have to fight these mysterious armies of 2.1 bullies who exist because the figures of authority in their world don't do their jobs? Or? Are afraid of lawsuits if they do more than tell the little darlings they have to "use words"?
One person attacking me because I questioned the meme campaign had an account with a name like "QueerFlag" or something and claimed that there was "hetereosexual apartheid" in America because not everyone was getting behind the lastest campaign for gay rights. After a few rounds, I didn't hesitate to identify this person as a loon, because we're in a huge tide in fact that is finding more support for gay marriage and gay marriage rights in many states and the issue is even being examined now by the Supreme Court. Regardless of this or that temporary loss of the battle for equal rights, it has turned a corner.
Yet talking in terms of "apartheid" is just crazy -- there is no such thing. Get a grip. Look at Syria. Realize you are not in some oppressed hell. No one has stopped you from doing whatever you want -- you're hysterically fantasizing about oppression on Twitter because ad agencies and Anonymous are ginning up meme campaigns. Criticizing your crazy notion that there is "heterosexual apartheid" in America isn't "being a bully"; you're the bully for thinking you can put over such arrant nonsense as politically-correct straitjackets we must all don.
Then...Who needs separate nonprofit charities or government agencies when you can have corporations and social media do the work of helping society and making a "Better World"? Says Ad Age:
The Mean Stinks Facebook page also includes a referral page for
counseling centers, some positive video shoutouts from Ms. Riley, a
section where women can upload video apologies or complaints about past
acts of meanness, and a store that sells T-shirts with anti-bullying
messages (along with links promoting F-commerce sales of other Secret and other P&G products).
"We're more than just products and brands, but we're actually doing
something meaningful for our consumers," said P&G spokeswoman Laura
Brinker.
Really, Laura? How are you measuring this? How can we evaluate it?
Part of the meme train is to get people to paint their pinkie fingernails blue. I'm not sure why. "Pinkie promise" is a concept that teenage girls sometimes invoke. Blue -- as in blue jeans -- seems to be the colour of this campaign. Just to be different, I've had all 10 of my toenails painted blue. You can never be too careful....
If you look at the Facebook account, and read some of the tweets, too, you see that middle-aged women still reliving their bullying traumas are as represented as some teens. I've also noticed that a few enterprising and aspiring hip-hop artists have seized the meme train to try to get attention to their videos. I thought this one by Tae Stax had a great name -- Fake Friends, Real Enemies. Don't we all have them! And any one of them could become a bully at any time!!!
There's kind of a mania about Chinese hackers now, now that the liberal bastion of the New York Times and the conservative bastion of The Wall Street Journal have been hacked by the Chinese themselves. That's what it takes -- the WSJ was better at reporting Hurricane Sandy because they could look out the window and see the flooding and their power went off; the New York Times was in NoPo, as the area is now jokingly called, not SoPo (north of power or south of power) -- the cut- off was 42nd Street.
Now it seems as if the Chinese are everywhere -- but they were always everywhere. There were people warning of them years ago (me). In 2011, Vanity Fair had a huge expose of the Chinese hackers and the incredible damage they do to both corporate and government web sites. The mainstream daily news didn't much pick up the story and the tech press was absolutely silent about it because China is their gadget manufacturing factory.
I don't think that Chinese hacking can be isolated from the other issues of Internet governance, however. You can't have L. Gordon Crovitz giving a bully pulpit to Google's Andrew McLaughlin to "break the kneecaps" of international bodies like the ITU over copyright, and then expect the world to do something about Chinese hacking. These things all emanate from the same problem: the legal nihilism of the communist regimes and the continued legal nihilism of their successors today, even if they aren't as communist as they used to be. The solution to Chinese hacking can't be artificially compartmentalized from the problem of piracy and hacking in other areas -- they all go together.
Hence my comment to the WSJ editorial that tries to put the focus on the content and the reporting -- as if Chinese hacking in their case was only about how they covered a government scandal. The WJS is a business; as such, it is a target for the Chinese Communist Party, Inc. to attack -- full stop. Every business person in America and many in the world reads it every day. The WSJ says:
The larger question is why the Chinese do this and what the regime's spying compulsions say about what it is.
In an op-ed in these pages last year, Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn noted that "The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace." The three former national security officials chalked this up to Beijing's need for rapid economic growth to improve the lot of its people. "It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property," they wrote, "than to incur the cost and time of creating their own."
The answer to your question of why Chinese hackers do their hacking is easy: because they can.
And the answer to why this happened to you is easy too: because you haven't taken the problem of hacking seriously enough and worked to prevent and mitigate it better.
The problem of hacking is often seen as merely a technological problem, that you need better IT people or products or expensive consultants.
But the first place to tackle hacking is in your mindset and your editorial board and your corporate culture.
And there, things are rotten because your young colleagues in particular have accepted copyleftism as a component of their culture which they radically defend; they have opposed SOPA and they have written news and editorial pieces attacking the efforts of any body, at home or abroad, to control piracy. Hackers are cheered as "freedom fighters" that might be protecting your Libertarians from losing your freedom instead of the anarchist Leninist-Marxists that you as *the Wall Street* Journal should be rejecting.
THAT is where the problem begins: a failure to understand the *ideological* side of the problem of a casual regard to property and property rights merely because they are digital. That's what you have to fix first. The rest will follow.
When you're ready to let writers like L. Gordon Corwitz stop dog-whistling to Kim Dotcom supporters and Google lobbyists ilke Andrew McLaughlin; when you're ready to stop golf-clapping WikiLeaks and letting Julie Angwin report only on the fears of government intrusion into social media and rarely the destructiveness of Anonymous, then you will be less of a target. It's just that simple.
***
Watch out for Eric Schmidt's solution to the problem he is finally admitting (Google didn't going into China or staying in China for years until their own servers were directly dinged). I suspect Eric wants Google to take over the state (it already has a revolving door) although he's less naked about it than Sergey Brin, who advocates for an end to political parties and governance on the Internet. For now, Eric is content to have this solution, in the words of a BBC review: "Western governments could do more to follow China's lead and develop
stronger relationships between the state and technology companies." This is why all those human rights organizations that joined the Google-dominated GNI were providing cover for something antithetical to freedom and human rights.
P.S. I remember the early days of email on the Internet in the mid-1990s when a tekkie swore to me that an attachment could "never" carry a virus. Boy, was he wrong. So when the stories began to surface of how software could penetrate the hardware of infrastructures, I paid attention, was sneered at by tekkies that "this couldn't happen here," took on some breathless Internet bloggers here, and today read that yes, power infrastructure can indeed be attacked. Bloomberg will report on this seriously; obviously the Onion won't, and lets us know an underlying attitude in the tech set -- "I for one welcome our new overlords."
A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.
Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.
I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.
That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.
Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."
Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.
In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.
Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.
Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.
But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.
A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."
I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.
Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".
So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?
Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:
Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong
national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,
to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic
and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure
“competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly
about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our
skepticism of central authority.”
He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.
Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.
To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:
This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the
Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here
liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with
aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government
laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the
idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”
Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it
that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its
real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state
sovereignty.
This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!
Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.
Says Judis:
Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective
action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should
do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the
service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of
government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government
that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but
grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists
invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights
interpretation of democracy.
Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."
The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.
Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.
Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.
James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.
I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?
Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.
Oh.
I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.
They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side, say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".
No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.
In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).
Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:
We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.
We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help
the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the
self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.
Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.
I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.
It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.
Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:
If any rational human being were to create our government anew,
today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of
the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government
workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.
The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.
Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.
For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):
Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy,
“high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green
business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to
both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.
Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.
While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:
Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make
“central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures
characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political
organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral
engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party
is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored
armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security,
that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and
groups like ACORN.
Details at www.rhsmith.umd.edu/miniMBA2.0/courses.aspxSocial Social Media Marketing Marketing strategy has been revolutionized by the rise of social
networks, real-time tools like Twitter and Facebook, user-generated
content (e.g., blogging) and a shift in consumer attention to new
media. Old paradigms of word of mouth marketing, viral strategy,
consumer targeting, brand and reputation management are being
radically altered for this business 2.0 phenomenon. The course will
address key strategic and tactical aspects of social media marketing,
using examples and techniques from corporations, election campaigns,
and recent startups. The strategic themes focus on the business case
for using various social media approaches and examples of successes
and failures. The tactical aspects will introduce participants to the
capabilities and uses of individual technologies through case examples
and hands-on exercises.
Faculty: Dr. David Godes Panelist on the Oct 2010 Session: Panelist: Shashi Bellamkonda, Director Social Media, Network Solutions Panelist: Rohit Bhargava, SVP Ogilvy/Author Panelist: Teddy Goff, AVP, Blue State Digital Panelist: Peter LaMotte (President), GeniusRocket (cc) Shashi
Bellamkonda www.shashi.name Social Media Swami Network Solutions Please credit as above if using this picture
I put all the details of this picture from Flickr because it lets you know how social media marketers morphed to political marketers and then won the election for Obama. Above is Obama's Digital Director, Teddy Goff, formerly of Blue State Digital. We will come back to him at the end.
You know that Silicon Valley saying, "If you are not paying for it, you are the product."
I think most people don't care very much about this and feel if they get a free product like Facebook or Linked-In, with maybe some premium options, they don't care. That is basically the social bargain.
I do think it's always worth peering at the business model, however, especially as the free/freemium platforms' business model always involves you working for free and often supplying free content, too.
A tweet fell into my vision from my feed from a guy named Ross Dawson, one of those typical newfangled Internet gurus who is famous for being famous and who tells you he is "sought after" and "in demand" as a speaker and consultant. It may be so.
Futurist/ Entrepreneur/ Keynote Speaker/ Author and contributor to global brain. Visualization of my neural activity: http://bit.ly/AHTGpBizModel
You know, I haven't clicked on that visualization of Dawson's neural activity -- I prefer to see if it is evidenced on Twitter for now.
So Ross was having a Twitchat and I decided to ask him a question.
He had begun breathlessly, but had few takers:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
In 23 hours I will be doing a Twitter #crowdchat on Crowd Business Models - tune in if interested! http://bit.ly/11N5W1G
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
A "crowd business model" is a business model based on participation and value creation by many, often outside the company #crowdchat
So I asked if these companies were profitable -- I figured to start with that. Answer:
@catfitz most of the companies on our Crowd Business Models visual are profitable. Jigsaw mentioned earlier sold for $140m
So, not all of them are.
My next question was to ask what the crowd gets paid. But his talk was over before you knew it.
If you look at Jigsaw, you get the answer: of course the crowd doesn't get paid. The crowd is relied upon to upload business cards of other people -- without their permission -- to fill up the data bases and create the service. They use it and get something out of it. They pay for premium accounts/advertising/consulting whatever -- although we never learn if this company *made a profit* on its own, running its business; it is so telling that in the hustle and shill of Silicon Valley, it is described as "making a profit" merely if it is sold to another entrepreneur and its original venture capitalists take a cashout. It's never about *the company*.
Salesforce, a much more gigantic and older and successful company that does customer service and all kinds of other things for companies found it in their interests to buy out a competitor. The data is criticized as being sloppy/erroneous/not with customer's approval. The New York Times wrote enthusiastically four years ago.
Jigsaw may disappear into the mists of Salesforth's maws, another little piece of the delusional history of the dotocom and web 2.0 manias. But for Ross Dawson, it's Exhibit No. 1. Jigsaw figured out how to get all those sales people out there to input data of those they were targeting in exchange for getting their peers' data -- and they could pay to access more for $25, or as a corporation, get unlimited access (the way LinkedIn, like an old Oriental Bazaar, makes you pay bakshish into the palms of Reid Hoffman, in order to make a connection to another person who might advance you in life; sometime, if it doesn't exist already, we will see the relationships reduced to commodities as they are in Russia or China, where you pay money not just for introductions; you pay money to get the job itself, as a bribe.)
So all those middle-class sales drones input data for free into this service, paid a little to get more of it out, and put $142 million cash into the hands of Jim Fowler, the owner, when he sold it to Salesforce. Great work if you can get it -- and he did, by not doing it, because you did.
Ross Dawson has a point to make:
Ross Dawson @rossdawson
Q9) we will see a dramatic rise in crowd-based businesses. In addition many established orgs will start to tap crowds in earnest #crowdchat
I had more questions, but it was hard to find answers about those other profit-making companies and what the user really got out of it (do we ever learn what percentage of LinkedIn premium users get actual jobs?).
But suddenly, my eye was struck by another piece of news:
Jo Brothers @jobrothers
Futurist @rossdawson joins Obama’s Digital Director at Air NZ Social Media Breakfast http://www.theflyingsocialnetwork.com:8080/archives/9175 via @FlyAirNZ
And then this:
Dawson joins headliner Teddy Goff at the Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast on Wednesday 13 February. Goff is the groundbreaking Digital Director of President Obama’s data-driven 2012 re-election campaign. Teddy Goff’s team harnessed data effectively to fundraise a ground breaking US$690 million, build online followings of more than 78 million people, and register more than a million people to vote in the largest online promotion programme in political history.
So, while Kim Dotcom was rolling out his new company in New Zealand, having fled American justice to his empire in NZ, and was twitting the content industry once again by encouraging uploads of content while he looked the other way and collected fees and ad revenue, Obama's digital director, head of Obama's "data driven" win, was breaking bread at an Air New Zealand Social Media Breakfast.
My mind boggles at things like that. Obama's ICE and prosecutors are trying to round up Kim Dotcom. He eludes their capture and eludes the NZ law-enforcers as well and the FBI are left bungling and fuming.
The smart thing to do then is to start to say to New Zealand, "Look, we understand you have your laws and all, and you need to respect civil rights and perhaps you haven't, but Kim Dotcom is wanted for piracy, we still have an indictment out, and we think maybe what would be appropriate because you keep refusing to cooperate in his extradition now is for us to cease to do business with you."
That's how technologists themselves do it.
Instead, Obama's Digital Director flies to New Zealand the week of Dotcom's rollout (was he in the audience for the big show? I bet he was!), and breakfasts with Air New Zealand, which is of course one of NZ's biggest businesses getting US revenue.
It's at moments like this that I realize Kim Dotcom will never be extradited during the Obama Administration.
I know I'm supposed to care about the government snooping on us online, but I never do.
I'd like to care more, because it seems important, but I don't.
The reason is simple: most of my day-to-day experiences of privacy erosion come from geeks on the Internet, not the government.
They either come from the big services like Facebook or Twitter, that just "know too much". Or they come from individual nasty geeks harassing me over my critical blog and trying to make my life miserable in various ways, in Second Life, on my web sites, or even in real life. It isn't the US government that has called me at home and scared my kids or blasted the Soviet national anthem over my phone -- it's Anonymous.
I follow the privacy issues involved with NSA's increasing ability to encroach on our online lines, and as I said, I do try to care because I don't want Big Brother or Big Government ruining our freedoms and civil liberties any more than I want Google to.
I just see Google as the much, much bigger threat now in so many ways.
Both leftists and libertarians got all crazy about the TSA -- I yawned. I went flying and had to go through those metal detectors and I didn't get what the big deal was. I got pulled aside and patted down and searched and questioned in line to New York -- who knows why. Randomly. Or because I spent four hours in the airport translating texts for a job, that happened to mention Uzbek terrorists. It was nothing. When I said after one search and questioning that I had been to a human rights conference, the officer quipped ruefully, "We have less of those than we used to"; possibly he felt slightly chagrined to be searching a middle aged translator over nothing. I don't care. It's all good. I still stare out my window at the Quonset hut with the chilled remains of some 3,000 New Yorkers, so I don't complain. I don't confuse inconvenience with loss of freedom. Say, inconvenience....wasn't that the term the copyleftists want to use about Aaron Swartz's crime?
Julie Angwin of the Wall Street Journal, who has done excellent exposes of Silicon Valley tycoons (her book on MySpace is state of the art) and who is critical of the Internet boosters has decided to adopt this cause of banging on the government's various plans for surveillance. That's good, that's what a free press in a democratic society should do.
I'm puzzled by the dynamics of it because I still try to wrap my head around why it is that a conservative, Republican-leaning newspaper for businessmen would undermine the state in this way, so to speak, but I guess it's the libertarians in them. And this is Murdoch's paper, and I think he'd like to papers do the snooping, er investigative journalism, thank you very much, and not have the government do it.
So in this this podcast with Lopate:
Wall Street Journal Reporter Julia Angwin
discusses the National Counterterrorism Center’s new authority to
access and keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years,
and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior even if there is
no reason to suspect them.
No one except the EU gets half as worried about Google keeping data for that period of time, but maybe Google doesn't "analyze for suspicious patterns".
So that's the part I look at, think about, and I conclude: I'm not worrying so much about this.
I'm happy to have you convince me why I should care more, but here's my thinking so far:
If the NSA or the NCC or any of these acronym outfits mount massive, automatic, mechanized operations to sift through all digitalized communications looking for patterns, they are not "reading my mail".
This is where you need your machinopology to kick in -- a machine is reading it, not a man. And they are not reading your individual mail thoroughly first, then looking for that tell-tale terrorist pattern like you saying you are "going to a wedding", Al Qaeda-speak for going to a suicide bombing.
Instead, they are just looking for the pattern.
That might be a distinction without a difference, but it reminds me of the two types of KGB surveillance, I think they were called operational and surveillance files. In one type of operation, they would just passively collect stuff about you merely because you, say, came into contact with foreigners at your job, or you were a nuclear physicist or because you lived in a closed city. They would pile up this stuff and not look at it until they had instructions to really follow you. Then they'd open up a more coherent and intrusive file that involved then more active following, tapping, etc.
So that's how I think of it. Neither of these things is good in the hands of the KGB; even in the hands of the FBI or CIA it can be violating civil rights.
But if there is a passive search for patterns that screens through the whole deck, it's hard to see it as personal. It's not. Only the pattern is of interest.
Oh, but you say, what about false positives? Well, let's say that active screening process went along and picked up these blogs, because they have Uzbeks, terrorists, and even lines about going to weddings.
Someone with intelligence in intelligence would look and see, oh, that's just a blog with newspaper clippings and somebody gabbing on about their opinions -- and move on. Nothing to see here. In fact, I've caught a few people like that gazing -- they should be more careful, especially if they are in the cybersecurity departments, of leaving their URL exposed as having visited LOL.
Perhaps I might earn a file because I've been on trips to some of these repressive countries, but I don't think it's much of one.
The point is, the massive filtration of the Internet isn't a direct and imminent danger to any one individual; it is only theoretically a problem of a false positive that in fact could be easily undone.
Naturally, people like Glenn Greenwald make a huge uproar of times when this sort of thing is wrongful, but I suspect they are doing a lot of edge-casing. He's not to be trusted on determining what it fact might really be a "clear and present danger" because he's always and everywhere minimizing that danger when it comes from real bad actors like WikiLeaks.
My problem is that people like Chris Soghosian and Greenwald aren't credible; they edge-case, they exaggerate, they hypothesize hysterically, and their noble and pious intonations when they do that aren't any more convincing.
I'm trying to think of who I would find credible about this, and I'd have to say Julia Angwin precisely because she gets it about the evils of Silicon Valley. Yet she's taken this libertarian turn on this issue that I just don't find convincing.
If it were up to the Kim Dotcoms and Anonymous and their friends, everything they do would be in a locker that no one could ever see -- giving them that free autonomous realm they crave which, as we know from Second Life, so quickly devolves to the mayhem of fraud, theft, child pornography, and illegal drugs, and must more.
The police lawfully wiretap old land lines with warrants -- how are they going to tap cell phones if they are encrypted by Jacob Appelbaum and beyond surveillance? What will society do to deter these criminals. THAT they are outlaws who defy the rule of law is already clear about them; that they lie in doing this is also clear. What is to be done?
Look. When you can show me somebody who has wrongfully been put under surveillance -- and that wouldn't be Jacob Appelbaum -- and when you can show me somebody other than Kim Dotcom squealing about improper state surveillance, even if technically true, then I might get more worried about it.
So the US is threatening to walk out of the WCIT, the meeting of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union, which aspires to run the Internet more than it does already, mainly as the cover to grabs by Russia and other bad actors).
As the Register reports, the US delegate has complained that some of the proposals coming down the pike from the likes of Russia " “creates an open door for review of content and potential censorship”. No surprise there!
So, good! That's what you do at international meetings like this. You threaten to walk out. You reject bad text. You fight. You talk to people in capitals. And you leave with either no document or a very thin compromise document or whatever. The US walked out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban -- that was the right thing to do. The US gets up and walks out of the room when the Iranian president rants about wanting to wipe Israel off the map -- that's what you do.
The ITU is a creaky, old-fashioned Soviet-style institution for which the UN is famous -- the entire place has the feel of 1970s Soviet culture -- right down to the bad art on the walls -- but it's still a multilateral body which politically represents the countries involved, for better or worse. It has its troubles, surely; the meeting has even had a network outage (was it hacked?) -- not exactly a good calling card for a group wanting to run the Internet.
Sure, the ITU is creaky and shouldn't be allowed to take over -- but neither should Google. Google just doesn't get it. Google doesn't have standing. And in fact, to the extent that this entire "multi-stakeholder" crap has gotten a hold in the whole Internet governance sphere, we have a problem, precisely because elite NGOs, funded by Soros or the EU or whatever, claim then an equal place at the table with governments and businesses even though they are no more democratically and transparently run than many of the countries. And they have neither the people behind them -- as elected governments do -- or the resources -- as businesses do -- to be making that claim. This is of course an entire topic, this grab at international governance as a whole by the lefty NGOs -- Ken Anderson has a great monograph on it. (Like me, Ken is a former HRW staffer.)
The entire Internet space -- the actual technology and then all the meta-ideologies that have sprung up around it -- offers a new playing field for the international jet-set aspiring to global governance, of course. And I'm not for handing it to them -- they don't deserve it. And they bring bad ideology to the table of a different sort.
Grumps Crovits:
Under the one country, one vote rule of the U.N., these 100,000 people
trump the rest of the two billion. It only takes a majority of the 193
countries in the U.N. to hijack the Internet.
And so...we should have Human Rights Watch or the Open Society Foundation or Google -- trump the rest of the two billion? Why?
It pays to remember that the Internet Governance Forum -- their preferred playing field to the ITU -- is in fact also nothing more than a UN creature that ultimately tethers back up to the UN. It was formed originally as a working group of a working group of a conference -- the World Summit on the Information Society which met over the last decade in various capitals of the world spawned the Working Group on Internet Governance, which then in turn spawned the Internet Governance Forum. The "stakeholders" who are the "multis" in the IGF are all government bureaucrats. If anything, they actually have less accountablity than an ITU delegation, because they are less tethered to political leadership, and are off on their own writing papers and making policy and citing the "complexity" and "technical nature" of the issues to get their way. The IGF has some good and some bad in terms of governments and NGOs.
But it has no more right to be the global governor of us all than the ITU does, and has far less stature as a forum of a working group of a world summit of a secretariat -- it's about three times removed from home base in Geneva, for whatever third-world time serving staff actually runs it. It's supposed to be saved from bureaucratic torpour by having "dynamic coalitions" that can come together to "solve problems" and "make proposals". Yet the "dynamic coalitions" can't just appear as flash-mobs or even conscientious and sober task forces. They have to be approved by the secretariat and have to have three existing multistakeholders endorse them. That's still not enough, that endorsement -- their papers, plans, charter, etc. have to be cleared. Obviously, if you make a "dyanmic coalition" on a politically correct topic like "global warming and the Internet" you'll get fast-tracked, but trust me, I might spend the rest of my life trying to get registered a coalition on intellectual property protection for small business on the Internet.
In a rant at the New America Foundation (where else), McLaughlin says:
"What is so bad about the ITU?" Mr. McLaughlin asked in a speech to the
New America Foundation in Washington on Nov. 29. "It's just simple
things like the nature, structure, culture, values and processes of the
ITU. They are all inimical to a free and open Internet, and they are all
inconsistent with the nature of the technical infrastructure that now
characterizes our communications networks." Voting rules let repressive
governments "engage in horse trading that has nothing to do with the
technical merits of the decisions under consideration."
o if we're going to play the development game -- doesn't bring its taxes home, and doesn't create very many jobs -- as part of the Internet-busting of paid content, it destroys more jobs than it creates
o opposes copyright by pretending that upholding livelihoods for creators somehow harms "innovation," which is really just Google's business interest
o arbitrary and overbroad appication of draconian TOS on G+ -- where bans can lead to loss of property on all other Google services.
McLaughlin goes to town on all the countries I've spent my life doing human rights work for:
"You need look no further than the fact that the ITU is the chosen
vehicle for regimes for whom the free and open Internet is seen as an
existential threat—Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia,
Vietnam, Belarus and Cuba. These are the countries placing their hopes
and ambitions in the vessel of the ITU for governance and regulation of
the Internet," Mr. McLaughlin said.
But Google was pretty late to the game opposing Chinese censorship and even today -- well, Silicon Valley uses China as its back end to manufacture its gadgets and is fairly beholden to China. What does Google do for any of these countries, really? The GNI, which was supposed to be the vessel where "the hopes and ambitions" for NGOs would reside has been a dismal failure, as Google and other Big IT firms never enabled it to make denunciations of Internet closures or censorship by states, but only tackled edge-cases which it felt might harm Google's direct business interests -- i.e. a case involving Youtube in Italy.
If you really want to hear GNI mumble -- and mumble loudly -- read this astounding page of non-answers and non-positions from this coalition, which nevertheless then amplifies the individual positions by some of its members -- like Center for Democracy and Technology, which basically cheerleads Google's decision not to wait for a court order, but to take down the anti-Muslim video from view in Egypt and Libya where violence had occurred. Astoundingly, none of these freedom fighters think to criticize the Egyptian government for putting the video on national TV and helping spark the violence. "And these targeted takedowns may also help Google's YouTube expand and preserve its market," says CDT -- and that, above all, is of course what matters, not universal human rights.
BTW, speaking of global warming and the Internet, I wanted to follow the Baku meeting and comment on it meaningfully but I couldn't; my power was shut off for weeks during Hurricane Sandy and I couldn't justify just sitting on the Internet following a conference during the brief hours that I was able to beat the lines for a seat at Fedex to use the computers uptown. I will have to study it another time. I'll skip the global warming stuff though -- it's likely to have the same kind of insanity we've seen from Susan Crawford.
I love this Robot ad from Adobe Systems. I think what it's trying to sell is real-people consulting time on top of the computer-driven analytics to give people more meaningful data. As computer hardware and software becomes cheaper and cheaper for the mass market and more and more people need less and less geeks, companies like IBM for sure need to find ways to sell consulting and software-as-a-service and such because the actual hardware sales are way down. I don't know what Adobe's story is that made them reach this conclusion, as they are known for software not hardware, but after providing free software to everybody on the Internet to make their awkward and hateful PDFs, they have to make their money *somewhere*.
Adobe is actually a corporate brand I associate with irritation and annoyance because it is constantly interrupting every session on my computer with requests to download a new update which it then requires me to re-start the computer to install. It then gives me a product where it is not easy to cut and paste text to use in other applications (it forces you to buy the version that does that, I guess). And why does software have to have so many iterations and updates all the time? And if it is "in the cloud" couldn't you eventually be streaming it so you don't have to turn your computer on and off? Why doesn't that happen?
In any event, the ad they've done is really cool!
And that's because not only does it tell the immediate story of how Adobe is going to treat its clients better with real people and thoughtful human analysis, not just machine-produced numbers. It tells a larger story about our times and the encroachment of computers on human life.
It also flips the narrative of how so many people have been fired due to computers, and fires the computer because it is unable to think conceptually as a human being.
The boss tells the endearing robot with the large, blinking child-like eyes that he has to let it go. "Yeah, good on the math!" he comments as the robot tells him it has worked for 5,732 days, 3 hours and 2 minutes. "But...not on the analytics."
The robot fights back against being fired by telling on a co-worker. It says that "Phyllis in accounting" takes 1.5 hour lunches and has "a bottle of fuel" stashed away secretly in her desk drawer. In other words, the robot has been used to monitor employee's performance on their computers and apparently even gathers data with cameras trained on them. The robot tries desperately to serve up the boss his real value -- keeping tabs on other human beings.
But the boss is merely embarrassed and chagrined for the robot. He doesn't care that Phyllis takes 1.5 hour lunches and even has a bottle with a cork in it in her desk! He asks for the robot's key card.
And here the Singularity fights back. The robot creates a tug of war for the key card, then deliberately drops it into a coffee cup. I suppose that means the data it has access to is destroyed. Or maybe not. It was like "accidently on purpose". It's the sort of subterfuge that maybe a robot is not capable of making anyway? The boss frowns at him at the end.
My own take on the robot problem has always been that robots or computers or code are all the concretization of people's will. The bigger problem with them isn't that they escape the good intentions of these good geeks. The bigger problem is that they in fact represent already a concretization of the geeks' bad will, and it does not come from a good place -- their authoritarian and unjust culture.
Example: Will Wright is a fun-loving, whimsical, creative genius. I love Will Wright. Except, I don't like or trust Will Wright ultimately making large virtual worlds and then robots in real life because Will Wright has shown himself capable of doing several things to undermine his own creation: a) making a social reputation system involving the nice handing of balloons to people, but then encouraging (like some pretend dispassionate scientist) the buying and selling of those balloons by cynics merely trying to cheat their way to the top reputational spots (Mia Wallace and her husband Moe Wallace and their whole "family").
Once you saw that Will Wright had Mia Wallace in his balloons, you knew that he was encouraging corruption like it was a game. Then there was his idly standing by while the Sim Shadow Government took over the entire game by buying out top lots or cheating on them or intimidating their owners to sell, like mafias. He simply let it happen without any consequences because it was "interesting emergent behaviour". He told some of his close friends among the players who were indignant that they should merely make other continents that played by other rules or social bargains -- but of course when these friends made the "Good Times" sort of continent with games or systems not always based on money or the game's polluted transactions and popularity lists, these, too, were invaded by social hacks.
I remember once an SSG operative admitting that the DJ position sold for millions of simoleons. What could Will Wright have done to fix all this? Well, he didn't have to code a thing, or nerf the game as he did by messing with the roomies system and disabling some of the good things in the game to prevent griefing. First, all he had to do was refrain from gifting his own cred to a miscreant to set the tone -- you can't always oppose evil, but you can refrain from conferring legitimacy on it.
And then all he had to do was allow free speech on the forums -- if players could critically comment on other players *and* on corrupt game moderators on the staff of the company itself, which was also a problem -- they could fix their own governance. Freedom of the media for a liberal democratic society. It was the best correction against crime. But the company wouldn't allow it: they had a huge geek bias toward allowing players free speech and wanted to avoid what they may have seen as legal liabilities if any of that speech criticized other players -- and of course, they didn't want criticism of themselves.
So no one could warn people about the true nature of the SSG; they couldn't tell people who the bad actors were and point out what was happening; they couldn't stand behind people who wouldn't sell to them and keep them from buckling; they couldn't use transparency and reporting to keep the game moderator system honest, and force it to refrain from banning on a whim people who opposed the SSG and letting them off scott-free. Very basic non-robotic stuff. Yet Will Wright kept trying to fix bad human nature with more robotics, if you will, and wouldn't let basic organic institutions of real life to function online (like free media and free association).
The Adobe commercial only wants to sell cloud computing and expensive consultants now, but it is also willing at least subconsciously to take part in the culture war around the world geeks have created for us. It is subversively questioning whether it really is necessary to clock Phyllis' lunch if she is a good employee, and whether the exposure of her privacy to the bosses which this dismissed robot comes up with in his own defense is in fact really so necessary to get the job done.
It ultimately questions whether data-scraping and crunching of the kind many companies are buying and selling now related to social media really means anything without some kind of human interpretation -- and whether the cost to get that data -- compromising of people's privacy -- is really worth the social anger and lack of cooperation it engenders.
But ultimately it points out the problem of the Singularity -- that the robots may not be nice, and if you get in their way, they might drop the key card in the coffee to disable it. Then what will you do?
Reading all this stuff about Orca has been scary," said Obama for
America Chief Technology Officer Harper Reed, "because I don't like
celebrating tech failures—I would never wish that on any enemy or
opponent. It's a scary thing in the world, because technology is not our
friend. It only fucks us over. We're just waiting for the robot
uprising."
Oh, come now, Harper. That's disingenuous bullshit. You yourself are an avid Singularist and in fact you *are* waiting for the robot uprising because you believe you'll be on the upside of it. And the problem in the tech isn't merely the automation and the rapid scaling. It's your bad culture and ill will. It's your notion that you create systems and "productivity tips" that knock away dissidents and critics as "unproductive" and then set up battles to the death or "truthquisitions". While claiming to be a proponent of "open source software" for its "openness," as an NDA'd Obama operative, you have helped create the secretive data system that Obama for America won't hand over now even to the DNC, let alone the American public.
The news of this book is being RUSHED so greatly, for reasons I can't fathom, that Random House doesn't even have the artwork ready -- despite the wonders of our digital age.
New book out by two figures I have often criticized on these pages (here,here, here), Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, and Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas, Google's new think tank.
“The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” begins a new book written by two top Google executives, which aims to explain how this experiment will play out in politics, business and even personal lives.
Alfred A. Knopf publishers, a Random House
imprint, said it would publish the book, titled “The New Digital Age:
Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business,” in April.
But this is what I've tended to write about all this:
Why do I worry about someone who is merely overenthusiastic about cool tools? Because lurking underneath this is not frivolity at the end of the day, but the arrogant undermining of institutions, and of course, the use of the tools to push certain ideologies.
If I hadn't just been staring at pictures of Eric Schmidt partying with the Obama engineers on election night, I might be more hopeful about all this.
You know, at the risk of instigating yet another furious rant from Andrew Feinberg, yes, I did predict this back here.
It really has all been terribly troubling, watching how first Google and Twitter and other big social media platforms sucked up all our data, as they got us to upload other people's content which they sold ads against and waited for lawyers to chase them; then they moved from all that free and open web 2.0 goodness to Big Data, and the closed society that the Obama For America campaign represented, drilling, drilling, drilling for data and Getting Out the Vote.
The Silicon Valley geniuses created the tools, baked their ideologies into them, larded them with features to block, ban and remove dissenters, then drilled the data to GOTV. If other alternatives caught up in the intervening years, it might not be so terrible, but meanwhile, Sergey Brin is calling for a world with no political parties and Harper Reed is here to guide us all in the lovely open source cult of the authoritarian persona.
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