Wired State

Lanier Takes on the Nerd Supremacy

There is howling all around the geekosphere these last few days -- Jaron Lanier, the geek who has turned against his own tribe, has taken on the nihilist anarchist Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and pronounced it as the result of a "nerd supremacy" on the Internet that has become destructive.

Lanier has gone to the heart of the matter and linked the WikiLeaks saga to the larger issue of the Internet and its makers and questioned their overweening power:

The degree of sympathy in tech circles for both Wikileaks and Anonymous has surprised me. The most common take seems to be that the world needs cyber-pranksters to keep old-school centers of power, like governments and big companies, in check. Cyber-activists are perceived to be the underdogs, flawed and annoying, perhaps, but standing up to overbearing power.

It doesn't seem so to me. I actually take seriously the idea that the Internet can make non-traditional techie actors powerful.¹ Therefore, I am less sympathetic to hackers when they use their newfound power arrogantly and non-constructively.

I don't require that geeks be "constructive"; what I do require is that they not be destructive. WikiLeaks is coercive and destructive. Few people are following the damages, really -- I am.  Whether it is the recalling of an ambassador who expressed legitimate concern about Iran -- a good thing -- or the recalling of a wayward presidential son-in-law who may have been corrupt -- a bad thing -- there's an underlying message from the WikiLeaks and Anonymous-aided conspiracy which is this: "we get to decide what's corrupt and who gets exposed, regardless of what interests or laws or people are at stake -- just because. Just because we can."

Therefore I pretty much agree with Lanier's premises, which  have coincided with my own for many years, although I can't quite follow his comments about object-oriented programming and such -- however, I'd like a second opinion on this from more fact-based folks than his critics.

One particularly spot-on anecdote that spoke VOLUMES for me, knowing these players:

Wikileaks grew out of a forum hosted by John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I almost became one of the founders of EFF as well. I was at the founding meeting, a meal in San Francisco's Mission District with John, John Perry Barlow, and Mitch Kapor. What kept me out of EFF was a sudden feeling -- at that very meal -- that something was going wrong.

There was a fascination with using encryption to make hackers potentially as powerful as governments, and that disturbed me. I could feel the surge of ego: We hackers could change history. But if there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world. Civil disobedience is a spiritual discipline as much as anything else.

Not surprisingly, Jay Rosen -- if there ever was a definition of nerd supremacy he would be it as one of the most influential "thought leaders" of the Wired State -- has led the charge against Lanier on The Atlantic.

It's currently taking the form of a literalist and Fisky assault on both Alex Madrigal, editor of The Atlantic, and Lanier, for not opening up comments under Lanier's article. There is a long and agonized hand-wringing from Madrigal which is entirely unnecessary -- these geeks from Jay Rosen to Cory Doctrow all block and ignore me for my legitimate criticism omf them; others who run sites where I try to post like Deanna Zandt delete and ban me. These thin-skinned cranky creatures have a hard time taking criticism!

Then some of the commissars of the InternIntern convened by Personal Democracy Forum have rushed to the front:  Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor of sociology (that bastion of "progressives" -- what else!) at University of Maryland  -- is refuting Lanier wholesale, mainly by implying that there really is only one kind of "scientific" social system -- socialism -- and that anything else is either unscientific, suspect, or abusive -- and certainly without any right to existence.

What do I mean by making such a blanket claim? Tufekci, like Dave Winer, Rebecca McKinnon and other PDF speakers, calls for a non-commercial, socialist Internet to be installed so that the "People Can Be Free," etc. All commercial operations and states are suspect. It all has to be peer-to-peer; it can't be hierarchical -- which is "evil".  I've documented this over time in running this blog; it amazes me that Rosen can question Lanier's thesis of a nerd supremacy because...he doesn't see any nerds take power, and doesn't see any of them threatening to take power.

What does it take, for a card-carrying member of the Nerdocracy himself to realize this truth about his power base lol?! 

o Andrew McLaughlin of Google serving on the Obama campaign team, going to work for the White House, working on all those "progressive" topics like "net neutrality," getting 11 visits with the president, then revolving back out to Google. Nerdocracy? Or coincidence?

o Jaren Cohen serving at State and presiding over the formation of the 21st Century Statecraft Internet policy, telling Twitter friend @jack not to turn off Twitter for maintenance when the Iranian revo is running, and revolves out to Google.

o Beth "I'd like to blow up Congress" Noveck whose scholarly writings on "democracy" and groupism and collectivizing of the Internet used to make my hair stand on end in Second Life -- lands a job as the deputy at the White House Office of Science & Technology.

o Anil Dash, a top dev of our beloved Typepad -- a job as a consultant on social media to the White House.

Those are just a few of the examples of people actually physically getting into actual liberal democratic government as it stands, which is a kind of state of shards of its former self.

Then there's all the nerds trying to take power through the new Wired State of transnational networks of all sorts, partly in old and new media, partly just in Facebook or Twitter or Blackberry or Android IM lists and connections, the new old boys' network.

o Ken Lerer, chair of the Huffington Post company, probably the most influential paper after the Wall Street Journal these days, inviting Moot (!) of 4chan to serve as an advisor

o the tremendously influential Google fanboy Jeff Jarvis drafting and putting over a new "Bill of Rights in Cyberspace" -- which gets enthusiastic approval from Tufecki, who merely wants Jeff to catch up on what's been happening and the New World Information Order successor WSIS at the UN, and maybe move it over there (where Pakistan and Iran and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Tunisia can ensure that it includes a ban on blasphemy, i.e. criticism of religions and theocracies, just passed at the General Assembly).

o Dave Winer's call for bypassing Amazon and other corporations on the Internet that he finds are "censorsing" and setting up a Darknet -- which won the enthusiastic approval of Rebecca McKinnon and others

o Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg just became Man of the Year at Time and his platform has 500 million members

Lanier's piece is good to read in companion with Bruce Sterling's literary masterpiece "The Blast Shack" that diagnoses and explicates the problem and nature of the geek quite handily -- which prompts even Evgeny Morozov (especially Evgeny Morozov) to say he "mostly agrees" with him (Sterling characterizes the geek very darkly as a social and amoral misfit mainly banal in his tendencies to do evil with power).

But unlike Lanier ("Forever Alone!), Sterling -- covering himself with a cloud of flaming against geeks -- then slips in to endorse WikiLeaks in the end -- he thinks governments "need" to be opened like this. There. Don't worry, Bruce hasn't betrayed the tribe in the end, script kiddies, no need to b& him! Cool story, bro! (and that is how Morozov can pretend he is what he isn't.)

That's the common thread with all these people -- a radical interpretation of an Internet they would run outside of/incompetition with/instead of the commercial modern Internet that has mixed ownership and controls by private persons, corporations, and states -- reflecting, you know, human society as it exists in reality -- and an ardent belief that "all knowledge is on the Internet" and *they* have access to it; that "all information wants to be free" and they decide how and when (except theirs) and that this utopian transhuman, transnational, transstate entity (which I tend to call the Wired State) is to be preferred than the imperfect realities we have now.

Professors, in universities.

Like Gabriela Coleman, another hacker groupie and 4chan enthusiast, who was also invited by the Atlantic tech section to pontificate on Lanier.

 

The Artificial "Net Neutrality" Concoction

The "Net Neutrality" stealth-socialist scam passed, albeit in compromised form.

My comment to the New York Times scene-setter is pretty generic:

Many things are wrong with this phony "Net Neutrality" gambit, starting with its fake name, cooked up by a professor, claiming that it's about getting companies "not to discriminate" or (as ACLU and EFF misleadingly claim) not "suppress free speech" -- because...they need to curb congestion on the Internet and manage the traffic that results from people downloading zillions of files these days, whether stolen movies, Lost Episodes, WoW patches, tons of photos, etc. etc. The entire proposition should be renamed "Network Congestion Management" to reflect the actual issue at hand.

1. Broadband is a scarce resource, it will have to be metered, and that will happen. And that's ok.

2. This is executive overreach, even after the courts already stayed Chairman Genachowski's hand, he's at it again. He will experience more judicial restraint as a result. Good!

3. This is part of Obama's stealth socialism, bringing in various DSA campaigners from the past into various single issues as part of a "progressive" agenda that slips under the radar. The complexity of this issue, the fact that extremist left geeks as well as right-wing libertarians embrace it will confuse the average person, congressmen won't get up to speed on it vast enough, and it will be "put over".

4. What it's most about is Google, and Google's need to have other people pay for its roads, so to speak, so that it can sell ads with less expense for itself, and maintain the whole geek class with all their new platforms, widgets, aps, etc.

5. Broadband has been sequestered off as "something different" in a compromise, which amounts to saying that the telecoms can still make money on this, if they let the president and his executive agencies have their socialism somewhere else. "Selling the rope," I guess it's called.

6. This appears to be renationalizing the Internet, which the geeks said they were always against. Oops, guess not, when its "your own" in power, and certainly Silicon Valley bundlers have a huge interest in having the pipes be as cost-free for their big IT, social media app, etc. businesses as possible. What it's really about is a war between IT companies with search and media and telecoms with mobile. Google and Verizon reached a deal that put an end to all this fussing earlier this year, which is why Google stopped lobbying as hard about it.

7. Those lobbying for it the most fiercest are people like Fred Wilson, venture capitalist in companies like FourSquare, who want to make sure that they and customers don't face more costs due to the growing use and need for broadband. They say making it cost more, or slowing down anybody's traffic in order to prevent unwanted expenditures, stifles "innovation" -- by which they mean their business interests. Their chief argument against pointing out this blatantly obvious point about their self-interest is to claim that the government invested a lot in telecoms or gave them breaks or they've had their piece of the pie. But nobody ever really shows you the numbers, nor does anybody ever really explain why everybody else has to pay for Google's last mile to deliver its ads to you and me.

8. Quite a number of misleading reports have been made about this complex and under-the-rug process where Genachowski himself has kept mum to enable people to ascribe whatever views they find comfortable to him, not necessarily true. The New Republic for example misleadingly reported that the "Net Neutrality debate was now over" as if it were lost and now a compromise would be made; the AP was more accurate in stating that the Chairman was going to put in "Net Neutrality" rules without sounding like in fact much of a compromise was made.

9. The silliest proposition ever here is this notion that all bytes are created equal and that customers should never face a company staying their hand as they cruise around the Internet. But nothing else in life works that way. More water, electricity, telephone usage all work on a metered principle. Tolls and taxes are put on roads to pay for them, etc.

10. One of the most duplicitous pieces of this argument is that it "helps rural people" i.e. there's a hue and cry that the U.S. doesn't have as much broadband as some socialist European country that has the government pay for it. In fact, all that translates to is, "Google needs to reach more people in the hinterlands with its ads."

11. A chief emotional factor driving this debate is that for some reason in San Francisco, where there's a high concentration of geeks using all these newfangled toys, there isn't enough choice of providers, so they develop seething hatreds for Comcast and AT&T if those companies don't make their toys work fast enough. People in most of the rest of the country either have more choice or less need for intensive broadband toys and don't grump as much.

And there you have it. It will likely be pushed through, like health care, and then the courts will get to work undoing it soon thereafter.

And so it was. Extreme leftists are howling, but so are conservatives, because it's a compromise.

I'm hoping it will go to the courts so that the main problem resulting from this hodge-podge--executive overreach -- will be restrained.

The End of the Rainbow

Science fiction novel by Vernor Vinges; the Wikipedia summary forgots to mention the confiscation and destruction of library books.

If you spent the last two years in Second Life, agitating about Mesh and Display Names and going to SLCC and various Metaverse Meetups, and fretting about copyright and SL Marketplace, obviously, you weren't at the cutting edge, as we all know.

Somewhere about two years ago, or two or three of those Virtual World Expo conferences ago (now they're renamed Engage! Expo and cover everything virtual, not just worlds but mobile, electronic kids' toys that hook up to the Internet, etc.) I could see that people like Tish Shute were losing interest in virtual worlds because they'd sort of played out. They had kind of done everything they could with them and they were either too expensive to keep playing with, or the tech was getting old and not "scaling," or whatever, and so if they couldn't get themselves a Farmville sort of game deal (like Raph Koster did with his Metaplace, which then morphed to Island Life and then got him a position in Playdom, where Robin Harper (Robin Linden) is now, too) -- they moved on to two other areas: a) apps for mobile phones, where they could make a fortune (or so they would hope) on various Yelp and FourSquare clones, or b) augmented reality via smart phones.

Augmented Reality would usually make some Second Lifers roll their eyes -- it had a lot of the feel of LARPs (Life-Action Role Play) of being out in real life doing something dorky. But certain SLers tried to combine SL and AR in various ways (remember Jerry Paffendorf linking up an art show with Destroy TV at the Lit Lounge art gallery?) and of course Tish Shute very early understood that she needed to drop not only commercial virtual worlds, even their open sim reverse-engineered clones that weren't really that exciting, and go into AR (VWs may be pressed into service later).

If you've tried to keep up with Tish's blog in the last two years, you'd give up, because not only are the posts extremely long (longer even than what I write), the material is very technically difficult for the non-geek and worse, very heavily geek culture ideological. They are always making a better world....

But, it would have paid to pay more attention to Tish and try to argue with her and her geek pals more (I did to some extent, and it's not too late to go to her blog and catch up) because as you can see from this "news you can use" sort of popularized New York Times article, AR will be a reality that will "slowly start to make consumers change their behaviour" (!) before you will have had time to properly understand what it is. And that's how the geeks like it -- disruptive, even destructive, as long as they profit and gain power from it.

I tune into it now and then, and usually have to bookmark it and leave it for later. Hence this blog, a kind of bookmark of a bigger sort to remind myself to "do something" about this latest encroachment on freedom

As you can see from the various very uncritical pieces in the Tech pages of the times about Layar and such, there is very little critical thinking going on about this topic, and instead, a headlong giddy rush, as with other new tech toys, to allow geeks to set the agenda by the lights of their own hacker culture, with some of them taking the kind of nihilistic and obliterative approach that we see fictionalized in Vernor Vinges "Rainbow's End" science fiction novel.

It's all the more nihilist and obliterative because it poses as "fun" and "cool". I'm going to try to convey what I came to understand about the experiments I saw being done with this in SL, which included Babbage Linden's tagging system, and this strange gang on the Transhumanism planet having a talk with a major brand about creating clothes that would be wired into your autonomous nervous system (remember how they always like to go for that, see Ed Castronova) and flash colours like a mood ring, or portray on your avatar as akind of elaborate emoticon.

WikiLeas is a Dox Dump Even if Glenn Greenwald and Tom Blanton Don't Think It Is

WikiLeaks is still a dox dump, even if Glenn Greenwald of Salon doesn't think so and strenuously tries to persuade us that it is not, and even if Tom Blanton of the National Security Archives, a man who tries to de-classify documents the legal way for a living, says it's not because responsible journalists are now handling the materials.

Here's what Blanton says:

So far there has been no dump of the diplomatic cables. As of yesterday, there were fewer than 2,000 cables posted on the Web in the Wikileaks and media sites combined, and another 100 or so uploaded each day, not the 251,000 that apparently exist in the overall database as downloaded by Bradley Manning. And even that set of a quarter-million cables represents only a fraction of the total flow of cable traffic to and from the State Department, simply the ones that State staff considered “reporting and other informational messages deemed appropriate for release to the US government interagency community” (the Foreign Affairs Manual explanation of the SIPDIS tag). According to the editors of Le Monde and The Guardian, Wikileaks is following the lead of the media organizations on which documents to post, when to do so, and what to redact from the cables in terms of source identities that might put someone at risk. Such behavior is the opposite of a dump. At the same time, an “insurance” file presumably containing the entire database in encrypted form is in the hands of thousands, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has threatened to send out the decrypt key, if and when his back is against the wall. So a dump could yet happen of the cables, and the prior record is mixed. A dump did begin of the Iraq and Afghan war logs, but once reporters pointed out the danger to local cooperators from being named in the logs, Wikileaks halted the dump and withheld some 15,000 items out of 91,000 Afghan records.

Sorry, but when a dox dump is dumped to media, that's still a dump -- to media. They may or may not be responsible; they may or may not be politicized in their handling of the materials. And a dox dump enabled for thousands of supporters to dump en masse from an encrypted file is a dump, too.

All of it is a dump because it all is  an artifact of a machine, and one not "watching over with loving grace," but a system coded with wikitarian thinking itself (collectivizing information in unaccountable ways in the belief that to keep it in silos was harmful) and exploitable, therefore, by those finding the neglect by the unaccountable in this de-hiearchified, vulnerable system.

When agents pursued the de-silo-ing of information, a kind of abstract good we can all get behind, they didn't also put in a possibly counterintuitive TSA-like scanning system that was checked by those in command to query *which personnel are accessing the system, and why*. The old days when Smiley copiously signed out certain background materials from the classified files from Connie, and then smuggled certain papers home in his briefcase, are long gone. As Manning explains nonchalantly, there isn't even any physical barrier or log-on barrier the wikified contents of the diplomatic cable system.

So Manning got the dump because it was there, not out of some strategic thinking about what to steal, not originally out of common cause with some strategic leaker (unless we're not getting the whole story -- and we may not be) but because of machine artifacts, his own nihilism about what he was doing in this situation, and the fortuitious relationship with Lamo and others in WikiLeaks -- about which we don't know enough (and of course the government will try to make the case that Assange incited the hack, knew about the hack, and directed the hack and is colluding in it, and his defense will try to prove that he merely received materials as a "good journalist".

Remember the question Manning is shown asking in the chat logs published by Wired:

if you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?

Not, "I've seen some injustices here and might get some documents to expose them, would you publish them?" (like Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers) but "How can we stick it to these feebs with the biggest dump possible?"

Tom Blanton is also trying to pick up the "good journalist" theme.  Either he didn't read the Wired chatlog (or there's the BoingBoing version claiming to be even less redacted) or doesn't care about its implications, or he thinks, like Bob Wright, that how you get the material for your journalism doesn't matter -- people have all kinds of mixed motives and they are not the point of materials that should be "in the public interest" to feed "the public's right to know."

Glen Greenwald is a bully, and delights in playing goon-gotcha with Joe Biden, trying to find him "contradicting himself" although in the end, his elaborate arguments are as persuasive as a toothache -- obviously Biden finds overall that the WikiLeaks phenomenon to be one detrimental to U.S. diplomacy even if happens to say that it's immediate effects aren't so damaging. The normal reader not interested in sticking it to the Man gets that, especially coming from the malaprop-prone Biden.

 The  point is not to obsess and analyze what this or that official says about WikiLeaks in the first heat of discovery or in the next week of cold fury, and set it in amber. Official will say and do different things and contract themselves and each other in this government that is more open than many in the world, and what matters is whether there is a decision to prosecute or sanction Assange, and how the Manning case will go.

Greenwald is challenged by a Salon commentor to answer the question about where the 250,000 documents are. Indeed! In this ecstatically transparent world that WikiLeaks invites us to participate in, shouldn't dox be all dumped at once? What happened to Assange's claim of only six months ago, "We always release the source material simultaneously"" -- no longer true, now that first the dox dump goes to the newspapers, then they pick and chose and dole out the cables based on...whatever. Their notion of what is cool, a scoop, relevant to an issue of the day, timing -- or not timing -- to events happening now.

"Congress Shall Make No Law" Should Not Become "Companies Shall Make Policies"

As expected, more rights groups are speaking out on the WikiLeaks affair -- Committee to Protect Journalists has turned in the most credible and supportable statement so far, in my view, and Human Rights First is back again with another statement that slightly clarifies their first in the direction of recognizing the rights of businesses but that still demands they make a policy to protect"Internet freedom".

I think if we have a Constitutional amendment that says "Congress shall make no law" we should not begin to substitute this protection of freedom with one that lessons it, which is "therefore Companies shall make policies". Either companies should be required to enforce the First Amendment -- or not. I believe they should be asked to do this only voluntarily; non-state actors should not be the keepers and enforcers of law if we are to avoid juntaism and vigilantism.

I believe CPJ has made the more supportable statement because it has avoided writing prescriptions for Internet companies and merely hewed to the topic of the First Amendment and its jurisprudence -- private companies are not required to enforce the First Amendment.

My critique of HRF in particular comes down to this: they are moving in the direction of trying to apply universal human rights standards to non-state actors who are not the proper subject of them nor have signed them as an obligation -- nor should sign them as an obligation (HRF must recognize this, which is why they are trying to build the case focusing on "undue government pressure). CPJ is understandable in its focus on the impact of any prosecution on journalism; HRF is being selective in its call for enforcement of First Amendment protection by companies and not willing to confront both the inherent legal nonsense of demanding non-state actors to comply AND the very uneven performance that is already resulting, and will go on resulting, which amounts to political correctness.

The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law.."  As soon as you make ANY law, even a liberal benign one, you have already restricted speech in wrongful ways. Therefore, to say "Congress shall make no law...but companies shall make a policy" is just as wrong and restrictive in the end. Even a liberal and benign company policy will be insufficient, and also legally nonsensical as non-state actors aren't the enforcers of law -- unless you want to bless a really dangerous concept that leads to vigilantism.

"Internet freedom" is something that is a debate (or should be). Internet freedom for some extremists means child pornography and Jihadist incitement videos and snuff films.  Just because government gets involved in prevention of the use of the Internet to commit lawfully-defined crimes doesn't mean it is "chilling speech". (There has been a hugely raucous and largely unnoticed [in U.S. mainstream media] debate about this in Australia, Assange's homeland, with the hard left consistently crying wolf and claiming falsely that the government was already about to block the Internet)

Freedom in fact depends on companies and individuals having privacy and free choice, not having to explain themselves, and not knucking under pressure from do-gooders, self-defined. Today, a concession to the need to host Assange's files. Tomorrow, a request to give equal time to Glenn Beck, or worse.

American is Already Healing from WikiLeaks

Remember how you knew that the destructive social whirlwind of the 1960s was dying down and becoming tamed? It was when they started having those stores appear in suburban malls that sold tie-dye shirts and beads and posters -- but not the bongs and wrapping papers of head-shops. Then, before too long, those little roach clips were made over to handy recipe-card holders for your kitchen counter. America has always had a vast capacity to commodify (and thus de-radicalize) just about any social revolution thrown at it to try to bring it down, Leninist-style. And I guess that's a good thing, or we would have been turned into China or Russia or Sudan long ago.

So this will be no different, and maybe in our times of Accelerating Unevenly Distributed Future and Singularity and stuff, this recovery of the trauma of WikiLeaks will happen really fast! Like, by next month!

In fact, I already see signs that WikiLeaks is now just becoming a marketing concept, a positive notion of disclosure for the public good that all kinds of people and institutions and businesses are going to take up to appear relevant.

So here comes the SC Johnson ad (clipped above and touted in the Times) about various cleaning products, many of them with toxic stuff that you try to keep out of the reach of children for good reason, with a new campaign to "share our ingredients" and build "trust" that is evidently a "green" campaign.

There's even a website, whatsinsidescjohnson.com, where you can go and hover over, say, a picture of a can of Draino, and find out the stuff in it (although I believe they were always listed on the side of the can anyway, no? but here you'll find more information about them). It's like a veritable Draino #cablegate.

Now, the good folks at SC Johnson (not to be confused with Johnson & Johnson), probably had "green" in mind more than WikiLeaks when they started this campaign, which was rolled out November 24 for PR Newswire, and was obviously some time in the making (but then, the warning that WikiLeaks was coming was also some months in the making, too).

Still and all, when the ad hit Yahoo pages after WikiLeaks hit, it all seemed of a piece, all part of the zeitgeist.

Disclosure of diplomatic secrets, disclosure of the ingredients of cleaning products, all cleansing, all for the public good, right?

Participatory Economics: The Supply + Demand of Participation

I'm on the tail end of my week in London and I was able to sit down with colleges Stefan Stern and Robin Hamman where we had a brief but rich discussion on the idea of being a social business (podcast here). We discussed quite a few things from emerging start up models to communications in a social age, but one of the things I brought up was the mainstreaming of participatory economics. My theory is that social technologies and the online behaviors they enable leads to more participation from what use to be static audiences and "consumers". But as a result of this, a demand is generated for participation to be reciprocated from business and brands. If this is true (and I think the needle is moving in that direction) does big business have the supply to meet the demand of participation?

via darmano.typepad.com

[That's a Reblog, i.e. reference to another person's blog, in case you aren't getting this interface which isn't so clear.]

I don't think the needle is moving precisely because not only big businesses, small businesses don't have the supply of customer service to meet the demand. And that's all social media is -- customer service.

Imagine if you were at the ad sales meeting and somebody say, "Hey, Stan, let's sink half a million dollars next quarter into MORE customer service with more staff time and more design work and not have any return!" Everybody would say, "um, no."

But if Fred says "Hey, Stan, let's sink half a million dollars next quarter into this cool new social media where we can get people talking about our brand willingly for free and spread virally!" everybody would say, "Wow, sounds great, let's do it."

It's like the Friskies campaign with even a virtual world for my cat (OK, my cat proved supremely uninterested, so I played the games in it).

I stayed on the mailing list and I will go on clicking on the ads, but here's where things went wrong for me:

o the game disappeared and no new ones came
o no more coupons like there was for the first few months a year ago, so what's the point?
o no tips corner for my real questions like "why is my cat hissing all the time dammit?" but inane anodyne stuff like "be careful not to put your Christmas tree bulbs too low for your cat to play with" and retarded stuff like "your cat is so over-stimulated by the holidays with stuff like bulbs hanging low that it needs some down time".

In short, Friskies, which I will go on buying anyway for my fur-covered pigs, can't be bothered to create a community and cut me some coupons, either, because both would be TOO EXPENSIVE in time and money. And that's ok. I don't need Friskies to be my friend. That's why social mediafication of Friskies was maybe a bad idea unless somebody had some extra millions to blow on entertainment.

That's the dirty little secret hiding behind social media after you peel off all the social media guru parasites and widget engineers on top of it, and get below the 10 percent in the power line who will "interact". The rest want entertainment and coupons or even more, a permanent interactive community that seriously follows up on the brand with CUSTOMER SERVICE.

So no, neither big nor small business has the supply of CUSTOMER SERVICE for the CUSTOMER SERVICE STATE as Ed Castronova called it in "The Flight to the Virtual World".

P.S. See Armano's slides to the left called "Social Media is Dead" lol.

U.S. Post Office Will Let You Mail WikiLeaks

Cooper Station Post Office, New York City.

I went to my post office today and I asked the postal clerk whether it was allowed to send a disc with WikiLeaks cables on it through the mails, or whether it was not allowed because it involved stolen government classified information. I thought it would be interesting to hear what they said.

And he immediately, without hesitating, said that it was allowed, because the Post Office does not have a rule against this, and it would be up to the sender to take responsibility for it.

I asked him if there wasn't a regulation because it would be too hard to go through all the letters and not practical.

And he said, no, there are random inspections, and if any unlawful material were found, then it would be the responsibility of the USPS patron to answer for it.

He said that if asked, a sender could be liable if he lied about it.

I said, ok, but what if I tell the truth? What if I say this envelope here has WikiLeaks in it, will you mail it? He said, yes, because they don't do it that way. It would have to wait for an action, an inspection, or some federal agent making a search.

The USPS is about as "common carrier" a "common carrier" as you can get. But it's interesting that no federal directive has gone out saying that WikiLeaks should be treated like chemical hazards. Of course, few people would *bother* to send WikiLeaks in the mail on a disk when they could just send it by email or bit torrent or whatever. Even so, it's conceivable, say, that somebody might want to send a disk abroad to someone who maybe had a blocked Internet in a repressive country (of course, such a country might peruse disks in the mail, too.)

Anyway, the big hue and cry the last few days has been that seemingly ridiculously, the U.S. armed forces or various federal officers are telling their employees they can't look at the cables and even blocking the New York Times. To which I can only say: understood, because they have to make their case -- if they don't go on treating these cables as classified and going through the motions of keeping them out of view even from their employees, they can't claim they are much of a secret such as to need to prosecute anyone related to them.

Of course, those employees could see them in an Internet cafe or at home (although they've been told not to view them at home, either, some news media are saying).

The Gotcha Gang are having many spasms of glee over the idea that they've found federal offices acting goofy, like they could "close the Internets lol". Um, yeah, we get it, and they get it, and it's all stupid.

But don't forget that was Assange's purpose, to make the "authoritarian regime" clutch up and close in confusion, and make itself dumb.

I'm reading this story and reminded of the time I used to work at a city TV station. The geek who ran the network there had an absolutely finicky system whereby we could not have the Internet near the same computers that were used only to sent out the TV broadcasts. Those computers had an intranet but not the Internet. He called this room "mission critical" and said that it could not possibly have the Internet on the same computers.

Why? Because of bugs, because of hacks, because of glitches that would take down the whole system. The mission of broadcasting had to take precedence over convenience.

That meant that we constantly had to run down the hall  to go look up stuff on the Internet, and sneaker-net discs past the watchful eye of the geek who didn't want discs going into the "mission-critical" machines either. But it made it tremendously annoying if you had to get a translation of something you knew was already done off the Internet  or had to look up a term, and couldn't just cut and paste. I don't know if this practice is done everywhere, but at one level, it made sense.

A Really Stupid Thing Is Getting Closed on the Internet -- Good!

TechCrunch has confirmed the news that Delicio.us is shutting down.

Good!

Not only have I always hated the name and the cutesie use of the .us domain - which I bet costs them some user confusion in trying to find it sometimes. Finally they had it changed to delicious.com for that reason, likely.

I've always found this service to be completely stupid. I remember how Linden Lab fanned it heavily in Second Life, and even used it as the system for us to record the sites we wanted to put in various public lists on their website to visit, either businesses or communities or places to explore.

And it's such the annoying place because you bookmark stuff, categorize it, and never come back to it. Ever.

I just went and looked and stuff that was put there in...like 2006. The links were dead, there was no connectivity, it was all stupid.

Whenever I ask people at conferences or meetings in RL and SL whether they REALLY ever go back to all those silly bookmarks they made, they always hang their heads and admit that they don't.

I have had a hit on my site from Delicio.us...like...once.

It's a totally bankrupt thing, and it's good that it has died from lack of an actual consumer market, despite all the hippie technocommunist fanning it got. Its freeness and communityness of course made them hawk it, but it had no business model.

Yahoo acquired it, and like all big IT companies that acquire stuff, they neglected it and then eventually decided to kill it. I'm waiting for the day that happens to Flickr, and somebody finally figures that if they don't start charging there, and don't put in ads, and don't put in a micropayments system to get people's rights paid for, they will die, too.

These freebie services can't go on surviving on the Internet because they can't get their devs or users paid, and they deserve to die. They aren't in the public interest because the public long since stampeded away from using them, they are too stupid.

If you are in a clutch about all those dumb things you bookmarked, half of which are likely dead links now, HTML export them and "put them in the cloud" as people say, and use Instapaper or some other thing.

To be honest, I don't even ever go back and look at my bookmarks in Firefox! And then FF crashes and glitches and loses them and...I don't care.

I don't save every phone number I call and create transcripts of every phone call I make, let along every real conversation I have in real life. Why would I fetishize the Internet and feel I have to be a pack-rack online and save every transaction and interaction?!

I realize now what I use instead of anything as cumbersome and non-user-friendly as Delicio.us -- Twitter and bitly.com which lets you know how many people clicked on your shortened link.

The problem with Delicio.us is that it was predicated on "sharing," but couldn't show you stats from the sharing.

Why The Nature of Journalism Matters for Our Wired State

Here's my debate with Robert Wright on Blogging Heads.

Some interesting discussion on these questions:

o whether the nature of the journalism matters or how you got the documents finally "sanitized" by journalistic judgement -- Wright doesn't think so, I do

o whether Bush's wiretapping and the complicity of telecoms is something we should be more indignant about than WikiLeaks hacking and publication of secret documents (because it's a state and non-state). And here I'm not willing to say "Oh, yes, it is". That is, I can certainly condemn Bush's wiretapping and telecoms, if you can illustrate to me that there was really no compelling "clear and present danger" type of problem (it appears to have been overbroad). To be sure, Wright put this in terms of trying to goad me into saying (because he admitted he thought I would naturally believe this!) that I thought it would be "ok" for the government to hack WikiLeaks, but "not ok" for WikiLeaks to hack the government.

But guess what -- both are wrong, because the method is wrong. However, having said that, I will then not rush to the next conclusion - as the anti-Americans and leftists will -- and say "therefore, the government hacking WikiLeaks is worse, because it's a state, and might succeed".

What I won't concede (and I'm not sure Wright has a context of thinking about state/non-state actors such as at the UN that I have ) -- is that non-state actors, just because they are non-state and therefore don't have the power (ostensibly) of the state are somehow more of a victim when they are hacked by U.S. intelligence in a cyberwar, than Mastercard is a victim when their script kiddie friends hack them. Oh, no. I will definitely not concede that because I think we are already rapidly moving to a Snowcrash situation where the U.S. is getting to be merely a glorified post office (that can't even hang on to its mail) and the stateless, that is to say, the new Wired State, is taking over with frightening rapidity -- the power Assange has to leak government secrets; the power Anon has to leak the secrets of Gawker.com customers because Gawker.com criticized 4chan's methods -- that power is a greater power now than any state, and we are only seeing just the beginning.

o whether the lunch-counter sit-in had to be civil disobedience precisely because the larger community of the South would not have ever recognized what would later become established rights for blacks, and that therefore that is what is required now with the DDOS or the entire WikiLeaks operation, i.e. the nature of the problem of U.S. government secrecy is so terrible that unlawful methods have to be used to bless it -- I certainly don't think so, and Bob Wright seems to condemn it, but he seems particularly animated about showing that "civil disobedience is needed" for some immoral situations.

I'm not willing to say that the U.S. role in the world is such a compelling reason for civil disobedience -- whether peaceful or violent. And that's because I challenge the left with their facile explanations about two wars "started because of lies," because the forces the U.S. is fighting --  terrorists and extremist militants -- are the ones killing the overwhelming majority of people. Terrorists blew up people in Iran this week; in Iraq in past weeks -- hundreds of people slaughtered just in the period of the WikiLeaks sagas, and not a single U.S. soldier to be blamed. If someone thinks magically that this will "stop" if you withdraw troops, you aren't understanding the complexities of what drew the U.S. there in the first place. You can surely argue that the U.S. shouldn't go around the world trumping up excuses to invade countries and step on hornets' nests that will wind up killing hundreds of thousands of locals -- I'm all for that.

But then...what is the plan to stop tyranny and terrorism in these regions? There is this frightful American exceptionalism in reverse that the left suffers from -- implying that if only the U.S. becomes good, stops "lying about two wars," and withdraws from the fighting of insurgents, that everything will go well. I disagree. I think a "domino theory" in Central Asia, the resurgence of Russia and then its conflict with China, and the loss of Israel in the Middle East to the triumphalism of Palestinians and their Arab backers  are all really awful things that really spell a frightening New World Order that isn't free -- and those would be the consequences.

(I think people have REALLY short memories about Afghanistan as well: the Soviets killed one million civilians and lost only 15,000 of their own men, not because the local fighters of that era threatened the spread of terrorism or fundamental Islam, but because they weren't willing to follow an imposed Communist government. I reject the claim that the U.S. "created the Taliban". The U.S. funded the mujahedin for its own geopolitical reasons of fighting the Cold War, but the Soviets created them -- and later, their forcing a generation of young men into refugee camps in Pakistan where they then studied, fatherless, in madrassahs, was a key factor in "creating the Taliban" that the left isn't willing to look at. If you are going to posit theories about how America's wars "create" insurgencies that wouldn't have been there, at least have the intellectual honesty to flip the history book back a few more decades and see how the Soviets -- and they backed Saddam in Iraq, too -- helped create those insurgents in the first place.)

o The question of shared context, if we are indeed, going to struggle against "The Society of the Spectacle" (see, I'm not willing to be defeatist like Guy Debord, and stay drunk in a cafe for 30 years and then commit suicide -- I'm not willing to suffer the victimhood or enjoy the glamour, as he did, of these insights he had -- I think you should still act morally anyway.)