Demotivator.ru "There are many types of shit. You have a choice, which one you will stuff your head with." Guess which symbol is missing...
Remember Jared Cohen, that much-feted and designated-cool State Department official who actually called up the devs at Twitter (he was on a first-name basis with @ev) and told them not to schedule maintenance time in the middle of the Iranian revolution two years ago? Legend had it that he was nearly fired for that brazen foreign-policy gambit but then it amplified his Twitter following and his cyber-cred enormously -- there was a celebratory New York Times Magazine piece, and much excitement among the Goverati and gov 2.0 gang...and then Jared tweeted from Damascus that the lattes were the best he had ever had... in a place where the dictatorship was arresting dissidents torturing prisoners...
Then Jared was out (and we don't know if it was due to the Latte Tweet) but snapped right up by Google -- Google which some say has had a bit of a revolving door in the Obama Administration anyway. Jared went off to a new "think/do tank" (Beth Noveck was the first I recall using that term "do-tank," and it still makes me grimace). It was called "Google Ideas," but it wasn't clear what it's footprint would be. It had no website (and still doesn't).
Jared Cohen then fetched up as a Visiting Scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations -- at the same time as he was doing Google Ideas, which seemed incredibly opaque. Of course, you can't know what goes on in the off-the-record meetings at the Council, unless you're a member -- I'm not, but a friend who is told me that she found one of Cohen's talks about how to deal with radicalization, which involved collaborating with former extremists, to be an interesting approach.
All this ferment in the Middle East, and I had the impression that Jared Cohen, who found the Middle East youth revolts to be cool way before anyone else, just wasn't talking. I never saw him blog. I never saw him tweet. It was so odd, after his very public life, where every tweet contained messages like "had lunch with the VP of IBM" -- but of course, never telling you the substantive content. It really seemed like we were going to get through the Arab Spring and never hear from Jared, who was buried at the Google Borg.
I'd all but forgotten "Google Ideas" and figured, like Lively and Wave, it just never got off the ground or died or something -- somebody's 20 percent project that never took off. And so when a tweet from @googlejobs happened to cross my path the other day, I asked the guy, who kept advertising "roles" at Google (i.e. jobs) forthrightly:
@googlejobs You keep talking about roles. Is Google a giant play? Also, what's up with Google Ideas? Will it ever have a website, jobs?
To my surprise, he answered June 24th:
Only one? No shopping?
Do you know, William May at the State Department public diplomacy department has been in Second Life for years, and even before Egypt became trendy, organized international conferences inworld bringing together American and Egyptian architects and students to build...a mall. I thought that was highly cool, actually. It was low-key and de-ideologized as you could get.
It was so post-ideological that when I asked a pointed question about the war in Afghanistan at one of the meetings, a State Department flunky in an anonymous SL avatar with the name Lionheart shushed me and warned me of expulsion. Can you imagine?! This was for typing a line in backchat -- not for blowing up the sim or waving a sign around. One of my determinations is to get every last real-life name of every last US government official in SL through FOIA. No government official should be appearing online anonymously, with nics like SL avatar names.
But Roger Cohen doesn't mean virtual worlds like we mean virtual worlds. He means, well, the virtual world of the conference circuit. The seminar-ians and the resolution-aries. The 80 people brought together in Dublin to discuss how technology can better the world. Don't we know how that goes!
Another expert had this to say:
The most vulnerable groups, he believes, are young men with strong feelings of isolation and a need to right wrongs. They need charismatic mentors with simple messages: “It’s wrong to kill people, it’s wrong to hate.” Usama sees a big role for technology in spreading the word. But he insists the human is critical to stop radicalization.
I'll say. I'm glad he's keeping the human in the equation and not imagining that gamification, bots, and rhizomatic Connectivism are going to turn jihadists into flower gardeners. But I have to say -- that desire to "right wrongs" doesn't come from nowhere -- there are actual wrongs often that need righting, just maybe not that way. But I'm sure that it's nothing a good, brisk session in the IRC channel can't fix!
Cohen is teeth-grittingly groovy about all this, as always, but did not give us as much of a report as the somewhat breathless Washington Post, which wrote of the "formers" as they are calling themselves (former gang members, former Taliban types, etc.) effort "to gather in Dublin this weekend to explore how technology can play a role in de-radicalization efforts around the globe."
I don't know why, when I read this phrase twice, I had a really sterling and crystal-clear memory of sitting in the basement conferences of the UN at one of those briefings by the security people for humanitarians who work in the field, which consisted of showing -- and translating -- all the Youtubes and uploaded video clips on social media sites and Facebooks and blogs, which coldly, methodically, smartly, attractively, advocated -- ordered! -- sheer mayhem and bloodshed -- matter-of-factly urging the chopping off of heads of white, Northern missionaries. De-radicalization and technology indeed...
Still, Washpo at least still practices journalism, and while Jay Rosen may call it "the view from nowhere," I appreciate when even clearly breathless reporters at least weave in a critical take on a subject:
But in its first venture, the decision to enter the space between thinking and doing is also drawing some criticism as Google steps enthusiastically into what many view as an intractable, enduring problem — and one that has traditionally been left to governments.
"Google Ideas may be setting its sights too high, said Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and getting terrorists to give up violence may be a more attainable goal than getting them to change their sympathies."
Well, no, it's not just that this sort of thing is "left to governments". I don't know if people realize just how many NGOs are in this conflict-reduction, peace-making game -- and have been since before Jared Cohen and Alec Ross were born. There are old groups like Fellowship of Reconciliation and Nonviolent Peace Force and newer groups like Independent Diplomat all of which have sought direct contact with participants in conflict, even dictators and warlords, and have tried various innovative approaches to "world peace".
I imagine part of what bothers Mr. Boucek is that Google Ideas is competition -- it's poaching on his preserve. Think-tanks and academic centers and NGOs are the ones who do this sort of "bringing together 80 formers" -- not corporations, so directly. Usually, the way it would work, is that the corporations would give money to one of these think tanks or academic institutions, not get into the act themselves.
But that's not our Google, they like to be hands-on. Do-tank!
Washpo also had their wits about them enough to let another respected scholar ask the other obvious question about all this:
Harvard University professor Joseph S. Nye Jr., who specializes in theories and application of power, agreed that the endeavor “could be problematic — especially if it is perceived to be in conflict with the foreign policy of the United States.” He added that the ambition could “complicate things further since profit is ostensibly involved.”
Bingo! It's all about selling the ads and getting the clicks -- more connectivity, less war, more advertising sales -- but then, I've always felt that the whole Google Rube Goldberg machine and the that essentially ad agency facet of Google was a kind of scaffolding holding up the real purpose, which was power and influence. Once people get that rich with a business or a gadget, they want BetterWorldism -- it's like Reid Hoffman, the fabulously wealthy LinkedIn guy who speaks the Silicon Valley BetterWorldist mantra perfectly.
So, why couldn't I simply support this? It's harmless, isn't it, getting together with people who left their violent ways, and cooking up ways to do that old E.M. Forster "Only Connect" stuff? Surely it could do some good if the powerful GOOG could put its enormous cyber-weight against the ruthless violent extremists of the world?
Well, no. I have a number of concerns about this whole thing, that go like this:
1. For the life of me, these "formers" feel a bit like the ex-heroin addicts that came to Jesus through the Campus Crusade for Christ, whose meetings I used to go to as a teenager. I'm sure they're sincere and it's all good, but...how former are they, really? There's a tendency when forming movements like this -- and I know, because I've been in them and founded smaller things like this myself -- to imagine that the 80 people you happen to have at a conference who are all like-minded and "yours" are really representative of their countries/movements/neighbourhoods. And it turns out...they're not. They don't have that connectivity precisely because they are viewed as renegades, turncoats, traitors. That doesn't mean it isn't a good idea still to work with them -- perhaps it's the only thing that makes sense in dealing with some of these rabidly violent groups -- but I bet there's a tendency to really smooth out the rough edges on some of these people "for the sake of the cause." You get in a tribal group and think, "We're different, we're special, we hold hands across the sea!" But nobody else does. I can't help thinking of Gita and Cageprisoners and Amnesty International's moral slide.
I mean, if I were a jihadist, wouldn't it be a great racket to pretend I was "former" (you know, like the Anonymous grieftards always do -- like they're doing right now with LulzSec) and come along to an all-expense paid meeting in London and infiltrate something like this? It could have Iran intelligence and KGB type intelligence finger prints all over it.
2. Stuff like this can get weepy and cut corners on morals and human rights -- you know, how some of these former statesmen and commissions and committees get, where they go on missions to North Korea or Sudan and break bread with dictators and act like they're making peace when they are forsaking principles? What seems more practical about Jared's thing is that he isn't going for the state leaders -- we don't have states and leaders anymore in the future virtual world and Wired State, remember? No borders -- but is going just for certain groups -- gangs, extremist religions, etc. And seeing what they have in common, and what they can devise. All good -- but I fear the tendency with these efforts is still to lurch toward moral equivalence. It's not just about some well-meaning peacenik delivering the message to a young potential jihadist "Thou shalt not kill," but it's countering, hammer and tong, the polemics in the newspapers and online jihadist sites he reads; it's stepping up to counter the 50- centers in China or the KGB sock puppets in the former Soviet Union that incite hate -- if you look at the Demotivator, Russian-style above, you'll note something that my Facebook friends instantly noted -- all the world's belief systems responsible for extremism are indicated...except Communism, with its hammer and sickle. No accident, comrade?
3. And speaking of borders, again, most people like their countries, like their language, like their customs, like their religion. They aren't looking to erode all of those things in a big Googly goo. When they go online, when they're from places like, oh, Uzbekistan or Nigeria, they aren't looking to enter the blissful One Worldism of old men in Hawaian shirts and goatees who have made fortunes in software and are gazing out at Half Moon Bay.
No, they want their own local thing, and that thing is often antithetical to the thing of the people the next village over. And frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. Why can't people have countries, villages, neighbourhoods that are their own, with their own style, traditions, languages -- freedom? Why do they all have to sound like a Peter, Paul & Mary song?
4. I have to think some more about why Google put their hand to this. Maybe they just liked Jared Cohen and he came up with this idea out of his own life experience. Maybe they think the challenge of extremist ideologies is their biggest friction to just pwning search and the eventual Internet of things worldwide -- those pesky Chinese, and Iranians and so on that cut off their search or filter it or hack their searchers. I remember Mark Zuckerberg's famous SXSW video claiming if only young men who were at loose ends and looking to jihad could come on Facebook and socialize, why, they'd give up their ideas of blowing up stuff. It's just lack of connection... Of course, I wonder how they'll make a living online, if they can't gold-farm like the Chinese or maybe work Zinga angles or come to Second Life...
Never thought I'd stand in b/t/w a former violent settler and former #iran ansar-e hezbollah #ave http://yfrog.com/kitenpj gushes Jared -- and the yfrog to prove it.
And it's all great, it's all grand, except all the other settlers and all the other Hezbollah activists aren't chumming it up with Jared and mugging for the i-phone camera, but are pursuing their deadly aims. (Except here, you will never get me to believe that a settler who builds a house, legal or not, is on the same moral plane with a suicide-bomber and rocket-launcher -- and yet our president puts pressure on the former, and not the latter, publicly, on trips to Israel or meetings with Israeli leaders. That's what I mean about Googly ideas.)
I guess I am thinking about all these problems of male machismo -- that's really what it comes down to, although females can suffer from the same insecure aggressive defiance -- much closer to home today, after the tragic stabbing death of Isayah Muller, a male athlete who happened to be a friend of some of my son's Facebook friends -- their pages are scattered with sad RIPs today.
This story will just break your heart with all the levels of tragedy and stupidity and injustice -- you keep turning it in your mind to see if you can figure out how it could have been prevented or fixed. To me, it's all about the unwillingness of people to be "dissed" -- the unwillingness to lose face, to stand down, to step aside, to be disrespected -- in order to take the wiser course, and actually live.
A father and mother and their son and his girlfriend had gone to his graduation ceremony and went to get the car at the garage. The father discovered that some expensive male colognes that he had purchased as a present for his son and left in the car were missing. He turned around and drove back to the garage, angry, to confront the garage attendants who he was certain had stolen the perfumes. An altercation ensued, he picked up a shovel and hit one of the garage attendants and broke his arm, and the garage men evidently stabbed his son severely. It was unexpected -- and deadly. The father rushed his son to a clinic 10 blocks away, the clinic called an ambulance, but he died at the hospital -- leaving weeping relatives remembering how he had told his mama that he would take care of the family after he made it to the NFL.
So often when young black men are shot or stabbed to death, they are described as model students and church-goers and sports stars. This man really seemed to be, and had a sports career ahead of him -- he is so larger than life that you can't believe he is dead.
And all because of some perfume! And all because people couldn't solve their suspicions and their allegations in a civilized fashion and call the police. All because they couldn't take being dissed -- the feeling of being wronged, the feeling of humiliation, the need for revenge.
Of course, there are so many other layers to this tragedy. The hope of the way out of the ghetto through the athletic star route (or hip-hop singer route) -- which only a few can benefit from. Perhaps the lack of a fast medical response in this poor neighbourhood. But the even more tragic failure of any of these people to trust the police or 911 and ambulances enough to call them immediately -- to even involve them in the first place or this dispute.
See, this is something the Googly Ideas can't fix with "technology" or "borderless goo". You need governments and police and jails and ambulances in local places, not in virtual online i-phone worlds, to try to make a difference against the tendency toward lawlessness of humankind -- but most of all, you need people to believe in their institutions -- and for those institutions not to be corrupt.
What kind of operation was this garage, that something could be stolen -- or that they could steal it themselves? What kind of garage attendant thinks stabbing his customers, even if they have an irate complaint, is a good idea? This isn't jihad; this isn't gang warfare; this is an ordinary proud father (well, a former criminal and inmate, but still) -- coming back from his athletic hero son's high school graduation and doesn't like getting dissed, and an ordinary garage attendant who doesn't like being dissed -- and this happens, on a typical block in an all too typical way.
And I continue to think that at the heart of it is the inability to be dissed -- it's a Tom Wolfe story:
Where is the poet who has sung of that most lacerating of all human emotions, the cut that never heals -- male humiliation?
The world is a poorer place for the death of this child just on the threshold of adulthood, and the arrest of his father, now charged with assault (and the media can't seem to tell us what happened to the garage stabbers, but the police commissioner said the father, who had served 10 years in jail for drugs and robbery, struck first--we're told the stabbing with a shank is in self-defense).
Where is the app for that?
P.S. Did you guess which symbol is missing? The hammer and sickle...
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