Wired State

TagBrand Brands Without the Brands Branding, Imagine #tcdisrupt

If StyleSaint is getting too refined for you, and you want something a little more, well, crass but addictive in fashion-sharing, there's the new Russian start-up TagBrand, "service for dressed people". (ChatRoulette was the service for undressed people -- they've sobered up since then).

This site was created by Russians from the Siberian town of Barnaul, the same town that produced my favourite video from this season's protests in Russia. Russians love brands -- leibly, they call them. "Marka" is the formal word for brand, but "leibly" are the labels that show something is really from the West. They will pore over every seam and button to try to determine if a pair of jeans are authentic and foreign or a sophisticated domestic knock-off.

Meanwhile, here in the States, many start-ups wrack their brains trying to figure out how they will get brands to integrate with their app, and how to monetarize the app with ads. Tagbrand simply cuts through all that crap and puts them brands all over their app themselves.  They don't wait for some suit to seek them out. Now is that smart, or what! And what can the brands themselves do? What, they're against people uploading pictures of themselves with their companies' watches, purses, dresses, socks, shoes, etc?! They can't be.

So you're in the dressing room at Macy's, and you take a picture of yourself in your "brands" with the "leibly" and share them with your friends. They help you decide what to buy (remember how this was the dream of the big brands in Second Life in 2007?).

It's a good thing I know Russian or I wouldn't (yet) have anyone to share with on Tagbrand, which has a very kickass design, but in fact you don't need Russian, because the instructions are in English with easy Facebook sign-up and pretty soon a zillion 16-year-old girls will be on there.

The question is what will happen when the brands themselves make accounts and show up and skew the beautiful folksomy you have now. Quick, study it now because it will soon be polluted! The owners will have to design whether to allow corporate accounts, and decide whether they will let them just flood the channels with their brand-branding unlike the People's branding -- and astroturf the place. It might work out anyway if there are enough 16-year-old shoppers on it.

Here's a neat thing: instead of "checking in," you "brand-in," by tagging your owned brand, and this builds up on a dbase on the servers.

It's like the entire notion of brands has been disrupted by these guys from Russia and we may never recover.

TechCrunch Disrupt: Michael Arrington Buys Facebook Stock #tcdisrupt

Come out, come out, wherever you are, Mikey likes it!

Michael Arrington, founding editor of TechCrunch who left the publication last year, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt that he had purchased Facebook stock at $33.

Arrington, who is still brought in by the AOL-owned tech blog to interview the top speakers at TechCrunch Disrupt, did not say  how much FB stock he had purchased.

In the first few day Facebook went public, ordinary mortals couldn't purchase the stock in the famous social network created by now fabulously-rich Mark Zuckerberg. You had to be an insider, and some kind of preferred customer at firms like Goldman, Sachs.

Now that "too much" stock has been issued to the point where the banks had to prop it up, now the "normals" (as one speaker called us) can purchase the stock. Not to suggest Arrington is a mere mortal, but I also spoke with a Canadian app developer who said he was able to buy it on the decline. The initial public offering was at $38.

Not only should every single user have received one piece of stock as a loss-leader and sign of good will for all our hard work producing in FB's content mills to sell ads, we should have had an ad or a button to click to buy stock immediately with Ameritrades or some other online company. That would help the price -- people like their Facebook. The ex-employees and VCs want their liquidity event, but the norms would buy it even while it is tanking.

Elsewhere in the news, back on May 1, Fred Wilson replied to my query on his blog as to whether he was buying Facebook stock: "hell no".

Anything changed there? Who knows, as the TCD people didn't deign to put out the microphones for questions today as they did last year.

Here Fred's thoughts on the FB IPO in general at TCD.

 

Why Doesn't Facebook Have an AdSense Thingie for Us like Google?

Maybe someone could explain this to me. Why doesn't Facebook let us monetarize our time online by enabling us to display ads, either of our choice or served by agencies, on our Facebook pages?

This is what they have to do if they want to pull forward out of their not-so-spectacular IPO.

Here's this nice walled garden, Facebook, with 850 million users plus. I use it and like it up to a point, although I'm not uncritical. It's sure a lot nicer than G+, which is like an anti-social network instead of a social network, filled with Google engineers and other Silicon Valley snobs.

So there's these ads on the side which sometimes are bought by people I know, but apparently also pitched to me based on my user data and posts (and why it keeps pushing these dating services with men age 50-60 at me I'll never know, as I will never click on them).

Apparently you can make these ads at least change and go away if they fetch up Sarah Palin or something you don't like, by clicking through "smart menus" that ask you questions why you didn't like the ads. Ok, all well and good.

What's missing, however, is ads that I can monetarize. You know, like Google AdSense.

Why can't I get a script, or operate some sort of prefabricated template on my settings page, and pick ads off a dashboard I would like to show on my page somewhere in a box at the top, or inside each post?

So let's say I could do a post about a product if I like it -- say, Siggy's Skyr, a sort of Icelandic kefir which is my latest enthusiasm and which none of the stores where I shop can keep on the shelves, it is so popular, even at $1.99 on sale for the little cup of it.

The ad from the Siggy's people would fetch up in my post, or I'd park it at the top of my page, and each time one of my friends clicked through to the central Siggy's page, or maybe printed out a coupon and used it or something, I'd get a piece of that revenue.

They could call it AdFace or AdBook. AdFace, because it's putting a human face on ads, because you're putting it right in your feed.

While all the snobby geeks of Silicon Valley who hate commerce (except their own) and the various technocommies who loathe ads would hate this,  most normal people would love it.

Already spontaneously, without being paid to do so, I see my friends and relatives "liking" Target or "liking" some other brand of tea or something -- without prompting. I see them over on the side doing that all the time.

Imagine if they could start to get paid pennies a day or dollars a day from clicks.

I don't see what's not to like here.

Facebook isn't just a chat room or a social network with just relationship chatter. It's a newsfeed and for a lot people it's really their blog. I know hundreds of Russians now using Facebook as a blog because Live Journal hangs and stalls or gets blocked occasionally, and they don't want to depend on Russian services like Vkontakte which might be removed by the authorities.

There isn't quite enough room for a blog post such as I would do, but it's long enough, and you can always write the longer thing on the "Notes". And for some people, their photos *are* their blogs; their shares *are* their blogs -- their news feed. Good! A little ad around it wouldn't hurt.

People who say they hate ads and don't want to click on them and don't click existing ads of Facebook now off to the side will change their minds in a heartbeat the minute you LET THEM MONETARIZE the ads themselves, and chose them so that they naturally flow into what they're doing.

Facebook has to cut us in on the revenue stream. We're the workers here on this collective farm. We need to get paid. We need to stop this communist thing where we pretend to work on Farmville, and they pretend to pay us by having friends help us level up in Farmville.

I've been reading Doug Edward's book about the early years of Google, I'm Feeling Lucky, and it's clear that it really took off the revenue charts when first it cut in partners from portals like Yahoo, and then it cut in ordinary people by letting them put ads on their blogs or web sites.

This just has to happen. It will happen. It will even happen in different ways, with different aps, because the place where Facebook needs to have it happen badly is on mobile phones. An ad interrupting your feed on a mobile phone is 10 times more irritating when you thumb through it than an off to the side on the page on a computer screen. People always tell me they hate ads on mobile feeds of blogs, even though the reality is, they click on them more.

I suspect the answer to my question is this:  Zuckerberg likely thinks he can get us to chat about products and put them into our feed without paying us a red cent. Because we do anyway.  And that probably he will only go in the direction of aps or services on the page that let you easily Facebook-share when you buy something.

But while that's going to work for some people, the way to make money is to stop exploiting everybody's labour like communists in the collective media farm, and let us monetarize our time online.

 

"Post-Westphalian Diplomacy" or the Wired State

The Peace of Westphalia, a series of treaties signed in German to end the 30 Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire and the 80 Years' War between the Dutch and the Spanish . Painting is The Ratification of the Treaty of Munster, by Gerard ter Borch, 1648.

The meeting at Carnegie Endowment on "Digital Diplomacy:  A New Era of Advancing Policy" #DigiDiplomacy was packed with more than a hundred people. You sense that Twitter is starting to now reach even the most reluctant and I hear in some government offices staff are being mandated to Twitter, whether they like it or not. Of course, there's a "gov 2.0" movement that has been going on for years in the Obama Administration, most symbolized by Alec Ross, senior adviser for innovation in the office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "the best title in government," as admirers say.

A regional official for Fleishman-Hillard International Communications made the introductions to the meeting in one of those symbiotic relationships between business and think-tank land that are so seemless as to be invisible to insiders and are perplexing to outsiders.

It was the day before Facebook's big historic IPO, and we were instructed solemnly not to ask any questions of the speaker from FB, Sarah Wynn-Williams, manager of public policy, by the moderator, Tom Carver, a former BBC journalist and later "strategic communications consultant" now VP for communications and strategy at Carnegie. Have you noticed how much communications (it used to be called PR, or public relations) is always combined with this really important-sounding term "strategy" now?

The meeting featured two Latin American ambassadors -- Latin America rarely has a face in public policy meetings but increasingly it is being seen. Maybe this is the growing realization that if only 50 percent of Americans are white and from European stock, that the fast-growing Hispanic population from Latin America that makes up a good portion of the other 50 percent (which is Hispanics, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and others) increasingly needs to be heard.

Amb. Arturo Sarukhan Casamitjana previously held the dangerous job of head of counternarcotics at the Embassy of Mexico and is now the envoy to the US. Amb. Harold Forsyth is envoy from Peru.

The moderator gave Alec Ross the floor under the dubious distinction that he had the most Twitter followers -- over 370,000 -- whereas the Mexican ambassador has only 70,000. (Full disclosure: I only have 1200). He might better have given Wynn-Williams the floor -- her company has 850 million members. Yes, America the state can still get its "innovation" guy lots of followers based on over 200 years of mindshare, but Mexico not only gives him a run for his money (after the meeting, his follower count probably went up!), there's the harsh reality that the platforms of social media are like the new transnational wired states now, and trump national entities. Or so it seems.

There's lots to say about this meeting, but it is already hashtagged, tweeted, and nearly forgotten, so before the week's end, I just want to mention two highlights, before I come back and add some more:

o Alec Ross spoke of the breakdown of the state and diploma under the pressure of social media connections, the "post-Westphalian" aspect of modern life, i.e. the erosion of modern sovereignty, a concept established at the Treaty of Westphalia with its recognition of "non-interference in internal affairs" -- a notion, BTW, which only Helsinki insiders seem to know, began to be challenged with the 1975 Helsinki Final Act which did validate borders and acknowledge sovereignty, but which affirmed human rights as a topic that states could ask each other about, because they were all bound by universal human rights obligations in UN treaties.

Ross rhapsodized about the new "direct democracy" of people directly speaking to officials and making proposals and getting real-time answers. He cited as a success story the recent defeat of SOPA-PIPA which in fact he had a HUGE part in making happen (as did Google, which leveraged its platform to get 7 million signatures on a petition, and as did Silicon Valley's Mitch Kapor, and his anti-copyright organizations, which whipped up sentiment. As the SOPA issue heated up, Ross held a "hangout" on G+ which he talked up on FB (as G+ only fits 16 people at a time, you have to amplify it with FB wall posts) in which he took a question from one of the seasoned cadres of the anti-copyright movement posing as a mere curious citizen about why Obama hadn't condemned SOPA.

Ross treaded water saying the concerns were important, but then, "heeding the Voice of the People," i.e. at least as it appears manpulated and packaged as expert G+ hangouters, he got to Obama, and Obama, in consultation with his in-house geeks who were anti-SOPA like Aneesh Chopra, announced that he would veto SOPA, even before he had done a formal statement of policy with a former process. I found that outrageous. Ross calls it "21st Century Statecraft" -- too bad for you.

It's a hustle, of course, the executive branch and its social media operatives using the power of office and the administrative resources of massive followings on social media to push through things without democratic votes.

So I raised a very valid concern about this, quoting the disturbing article in Tech President recently about Aneesh Chopra, and his notion of his greatest achievement while in office as CTO of America, making whitehouse.gov/petitions. As Nick Judd on Tech Presidented noted, quoting Nancy Scola, formerly of Tech Pres and now at the Atlantic, an activist found this a great "circumvention of Congress".

So I asked during the Q&A about the implications for "circumvention" of Congress and the implications for SOPA never having come to a vote, even if it had some popular sentiment to back it up (sentiment that had a lot of help getting whipped up by the lies of Silicon Valley).

Ross responded with what I view as a really nasty sleight of hand. He reiterated this issue as the same issue he had just heard when meeting Netanyahu recently. That was cunning, because it was sure to set in motion the hate vibes for Israel and Netanyahu by the liberal crowd at Carnegie, and establish concerns about "direct democracy" and its sinister side as merely being a neo-con or conservative concern. It's not. It's the most liberal concern of our age, and serious as a heart attack.

He admitted that there was a "tension" between "direct democracy" and "representative democracy" and that he was "not omniscent and didn't pretend to have all the answers.

I went up afterwards and added: No, Alec it's not about "tension," it's about "direct democracy" not really being direct or democracy, it's about the tyranny of who shows up. The issues are framed and that's the problem, they aren't really democratically deliberated. The cadres -- the coders -- decide everything. There isn't any "direct"ness because the platform owners, the providers of services, the coders, they weld in a lot of worldview into the services. He doesn't really focus on that or concede it, but he conceded direct democracy has its problems. He reiterated that he is "not omniscent," a faux-modest meme that he probably frequently relies on to get himself out of tough conversations, even as somebody challenges him on the outcome of his "disruptive" technology (always disrupting others, never him).

I said I don't need him to be ominscent, I need him to be accountable. Undermine representative democracy? Take the consequences that you have unleashed mob rule and injustices, and don't tell me about how "we need to get money out of politics" or how "Congress is stupid and not technical" and that "Congress is broken". Geeks who want to seize power with their coded platforms are what is broken.

o Now let's come to Ms. Sarah Wynn-Williams who enthused about the power of Facebook to bring tens of thousands of people together around the world in expressing concern about the FARC, the terrorist group in Latin America that has killed many civilians and caused havoc. The page and the group "empowered" people. I've written about the creepy implications of Zuck imagining he has an empire (then of 69 million; now of 850 million!) of users he can whip into political campaigns of this nature, and how stupid they are.

I went up afterwards and said to Sarah, as she bent over her purse looking for business cards, "You didn't stop the FARC."

She said nothing.

"You didn't get rid of the FARC with that page." I gave her my card. She smiled artificially and then exclaimed "The FARC!" as if to imply "How could you possibly expect me, or a page on our platform, get rid of a terrorist movement."

Well, indeed.

The stock is already trading at $42, after opening at $38, as of this writing. You can't even just go and buy it as it has been held close and apportioned only to insiders, such as  trading firms like Goldman Sachs and their already preferred customers. But, caveat emptor. It can't stop the FARC; it may be undermining a representative democracy in a country near you, replacing it with who-the-hell-knows-what, about which Ross is not ominiscent nor over which he will accept ownership.

"SOPA never came to a vote," I objected.

"The 17 co-sponsors dropped it after getting deluged with petitions," he objected.

"They were flash-mobbed," I pointed out. "That's not democracy."

 

 

Net Loss at The New Republic with the Geek Buyout

My beloved The New Republic, which I'm less enamoured with now that it is owned by a Silicon Valley tycoon, Chris Hughes, ran an editorial titled Net Gain, in which it recited every single one of the geek squad's pet planks.

Ugh, this is awful, and what I was afraid of when I saw this liberal magazine taken over by Hughes. I've been watching to see if the signs of bias and open source cult creep would start appearing. So far, there have just been things like too much Tim Noah surfacing, and two rants on Citizens' United, which is a pet subject of Occupy Wall Street and the nerds of G+.  Leon Wieseltier was able to lob in a critical column on the goofy Google guru for productivity, a fake Buddhist, and the center seemed like it might hold.

So I was thinking we might escape, much as we escaped even with TNR's sale of pages to Saudi Arabia, and even with the loss of Peretz, but no...

"Net Gain" is a vivid example of the Silicon Valley torque that will happen to the editorial line now, and the reason why this rich man bought this outlet, to push his views. It's very sad, but maybe if we all call it out, it might change.

My comment:

I'm appalled by this editorial. It was dropped right into the pond wholesale by Chris Huges, the new owner, with every single political plank in the Silicon Valley agenda without any intellectual debate. Indeed, probably the other editors didn't feel they could debate it because it was "technical". Yet if for 5 minutes, the same critical thought of Leon Wieseltier brought to the notions of scientism, or the fake Zen of the Google productivity guru elsewhere on these pages, was brought to the subjects of fake notions like "net neutrality," we'd likely see the editorial simply disappear.

Everything about this editorial is straight out of Silicon Valley central casting with every hackneyed and misleading claim about the Internet. We're to believe that consumption problems and scarcity of bandwidth -- often caused by the bittorrent kiddies downloading pirated stuff! -- can be handily converted to "free speech" problems. What tripe! We're told that the SOPA bill was "overzealous" and hampered "freedom of expression" when the problem again, was about consumption and production of pirated content. The bill contains definitions, remedies, and fail-safes that would make it impossible to shut down a teenage Tumblr blog over an illegal Youtube link or upload.

It's really intellectually unconscionable to imply that there was something overbroad about legislation designed to target pirates who cause billions of dollars of losses, or that somehow music critics were going to be stifled. Not when the bill said very explicitly that the sites had to be commercial, in large amounts of a certain value, persistent over time, and not when it gave as a defefense within the bill the notion that removal of the content would pose a significant hardship to the site owner, i.e. because it would harm his legitimate business.

It really is an appalling display of thuggish muscle we saw in the anti-SOPA campaign, that scorned representative government and replaced it with a flashmob, complete with the tech blackmailing of website blackouts like Wikipedia.

And then that fake evenhandedness claiming the FTC is really going after Google, when it has only suffered wrist-slaps of tiny fines for its erosion of privacy and its monopolistic behaviour.

Net neutrality is ill-named and argued here as a propagandistic storm covering up a business model -- the California business model that involves hijacking content first, selling ads with it, then letting IP owners chase the platform provider with DMCA takedown notices.

As for CISPA, private companies suffer as much as government from overseas hacker attacks, sometimes committed by obvious malevolent governments, not individuals, i.e. the recent massive attack on ustream by Russian hackers to stop coverage of the demonstrations. The bill calls for voluntary sharing of anonymized data and doesn't intrude on the privacy of individual accounts unless the government indeed makes its case and shows probable cause. But these companies should obey their TOS in the first place; indeed, if they did that, we wouldn't see SOPA or CISPA because they would be doing a good job of regulating themselves. They are not.

And finally, this silly meme that Congress and "the world of politics" is somehow technically incompetent and therefore geeks get to use circumvention software to route around representative democracy is dangerously authoritarian. There is nothing special about the Internet, which is like any human enterprise and should be under the rule of law.

Should Google Just Take Over Wikipedia and Fix It? And Take Over Quora Too and Add it On?

I'm thinking out loud here -- I don't care for either Google or Wikipedia and I'm among their biggest critics, even as I'm forced to use them for lack of better solutions and because they are ubiquitous. Most of the time I have to cite Wikipedia in arguments by saying "even Wikipedia says..." to people even more extreme than Wikipedia.

The central problem of Wikipedia is the central problem of the open source software cult -- lack of democracy, accountability, transparency, interactivity and so on. That is, the very things that open source software cults claim to bring to us are the very things it in fact lacks.

It purports to be "open to anyone" so that the expertise surfaces to the top, unintimidated by the "old notions" of credentials or expertise only recognized by institutions. If you are the world's expert on pipe cleaners, even if you aren't a pipe cleaner manufacturer or a materials engineer, you can correct the Wikipedia entry, so the theory goes.

Of course it all went horribly wrong due to human nature, and the secretative cabal with its hands around the neck of Wikipedia today, killing it to save their own cult, are an examplar of all this. The horror stories are legion. The insane, loony procedures this cabal has put in to place, largely to keep out the "others" and install their own tyranny, are on display.

Wikipedia's own annual report lets us know the desperation of the situation is worse than we knew. They are hemorrhaging editors and losing users. They can't raise enough money. They have their own internal wars -- some opposed Jimmy Wale's blackmail used on the Internet against the public during the anti-SOPA crusade. The moral was this: if geeks didn't get their own way on a piece of legislation, they would take everyone down with them. Ugh.

So what do you do with a failing open source software project, which is all this really is? What do you do when the open source cult overtakes whatever good it might actually produce in its software or content product?

You have some bigger company -- some commercial enterprise -- buy it out or take it over. As it is a non-profit, that might not seem so obvious, but then, all open source is nonprofit and a lot of supposedly commercial start-ups are so poverty-stricken and reliant on friends' and family handouts as to be charities.

Google has a motivation to take over Wikipedia -- indeed, it has already taken it over by having algorithms that ensure it is always on top (others link to it; it doesn't matter if Wikipedia itself in the body of its articles doesn't link to anybody or even have Facebook likes).

Google needs the factoids of Wikipedia to surface on top -- that's what gives it its continued street cred as a "utility" -- a search engine with which people find facts. Otherwise, they might only find commercial sites, or vanity pages, or just Google ads.

Wikipedia is the still-fairly-thick wedge between Google's PR version of itself as a free utility, and the actuality of its increasingly greedy and rapacious Big Ad business. If Wikipedia didn't show up on the first returns, you'd see lots of paid-for stuff and sites that Google favours with its algorithms by defining popularity as what is linked -- which in turn can be driven by a lot of things the Google culture owns, like tech blogs.

That wedge might get smaller -- after all, Wikipedia isn't first on every single search, and even gets out of the immediate view on a few topics.

In any event, Google's buyout or takeover of Wikipedia would end the fiction that what comes up first is in fact "merited" by some aggregate linkage system, and it would end the fiction that Google isn't the yellow pages. Once Google owned Wikipedia, everybody would get better why Google was evil -- it takes over high-minded civics projects like contributing to the world's knowledge base.

Of course, Google doesn't hesitate before such pronouncements of evil on other fronts -- it is happy to rapaciously gulp up all books and battle copyright of publishers on the fake grounds that this is important "for world culture" or "the knowledge commons" (it's best of all for Google's ad business).

Yet there would be a hardcore of Google fanboyz who would applaud the Goog taking over Wikipedia as they would see this as a civic project and "making it better".

Google would likely insist that it get to hire and fire any of the staff of the foundation, and then frankly, would keep or fire a lot of the volunteer editors. I'd love to know more about what happens when Google puts its big camel nose under the tent of any open source software project -- oh, but I do know. When Google (or a former Linden turned Google employee?) convinced Linden Lab to use the Google Search Appliance in Second Life, the Lindens utterly ruined search and the economy of this little world. The search was previously arranged in data tables and worked with a pull down menu sort of like Amazon, whereby you put in a search term with the tab "places" and got a list ordered by traffic. Not by links, not by magic-sauce algorithms, but just the sheer raw data of visitors. Naturally, some geeks complained this was "gamed" because of traffic infusion devises like fake bots that sat on lots driving on traffic metrics even though they weren't real people consuming content or buying. Remember how the geeks killed visitor counters on websites in the 1990s?

But Google probably loved seeing "what would happen" with this already pre-built existenting model of "the Internet of things". Second Life is a world where every single thing is digitalized and located on a grid of coordinates. Search can pull up a location, and send you directly to the thing you searched, like "lamp".  Google would love to  have someday what Second Life has today -- the ability for someone to type in "lamp" and "$45" and "Tiffany" and get a red vector showing on a map taking them directly to the location in a store in their defined radius. In fact, some aps more or less do that already; the only problem is that they are contingent on somebody at the location defining the object in a web page, not having it "wired" with RFIDS or "spimes".

So whether or not Second Life's search was broken on the way to examining how it could work for bigger projects, Google got lots of data (informally, or maybe formally) about how it got fixed and reiterated and how it exasperated users and accommodated some of their complaints and created new problems along the way...

That's not a good example, because other things that Google acquires get sucked up into the Borg and appear as useful features we all take for granted.

So Wikipedia is a search feature (think of it as a search feature, rather than as a search result) that Google could make work better.

Whatever you want to say about Google's awfulness, and I say a lot, it's an efficient machine for taking talent, exploiting it, and monetarizing it for the talent and for Google, a lot of the time.

So Google would squeeze the Wikimedia process, currently a horror-bag of awful blood feuds and hideously arcane processes and user malaise -- and try to make it better. They would simplify the UI -- Google is the world's master of simple UI's, to the point that they are too simple and look like an engineer's diagram, making them not very "fun". But Google would likely take the over wiki-ness of Wikipedia and simplify it for the user.

Google would likely also squeeze those awful arcane procedures and simplify them. It might get rid of the Wikipedia-as-cul-de-sac problem where it only links to other pages of itself, instead of outside itself (except for footnotes) -- really unfair, and so unlike the rest of the Internet, given that it has prepared the entries with other people's facts anyway -- it abhors original research.

Google might buy Quora, too, and combine Quora with the Wikipedia pages and make them thereby far more interesting, fun, and maybe more monetarizable for the user -- something that no ad system should be without.

Imagine if every Wikipedia page was better -- less biased, less stupid, less covered with the cruft of all the flags and notices and talks left by panic-stricken myrmidons worried that the entry is biased (when they all are) . Imagine if you could click on a window or link that took you to the Quora discussion. Imagine if you could share on Facebook or Twitter and draw in either friends or likeminded. Imagine if you could open up a Google Hangout *right on the Wikipedia/Quora pages* and discuss in real time with other interested persons what should go on that entry, and why some edits were wrong or tendentious.

Google could keep a big golden box around Wikipedia as a civic project that it is supporting as a corporation while keeping "its integrity" -- that they might do to soothe the screaming fanboyz or Jimmy Wales himself. Jimmy Wales has to go, of course, you can't have two people like Sergey Brin in the same space-time continuum. But the golden box would still be in Google's clutches and they would run it through the Google wringer. The result would likely be an improvement of both awful things which I criticize.

 

Whimsley Wimps Out and Gives the O'Reilly Cult Operative Alex Howard the Last Word

Well, it's surprising that he let it go on as long as he did (most wouldn't go even one round) but in the end Tom Slee, author of the Whimsley blog, cut off my debate of Alex Howard, (which I originally discussed here) likely because conflict made him uncomfortable in the end, and he was likely under pressure from others appalled at allowing a confrontation of a web 2.0 god to go on for any length.

Alex Howard is allowed to have the last word, and it's a disturbing intellectual fraud:

The reason I'm unable to "admit" that what I do is PR, in other words and to your evident consternation, is that it's simply not true.

This is a really scary proposition, because it means that we can't insist on meaning and universal standards, that any cultist is able to fragmentize and undermine them and wrap his ego in their glory -- attack the false premise, and he cries "uncivil" and "troll"; attack the lie that an evangelist for software is in any sense a credible journalist at its root, and simply suffer silencing and blocking.

See, this is why I attack the open source software cult so vigorously. It's one thing if it undermines the old craft of journalism and old media with a new "business model" based on customer demand for "free" of course engineered into the architecture. But it's quite another if the open source cult then attacks the very premise of professional, critical journalism that tries to avoid bias by presenting various facts and views so the reader can decide himself.

Criticism of the open source movement is not new, and doesn't only come from me. Back in 2001 on the trendy tech magazine Wired, for example, Farhad Manjoo explained matter-of-factly after attending an O'Reilly Open Source Conference what was the dirty little secret of open source: big IT firms and other big businesses use Perl, Apache and Linux in their own systems.

Manjoo called this the dirty little secret of the big firms, who didn't talk about it, presumably to hide what each thought was a competitive advantage or even went against their own firm's devotion to proprietary software. But the dirty secret is about open source, too: all those legions of volunter geeks working with such dedication for free in a  modern-day collective communes hardly seem to fit with an ethos that involves ruthless capitalism by large corporations. Yet it's precisely because the big firms take over open source projects much of the time that we can even speak of them as being ubiquitous on the Internet (a favourite argument of open source cultists when you object to their culture is to tell you "the whole Internet" depends on it).

And when they take over the projects or simply just become a power user of the software, they manage it better -- the other dirty little secret of open source. As Majoo ercounts, this was said by one speaker at the conference, Fred Baker, then a "fellow" at Cisco and the former head of the Internet Engineering Task Force -- but to much disdain. What he means is that people who are paid for their work show up on time or get fired if they are lazy and that is an important aspect of the culture of functioning software. Another speaker from Morgan, Stanley claimed the problem with proprietary software is that you can't get answers quickly and fix bugs and you are talking to 1-800 numbers where the clerks can't even spell the product you're calling about. (This is a function of globalization of labour, the shipping of jobs overseas to cut costs, and the desire of Big IT not to use some of their vast wealth reserves for creating jobs in this country.) But I guess this speaker, W. Philip Moore, never had to try to reach a $50/hour IT consultant hired to make the Drupal on a website work, busy with multiple clients, or struggle with a Wordpress blog by combing numerous sometimes contradictory fan sites.

As I've explained, O'Reilly is aggressive and hegemonic in his various projects, including Code for America, and wants to walk into every city, scoop up the city's data such as lists of addresses, and make apps for them that will be either "for the public good" as he and his friends view it, or will "create business opportunities" for app engineers and others, also his friends and likeminded. I've complained that this isn't a democratic process, and that it's driven by the wacky notions of "open source business" which often aren't sustainable for anybody but the high-priced consultant.

And for once I had company, as Whimsely (Tom Slee) of Canada published a frankly critical blog called "Why the 'Open Data Movement' is a Joke". He made a frank, "Emperor has no clothes" critique of the sillyness and then troublesome indulgence of this movement in his own country's government -- so that the conservative Harper government, which he says has been secretive and backward on a number of important issues -- is covering up its flaws with a fake "openness".

I have a lot of respect for Whimsley, as he is one of the few bloggers critical of the open source/gov 2.0/open data etc. movements. He doesn't accept the facile technocommunist arguments for defeating copyright and embracing piracy as a business model or a collectivization tool. To be sure, he doesn't go as far as I do, and would never use a term like "technocommunist" or focus on the collectivization ideologies of these latter-day medicine men. Tom is more of a social democrat than I am; I don't use any kind of adjective in front of the democracy that I espouse.  This is common with Canadians -- I studied in Canada and I understand it and respect it. But I don't agree with it, and I'll contend it.

Someone might say that if there are so few critics of open source out there, why accuse him of "wimping out" and alienating his affections? Well, that's because Tom Slee doesn't have any affections for me to alienate. The few times he engaged with my blog, he let me know he didn't like it -- he disagreed about my explication of the problem with Katy Pearce and Sarah Kendzior on the "Central Asian" cats piece, for example. But like a lot of people, he was timid about having the debate with Howard. He found vigorous polemicizing on the issue made him uncomfortable and didn't want to go the next round. That's too bad, because the stakes for these issues are high: I wouldn't put some much effort into it if I didn't see this as a grave threat to our freedoms, as in "totalitarian" threat to our freedoms.

Even so, Tom as a much, much higher threshold for debate and polemics and counter arguments that most people in the blogosphere who become uncomfortable at the first "dislike". So he let this argument go many rounds, and one hopes he won't delete it under peer pressure.

It's important that he did, because one very obvious thing about Alex Howard immediately became visible: he was willing to denounce me not through argumentation, but by the sort of ad hominem attacks that he admonishes others not to use. He sought to discredit me by linking to the notorious Anonymous/4chan griefers' Bible, Encyclopedia Dramatica, which of course only discredits him. When I pointed out what libelous and stupid dreck is no this page, he backtracked and apologized -- clearly he had linked to the page merely thinking it was a handy way of explaining to "the commuuuunnnity" that I was "a troll". (Let me give him a better link, Tips for Google Witch-Hunters, that has my rebuttals as well, at least that's more fair.)

His apology was shallow, however, because he still sought in the end to discredit me by what the commuuuunity thought -- he cited my page on G+ that proudly proclaims that certain thin-skinned lefty "thought influencers" like Dan Gilmore had blocked me. Good Lord, that's a good thing -- have you ever looked at Dan Gilmore's plan for coercing journalists into using politically-correct terms? I've been debating Howard Rheingold's socialist-style collectivist models for the Internet since I first found him in Second Life trying to convert people to this ideology -- and I'm right to do so.

Tom Slee doesn't fall for the hype of the Internet hucksters on the collectivizing of property and removal of copyright, either, but in this debate, he finally closed it and gave Alex Howard the last word. In the end, a long drawn-out polemics on his blog only makes him uncomfortable and he may have succumbed to peer pressure (and dollars to donuts, he'll explain this differently, by saying that he didn't think the discussion was "productive"). He already has all the gov 2.0 heavies telling him he was wrong to ever post such a blog without essentially conceding that they are a wonder, and we all need to consult with them first, and only make "constructive criticism". I marvel, in fact, that he went as far as he did, given the enormous pressure he was under. Tom, in the end, no doubt worries about his blog being seen as respectable.

I don't suffer from that problem, because I know this is a really pitched, drawn-out battle and that people will take up different positions in it, and my position is going to be vigorously critical of open source to the last because it's about the culture of this cult, and not the mere technical software issues that we have to worry.

It's typical that in his last round where he tries to win, Alex Howard uses the old chestnut of the sort I've flagged at the beginning of this post -- that "89 percent of computers have Microsoft on them," a proprietary code as if to say "we may be a cult, but we aren't winning."

Of course, that's completely irrelevant, because the code running Windows is irrelevant to the code on the Internet and the culture of open source that is insinuating itself into the very body politic. Who cares if Linux lost the war for PCs because it is nerdy and clunky? Using aggressive viral tactics and bullying against critics, it is prevailing in *cultural* battles using its in fact non-open, non-due-process approach of swarming and insisting on "the tyranny of who shows up" and the forced migration of those who "don't contribute". Who cares if technically, open source cultists don't make every single purchase decision in the government today? Their proponents are in high offices of power and inserting gov 2.0 logic and exigency everywhere, undemocratically. THAT is what matters.

The correlary to the "Microsoft owns the computers" is that "we all" use open source software; that it is "everywhere" on the Internet -- Howard would use that argument if there were another round, because geeks like him always expect that they will embarass and shame any critic of open source software if they "suddenly realize" that they are "soaking in it" on the very Internet. Oh, blah, that's stupid -- again, it's about the culture: 12 Reasons You Don't Want to Adopt Geek Open Source Culture, Even if You Use Open Source Software.

Howard has also tried to turn this polemics into a pity-party about a supposed "attack on his integrity". Here this wealthy, influential software evangelist in Washington, DC working for one of the top web 2.0 lobbyists, the O' Reilly publishing, conferencing and coding empire, is going to claim he is suffering because a blogger has criticized gov 2.0 as open and even sinister in undermining democracy. Why the insecurity? Is it a home truth?

I didn't write that "hundreds of people" give "credence" and "validation" to a "tech cult." I wrote that institutions like Harvard and Stanford have recognized me and my work. National Journal and the Atlantic would not publish PR. Their editors published journalism that I submitted to their editors. For that matter, all of my posts the O'Reilly Radar have been edited and reviewed by a trained journalist

But the Atlantic publishes PR for its political perspectives constantly. It's one of the reasons why the magazine has gone downhill intellectually in the last decade -- horrid infatuation with web 2.0 and all Internet fads. Atlantic copies blogs all the time -- I know because my EurasiaNet blog pieces were reprinted there twice. They don't make the claim that everything they print is "journalism" just because they are a magazine! The act of editing copy that advocates a tech cult isn't adding criticial *journalism* to a piece, it's merely adding expert editorial skills.

Furthermore, Stanford is obviously in the pocket of Silicon Valley. We now have Ken Aleuta to documents this for us better. "Harvard" means "the Berkman Center" which is also in the pocket of big IT and the IT cults.

Howard simply refuses to concede what I think even (especially) Tom Slee could concede, and a good many readers: that O'Reilly is a company, not a journalistic outlet, and therefore communications around it are PR, not journalism: it's about the tech business and wealth for technologists, ultimately, not the public good, as it claims.

Howard can't focus on the ideas, however, but keeps bringing it back to a slight on himself, each time O' Reilly is called a cult, and open source software called a cult, trying to gain sympathy and portray his interlocutor as "a bully". This "you're a bully" stuff practiced so assiduoulsly by the open source gang who are the original bullies ought to self-discredit. Regrettably, it works emotionally on their audience who imagine that anyone who sticks to his or her views, and refuses to be rounded up by the collective, is someone they can then pronounce "a bully". It's really a novel way of suppressing dissent -- claiming that the minority voice with a viewpoint that is not prevailing is in fact the suppressor of dissent. Clever, vicious, sinister.

In these sorts of argument, nit-picking and edge-casing and slicing and dicing "facts" are the weapons of choice. I quoted Nancy Scola, because Nick Judd's blog was about Nancy Scola's piece -- duh. That's not a misquote, as Judd's piece mainly consisted of quoting another writer. And in the piece linked to, I quote them both and link to the piece that everyone can see is Nick Judd's piece -- duh. That's why this sort of pestering reprimand should self-discredit.

I haven't said anything "untrue" in my pieces, but Howard thinks if he can play "gotcha' over an alleged "misquote," he can defeat me. But they only way he has prevailed is by relying on the discomfort of people who hate conflict to finally overwhelm them.

As for a more substantive statement, Howard says

For the record, I do not "hate representative democracy" nor non-technical people, nor has it been my observation that former White House CTO Aneesh Chopra or dCTO Beth Noveck do.

Well, that's nice. Except Beth is on the record saying she'd like to "blow up Congress". Chopra is more circumspect, but another person remarked on his project aptly that it was about "circumventing Congress" -- which is EXACTLY what it's about.  And Howard can't concede that, so he has to not only misrepresent them, but try to portray himself as more mainstream than he is -- his boss Tim O'Reilly wouldn't be busy storming into communities -- or the capital of the nation -- demanding data to be used by his select group of coders if he believed in doing things through the process of law passed by Congress. He doesn't. Hello!

Howard looks like a total gibbering symp when he pretends at the end of his "last word" to be magnificent, and "forgive me" for my "insults". I don't need forgiveness because speaking the truth about cults isn't "insulting" or "incivility" -- it's a public duty.

The criticism of the O'Reilly cult is advancing further, precisely because Tom Slee was tolerant enough to allow a person knowledgeable about all their debating gambits to go many rounds with their leading operative. Even Wikipedia cites a bit of Marxist-type criticism of Web 2.0 from the other side, making the same point that I make as a liberal, that labour is exploited.

 

 

 

 

Wiring the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Lolcat by anomalous4.

Oh, did you think I made up that headline? You'd be wrong. It actually comes from a fascinating piece by Matt Bai in The New York Times in 2004.  I fell upon it was I was looking for information about the Rappaports, the *other* funders of the anti-copyright organizations of Mitch Kapor and the various lefty geek causes.

This article by Bai is really helpful in understanding what George Soros and other "progressives" (as they prefer to call themselvse to get the word "left" or "socialist" out of the description) did in recently announcing a $100 million campaign to counter the Republicans in the November presidential elections.

The Democratic Party establishment was dismayed, because this money is going to "grassroots" organizations like American Bridge 21st Century, America Votes, and Moveon.org to "get out the vote" instead of countering negative Republic attack ads on TV. They think it's duplicating efforts the party is already making, or wasting money.

They don't get it.

What this money is really about is the vast opportunities of social media as the new negative attack ad milieu instead of TV. Who needs TV? TV is Fox News. Who watches TV? Not enough people. Fox News has 2 million viewers. Huffington Post has 39 unique visitors a month. So you crank out a lot of advocacy pieces in Huffpo and drive traffic with social media links, or you just get legions of Facebookers and Tweeters to rant in hatred about Romney and in praise of Obama.Voila -- free attack ads.

The staffing for the new hate campaign will come from these newly-flush non-profit campaign groups -- the 527s.

Sure, they can spend time recruiting new voters, focusing especially on the dynamic young Hispanic population, the fastest growing youth population in America. They can continue to do ACORN-style work in recruiting blacks, other minorities, poor people in the resentment and entitlement queues. But that isn't really how they will win -- if they do win.

They plan to win on social media, as they did in 2008 with only $13 million of the Democracy Alliance rich guys' money, and the budgets are for social media, which folds in easily to any nonprofit's financials for the year.

They will use concocted stories like the Romney bullying story in the Post, or various other 15-minute-scandals of the day they can leverage, real or imagined, like Komen and Sarah Fluke. The Democrats started perfecting this viral hate campaign technique back in the days where they had the guy dress up as a chicken and go around heckling Bush supporters.

Nobody can ask for equal time for the other view, or charge you money, for putting an attack phrase on your personal Twitter account, can they?

The Tea Party is now scrambling to get followers on Twitter, but the system is so rigged, they will lose -- at least, on Twitter (although not at the actual ballot box which we will still have -- at least for this election!).

Unlike the early Twitter adapters -- mainly lefty geeks -- who used scripts to jack up their follower count to the tens of thousands, and who are perched in the recommended list of the Twitter devs so they add even more followers -- any newcomers can't compute. Sure, somebody with a huge amount of old media attention like Michelle Malkin will get and add thousands of followers. But the average Joe on Twitter can't break the 1000 ceiling, let alone the 2000 ceiling. That's because Twitter's algorithms are set up so that you can't follow other people (to get them to follow you back) until you get more followers after about 1,000.

It's very hard to crack that 1,000 as I've learned from being on Twitter on two acccounts, one since 2007. What happens is that people harass you for your alternative, i.e. non-progressive views, and sic Anonymous and others to have porn stars or hecklers on anonymous accounts follow you. Then these throw-away accounts get banned for spam or abuse reports by multiple people, or they delete their accounts, or you block them, and then your algorithms are thrown off, making you appear to be an account that is not worthy to be allowed to have more followers because it's churning with spam.

There isn't a universal limit as I've found -- if you have lots of normal people, i.e. not hecklers or spammers follow you, you will get more following ability -- but not by much. I could have 100 more people follow me on Prokofy, but not get above 2,000; on catfitz, I slowly add some every day, but constantly meet the ceiling of 2,000 because of the harassment-followers problem.

Twitter should just let us follow as many people as we want, putting normal checks on spammers and SEO annoyers by putting flood gates on the speed of following, not the quantity of followers. There is no reason not to do this -- except it would disturb the political hegemony that the early adapters and their lefty political friends and lobbyists in Washingon already have. Oh, and the usual geek reason: deliberately throttling the system as a solution to deal with their crappy code and failure to scale up.

There are reports that Republicans and Tea Party have more *accounts* on Twitter. But do they have more *followers*? I don't see that they do, looking through lots of them, anecdotally, to be sure. I'd like to hear a non-biased report on this. The way it looks to me, the lefties have the edge from their boost from the devs in "recommend". Twitter doesn't recommend Michelle Malkin or Jennifer Rubin. It recommends Scoble, who tilts to the left, for his tech cred, or it recommends Alec Ross, Obama's social media guru, or various other trendy social media characters who scan as "progressive" like AplusK (Ashton Kutcher).

It's not just the recommends; the top "community organizers" have padded up their accounts with junk, letting SEO gurus and other idiots follow them and follow them back just to get the boost up the chain past the 2,000 ceiling limit and beyond. I personally won't do that, because I hate polluting the Twitter conversation. I like to find interesting people, then look at who they follow or who is following them to gain more interesting people I can at least put in a list if not follow. I hate finding prostitutes and SEO jerks in their list, instead of real people.

Soros and company are going to inject an enormous amount of money into these astroturf one-way non-interactive groups like Daily Kos, Moveon.org. There is no open forum where you can discuss the issues of the day openly and adversarily with Moveon.org. You can only go click on pre-prepared  petitions that their cadres have already designed for you. Daily Kos might let you open up a blog, but it will be in the long tail, and there, too, the cadres decide everything.

Center for American Progress and the other "progressive" think tanks aren't going to debate the issues surrounding Obama -- they are going to annoint and bless and disseminate them as gospel, describing other people as ignorant or biased or unscientific along the way -- you know, like Jon Stewart and staff do on his popular show.

Matt Bai's article is interesting in that as far back as 2004, he saw that what the purpose was, was not just to try to get Kerry elected as president (they failed), but to defeat the Democratic Party itself and hollow it out and make it turn to the left. It was viewed as failed and ineffective.

You wish we had multiple parties in this country, so that these socialists would stop doing things so stealthily, and just make a socialist party like their DSA, and see who shows up. The Tea Party could make a Christian-Democratic Union or whatever; we could have four parties. Those of us who aren't socialists but not conservatives would go into the Democratic Party where we started.

But that is not to be. And I fear what Soros is doing is more about creating front groups with conveyor-belts to take over the executive than it really is about election politics or creating pluralism or conditions for a fair fight. Soros said he was only get into election politics that one time, just to get rid of Bush. Now he has to come back to keep Obama -- and Obama isn't even so important because it's about setting the stage for 2016.

Even so, I think it will fail. I think it won't be as close as the 2000 election. Because I think the negativity that the firestorm of "grassroots progressives" will unleash on social media will not be persuasive, will be sectarian and stupid, and will not win.

The smart people who just want conveyor belts to power like Micah Sifry at Tech President are now doing things like currying favour with Daryl Issa, the Californian Republican who helped defeat SOPA. Better to have those "bi-partisan" chits ready in case Romney is elected in fact. The tech set can go right on infiltrating all the tech budgets and getting their people in everywhere with the 2.0 stealth campaign and not worry who is technically president.

The problem with the groups like Moveon.org, whatever their millions, is that they don't have authenticity. People don't like having only a few issues dictated to them. They might in fact oppose SOPA or be ready to sign a petition against the NDAA. But then after that, it can get more granulated and diverse, and these organizations, without any real roots in real communities, but only existing on the Internet, just get useless and dense and stupid -- and even harmful. Who wants Code for America and Tim O'Reilly to take away all the IT budgets in a town depending on them for jobs, by evangelizing their open source cult?

Notice that the grown-ups in charge here have given up trying to fight Citizens United as such. It's too late for that. The money is already flowing, and the PACS are already forming on the left, too, with a "can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy. I knew that the angst about CU had no traction when Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wasn't saying a peep against it -- how could it, when he hoped to spend his own money on campaigns to help the left.

OWS is still mumbling about CU, but OWS has dwindled to a nothing now -- Amnesty International may still be goofy enough and enamoured with leftism to put them on their platform for annual meetings, but watch what Micah Sifry does: he might have put WikiLeaks or OWS as a subject on conferences or seminars, but his annual jamboree for $495 a ticket has not a single one of those types at the podium. Instead, he has the CTO of America and some token Republicans.

Of course, I may be wrong about Romney but that would be sad. I hate seeing what Soros fertilizer does to lay down a layer of astroturf all over our democracy. These groups funded aren't democratic but are fronts run by cadres to maneuver public opinion and votes. They don't have authenticity. The Tea Party was authentic but probably isn't going to make a big comeback.

Maybe something different will happen?

 

Google and Social Media Are Bad for the Country Because They Don't Create Jobs

Google has a new creepy page -- Take Action.

They aren't content any more with just letting their search algorithms turn up the tech blogs first before all the other blogs* and letting tech CEOs, in symbiosis with tech media, set the political agenda.

No, Google isn't content just to lobby quietly in Washington, with actually less of a budget than some other Big IT and of course the hated Hollywood and record companies.

Now they have to make getting into politics a product, a destination page. Hence the Take Action page, where you can see that stark, warning-road-signs graphics that are favoured both to sooth overstimulated coders on the autism spectrum and the average goof on the Internet who needs things dirt simple to understand them.

In January, Google first sicced "the Internet" -- 7 million people -- that they could reach,  using their dominance in search and as a beloved geek company -- to get 7 million people to sign a petition. Wow, that's democracy in action! (Except, as I point out, it had a lot of help through the seasoned cadres of Mitch Kapor's anti-copyright operations, Electronic Frontier Foundation and a new front group made up of old operatives fighting the music industry's copyright, Fight for the Future).  The campaign was misleadingly and mischieviously named "Fight  Against Piracy, Not Liberty," although in the end there was...nothing to fight the piracy. Nothing at all. The bill never got to the floor to be debated. And some other vague, supposedly Silicon-Valley supported bill on the "Open Internet" never got any attention at all. That was deliberate. There was never any liberty threatened; now we're stuck with two things instead of one: 1) piracy 2) the awesome (as in, scary) power of Google to whiplash the Internet, including through service blackouts, such as Wikipedia executed, and boycotts, such as was made against Go Daddy, to get its political way.

Is this a good thing for the country? No, not in my view, as it undermines the institution of Congress -- it begins impossible to rationally discuss a bill with limited powers to enable legitimate law-enforcement against piracy in a climate where there is a tsunami of screaming insanity from geeks gone wild (because their beloved piracy was taken away from them -- piracy that they have elevated to a business model, for Google.)

So now Google, fresh from the kill, has moved on to other topics -- although perhaps it is fearing its might, because what's offered to "take action" on is something utterly anodyne and toothless and obscure.:

You stood together to stop something. Today, let’s start a conversation about the future of the web and what makes it awesome.

Because it’s about more than wires and chips, politicians and companies. It’s about how you use the web every day, to make differences big and small.

So now, instead of petitioning Congress to stop a debate about a bill (instead of petitioning your congress person to take one side or the other in the debate -- difference) -- you are just to have...a conversation.

What is that conversation, in a series of silly G+ hangouts, to be about? Awesomeness? How's that?

Well, click on the graphic they supply and read it closer.

It's actually a little PR infographic puff piece about how the Internet supposedly "creates jobs".

"We create jobs," says the jaunty little green graphic with trees.

Supposedly the US economy is driven by the web; supposedly the smart phone industry has created 466,000 jobs since 2007 (!);  and there are more than 3.6 million jobs created by the Internet since 1996.

Google might be good at search; it's terrible at politics and propaganda because it tells such whopping lies.

If these things Google's agitprop center is telling in fact were true, we wouldn't have a recession. 466,000 jobs since 2007 with apps?! Really, guys? Where the hell did they pull that out of, their asses?

Ap jobs? I didn't have to take long searching in Google of course to find the replication of this statistic in USA Today,  "according to an analysis released Tuesday by technology trade group TechNet.

Do they mean all engineers who have designed apps and maybe made $17 from their apps? Or do they mean engineers who have actually earned living wages from those apps? Most engineers making apps lose money, and don't make money; many of them don't even charge for the apps and don't have a business model.

What is TechNet?

Oh, and see how they constructed the numbers:

The estimate counts 311,000 jobs at companies making the apps and another 155,000 at local merchants who have expanded their payrolls in an economic ripple effect caused by increased spending at their businesses.

That second part really seems bogus, because local businesses having a Groupon windfall, as TechCrunch is quick to report, over and over again, sometimes end up regretting their windfall because it leads to not being able to serve their original customer base, which then deserts them, leaving them worse off. I'm really skeptical of the numbers used to calculate "economic ripple effect." A candy store next to a start-up might make a little money. Then what happens when the start-up fails?

But there's a lot of irrational exhuberance here:

"This is a telescope into what the future looks like," said Michael Mandel, the economist hired by TechNet to put together the report. "This is one part of the economy that is actually expanding and hiring. Once you point people in that direction, they can realign their compass pretty quickly."

Who is Dr. Michael Mandel and what is TechNet? And can we trust a tech company in Silicon Valley to really tell us the truth about this, and not massage it tremendously?

It turns out TechNet is "the bipartisan policy and political network of technology CEOs that promotes the growth of the innovation economy." Uh-oh, it's just a lobbying group made up of the very companies that want to try to claim that they are supplying jobs so that the public, which is beginning to suspect that the Internet kills jobs instead of creates them, won't backlash. That's all.

I understand why the tech blogosphere and professional tech media cut and paste the press releases from this group. But why does the mainstream media do that? We are likely to see the number "466,00 jobs created by apps" until the heat-death of the sun. Why? Because the executive council of TechNet, the lobbying group which sponsored this study (PR piece), is made up of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and the heads of Cisco and the other leading tech companies and investors. They all have jobs. Do we?

Michael Mandel, a hired researcher for this tech industry lobbying group, explains some more about how he did this study.

Strangely, he only talks about the job creators coming out of the last recession, in the 1990s, in a study he did (not surprisingly) for the Progressive Policy Institute, which is also a lobbying group, not an independent academic institution (not that we'd be likely to find one anyway, given the fact that institutions like Stanford University are in the pocket of the IT industry totally, financially and ideologically). He never talks about the jobs the Internet killed off, in media and related support industries, and doesn't then give us the net of jobs created by new tech against jobs lost.

He's counting as an "app job" jobs in companies like Apple or Microsoft that began to turn to involvement with apps -- jobs that might have existed any way, as we don't see elsewhere that there was this big job hiring spree at these notoriously miserly companies that horde their reserves jealously:

This total includes jobs at ‘pure’ app firms such as Zynga, a San Francisco-based maker of Facebook game apps that went public in December 2011. App Economy employment also includes app-related jobs at large companies such as Electronic Arts, Amazon, and AT&T, as well as app ‘infrastructure’ jobs at core firms such as Google, Apple, and Facebook

Zynga? How many employees does Zynga, the Farmville people have? Some 3,000, as of  November 2011. The famed CEO Mark Pinkus got only a 46% approval rating after a "negative" (i.e. truthful) New York Times story about the toll on the talent -- as we know full well from watching Linden Lab and other virtual world and MMORPG companies, the geek companies are ruthless collective farms using Stakhanovite methods on their staff:

As the discord increases, the situation may jeopardize the company’s ability to retain top talent at a time when Silicon Valley start-ups are fiercely jockeying for the best executives and engineers. It could also hamper deal-making, a critical growth engine for Zynga, which has spent about $119 million on acquisitions in the last two years.

Note how the story speaks of "data-driven" work -- this is a feature of Google management as well, as I'm learning from reading I'm Feeling Lucky by Employee No. 56. Big data, from government and industry, is the latest fad -- O'Reilly is having a big conference on it.

If Zynga made $828.9 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2011, couldn't it hire more staff and wear out staff with long hours less? Well, that's now how these tech companies work.

Read more for the ugly story of how Pinkus bought out MyMiniLife, the company that made the backbone of Farmville, and exploited them, making a respected project manager walked out. I didn't realize that there was some other small company behind the giant Farmville of Zynga, did you?

Electronic Arts suffered two lawsuits from burned-out exploited game programmers and settled for $15 million -- that was something I don't recall reading on Scott Jenkin's Broken Toys although it must be there somewhere. Wow! When are the exploited users going to get their day in court lol?

Zynga is responding by changing conditions, Google-wise:

Zynga has made efforts to change its ways. The company has added data centers and expanded teams to ease the burden on its engineers. It is also encouraging managers to schedule a bigger buffer between project phases and to give teams the week off before a game’s debut. Zynga — which offers employee perks like acupuncture, Friday happy hours and a cafeteria with organic food — is also spending millions on focus groups and other initiatives to strengthen its manager training programs.

But I don't think they can fix the essential asshole culture at the root of all these companies, which they attribute to their very success. Some day we will read books analyzing how this culture they thought led to success was like the lead in the Romans' cups and led to the downfall of their empire.

They can't have hired THAT many engineers because as of March 2012, the number of employees was only at 2916.

I had a  table of all the major companies from Google to Twitter to Facebook and all their employees which I tried to paste into this blog and it crashed. You can easily make your own job by search. It can be a hard number to find for some of these companies. Google is notorious for burying the figure. Go here, if you finally figure it out past the Ask.com returns, but you won't get the answer, as they tell you that "the headcount can be found on the financial tables" -- but I'll be damned if I can pick it out, can you? Oh! Go down to the lower-left hand corner, find "Who We Are" (something most companies put on their home page very visibly, but they don't), click on that, and find this slogan:  "There are more than 30,000 Googlers behind the tools that you use every day."  Gee, that's odd -- and sneaky!

They also have trouble telling us how many employees there are at each location. Is that because we'd find out that they don't really supply many jobs when they come into a community -- to help the Internet take jobs away?

Only 30,000 employees? For a company whose net worth is $190 billion (or $290 billion?), and which took in $10 billion last year?

Eric Schmidt, the CEO, is worth $6 billion; Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth more than $16 billion.

Why do those OWS 99% freaks never look at these people, who have taken away so many jobs, adding little, from companies that don't pay their taxes in the US, shielding their revenue in tax havens overseas?

Even if you took all the companies in social media together, they don't make up even a quarter of a million -- 250,000 -- jobs. Any dying auto industry giant like GM has more employees even now than they have all taken together. That's the reality. That's what has to be looked at, not studies commissioned by the people trying to avoid this news getting out.

Google's choice to make its agitprop for the month of April to be "starting a conversation" about how "the Internet creates jobs" including "466,000 jobs" isn't accidental, and is driven by the realization that the most powerful argument that the sponsors of SOPA had against these Internet bandits is that they were destroying jobs and killing revenue and harming our country. Which indeed they -- and their whipsawed millions of geeks -- are doing. Billions are lost overseas to piracy; we all see the devastation left from the Internet copying machines. There is no way we can believe in this  more than 3 million jobs created by the Internet when that many were destroyed at least; there is no way that the app engineers are going to save the economy. If this were true, California itself wouldn't be suffering.

In my neighbourhood, I see the shuttered Borders and Blockbusters megastores, losing hundreds of jobs and related commerce in the area. I see the cafes that used to exist in the niche around these big stores gone. I see the smaller independent book stores and video stores and record stores gone. I see other small service stores shuttered. In their places are empty stores that go months -- years -- without being rented. The owners drive up the rents then to compensate and drive out even the most basic of services like dry-cleaners or copy and stationery stores (still needed, even in the era of the Internet). I've watched all of these businesses and their jobs get wiped clean out of just my area of 20 blocks -- not to mention the widening doom of all the newspaper, media, music and related jobs sucked out of the town by the Internet.

In their place, I see maybe one app engineer sitting in the Dunkin Donuts who lost his way en route to Union Square Ventures -- VC capitalists for the new businesses like Four Square that are "supposed to create jobs". They don't. They create them for a few; they enable only a few to get rich. There are only about 70 employees at Four Square! That's all! This notion that "apps" are creating jobs -- and creating spillover effects for the economy -- is an optical illusion induced by seeing a few overflowing bars around Union Square.

Why are the Marxist Leninists taking over Union Square focusing on old money like banks and Wall Street, when it is the new money that is harming the economy?

So I look at this obscene deal of $1 billion for Facebook to buy Instagram -- which has a grand total of 11 employees, probably some of whom will get axed after this buy-out. The deal is now being investigated by the FCC. Good!

I don't believe in the Schumpeterism and social Darwinism of "creative destruction" simply because I always see it wielded by people who want to destroy other people's jobs, and leave their own unthreatened.

I'm not a socialist. I believe in capitalism. I think what Big IT does is more like communism than capitalism, however -- state capitalism for the giant corporation and a class of oligarchs, infliction of communism on everyone else, exploiting free labour (the open source movement), exploiting the free content uploaded by its billions of users, and not creating ways for people to make a living online, but destroying them with their own "California business model."  No wonder the social media giants find it convenient to support Occupy Wall Street and get people's attention distracted to banks and old companies instead of themselves.

I don't think the government has to "make jobs," although it can help in some areas. I think capitalism will do the job creation in a free market. But that's not what we have here with oligarchs who horde their revenue and don't give to charity and don't hire sufficient help even for their own projects, let alone customer service representatives. There is a balance; capitalism can have a human face. It doesn't with Silicon Valley.

_________

*Tech blogs show up first and have the highest traffic of all blogs, despite their niche. That's a natural outgrowth of weblogging being something that originated in webmasters' mundane reports on what they were doing on a website, which morphed into opinion statements, and then gradually bled out into the "blog" phenomenon for all of us. The tech blogs got there first and thus have the higher rankings; social media recommends them more than others (liberal outlets like Huffington are then recommended next).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Information in the Time of Cholera

Infected river water is spreading cholera in camps and poor shanty towns of earthquake-stricken Haiti. Photo by UN.

I just finished reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, the story of a British couple who go to serve in a Chinese colonial town in the last century or even earlier. Kitty Fane is unfaithful to her husband, a bacteriologist, and in retaliation, he takes her to a town where a cholera epidemic is raging. She undergoes a kind of spiritual transformation after encountering devoted French nuns working with the cholera victims, and begins to help the orphaned children herself. Then her husband himself dies of cholera, uttering, "The dog it was that died," from Goldsmith's Elegy -- which is supposed to be the enigmatic end of this story that turns out to be "man bites dog" in that Kitty doesn't die; Walter does.

There wasn't a cure for cholera yet, although Walter was researching it, and it seemed that they knew enough not to eat fresh salads (but did anyway). They hadn't figured out to put chlorine in the water or boil it -- the information hadn't gotten to them. Eventually, British authorities did figure this out and worked on sanitation and clean water in cities when they made the connection. Russia didn't get the news -- it's astounding to realize how many millions of Russia died of cholera, far more than any other country, if you read about the cholera epidemics throughout history.

There's a pretty simple prevention of cholera -- just don't shit in or near your water supply. This sounds easy for modern people to do -- but they're forgetting how difficult it can be to set up latrines and keep water supplies clean, and to get poor people who have been used to bathing and drinking from rivers for centuries to change their habits -- even if they have access to fire or electricity to boil water, let along chlorine. They didn't change their habits for centuries because it didn't matter, their water kept flowing and there weren't too many people or over-building to upset the water tables.

The way information flows in The Painted Veil is fascinating -- it's a preserved box of a world in which there is no Internet or fax or even overseas telephone. The disease could spread faster than the news. Kitty discovers she is pregnant -- not from a drugstore test after a week, as today's woman might, but after months of feeling slightly queasy -- the old fashioned way. She doesn't know who the father is; and in that day and age, there was no DNA testing to tell. We are left wanting at the end of the story when she goes to live with her father, now widowed -- who will the child look like?

Kitty gets the news of her mother's death too late to see her in her dying days -- a letter reachers her as she alights from a ship, and then finally a telegram. No email or wireless.

That ultra-slow world in which people lived in the dark -- they didn't know how to prevent or stop cholera; they didn't know how to tell who the father of a child was; they didn't get the news in time that a loved one had died; they lived their lives in a state of unknown and dark mystery. And were not happy.

But we've changed all that, right? Now Kitty could find out who the father is (or have an easy abortion, for that matter). She would have flown home to visit her mother the instant she got the poor test results back (well, she never got test results, they didn't have them, no one knew what was wrong with her). Her husband may never have died, having figured out to put chlorine in the water and even vaccinate the kids (although the cholera vaccination doesn't work perfectly or for long).

So in this day and age, with all our information, with the Internet, how is it that Haiti, already devastated by an earthquake, could have a cholera epidemic, in which more than 7,200 people have already died and 530,000 are infected? There has already been one case reported in Florida. Why isn't anyone stopping this?!  It's been going on since October 2010. We have all the information and all the cures we need. What happened?!

Worse, the epidemic has been traced to UN peace-keepers from Nepal, and despite the findings of several reports establishing this, Nepal remains in denial and the UN remains in slow mode of a century ago. It turns out the Nepalese troops' latrines leaked. Why didn't they have better latrines? Even atomic toilets. Well, Nepal is a poor country too, ready to supply soldiers for the higher UN salaries.

OK, once there's an epidemic, rather than assigning blame, stopping it is the problem. So why is it spreading?

It turns out there are all kinds of stories. For example, repeatedly (and I hear this all the time at the UN), well-meaning NGOs install pumps and access to clean water in settlements, but then they break down. The NGOs have moved on. Nobody knows how to fix the pump, or even if they do, they can't get the part. This has occurred so many times -- sometimes because oppressive governments kick out the NGOs, sometimes because corrupt people steal the pumps to sell -- I wish there were an NGO that would get started that calls itself simply "Pumps" and which does nothing else but methodically go around to the sites of all other NGOs who have installed pumps and checks to see if they are working and fixes them, using mobile technology and maps and notification aps or something.

There's overcrowding, lack of sanitation, lack of medical care. Everybody tries to do what they can, but it isn't working because there's a lack of leadership, focus, and coordination. There's some press coverage, but not enough, given the devastation. I'm not suggesting the media acquire a social-action role, which is antithetical to press freedom. But where are all the twitterers? As the Times reported:

“In the future, historians will look back and say, ‘Wow, that’s unfortunate,’ ” said Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, a nongovernmental organization that provides health care for the poor. “This unfolded right under the noses of all those NGOs. And they will ask, ‘Why didn’t they try harder? Why didn’t they throw the kitchen sink at cholera in Haiti?’ ”

While it might seem pointless to pursue, the Haitian people want answers about the epidemic because they are demanding compensation. Al Jazeera found the latrine of the Nepalese soldiers was leaking, and not in sealed containers as they claimed. The Times reports:

Dr. Piarroux, an infectious diseases specialist and parasitologist from Marseilles, arrived to lead a three-week French-Haitian investigation. He and his colleagues built a database of cases, identified geographic clusters and mapped the epidemic’s movement.

His conclusion: the only explanation for an outbreak of South Asian-style cholera in a rural area of Haiti home to a Nepalese Army base with a faulty sanitation system had to be infected soldiers on the base itself.

Yet in our information age, the respected medical journal, The Lancet, refused to publish Dr. Piarroux's findings, with this comment:

“Although interest in how the outbreak originated may be a matter of scientific curiosity for the future, apportioning blame for the outbreak now is neither fair to people working to improve a dire situation, nor helpful in combating the disease.”

A good example of why you don't want to ascribe a social role to media, even specialized medical media, because they block news on the basis of their own decision of what is in the public interest or good for society.

What's driving this silencing and reluctance? Fear of having to pay a whopping compensation. Haitians have been demonstrating demanding justice.  It's true that the apparent fault of the Nepalese is exasperated by the poor habits and poverty of Haitians. The Times reports -- with a picture atop the article -- how a woman washes her clothes in the river while her young daughter shits on the river bank, then wades into the river to brush her teeth after eating a sugar cane. Paul Farmer points out that the New York marathon provides clean water stations for a sport; can't we do better in providing water to Haitians? Look at all the money that has been spent.

The rainy season is coming, and with it, the increased danger of cholera. So far, everything about the earthquake and the cholera and its aftermath have shown the deep flaws not only in Haiti, but in the international community and the way it handles emergency response and long-term development.

Here's one petition (I couldn't seem to find any active ones) by a man who has been active in trying to stop the epidemic with water purification.

Cholera hospital in Haiti. Photo by UN.