Wired State

George Packer Takes Down Silicon Valley - But Not Too Hard

Obama had dinner with all these tech CEOs -- and they got SOPA/PIPA removed so they could go on prevailing over Hollywood and other content businesses. But what did the country get?

I've always loved George Packer's writing at the New Yorker. His takedown of Obama's Cairo speech was state-of-the-art. I'm not as leftist as Packer, but I surely appreciate his work.

It's a shame that his great article criticizing the Better Worldism of Silicon Valley (as I call it) is -- symptomatically -- behind a pay wall. Maybe the financial elves at the New Yorker realize that there's nothing that Silicon Valley loves to do more than read about itself, and this is a lure to get some of them to help sustain East Coast intellectual life in the form of the New Yorker, struggling like all print media, even having moved online.

I recently subscribed, in fact to get the tote -- and the tote was a total rip-off. I expected at least a full-size Adidas-style flight bag; instead I got a glorified smushed book bag, if that. Don't fall for it. It's tacky. The magazine is worth $20 if you get one of those offers. Otherwise, buy it on a case-by-case basis. It's had way too much Julia Ioffe for my taste lately. Isn't it enough that she's at TNR?

Recently I saw a list which I can't find now of the top Silicon Valley moguls and their philanthropies. So you saw that Sergei Brin was donating to Parkinson disease research because he has the genes for it himself. And somebody else was donating to some project to extend life a la the Singularity University. And somebody else was spending on something else that was, in the end, about me-me-me. I remember out of the whole bunch of them, the only one who seemed to be giving to more societal-type of philanthropy of the more classic type was Pierre Omidyar, who funded minorities education, NGOs that work on human rights, and so on. It was sad to see. There was recently an article about a billionaire couple that was putting everything into obesity research and education -- you know, those "broken" schools. They were slender and perfect themselves, but they thought this was an area where they'd make a big impact, finally cracking the nut of obesity by just spending a lot on it with someone they felt was the "smartest". It's like what I was saying in my previous post about the Spartan way -- taking the few select men and training them intensively, away from society, to perfection, but having them turn out to be authoritarians; or the Athenian way, training the entire class democratically in the hope that the geniuses would appear among them and flourish, too.

Anyway, George is troubled by Silicon Valley's creepy insularity just as I am, but he comes to a more socialist-style critique, much like Evgeny Morozov. As Packer writes, Morozov grumps that Silicon Valley won't care about health institutions and sustaining them (ObamaCare?) but will just create an app for you to track your own health. But to me, the problem is sustaining the kind of society with large, medium and small business -- pluralism -- where companies and people can pay for their own insurance.

In any event, George's piece takes apart all the things you'd expect in the Better Worlders -- the vast disparity in wealth between their moguls and the homeless people in the Mission forced out of their homes by gentrification

I doubt George Packer, even though he is from Palo Alto evidently, has read the novels of Kathleen Townshend Norris from the turn of the century, one of my favourite authors, but she wrote vividly of the great disparities in wealth in San Francisco and the other cities in California even 100 years ago. The poor you always have with ye.

In New York, the giant towers where the moguls and their middle-class staff work require a working class of people running delis, drug stores, gyms, hardware shops, etc. down below, making up a more diverse economy. But in Silicon Valley, all of these services, or a lot of them, are put inside the Big IT campuses themselves -- even a bus comes from Google to pick you up in the morning so you don't take a cab or pay for public transportation. In a way, it reminds me of the problem of Washington, DC, where it can actually be hard to find a sandwhich or a xerox shop -- because there are so many federal buildings with subsidized cheap cafeterias for federal employees. There's disparity in Washington, DC, too, you know.

To me, the problem with Silicon Valley isn't that they don't engage in more philanthropy or somehow subsidize their towns more with higher taxes to create bigger welfare classes -- a concept I don't think is such a great solution for urban progress, really -- the problem is the technocommunism. It's the way all of these moguls scrape data and get ad clicking and get creation or uploading of loads of content and private information for free -- in a collective farm for us -- that enriches them. We might toil all day on Facebook writing and clicking on ads and uploading photos, but we get nothing for it. They get stock which they still seem to have enriched themselves considerably with, despite their poor IPO showing.

But for George Packer, it's about mere inequity which presumably he'd fix by more philanthropy and more taxation, social democracy style, rather than by a social justice challenge to these billionaires to start cutting us in on the pie.

There are fifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Silicon Valley; last year’s Facebook public stock offering alone created half a dozen more of the former and more than a thousand of the latter. There are also record numbers of poor people, and the past two years have seen a twenty-per-cent rise in homelessness, largely because of the soaring cost of housing. After decades in which the country has become less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places in America.

I understand Lanier, in his new book, has spoken of the need to create ways for customers to get paid more online with all these products, but we know how fiercely somebody like Kevin Systrom resists that notion that would mean "friction" -- and Anil Dash and Gizmodo and all of the tech press and investtors.

Packer has done the public service for the East Coast intelligentsia and gone around and interviewed these Big IT guys, the same ones who met with Obama before his election.

We never got much gossip out of that dinner, and now we get more -- but mainly it's about Zuckerberg fretting that too many of his colleagues were looking for things like tax incentives or an immigration bill (for their own cheaper engineers from India or Russia), but not for things that had more resonance -- he conceded then the need to broaden the immigration issue.

Packer quotes Gavin Newscom, the mayor of San Francisco, as saying "technology has rendered our current system of government irrelevant". Sigh. When will technology render people like him irrelevant?

George gets his number and the number of the others instantly: "many of the tasks of government are outsourced to citizens with smartphones," he concludes. And that won't be viable. It's government only for the wealthy and the connected, not the rest of us.

He makes short work of Steven Johnson and his "peer progressivism" and "liquid democracy" which despite its seeming democratic credentials actually involves reducing your participation in a corporativist type arrangement where you transfer votes to those you think have more expertise in some area.  I wish these jerks would spend even one day actually trying to practice these ideas in a commune, they would get over them quick.  Steven Johnson makes money from his best-selling books or his speaking fees, not by using Facebook to find a friend whose couch he can surf on, or somebody who will accept him spending an hour of his time to give him some intangible -- or even food. These nuts that say cash will disappear and people will merely be collectivized and working happily in the commune just never studied Soviet history. And this is collectivism -- communism -- not libertarianism -- it's libertarian only for the person harvesting the cash from it, not us. That's what I wish George would understand.

Even so, Packer gets the cultural inanity of it all:

"It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up."

Packers asks everyone: how it could be that this revolution coincided with a broader economic decline?

Answer -- and I don't think Packer himself realizes -- it's the Internet that in fact is destroying the economy -- not only the print, music, news businesses but the government and financial sector.

I don't know if George Packer will stick with this topic and read more and realize just how bad it is -- that this isn't just a social equity problem with some rich guys in California not paying more taxes so their cleaning ladies can have been homes and schools for their kids. This is about a raging, destructive power that wants to uproot and eliminate institutions as we know them, including Congress, in the technocratic notion that they are "broken" and need "fixing".

Maybe he will figure it out -- but one thing that's very refreshing is George's nonchalant take on FWD.us. He writes how this effort to create a lobbying arm of Silicon Valley and work on political issues, headed by this friend of Zuckerberg's Joe Green, has been criticized fiercely for going outside the bounds of the accepted party line, because in order to get their hands dirty in politics, they had to back candidates, and that meant backing people who have different views than they do on some subjects. So if they want Lyndsay Graham, a southern Republican, to get on board with their immigration position, they have to accept that he's going to back things that some of their more touchy eco-friends will hate, like oil and gas. Of course, I don't know what it is they put in their cars every morning, maybe it's fairy dust, but Musk, the electric car guy, pulled out of FWD.us *gasp* because of these values gaps.

Parker thinks this is just part of Silicon Valley growing up as a political bloc, and doesn't seem that upset about it, although Bill McKibbon may be along any minute. I actually hope myself that Zuckerberg's lobbying group doesn't fail over sectarian sniping from the hard left because I think his prevailing is in part what may someday modify and even out the extremists in his midst and gives us a more tolerable and less destructive Silicon Valley (dare we to dream?)

Joe Green, Zuckerberg's friend who was a member with him of Harvard's Jewish fraternity, even collaborated on Facemash, the precursor to Facebook that rated classmates for "hotness" that landed them before the college disciplinary board. Joe Green had a strict father, a math professor at UCLA, who didn't want that sort of thing happening to his son, and he urged him to get off the project. He also urged him to stay away from Zuck when later Green had spent some time working for John Kerry's presidential campaign and then wanted Zuckerberg to make a political network out of Facebook. Green went on to make Causes with Napster's Sean Parker and NationBuilder on their own without Facebook's interest, although you could argue that Facebook's crucial role in the Obama campaign surpassed all that fooling around with Causes.

I personally dislike Causes as it tilts too far to the left and constantly pushes left-wing causes at me. In theory, more centrist or even right-wing causes could be put there, but then they won't be promoted by either curation or algorithm. When I first joined, for some odd reason, I found I couldn't make a petition, it wouldn't let me log in and do that, although it kept sending me others' petitions. Finally, I was successful after literally months in getting the system to generate a new account and now I think I could make a petition -- but I just don't like the cramped space, the friend-forcing that it shoves at you trying to get you to send your cause to every single one of your Facebook friends, etc. NationBuilder I haven't used and I understand that it has been criticized lately for in fact not tilting to the left but being more evenhanded. I'll have to investigate.

As Packer reports,  Green doesn't think that the Silicon Valley methodology necessarily transfers to politics.

"Whereas politics is transactional and opaque, based on hierarchies and handshakes, Green argued, technology is empirical and often transparent, driven by data."

Well, the data-drivers in the Harper Reed machine sure won the day for the transactional and opaque!

Let's hope that New Yorker will get stronger in mounting a really serious, sustained critique of Silicon Valley that doesn't just amount to socialist weeping and saying "oh, poor people, not rich like those tycoons, and they don't care".  Ken Auleta's writing on Stanford and the insidious connections between business and the university and its corrupting influence on academia are also an important start here.

So here's my question: Atlantic has been taken over by Silicon Valley -- and it's awful. The New Republic has been taken over by Silicon Valley -- even more awful. At what point will the New Yorker cave, and how?

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George Packer: Can Silicon Valley embrace politics?

My Twit-Fight with Jeffrey Sachs: Who Develops and Where's the Democracy?

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In Silicon Valley, philanthropy does not begin at home

My Twit-Fight with Jeffrey Sachs: Who Develops and Where's the Democracy?

I'll put this here, because it can be very hard to access old tweets now -- you can't get them more than a month or so before today's date, and even Topsy may not have everything.

I had been meaning to post this and forget about it and was reminded again by coming across Sachs pontificating on the Millenium Development Goals again. And I was reminded again just how wonderful Armin Rosen's article was, critiquing Sach's idea about African development (see at the very end).

I don't know if this exchange needs much explanation, but just in case: I got into a debate at first with a woman about whether the US and Europe were to blame for Africa's disruption. I think this is myopic and unfair and part of that anti-Western Marxist mentality you see in Western campuses and some African political organizations -- but not all. I think it's more complex than that, and while the scourges of colonialism naturally have to be blamed, and US machinations and oil companies and all the rest, at a certain point, you have to seek personal accountability, and you can't go on forever blaming whitey and the West. That's my conviction. And when I see the kleptocrats and maniacs leading some of these countries, I stand by it. I don't think they can be fixed by adding more mosquito nets.

But regardless of what I think, this story is about how the debate gets framed. Jeffrey Sachs has long been supported intellectually and financially by George Soros. He is typical of the can-do technocratic elite figure that George loves to back as a doer and maker, not in the Silicon Valley way -- George doesn't really seem to have an affinity with Silicon Valley -- but more in the old fashioned way of scientific development approaches -- economic solutions to political problems. There's more than a little third-way social democracy, even socialism in the ideals of this billionaire, and he tends to fund the leftwing and "progressive" organizations that fit these ideals.

Some time ago, he more or less revised -- abandoned? -- his ideas of the "open society" a la Popper, and began to believe that picking the one, true, scientific "progressive" way with rationality and free will was the way to advance society -- and then give the strongest organizations that extra boost, rather than funding pluralism for pluralism's sake.

As Alex Goldfarb, a one-time aide to Soros, once put it: It's the difference between funding the entire class, and hoping that out of that class of mixed abilities will come one or two geniuses, and the rest will have benefited from all being funded or funding those one or two geniuses because they are the strongest and best and you shouldn't waste money on failures or mediocrities. (This is also described as the Athenian versus Spartan form of education). 

I think arguably Soros has moved from the former to the latter belief, especially with his investments in American politics, but at any rate, Jeffrey Sachs is one of his big investments -- and by that I mean not necessarily in some literal dollar amount that Sachs may get today but more about his ideas, and advancing them either personally with Sachs, or many NGOs that will listen to Sachs and at least not criticize him.

There's almost no criticism of Sachs anywhere, and I think this is a function of the fact that there's a kind of taboo on that -- Soros grantees -- and there are a lot of them! -- don't want to fall out of favour. Even those without a direct Soros grant, say, a university, don't want to speak out of tune with the great one. This is incredible pervasive throughout the progresso-sphere -- this Partiinost' or Party discipline, and I really find it repulsive. What this interchange I had with Sachs shows is the enormous lengths he will go to -- narcistically -- to keep the adulation intact.

You would think normally someone of his magnitude wouldn't have time to come and interrupt a Twitter chat between two strangers who happen to use his handle merely to indicate they were discussing his article. But he did. He challenged my claims about the critique of his ideas for Poland and Russia -- which at the time were very controversial and caused a certain amount of dislocation. Maybe they worked better in Poland; Russia was beyond him. He doesn't answer that challenge.

But when I invoke Bill Easterly, a thoughtful writer on the great wrongs of international development, Sachs actually points me to the 22nd minute of a video (!) where on a panel, Easterly is basically forced to retract his past critique of Sachs. I marvelled at this. I couldn't understand it. Easterly had already gotten a reputation to standing up to Sachs, but then he stopped. I surmise he stopped evidently because the flak he was getting not only from Sachs' supporters and the Soros-funded "system" -- and Sachs himself! -- was going to harm his career possibly; he felt that constantly being the negative nabob, the sourpuss as the celebration of Sachs' lovely ideas was just too much hard work. Nobody wants to be negative all the time.

I had to marvel that Sachs would waste time arguing with me, a minor blogger, yet he did because the vanity and the imperative to keep the rep ever bright was so great. In the end, I made the crack that Armin must not get a Soros grant because he was able to eloquently take apart Sachs' ideas -- which truly are missing the vital component of governance and democracy.

I've told these stories many times that sum up the entire fandago that is "development" via international organizations. The first comes from a Russian human rights activist in 1995 at the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, where the Soviet Union had already collapsed, but its old pupils were still demanding the erosion of civil and political rights by insisting on the primacy of economic and social rights. Vienna represented a certain truce on these two issues, but not really. One of the compromises the UN had to put up in order to get the acknowledgement of the civil and political rights out of the worst abuses in the world like Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, etc. was to create this "right to development" concept and the whole clumsy (and expensive) infrastructure that still exists today around it. The third-world countries kept yammering about how they had to have the right to development. The Western concept of this is different than the Marxist/Eastern one of course, and in the US, economic rights aren't even recognized. Finally, exasperated at this constant demand for positive rights, coming from a state that was finally at last getting out of the way of the negative rights, this dissident said, "Nu, develop already!"

And to be sure, in a certain sense, that's all you can say to people and countries asking for a big shakedown and a handout. What's stopping you from developing? Stop stealing the foreign aid and use it to help your people. Life is more complicated than that, of course, and I have come to see that in fact the international system and states have to invest in certain areas like health care and education to ensure justice in their societies in tandem with the civil liberties. This idea of balance isn't one libertarians/Randians share but in fact the rights lexicon can help these developing countries, as they are called, wrest commitments out of those autocrats. But there's more.

The other story comes from a time I brought a Tibetan scholar in with our organization to take part in this panel at which a Chinese diplomat was speaking about development. The Chinese official went on and on about how wonderfully everything was going with adding railroads or schools or whatever in places like Tibet. To which the Tibetan could only ask: who develops? Indeed. Who? The Han people deliberately flooded into the region to erode the population of Tibetans, or the Tibetan people?

Re: Benghazi I just wrote about how I thought the development approach to terrorism just wasn't working and was misleading and even dangerous -- but then, on the "democracy" side there are just as many idiocies, such as the fetishization of elections in places like Afghanistan. In any event, here it is, the rare challenge to Jeffrey Sachs, one I don't have the ability, scholarship, or funds to sustain, but one in which I hope others will take up.

1. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   .@JeffDSachs: We should really understand how much the U.S. and Europe have destabilized Africa over the last 60 years #ForesightAfrica

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2. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii @JeffDSachs So murderous regimes like Bashir's in Sudan, civil wars in DRC, these aren't destabilizing?

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3. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   @catfitz @JeffDSachs of course there are many factors contributing to destabilization - does affirming 1 negate others?

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4. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii @jeffdsachs sounds like the usual "blame America first"

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5. Hellen Otii ‏@hellenotii 9 Jan

   @catfitz history is history not about blame, more looking at the whole picture, this part has been glossed over

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6. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 9 Jan

   @hellenotii I don't buy the narrative on Africa at all. Let's go back to @JeffDSachs damage in Poland, Russia, then take it from there.

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Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs

@catfitz @hellenotii Poland's success surpassed that of the other countries in the region. Here are some facts. http://jeffsachs.org/2012/03/bolivia-poland/ …

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1. CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

   @JeffDSachs @hellenotii If you could fix the world by freeing prices or supplying mosquito nets, no one would be migrating from those places

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CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

@JeffDSachs @hellenotii You don't mention Russia. And as for Poland, at what price? And facts? Well, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-easterly/sachs-ironies-why-critics_b_207331.html …

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs @hellenotii Maybe if the entire world wasn't on a Soros grant, you would have more worthy critics.

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz @hellenotii You're a bit out of date. Please see Bill Easterly's comments http://www-2.iies.su.se/Nobel2012/video_public_panel1.html … at 22:00 onward.

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz @hellenotii If you can save children with bed nets I'm going to do my best to do it.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs No. I'm not out of date. I'm just not cowed. When you set out to smear someone's rep, you succeed, and they back down, I guess

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs That's nice. Save them for what? Unemployment? Terrorism? MDGs succeeded on child mortality Now what? Nobody ever talks abt that

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Bed nets, price freeing -- these are all technocratic solutions, combine Western tech with South's centralized kleptocrats.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs that you have to refer to some 22nd minute on some video to some minor blogger on Twitter lets me know the size of your ego

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs the MDGs are missing one big thing: human rights. Governance, free media, accountability all missing & nods 2 these bureaucratic

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• Jeffrey D. SachsVerified account ‏@JeffDSachs 10 Jan

  @catfitz I feel that a comment by you deserves a respectful response. That's what I tried to offer.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Letting me know that you somehow bullied @bill_easterly into capitulation isn't winning. Citing Polish "facts" isn't winning.

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• CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs Figuring out to do with all those kids now alive you & the UN save might win, but nothing in your philosophy can accomodate

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  It's the Politics, Stupid: What Jeffrey Sachs' Development Work Is...

  The founder of the Millenium Villages Project espouses a geographically deterministic view of African conflict.

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  CatherineFitzpatrick ‏@catfitz 10 Jan

  @JeffDSachs @ArminRosen must not get or need a Soros grant. Bravo! http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/its-the-politics-stupid-what-jeffrey-sachs-development-work-is-missing/267054/ …

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What's Never Discussed Around Benghazi: The Fallacy of the Developmental Approach to Terrorism

Gregory Hicks testifying in Congress in May 2013.

There's so much noise about Benghazi now that it is hard to make any other point heard. And hard to justify even attempting to try to sound some different note that is already being sounded by the left and right. So much of the commentary in fact is about "honour and dignity" -- it's emotion. What a coup for the left that Robert Gates, the former Bush Defense Secretary, describes the current right-wing attacks on the Administration's handling of Benghazi as "cartoonish". But whatever the right-wing congressmen's understanding of how the military works, they are right to continue to ask questions because there is a disturbing way in which Obama personally keeps minimizing the nature and danger of terrorism. He most definitely did not use the term -- and the generic "acts of terror" that wouldn't be tolerated which he included in his much-discussed Rose Garden speech was not a substitute for acknowledging the nature of Benghazi. Imagine,  he could give a speech at the UN after Benghazi about the future "not belonging to those who insult the prophet" -- as if insult isn't protected speech and as if there isn't something fundamentally wrong about letting insult regarding your religion serve as a pretext for violence.

Trudy Rubin knows exactly how bad the Arab Spring has turned out, contrary to its high expectations by liberals, because she's reported it exactly. She knows exactly what Obama is all about, because she's reported the Administration's inaction on Syria accurately, yet still can't resist scolding the right -- Daryll Issa for "politicizing" Benghazi.

That's what I mean about emotion -- whether pinning the problem on Susan Rice or Hillary Clinton, neither of whom is the problem -- or expressing indignation about even keeping the topic open -- which it most definitely should be -- there is a sense of distractions and taboos.

Yes, there's the constant sense that the right-wing, even Sen. McCain who should know better, are partly barking up the wrong tree. Susan Rice is irrelevant; the US does not view the UN as that important, and people at the UN do not make policy, even if they are in the Cabinet; they read talking points. And the issue isn't really about trying to bring in airplanes from Tripoli within an hour's notice, either. We get that.

And yes, Hillary was supposed to be in charge, but as we've been told many times, the CIA were running this operation, not the Secretary of State; diplomacy was at best a cover or a sidebar. If the real mission in Benghazi was to get back arms given to rebels (so the story goes) and not open up a hospital wing, is it any wonder there was an attack, and on September 11? I simply don't buy the excuse invoked by "progressives" (who suddenly care terribly about the CIA they usually hate) that Petraeus had to urge that references to Al Qaeda be scrubbed from the talking points to protect sources. Nonsense. They could have generically referred to Al Qaeda affiliates or even simply "terrorists" without having to mention the precise name of the splinter group.

Even so, there are so many disturbing questions, and I keep coming back to Sean Smith's last words, his sense that the people guarding the US compound were not trustworthy, his gallows humour with his gaming buddy in Eve Online using his game name "Vile Rat":

(12:54:09 PM) vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures

It's not about planes from Tripoli; it's why we are guided by a force that "melted away" in the words of Eli Lake, but worse, I think, may have been in on it, if we think about Sean Smith's last warning.

Why the hell were they taking pictures? Were they casing the join and emailing them to their buddies in the terrorist group that attacked the compound to help them out?!

Every time I've been in a country overseas and visited the US embassy or consulate, I always found Marines guarding it. Oh, but I must not have gone to war zones (I have never been in any), because apparently there, they rely more on contractors. I can't imagine the thinking that even goes into hiring something called the "February 17th Brigade" named for a battle. Why weren't these at least US-based contractors? Is this because you *have* to use local people...or else? The New York Times pointed out the problematic nature of hiring the local militias after the fact.

Ansar al-Shariah actually guarded the hospital that Amb. Stevens was taken to -- the very hospital he was planning to visit the next day to open a new wing.

And that epitomizes the problem I tried to explain in a post at the time, "The Taliban in the Building" -- an expression that was used by an official in the hearings then to summarize the problem of those at the State Department who minimize and even deny terrorism.

I wouldn't go so far as calling them "the Taliban" but I would describe it as two (at least) warring camps -- those with the USAID or "development" approach, and those with the "freedom" or "democracy" approach (in fact, maybe it is at least three camps as "freedom" boosters and "democracy" builders are usually divided between Republicans and Democrats).

The point is, as I put it in the past post, is that we view the world as a place that we can fix easily with development programs after having technologically superior brief wars:

But there's no question that a mindset of our elites -- that we can go overseas and change foreigners with various aid programs supplemented or preceded by surgically-precise high-tech warfare -- is a real problem in the world and sadly, the reason for a lot of our failures. It's a mindset of projects and contracts instead of deterrence and counterpropaganda.

To be sure, we have some deterrence of course in our nuclear and conventional weapons and of course we have counterproganda of sorts where experts go and put comments on jihad sites and such in local languages. But this is not robust, effective, and vocal. It's wan, and those with the "development" approach are definitely winning under Obama. (The entire saga of the CIA in Benghazi is a relevant but other point which I will address in another post.)

The piece by Ethan Chorin, who could have been the last person to talk to the Ambassador in fact, is really telling of the mentality of the "development" approach -- which Amb. Stevens shared (my blog is quoted next, with Chorin's excerpts in italics):

I keep coming back to thinking of these men sitting late at night in this facility with shoddy security where they were soon to meet their deaths.

The ambassador wrote in a diary that -- again, we had to learn from CNN about, and not the State Department, and despite the complaints of relatives -- he was uneasy about his security. And yet he didn't feel so uneasy as to not hold a meeting there after hours with a Turkish diplomat until 8:40, and he didn't feel that it was a place he should avoid on the horrible date of 9/11 -- when terrorist threats of attacks on that date had been made around the world.

In fact, as we know from a piece that has fallen out of sight, the ambassador was expecting to go to a hospital the next day to assist in the launching of a program -- the sort of activity you do in a country when you think the war is over and the reconstruction has begun.

The piece is an op-ed by Ethan Chorin, who was supposed to meet Amb. Stevens on the day after he was killed. I say "fallen out of sight" simply because it says a lot about the ambassador's actual activities and preoccupations, yet hasn't been discussed.

Chorin writes on September 13 -- two days after the attack:

ON Wednesday morning [September 12], my colleagues and I were to meet in Benghazi with J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, to discuss a plan for a new division of emergency medicine at Benghazi Medical Center, the largest and most modern hospital in eastern Libya. The meeting never took place. The night before, militants laid siege to the American Consulate in Benghazi, killing the ambassador and three other Americans. The ambassador was taken, without a pulse, to the hospital we hoped to upgrade.

So the ambassador was thinking of Benghazi -- always described as an "opposition stronghold" during the war -- as a place safe enough to work on hospital upgrades -- reconstruction work, not war. Of course, he was a very savvy and seasoned man and spoke the local language, but he seems to have treated the dangers of the area more as a kind of occupational hazard that was under control than as a real threat -- we know he had suspended his morning jog after some attacks but then resumed them.

Chorin writes:

The draft agreement we were working on was the kind of visionary effort to improve life in Libya that Ambassador Stevens liked — in this case, a collaboration between doctors in Boston and Benghazi, brokered by a nongovernmental organization that a Libyan-American and I had organized after the recent revolution.

In horror, Chorin describes how he spoke to the ambassador late Tuesday night about plans for the hospital visit and how enthusiastic Stevens was, and then spoke to the security detail about the logistics -- only to have him swear and hang up after saying "We have a problem here."

Further, he describes the ambassador's thinking on the "root causes" of the problems of Libya:

Mr. Stevens understood that Libyans had suffered under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and that conflict and post-revolutionary instability were to be expected. He also understood that some, if not all, of the hatred that had pushed some of Libya’s youths to join radical factions in Afghanistan and Iraq had sprung from years of neglect and oppression. Now, he felt, new opportunities needed to be created to wean these people away from ideologies rooted in hate.

No doubt that was one reason he made a point, as ambassador, of continuing to visit Benghazi, the East’s largest city, despite the clear risks; there had been attacks on other high-level diplomats there in the previous months. It is a mystery at this point why the consulate compound was so lightly fortified, but I would not be surprised if Mr. Stevens had decided to stay overnight in Benghazi simply because his list of planned meetings with Libyans there was too long to be accomplished in one afternoon.

If the "development" mindset didn't prevail, there'd be a healthy awareness that this was a country still at war; that the attacks on the UN chief's convoy and the British ambasador weren't aberrations but realities of a country still at war. There would be a heavier military presence and there wouldn't be the naivite that you could simply open up hospital wings to pacify the locals.

Chorin's careful reproduction of Steven's belief -- the beliefs of LOTS of people in the building and overseas serving as FSOs -- is nuanced enough not to attribute "all" hatred to developmental problems  -- "He also understood that some, if not all, of the hatred that had pushed some of Libya’s youths to join radical factions in Afghanistan and Iraq had sprung from years of neglect and oppression"

Even so, there's this belief that with enough early childhood nutrition and after-school programs, supplemented by job corps, why, people will stop clinging to their guns and religion. Imagine if ObamaCare could get all those Wal-mart shopping SUV driving gun-toters to give up their 2nd amendment obsessions if they had free mental and dental!

I never understood why the State Department didn't learn from the collapse of the Soviet Union -- that in fact led to the worst wars in decades for this region in Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Tajikistan and Georgia -- and led to some of the worst problems of inequalities and oppression of civil liberties -- that democracy and liberalism doesn't always bring good results for everybody. Oh, maybe they did learn but the people who learned this died out or went into the private sector as oil and gas consultants, and now most of the foreign service is made up of young people who don't remember the Soviet Union or its aftermath.

What's happening nowadays with the upsurge of the "progressives" and the "realists" (RealPolitik) is that the "freedom and democracy" gang is being trashed as too utopian and naive and even deadly, in getting America into wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan (for too long) and then having the world turn against us.

But Libya is all Obama's -- that was his quick, surgical technocratic strike that he thought would "lead from behind" and work rapidly and effectively. Obama didn't attack Libya out of a "freedom and democracy" ideology -- he doesn't share that ideology and it has always been alien to him. Rather, he did it out of a technocratic calculation that in fact was actually developmental (socialist) in nature -- that if only they could take out the oppressor by letting the Arab world and the EU take the lead, why, the developmental work we did subsequently would all work -- just like those PRTs that started under Bush and were continued under Obama were supposed to work in Afghanistan.

They didn't, for the most part. The "development" approach is as bad as the "freedom and democracy" approaches when they look for quick fixes or simple explanations of human behaviour. We left Iraq, after spending zillions.  This week, 66 people were killed in suicide bombings without us there, just as hundreds of times over, 25 or 50 people were killed every month in other bombings there we had nothing to do with, except to be blamed for because we were present.  The world is way more complicated than those myopic and juvenile comments flung on Foreign Policy to the effect that "the US is to blame for everything" and "kills the most people". It doesn't. Terrorists and extremist movements like the Taliban do, with the consent and even aid from theocratic authoritarian states like Iran.

I'm all for development aid -- we don't give enough of it. And I think democracy and freedom programs have every right to be central to that development aid -- and that when things like the expulsion of USAID from Russia occur, or the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Turkmenistan occur, for largely benign (and ineffective, even) programs, we should announce that all those funds are going to be kept for funding exile groups instead. This isn't "interference in internal affairs," it is part of what gives the universality of the best parts of the UN or OSCE its operational life.

But to accomplish this, I do think we have to face down this bureaucratic "Taliban in the building," if you will, who have prevailed for 50 years with their belief in their own superiority and the efficacy of fixing unhappy childhoods.

BTW, a good example of the insanity of this approach is the back-patting going on at the UN or State on the fulfillment of some of the Millenium Development Goals, i.e. lessoning the percentages of child mortality -- without any thought as to how jobs, let alone sustainable economies and goods, are going to be supplied to this now living, larger population. Did we just create a rising tide of expectations that is going to end only in more civil wars and terrorism against the West?

For too long we've had this belief that the foreign and civil service corps are "beyond politics" and "professional" and not bogged down in "partisan conflicts". That's just not true and maybe we have to drop this fiction. I think much more research and writing has to be done about these different warring camps at State and NSC and in particular confront the Obama Administration with their stubborn clinging to the developmental approach to terrorism (which also engenders their determination not to have a "war" on terrorism but instead to have a "police" approach).

A man like Gregory Hicks who is likely a Democrat *is* such a professional man with deep knowledge and experience of the Middle East region.  But until the context he works in, and the highest leadership, decides that the "developmental" approach is central to America's errors -- and deaths! -- abroad, they will keep on happening -- as they did in the tragic death of Anne Smedinghof, a 25-year-old foreign service officer,  as she delivered books in Afghanistan in a war zone. The State Department reversed a claim they originally made that the five Americans killed in this suicide bombing were in an armoured vehicle, and acknowledged that they were on foot.

We as a nation of conscience should give foreign aid and should promote both welfare, prosperity and democracy and freedom abroad. But to make it more effective and less deadly, we have to debate the actual nature of terrorism and its "roots".

 

Related articles

A look at why the Benghazi issue keeps coming back

Why The Benghazi Problem Won't Go Away

CNN's Crowley Admits Obama Didn't Call Benghazi a Terror Attack

Benghazi 'cover-up to protect Hillary'

Better than Google Glass: Is the Augmented Future Already Here?

With this video about Meta, which I got word of from William May, my old friend from Second Life, you can see that the world envisioned by Vernor Vinges in Rainbow's End is coming closer.

In Vinges' science fiction novel, people have "wearables" that enable them to seamlessly see all sorts of aspects of virtuality in reality -- a boy walking to school can play a game of war with monsters and weapons that "aren't there" but he can see. People can have meetings with the holograms or 3-D avatars of their counterparts effortlessly. The world is made to look better everywhere, and nobody looks at the real world again after that.

And it turns out Vinges is speaking on these topics lately -- see below in the related posts.

I'm wondering how these developments compare to Hi-Fi, which is the new virtual reality system that Philip Rosedale and friends are working on.

Also, while I think some people will think it's great to be viewing a world where flames shoot out of their fingers, I think there is still the issue of vertigo.

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This Is The Future Of Wearable Technology

Vernor Vinge on future technologies, the mind, and technological unemployment

Augmented Reality: Google Glassware

Matthew Keys Digs Himself in Deeper

The Matthew Keys follies continue -- now he's managed to get the Bloomberg News social media editor Jared Keller fired out of spite.

Jared was his colleague with whom he DM'd on Twitter, but Jared then sent an anonymous (later easily discovered) comment about Keys' firing to the media.

Then they had a fight. (BTW, Keller's repeated reference to the line in the Godfather, "This is the business we have chosen," is awfully creepy.) I'm curious what group they were in. Is this Journo-List? Is this Paul Carr's NSF? What is it exactly? Anyone?

Keys then waited for weeks -- for reasons that aren't clear -- stewing in his spite and then exposed Cullen as the culprit for the leaked remark AND exposed his own disgruntled comments about his employer.

Needless to say, Bloomberg let him go the next day -- or he quit before he was fired?

Reuters should have done the same thing when they first discovered that Keys had decided to be defiant about his indictment, and not acknowledge the journalistic ethics involved.

Keys was said to be fired for violating Reuters ethics requirements -- but you have to wonder why he wasn't fired then on day one after his indictment not because he's "innocent until proven guilty" and his employer could in theory stand behind him, but because he simply failed to acknowledge that *yes*, there were ethical considerations involved in disguising his identity, hanging out in the IRC channel with the Anonymous hackers as they plotted hacks, and then not telling the authorities about this -- and even appearing to join in one "prank" against his own former employer -- and gloat about it.

Keys has never said "those acts were wrong" but instead has said "I didn't do it" -- and we're all waiting to see what rabbit he's going to pull out of which hat to make this lame claim -- likely it will be along the lines of "I wuz hacked" or perhaps even "I was depressed and taking medications". The font of hacker excuses is bottomless.

What I marvel at is that the Columbia Journalism Review would celebrate Keys and make an "exit interview" as if he has done some sort of daring exploit.

Do they teach ethics at Columbia School of Journalism any more?!

My comment on their website:

Does the Columbia School of Journalism still teach journalism ethics? The Trust Principles are basic ethics like not misrepresenting yourself to get a story, and that's what Keys acknowledges he did in the IRC channel with Anonymous. Although he learned of crimes being planned and executed and is even shown to participate in hacks of media outlets, he didn't report the crimes to authorities and seemed to make himself part of the story. He both admits he was the person in the account leading to him and then implies his legal defense will somehow prove it wasn't really him, that he was "hacked".

Then you have the obvious discrepancies in Keys' account of the Boston police scanner story; elsewhere, he says he would have complied and stop tweeting had he known authorities had made this request, but got the notice hours after it was made -- but then complied with it. Here, he implies you don't have to comply if you're a fabulous social media editor.

Then, if you criticize Matthew Keys legitimately for his questionable lack of morals, his defiant bragging of breaching journalistic ethics, white-washing of Anonymous, he heckles you, as he has been doing to me:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/03/whats-wrong-with-matthew-keys.html

Keys wasn't fired for tweeting a police scanner report that multiple other journalists and bloggers tweeted, myself included, but because he had already built up a record of nasty defiance of management and of rules by then.

One shouldn't require "training" in basic principles that should be part of your character before you are hired. When we see the gushing treatment Keys gets in this piece, we can see where the problems are rooted -- in journalism schools that in the rush to be part of the fad of social media seem to have discarded their long-established foundations for credibility.

***

I want to note again that I tweeted the exact same Boston police scanner information that Matthew did. THAT I don't see anything wrong with -- and not merely because I did it -- if these scanners are open to the public (and I'm not sure they should be, or least, not for every operation), then they have to be reported.

If they locked down the city of Boston while they were trying to capture this suspect in the bombings, why didn't they also cite public safety and block their scanners? Isn't that possible? Because it does affect their ability to capture someone if he has helpers listening to the scanner (it's not about him listening himself).

There's also the issue of Matthews changing his story -- which is definitely the case, as first he said on his open Facebook he didn't see the warning the BPD made to the public to stop tweeting the scanner, and claimed he would have heeded it if he had seen it in time -- and *did* hours later:

C) When people became upset, I said on Twitter I hadn't seen the CBS News report that everyone was sourcing in which the Boston Police supposedly asked people not to publish scanner traffic. With a focus on four different video streams, several Twitter lists and, yes, dispatch audio, it slipped by me. But once I became aware of it, I stopped. In fact -- having been awake well over 24 hours, with 10 of them covering the overnight event -- I closed the computer and went to bed.

But now for the CJR interview, he's doubling down and saying that it's okay to tweet it anyway:

As far as I’m aware, there was no request by law enforcement on social media and no request by law enforcement by way of a press release or media statement asking for people on Twitter to not tweet emergency scanner traffic.

He's since deleted his tweets from the scanner.

When you see how Matthew contorts himself and gives two difference versions of his behaviour and beliefs about what is right on the Boston police scanner incident, you can see how untrustworthy he is on the Anonymous issue (where his story has also...morphed).

 

 

Related articles

Matthew Keys Is Running Out of Arguments

Exit Interview: Matthew Keys

Reuters Finally Fires Matthew Keys

Reuters editor Matthew Keys defends himself on police scanner tweets

What's Wrong with Matthew Keys

Social Media Newsfeed: AP Twitter Account Hacked | Matthew Keys Arraignment

TechCrunch Disrupt Day Two #tcdisrupt Fred Wilson and Crazy in a Good Way

The value of TechCrunch disrupt is being in the room and having the side conversations. That's what people pay thousands of dollars for. For someone like me, it's not about meetings with VCs, as it is for eager young start-up founders, but trying to hear what the main ideas of tech are in the air, the future that's coming, and who and how is is being shaped.

Fred Wilson is our own neighbourhood VC, with the blog A VC and Twitter by the same handle @avc  I always ask him a question at these meetings because he's one of the few speakers that actively seeks questions -- he's very interactive as anyone who has been on his blog knows, he takes the time to put in answers to readers every single morning. In fact, when I filed a major criticism of him some years ago about his destruction of the content and educational systems with technocommunist ideas, he asked to meet me for coffee and said in a friendly way something like, "Let me see what I can do for you," to which I replied "I'm an upstart, Fred, not a start-up." We did have coffee, although he was so modest and retiring that at the ordinary local coffee shop, waiting at the door for someone who looked like the guy in the Impressionist caricature he uses of himself, but expecting him to at least look like an imposing rich guy, I missed him, and he missed me, too, so our meeting got started 15 minutes late. Well, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Arrington drilled Fred on the question of the psychopaths in the business that get funded. I don't know who they really had in mind; I don't know if lurking in their minds was the suicide of Aaron Swartz, once the darling of Silicon Valley's old men as I've written, when he was funded in the Reddit start-up operation. Or if they just meant Zuckerberg -- Loren Feldman seems to be the only one publicly to admit he's a sociopath but it seems the signs are there; or Mark Pinkus, who is infamous for doing things like sending clowns to cheer up his depressed staff at Zynga, which only feels sinister.

Fred wouldn't bite and disaparage anybody he's investing in -- well, that would just be stupid. So he tried to turn the discussion around to what "crazy in a good way" would mean. They conceded that 80% of the people in the business were "off" a little, but Fred said this was about being very creative.

Fred pointed out that

Since Fred had once acidly retorted to me on his blog that he would love to fun anything I hate, and I should give him a list of what I hate and he'd be sure to fund it because it would be great, i.e. IP-busting things. I kvetched about him and other VCs like Ken Lehrer funding Moot (Chris Poole) founder of 4chan.org who is still in the Anonymous griefing business as far as I'm concerned. I think it was to Moot or someone like him that Fred was referring when he spoke obliquely about finding young men who had servers in their closets at home and all these people coming to them (millions) but didn't know what to do with them and wanted to get a business together -- and how different than was than people graduating with an MBA and concocting a business, when they had no people or anything around them to start with. Fred did later drop a hint about a year ago to the effect that Canvas wasn't maybe the best buy, but it was buried under hundreds of comments and probably no one noticed it. Failures like this "in the community" tend to get buried and not discussed, they put a brave face on it. But Canvas just didn't work because I think Fred forgot or didn't know what we know from Second Life: 10% of the people make the content for the rest; of these really 2% of those 10% make really good content. The rest gawk, and that's why Gawker.com or BuzzFeed is successful. 

People don't want to be given better-worlding tools or creative tools because they can't make stuff. They want you to make the stuff or somebody else. Canvas was predicated on the notion that all these people would come and make memes out of simple generators, and then add to them and modify them. But this was Larry Lessig nonsense, that there are all these people waiting to mash up stuff. They're not. They're waiting for original, bright, cool content like Psy's Gangnam Style, not some mash-up they made of 3 other hip-hop stars, ripping them off.

So when I asked Fred this question he said something about how Canvas had "made a nice pivot" to Drawquest. So now the ever-eager lapdog tech press is loving this particular thing up -- it's for i-Pad -- and you have to wonder if "pivot" is the new word for "fail". Here's what he told the Verge:

4chan creator Chris "moot" Poole spent two years building and refining Canvas, a family-friendly version of the massively successful 4chan, when he realized something was off. "90 percent of our users didn’t feel like they were at the level where they could make stuff on Canvas," Poole says. Whereas 4chan engagement stemmed from a very organic virality, Canvas’s "remix" culture perhaps felt a little forced.

Hey, that's what I said, and said it not just two years ago but 10 years ago. Everyone in Second Life knows about the ten percent problem, and they know it viscerally, organically, thoroughly, after trying to live there and make businesses.  And of course it felt forced, as it was propped up not by customer demand, not by a real business model, not by an institution, but -- dare I say it, Fred! -- VC cash. Nothing but VC cash. Washes of it.

Maybe if Moot and his little griefer pals had spent some real quality time in Second Life instead of griefing it and crashing servers, he might have learned these lessons it seemed to take him millions of dollars and two years to learn about how people in fact don't like to make stuff. Geez.

Now, Moot is discovering what people four times his age discovered in the last century, that kids like colouring books. Draw the outlines, and the kids will colour them in. Or draw some basic elements, and kids will ad.

Except...you won't get it much beyond, oh 15% when you do this. This is like the equivalent in Second Life where some people sell animations, or sculpty shapes pre-made, or other templates, and then people like me who have to struggle to put two prims together even by the numbers on the grid can then have some good ideas and put them to life, as I've done with animated and sound cookies and lamps and various other novelties. But...there's only a FEW more of us after that 2-10% who are going to do even THAT. Most people -- truly -- find it hard even to texture or colour a prim that you break down into dummy steps for them! For example, I could offer my Second Life customers wallpaper change options, and it will be too big a struggle for them to go into "edit mode" on the prim and "select texture" and use their own or all-perms textures in inventory. It's just not worth it. And leaving the prims open to "group edit" means Chris and his little griefer pals will convert my rental buildings into flying tub girls.

So much for Moot. Two years from now, we will tune in and find this failed, too, and Chris will have a drug habit. Let's fast forward it and put him in rehab now.

So then I asked about Four Square. Like many people, I was hugely enthusiastic about Four Square and did all the check-ins and tried to be the mayor but then got bored. The discount on the salad in my neighbourhood paled after one visit. I found myself going back to Yelp over and over again because it seemed easier to use or something -- I can't even tell why. When I saw people checking into jails in Moscow and the TV tower in Ashgabat, I realized that, well, Four Square had peaked in America. It was going through that period that Second Life went through and lots of things go through where they become wildly popular abroad, but the Americans, who don't speak language, don't get foreign countries, etc. just don't harness as they should. Somebody should have been awake and aware and started the Russian Four-Square franchise when millions of Russians were using this to tell their friends about demonstrations and keep tabs on each other when they were arrested as to what lock-up they were in. But the government started putting an end to all this already...

A Russian start-up called 4 Fingers with social narration of your check-ins with more like and dislike features could be a competition to Four Square even if small or mainly in Russia. I will check it out some more, but so far I am thrilled that they have what no other geek in America will put in a product: DISLIKE. THUMBS DOWN. RED HAND. We are all craving this and it just has to happen, and we have to stop listening to these geeks in sunny California who think everything can only be "liked" and "dislike" is only "gamed". Nonsense. No more than "liked".

I then asked Fred what he thought about the slump of Four Square, the period of criticism it was going through, what yesterday the founder himself called "the hazing period" (and he's right, so many products do have to go through that hazing, like Facebook, in an eternal haze like college frats).

You know, I felt a little bit afraid asking this question. I know that Four Square is a VERY big deal to investors, to him, and lots of people. But I was somewhat emboldened by the fact that the TC interviewer the say before had been pretty penetrating.

Fred responded with something that sounded like the Four Square press release and also said he wouldn't disparage his vested companies well...I will go watch that tape again to see if I can glean anything more coherent out of it, it felt like a dodge.

Then a young Russian developer went up to the microphone and asked Fred very matter-of-factly if he could explain what precisely are the characteristics of "crazy" in a statement or question or behavior of a start-up pitcher -- obviously so as to game Fred's system and fake him out.

Fred wouldn't bite lol.

The Russian persisted -- they have to be good at this in Russia! -- and tried to get some tips from Fred about how to avoid looking like you're crazy.

Fred avowed that sometimes you don't find out until after you've written the check!