Wired State

Googlization of Obama for America, Organizing for Action

Yes, soon, I may be able to retire from blogging about the Wired State, which I'm not particularly good at, because there are better bloggers with more resources and more attention on this subject now, for example at Red State.

I didn't use to read Red State much at all, but after the elections, when they repudiated the crazies in the GOP like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman, etc. there was hope. After all, I had just voted Republican for the first time in my life as a protest. I don't think I could become a Republican party member, but I'd like the party to get better than it is.

I only care for about half of what I read on Red State -- so much of it leaves me cold because it's either about gun stuff, which I don't support, or it's about that day-to-day political scrum of domestic issues on the Hill about who said what or who fought with whom or wasn't righteous enough -- and I can't get hugely interested in that.

But I like Tech at Night (I wish the guy would just write and stop clearing his throat all the time and apologizing) and there have been some great pieces on the whole Google problem and politics which have been very well done.

Obama, Google and the Democratic Party

Today, there is a great expose on Google and the intimate connections with the Democratic Party.

Of course, I noticed the picture of Eric Schdmit and Harper Reed on Google+ back in November on election day, and it's taken them all this time to notice it, even though I put links in the comments a few times to my piece, Harper Reed and the Soulessness of the New Machine. It is almost impossible for any new voices to get attention there -- though they promise you a blog page (like Daily Kos) and they promise to elevate some of the blogs, I simply never got the blog page because evidently they are either overwhelmed or don't like me. Oh, well.

Neil Stevens has a great piece, Whose Side is Google On? which really gives the lie to the constant refrain from techies that there are a mixture of political views in these big companies. Of course there aren't. Geez, look at the campaign chart above! Says Stevens:

A few years ago, Google was deeply in bed with the left wing activists like Moveon.org and Free Press pushing for Internet regulation. When Obama was elected, Google got even more deeply embedded with both the left and the government.  At this point, Republicans began paying more attention to Google and Google realized it had a political problem.

So, after years of lining up with the left to demand more government regulation of the internet, Google changed course. (“Google cozies up to the GOP“)  Google promoted their Republican lobbyists, hired Republican consultants, sucked up to conservative organizations and even hired a squishy Republican, Susan Molinari (R-MSNBC) to run their DC office.

Stevens asks whether Google will jump back into the arms of Moveon.org and CAP etc. on "net neutrality". Oh, of course they will. They never left. They feel they can move in for the kill now with Obama II.

Ben Howe talked about Google as the Democrat's Private Intelligence Agency.

Remember that enormous, sophisticated data operation the Obama campaign had? The one that gave them massive daily data on public opinion trends in almost every segment of potential voters.

It’s almost as if Democrats had access to some sort of huge database of real time information about what the public was reading or writing online. The kind of breathtakingly large, real-time data that could be used for real-time trend analysis, predictive modeling and even behavioral manipulation.

Well, I've been trying to find the smoking guns on that, and of course, in this discussion here over Katherine Maher's article on Westphalia, they all vigorously deny it.

My hunch is actually that Eric Schmidt is not going to stay with Google. I don't know why I feel that. I just do. Maybe because he sold his stock, and because his title is demoted, and because his trip to North Korea to snuggle with the Dictator and bond over connectivity cults wasn't so well-received and even got sort of upstaged by his own daughter's blogging.

But Google may be calving off other nonprofits to permeate society better and maybe they'll have him run one.

Google Running Intel for Dems?

Ben Howe says:

The real threat is that Google, or perhaps just a few people within the leadership of Google, may be quietly operating as a private intelligence agency for the left.

And every time you use Google or Gmail you could be contributing just a little bit more of your behavioral data to the left.

Well, they probably are doing that. But he has no proof. You can be sure that Google would work very hard to keep traces of anything like that out of the public eye. If you notice, the top Googlers really are very well hidden, and aren't even in Google -- McLaughlin doesn't have a Wikipedia entry -- neither to others in the top echelons, current and former. Do they have a deal with Jimmy Wales? Or are they just good at working their own non-secret-for-them algorithms?

Ben Howe is on stronger ground when he simply researches the connections of all the leadership and the engineers to Obama's campaign and OFA:

Obama’s impressive data team also boasts a large number of high-profile connections to Google, starting at the top with Rayid Ghani, OFA Chief Scientist. Not only has Ghani keynoted an address at Google Research Labs, according to his online CV (PDF), but he also spoke this month at his grad school alma mater Carnegie Mellon University in a lecture series sponsored by – you guessed it – Google. Ghani’s former department at Carnegie Mellon boasts seven alumni on Google’s payroll on their website.

Ghani’s role on the Obama campaign was to direct Project Dreamcatcher, which used “text analytics to gauge voter sentiment” about issues and speeches. I wonder how he came up with that idea? Could it have been in talking with Katharina Probst, Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, who, according to her own site, is “working on new features for Gmail and Gmail Ads?” (Google is currently facing some heat over how it exploits Gmail user data for advertisers – but they would never exploit user data to help the Obama campaign, right?)

 

They Have All Come Out from Under the Berkman Center's Overcoat

Ben Howe also notes Catherine Bracy, OFA Community Outreach Lead, Product Manager, Tech4Obama Program Manager, and co-director of Obama’s San Francisco technology field office and formerly of the Berkman Center "an administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which receives millions in funding from Google," says Howe. Well, no surprise there; I have spent a lot of time over the years arguing with people from the Berkman Center like Ethan Zuckerman, an avid GrumpyCatFitz follower, and Jillian York, who is no longer there but is now at EFF.

I was trying to undertand what all the neuralgia was from York over my probing on her position about "net neutrality". I put all the tweet fights here on Storify. She claimed she wasn't flogging it at the OSCE Internet 2013 meeting because it's a domestic issue and that's "not her job". I pointed out that it was a position of EFF's, where she worked, and she could hardly separate from it. She claimed it was a division of labour between foreign and domestic affairs and that EFF didn't really lobby on "net neutrality". Oh, come now. I pointed out the blog illustrating that a former intern at EFF had gone on to become the Free Press advocacy director on "net neutrality," surprise, surprise. She made it seem like this was some terrible exaggeration and mocked it by saying OMG, we cited someone's blog! Well, it's not just someone's blog, it's your former guy, now in this other group that does your agenda. She thinks that the microscopic differences between all these Mitch Kapor groups, despite the overlapping of boards and funders, are somehow significant. They aren't.

One of the things I really, really complained about all last year was the way these copyleftists were taking the "net neutrality" gambit and trying to insert it into international fora and put it on par with the problem of countries like Russia filtering the Internet or countries like Tajistan simply blocking all of Facebook or trying to -- not to mention the arrests of bloggers such as in Azerbaijan.

There was no question that Rebecca MacKinnon, on the US dime, speaking as the keynote speaker at the OSCE Dublin conference, pushed for "net neutrality" as did the UN rapporteur Frank Le Rue, somewhat indirectly, and some European states. The US activists also got various Serbs and Azeris and others to speak up from their NGOs about the issue -- and of course there is a very active Dutch group called Free Press (which claims it is not related to the US Free Press group) which is pushing it -- I got into a debate with their staffer and really challenged them doing this -- "net neutrality" in the hands of oppressive governments in fact means further granting of control of the Internet for filtration and censorship -- it's the old New Information Order gambit of yesteryear at UNICEF, or the World Information Society summits in which journalists and ISPs are pressed into service to fulfill "progressive agendas" that are "helping mankind," and then of course kill off competition, markets, freedom.

The fight is more dramatic in Europe where they have a history of distrust toward private media, more state broadcasting for TV, and a natural inclination to have the state then run the Internet, too, in the name of "freedom from capitalism" which they view as a negative -- much the way Lessig calls markets a "restraint" -- or worse.

Fake Claim that Comcast 'Censored' OWS

Free Press' rep at OSCE Internet 2013 Tim Carr openly called for "net neutrality" and gave a talk claiming falsely that Comcast censored OWS and Amazon censored WikiLeaks -- wildly tendentious stuff that no one was available to push back on from the panel, which left me just being able to question some of it from the floor, which was limited. Free Press is of course a Marxist front group (McChesney).

I'm reading an old Rand study now, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics by Philip Selznick. I swear every word reads like the "community organization" background of Obama, and the vehicle that Obama for America is now morphing into. It's refreshing to read a book where there is no apology for frank discussion of how communists infiltrate organizations because they were really doing that and it was really visible just after the war.

We shall speak of organizations and organizational practices as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutional order of the arena within which the contest takes place. Thus the partisan practices used in an election campaign -- insofar as they adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the contest -- are not weapons in this sense. On the other hand, when members who join an organization in apparent good faith arei n fact the agends of an outside elite, the routine affliation becomes "infiltration".

As this book was published in 1952, there's no Internet -- but that means there's no distraction to studying how organizations work, how people are indoctrinated into them, how recruitment and ideological zeal is cultivated and of course loyalty.

With the whole Google and Wired State sort of thing, it's not like they have to have a YPSL-style summer camp to indoctrinate cadres. There's no need for boot camp when you have bar camp. Through all the various conferences and unconferences, bar camps and TED talks and Sun Valley and Roots Camp and Wikimania and even Tech @State, people find each other and bind and develop that formulation of "the line" that is so important to cadre organizations.

What does "cadre organization" mean to me? It doesn't have to mean some literal communist cell or even special indoctrination; it means people who work with a very aggressive line that does not brook dissent, and who react to outside criticism by either trying to vilify the critics as in the wrong political opponents' group, or demean them as "trolls," or say that they are so complex and technical that the average person just can't understand them. You see all of that cadre work on this thread related to the Westphalia article I discussed.

RightsCon

I think one of the ways the ideological line was crafted and advanced was through RightsCon (aptly named, as it is a con using rights as a cover). This will be back again this fall. Here the Silicon Valley regulars leading the charge like EFF (John Perry Barlow) took advantage of the fact that the Ebay VP's wife, Elaine Donahoe, as an Obama bundler, was named as US ambasador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She still holds that post. And that office has been used to advance Internet Freedom, in part understood in the classic way, but also as a toehold to give MacKinnon a platform and slip in the "net neutrality" stuff and anti-SOPA and anti-CISPA work.

At this Rightscon, Silicon Valley was able to bring in all the top human rights officials, like the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner (whom I've known and worked closely with for  some 30 years) and all the leading human rights groups, and lobby them to their heart's content with no outside critics, trying to convert them to their vision of "Internet freedom". They didn't succeed in totalling throwing these people to adopt "net neutrality" -- but they didn't have to, as the purpose was to soften them up to the approach of moral equivalence between control of the Internet by China and Russia and "control of the Internet" through something like SOPA. The result was collaboration, many more meetings to come, and of course, the deploying of budgets.

I don't know who will fill Posner's post now that he is leaving. He and several other key human rights leaders like Harold Koh, the legal advisor, and Samantha Power, the democracy staff person at the National Security Council, are leaving. Maybe they don't feel they can justify drones. Or Bradley Manning's pre-trial detention. Or any number of things. I will be very, very interested to see who gets in that spot at DRL, whether it will be one of these very copyleftist-primed cadres or whether it will a a veteran style civil rights leader like Gay McDougall. In a way, it doesn't matter, as this office already has Dan Baer in charge of the Internet Freedom portfolio, and he may be friendly to all the copyleftist types, but he is under adult supervision at State that means he cannot go too far with this (I hope).

There's no question that these folks are battered mercilessly by the left and those far more radical than they are or can be.

US Delegation at OSCE Gets it Right

There's nothing objectional of the "net neutrality" or "anti-SOPA" stuff in this speech delivered by Baer at OSCE last week.  But it has some generic phrases that have been tooled-and-died to fight internal bureaucratic battles with those that might worry if they pass CISPA that it will enable countries like Russia to say they are doing no different (that's actually not the case, because the nature of the regime matters). Says Baer:

But just as we support individuals who are targeted every day for exercising their rights online, we are conscious of a broader threat to the future of Internet openness. Right now, in various international forums, including OSCE, some countries are working to change how the Internet is governed. They want to replace the current multi-stakeholder approach, which supports the free flow of information in a global network, and includes governments, the private sector, and citizens. In its place, they aim to impose a system that expands control over Internet resources, institutions, and content, and centralizes that control in the hands of governments. These debates will play out in international forums over the next few months and years.

Katherine Maher goes much further -- it's clear from her piece that she'd just as lief not have governments at all in her notion of multi-stakeholder approach, except as possibly cash cows to just keep supplying broadband to the masses -- she romanticizes -- and misreports -- the origins of the Internet:

And unlike almost every other global resource in history, the Internet largely escaped government regulation at first -- probably because no one could figure out how to make money from it. From the outset, it was managed not by governments, but by an ad hoc coalition of volunteer standards bodies and civil society groups composed of engineers, academics, and passionate geeks -- awkwardly dubbed the multistakeholder system.

In fact, it was managed by the US government in DARPA and ARPANET and all the rest, and the USG then handed it over to nonprofits like ICANN with the understanding that they would be good stewards. It's not clear that they are. Whenever people hear the term "standards bodies", they genuflect and grow very pious -- as if technical standards are beyond the ability of mere mortals to question.

But that's sheer nonsense, as these bodies like IEEE and IETF are not democratically run with due process like Congress -- they can be swayed by whoever shows up and behaves the most aggressively. I constantly cite from personal experience the example of the Virtual Worlds working group in IETF which was run by a loose consortium of companies and coders who argued about things like copyright, but which then got entirely taken over by the US military. Completely. And they have been unfriendly to copyright and push the open source line as a cost-cutting measure (supposedly) -- they want to be able to download and save all the OAR files and have them as freebies and not pay for virtual builders or worry about licensing fees or problems.

Problems involving people's ownership rights; their livelihoods as designers; issues of identity, geospatial location; proximity data; privacy; on and on and on -- these are not mere technical problems. They are profoundly human problems and they should not be left only to Google and its chosen Democrat or OFA apparatchiks to manage for all of us. We need to fight hard against all of this.

 

 

What's Way Wrong with "We the People"

Lenin and the Petitioners by V. Serov.

Imagine if Luther, when he posted his famous 99 theses on the door of the cathedral, had to first seek the imprimatur of the Catholic Church on his protest.

Imagine if the barons who wrote the Magna Carta had to rely on the King to display their text -- and if he only displayed it partially.

Imagine if he only responded to it if they had 25,000 signatures.

All this and more is what you get in the total collectivizing, distracting, destructive concept called falsely "We the People" at whitehouse.gov/petitions

Once again I got into a Twitter argument with Anil Dash, for a time the goatse boy at the White House, over the significance and usefulness of this collectivist and socialist idiocy.

Naturally he derided my use of the words "collectivist" and "socialist" with regard to something that is supposed to be Mom and Apple Pie and red-white-blue American.

I don't care. It's the best way to describe the awful thing that happens when you come into contact with this site lose both your individuality and individual rights and you deflect away from Congress, which is the result of the expression of your democratic will.

As this "We the Coders" (snort) essay lets us know, the people behind this site have very clear ideological preferences and cultural norms and they let this bleed into the whole site. Many of the people coming to the site have wildly differing views -- you get a lot of people who sign petitions to secede from the Union of the United States due to Obama's winning of the elections for example. Their petitions, no matter how many they gather, are never featured.

Instead, as "We the Coders" indicates, the petitions that fit with the values and lifestyles of the geeks are what is featured:

Since We the People went live, thousands of petitions have gathered millions of signatures from people across the country. As those petitions have come in, the White House has posted responses about an open internet & SOPA/PIPA, puppy mills, reducing student load debt, working to fix our broken immigration system, reaffirming the President's opposition to the Defense of Marriage Act, and more. 

Who isn't for reducing student debt? And I'm happy to endorse opposition to DOMA. That's not the point.

The point is THIS IS NOT DEMOCRACY, IT'S GEEKOCRACY.

 These are the ten ways in which We the People creates a dysfunctional shill of real democracy and is in fact only a very distorted and diminished coded form of the real-life right to petition the ruler:

1. Petitioners are required their email address, they are steered to providing their real name, and likely their IP address is captured which enables the government to track them in various ways (whether they do or not isn't the issue; what is the issue is that they are ENABLED to do so).

2. Only petitions that acquire 25,000 signatures can get a response from the executive branch -- a completely arbitrary number (it's a wonder they didn't chose 65336 like a server partition).

3. Certain popular petitions rotate on the front page, but not necessarily due to raw high numbers -- there are clearly both algorithms and editing going on here.

4. The petitioner's petition is not separate from the executive; he relies on whitehouse.gov to display his petition; to store it; to collect the signatures from him -- and at any point this can either malfunction or bad faith can be shown in dealing with the petition. The petition is in the hands of the petitioner and dependent on this adversary for its very existence. This is the chief form of collectivizing of "We the People" -- awful.

5. The splash page at whitehouse.gov has no obvious button "click to petition us" -- which lets us know how serious they are about really wanting to be petitioned -- and lets us know again why *this entire process should not be in the hands of the executive branch -- hello!*

6. "Search" is difficult to find -- it doesn't seem to be accessible UNTIL you log in, and then even if you search the key words you know you have in your own petition to find it (for example) it will not pull up. Yes, you can pull up your own drafted petition under "my petitions" but if you forget or lose the link, and just tell someone by word of mouth, they will have trouble finding it.

7. The fetishizing and collectivizing of petitions and the chase after the chimera of an executive response are all distracting and diverting from Congress. Congress is set up much better and more legitimately to handle constituents on issues and complaints -- this system is a deliberate end run around a body that geeks tend to hate and despise for not being technical (supposedly) or wishing (properly) to legislate them and their Internet.

8. At any time, the president could decide to ditch this entire silly experiment and all the content would be deleted. Did I mention what a terrible idea it was having the very mechanics of the petitioning process in the hands of the executive and its servers?! There is no legislation or executive order that governs this (that I know of) and nothing to protect it from arbitrariness.

9. The answers given are often anodyne, incomplete, misleading or even stupid. It's busy work to go through the motions of looking there is "interactivity" and "21st century" "gov 2.0" crap going on, but it's fake. Just take a look at them, and you'll see.

10. The site doesn't have a way of enabling people to negotiate to join their petitions -- but then, again, as I don't believe it's their function to even be involved in the petitioning process, I'm not asking them to do this.

All of us in Second Life, which was the prototype for all these disastrous things we see now in gov 2.0 and web 2.0 and all the other "iterations" contained these flaws -- and more. Every single one of the worst-case scenarios came to pass -- the content was deleted, the petitions not only ignored but hidden; finally voting disappeared; finally even the very view of the petition was hidden (!).

This is what happens when you put your democracy into the hands of coders, people. They are inherently unscrupulous because they do not see themselves as bound by the rule of law, but merely view "code as law" as they establish it.

The very features and operation of this "democratic" experiment were not democratically discussed and decided by those very "We the People". It was just "We the Coders".

Soviet Socialist Realism painters like Serov went to a great deal of trouble to create the pictoral illusion of "democracy" or "justice" with "the people" able to approach the Vozhd' (Great Leader) directly -- in their hobnailed boots and coarse muslin Russian tunics and their tousled grey beards. But of course, Lenin was busy massacring people who didn't go along with the program in large numbers and dismantling the local self-governance bodies that might have made such  appeals to the Center unnecessary if they had real power.

In the same way, creating the illusion that 25,000 signatures that got some functionary in the executive branch to write something is not only a distraction from Congress and the real paths of influencing government (the media, non-governmental groups, demonstrations, etc.) but as I noted a collectivizing and debilitating experience. These petitions are designed to look like they mean something significant and authentic and "democratic" has taken place, but precisely because the petition is in the hands of the executive, you don't have a way to form associations, discuss issues, change the text together, merge petitions etc. -- in order words, the normal functions of democracy are not coded -- and in some respects can't be coded without doing damage to them.

The best thing people could do is to cease to use this semblance of democracy that simultaneously undermines it. There's no reason why people can't make their own organizations, websites, drafting and collaborating content management systems, etc. -- without coders steeped in their own world view and without the executive itself scraping their data.

The left as well as the right and the center should be disgusted with the mere facsimile of democracy this thing yields and junk it for more authentic organizing.

At best, we are getting a pat on the head with the answers -- like the little Russian boy in this other Socialist Realist painting below. At worst, we are sawing off the branch of democracy that we do have still vital in America and which we still sit on, using social media.

Lenin and the Peasants. V. Tsyplyakov.

 

US to Walk out of ITU Meeting? But Who Should Run the Internet?

WCIT meeting, Day 3. Photo by ITU.

So the US is threatening to walk out of the WCIT, the meeting of the ITU (International Telecommunications Union, which aspires to run the Internet more than it does already, mainly as the cover to grabs by Russia and other bad actors).

As the Register reports, the US delegate has complained that some of the proposals coming down the pike from the likes of Russia " “creates an open door for review of content and potential censorship”. No surprise there!

So, good! That's what you do at international meetings like this. You threaten to walk out. You reject bad text. You fight. You talk to people in capitals. And you leave with either no document or a very thin compromise document or whatever. The US walked out of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban -- that was the right thing to do. The US gets up and walks out of the room when the Iranian president rants about wanting to wipe Israel off the map -- that's what you do.

The ITU is a creaky, old-fashioned Soviet-style institution for which the UN is famous -- the entire place has the feel of 1970s Soviet culture  -- right down to the bad art on the walls -- but it's still a multilateral body which politically represents the countries involved, for better or worse. It has its troubles, surely; the meeting has even had a network outage (was it hacked?) -- not exactly a good calling card for a group wanting to run the Internet.

But...When I said Google needs to be paper-trained for international meetings, I wasn't kidding. Here's Andrew McLaughlin, former Googler, and former deputy CTO for the US government (who got his wrist slapped while in office for contact with his former company), saying that the ITU should be "knee-capped" like an IRA thug. Techies are so nasty! I was shocked. Crovits' headline -- that the ITU "needs to be deleted" is little better.

Sure, the ITU is creaky and shouldn't be allowed to take over -- but neither should Google. Google just doesn't get it. Google doesn't have standing. And in fact, to the extent that this entire "multi-stakeholder" crap has gotten a hold in the whole Internet governance sphere, we have a problem, precisely because elite NGOs, funded by Soros or the EU or whatever, claim then an equal place at the table with governments and businesses even though they are no more democratically and transparently run than many of the countries. And they have neither the people behind them -- as elected governments do -- or the resources -- as businesses do -- to be making that claim. This is of course an entire topic, this grab at international governance as a whole by the lefty NGOs -- Ken Anderson has a great monograph on it. (Like me, Ken is a former HRW staffer.)

The entire Internet space -- the actual technology and then all the meta-ideologies that have sprung up around it -- offers a new playing field for the international jet-set aspiring to global governance, of course. And I'm not for handing it to them -- they don't deserve it. And they bring bad ideology to the table of a different sort.

Grumps Crovits:

Under the one country, one vote rule of the U.N., these 100,000 people trump the rest of the two billion. It only takes a majority of the 193 countries in the U.N. to hijack the Internet.

And so...we should have Human Rights Watch or the Open Society Foundation or Google -- trump the rest of the two billion? Why?

It pays to remember that the Internet Governance Forum -- their preferred playing field to the ITU -- is in fact also nothing more than a UN creature that ultimately tethers back up to the UN. It was formed originally as a working group of a working group of a conference -- the World Summit on the Information Society which met over the last decade in various capitals of the world spawned the Working Group on Internet Governance, which then in turn spawned the Internet Governance Forum. The "stakeholders" who are the "multis" in the IGF are all government bureaucrats. If anything, they actually have less accountablity than an ITU delegation, because they are less tethered to political leadership, and are off on their own writing papers and making policy and citing the "complexity" and "technical nature" of the issues to get their way. The IGF has some good and some bad in terms of governments and NGOs.

But it has no more right to be the global governor of us all than the ITU does, and has far less stature as a forum of a working group of a world summit of a secretariat -- it's about three times removed from home base in Geneva, for whatever third-world time serving staff actually runs it. It's supposed to be saved from bureaucratic torpour by having "dynamic coalitions" that can come together to "solve problems" and "make proposals". Yet the "dynamic coalitions" can't just appear as flash-mobs or even conscientious and sober task forces. They have to be approved by the secretariat and have to have three existing multistakeholders endorse them. That's still not enough, that endorsement -- their papers, plans, charter, etc. have to be cleared. Obviously, if you make a "dyanmic coalition" on a politically correct topic like "global warming and the Internet" you'll get fast-tracked, but trust me, I might spend the rest of my life trying to get registered a coalition on intellectual property protection for small business on the Internet.

In a rant at the New America Foundation (where else), McLaughlin says:

"What is so bad about the ITU?" Mr. McLaughlin asked in a speech to the New America Foundation in Washington on Nov. 29. "It's just simple things like the nature, structure, culture, values and processes of the ITU. They are all inimical to a free and open Internet, and they are all inconsistent with the nature of the technical infrastructure that now characterizes our communications networks." Voting rules let repressive governments "engage in horse trading that has nothing to do with the technical merits of the decisions under consideration."

But here's what's inimical about Google:

o non-transparency in its vaunted Transparency Report where it has set itself up as a global censor -- and reprimands to critics

o erosion of privacy

o unfairness in dealing with user complaints in Ad Sense cases

o if we're going to play the development game -- doesn't bring its taxes home, and doesn't create very many jobs -- as part of the Internet-busting of paid content, it destroys more jobs than it creates

o opposes copyright by pretending that upholding livelihoods for creators somehow harms "innovation," which is really just Google's business interest

o lobbying for its business interests under the guise of care about freedom of expression (GNI)

o arbitrary and overbroad appication of draconian TOS on G+ -- where bans can lead to loss of property on all other Google services.

McLaughlin goes to town on all the countries I've spent my life doing human rights work for:

"You need look no further than the fact that the ITU is the chosen vehicle for regimes for whom the free and open Internet is seen as an existential threat—Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus and Cuba. These are the countries placing their hopes and ambitions in the vessel of the ITU for governance and regulation of the Internet," Mr. McLaughlin said.

But Google was pretty late to the game opposing Chinese censorship and even today -- well, Silicon Valley uses China as its back end to manufacture its gadgets and is fairly beholden to China. What does Google do for any of these countries, really? The GNI, which was supposed to be the vessel where "the hopes and ambitions" for NGOs would reside has been a dismal failure, as Google and other Big IT firms never enabled it to make denunciations of Internet closures or censorship by states, but only tackled edge-cases which it felt might harm Google's direct business interests -- i.e. a case involving Youtube in Italy.

Did GNI muster a denunciation of Syria's shutdown of the Internet? Sure, it had to do that much! But it missed dozens of other cases where this happens and instead focuses again on its core business interests and defiance of any attempt at even a liberal government's regulations, with events like "The Communications Data Bill: ‘Snoopers’ charter’, or safeguarding our security?"

If you really want to hear GNI mumble -- and mumble loudly -- read this astounding page of non-answers and non-positions from this coalition, which nevertheless then amplifies the individual positions by some of its members -- like Center for Democracy and Technology, which basically cheerleads Google's decision not to wait for a court order, but to take down the anti-Muslim video from view in Egypt and Libya where violence had occurred. Astoundingly, none of these freedom fighters think to criticize the Egyptian government for putting the video on national TV and helping spark the violence. "And these targeted takedowns may also help Google's YouTube expand and preserve its market," says CDT -- and that, above all, is of course what matters, not universal human rights.

BTW, speaking of global warming and the Internet, I wanted to follow the Baku meeting and comment on it meaningfully but I couldn't; my power was shut off for weeks during Hurricane Sandy and I couldn't justify just sitting on the Internet following a conference during the brief hours that I was able to beat the lines for a seat at Fedex to use the computers uptown. I will have to study it another time. I'll skip the global warming stuff though -- it's likely to have the same kind of insanity we've seen from Susan Crawford.

 

 

 

 

The Inherent Unfairness of Geek Coded Voting Tools

Yet another lefty Scott Walker- hater geek codes up a site and thinks he can be viewed as an honest broker in the voting business. He says his business failed, but his idea is great and is just waiting to be picked up by "the people" who will "carry the torch". Nevermind that this is a guy that thinks anti-Walker protesters "convey information" but by implication, then, their opponents "purvey falsehoods". Fortunately, reason, common sense, and fairness prevailed and the geeks and the lefties and the "scientists" of the Democratic Party who muscled in unions, Occupy, Michael Moore, etc. could not prevail. Scott Walker was not recalled. You lose, good day, sir.

The market voted on this failed web site -- it didn't serve people for all kinds of reasons. He blames the failure on features of his team or his location or lack of full-time programmers or sufficient VC capital. But the reality is, a voting site like this is UNTRUSTWORTHY and will only gain like-minded geeks and their "progressive" pals who want to socialize with each other and reinforce each other, not people really interested in authentic debate and real deliberation leading to consensus in a liberal democracy. These things are awfully hard to replicate anyway online, but they are even more difficult because of the heavily-biased utopian Marxist-style ideals that geeks like this bring to the task.

So typical of the "scientism"of the left. The people who protested against Walker weren't merely "conveying information". They were *expressing an opinion* that they believed municipal unions should enjoy unlimited collective bargaining rights even though they are state unions paid out of the taxpayers' pockets, not in private industry. And these people with "information" in fact then *lost* the recall vote, and Scott Walker was not recalled, despite their hatred of him. Other people had voted for him and wanted to keep him and his plans to reduce the deficit. And you know, when you win an election, that's that, hey don't be a sore loser, as Obama gloaters are telling us now.

Voting is not "broken". Geeks are broken in their understanding of what safeguards are needed in elections. If it were up to them, they'd abolish political parties (Sergei Brin's proposal), and they'd just code up a platform where we'd all vote on prepared propositions and "like" them (Sergei's friends). No thanks! I want real democracy with yes/no votes and deliberation that results in propositions, not "science" that produces them.

You and your geek friends with your worldview may love "OurBallotBox," but the rest of us don't share your views, and you don't have a better idea for us than "patch or GTFO" or "remove" as in "Harper Reed's tips for problem solving". Sorry, but that's not a democracy, it's totalitarianism.

Every single one of your ideas for "fixing" the problems of "political social networks" in fact perpetuates the real problems of geek networks antithetical to democracy:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/11/socialmediaengineering.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2011/02/the-seven-deadly-flaws-of-online-democracy-.html

The typical Redditt style mass site has features like "downvoting" that make it possible for aggressive minorities or intolerant majorities to eliminate dissent from the view. Surfacing and sorting in fact amount to algorithms that usually favour the devs' friends -- the early adapters get more followers, they get listed as the recommended people to follow, they are the power users on the power curve, etc.

Open data? And who gets to slice and dice it? Your friend Nate Silver? With science? And you're sure Nate Silver never makes a political judgement, ever?

You just hate it that "certain radio hosts" can articulate an opinion and get followers, don't you! You wish you could just rule everybody with your Twitter account as a "thought leader"!

Change.org like all left-leaning platforms pretending to be for "everybody" have several severely built-in flaws: a) their cadres promote some petitions and not others that fit their views b) if you ever develop a difficulty in registering and fielding a petition, they simply have no customer service to help you, like all these big platforms, you're toast c) your petition is only as good as your social media network to promote it, if you aren't chosen by the devs. Very, very unfair system.

POPVOX has a very heavy bias problem whereby it lets people post comments only in favour of their vote, and not in criticism of the opposite vote. It is not a real simulation of real democracy where people argue and deliberate with fair conditions. POPVOX also fronts and promotes the ideas they like, they don't create a level playing field:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/popvox-or-poxvip-how-a-voting-platform-intrudes-on-democracy-and-skews-the-views.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2012/02/email-from-marci-harris-of-popvox-and-my-reply-are-you-building-lists-for-lobbyists.html

All the makers of all the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc. claim to be wanting to "effect change" and to "make a better world". What they mean is that they want to weld their own ideas into the platform and then let it be hijacked by data-miners from Obama for America. You see these tools as Trojan horses and stalking horses for your own perspective. And that's why people don't view you as fair and will go on disrupting what you do. Of course, you'll try to deal with them by mute, ban, block but the Internet routes around.

Accordingly, what I saw to all these wannabe totalitarianism who want to code these platforms to engender the "disruptive" -- revolutionary -- change that will destroy "the old order," here's what you would really have to do to ensure real democracy:

1. Not just verify identity but have a plan for fighting those who will insist on preserving anonymity and invoke all kinds of notions of repression of dissent in order to justify their unwillingness to face accountability.  This might mean separating the voting apparatus with secret ballot but verified identity and pseudonymous discussion (backed by real identity).

2. Any propositions must be allowed to be submitted, and allowed to attract votes, with no time limits or thresholds  to be viewed. None. Absolutely none. Every geek-driven site from the WhiteHouse.gov to SecondLife.com injects various restrictive notions to suit their own notions, but these have to be jettisoned. There is absolutely no reason why any system can't have an unlimited number of proposals, votes, and comments, and be reviewed as needed by elected officials. The limits geeks devise here coming out of clutchy little notions of tidiness of binary notions of numerics have to go. In a world where *search* is used to find propositions of interest, any effort to restrict size, frequency, numbers of votes, etc. etc. is unnecessary.

3. Search algorithms must be open and publicized and any notion of secrecy for the sake of preventing "gaming" have to be jettisoned. Devise an open algorithm that has red dye on the gaming, or don't make a voting system. End of story. This is the central flaw of all voting systems.

4. Leave gamification out of the system. Nobody needs any net nerds who get badges and reputational points for posting the most, voting the most, getting the most passed, etc. Democracy works, well, when it works.

5. First Amendment level protection of free speech. No speech codes, terms of service with overbroad language about "incivility," no abuse reporting accepted for "hate speech," etc. etc. Unless somebody has a successful judge's decision from a court proceeding in a libel case or a case of "incitement to imminent violence," they cannot have the platform provider remove speech. Accordingly, no blocks, ban, mutes, downvotes, etc. on speech grounds whatsoever. Offenses like malicious scripts with spam bots may be punishable under the TOS, but not statements that hurt the feelings of thin-skinned geeks and forums divas.

6. Independent, separate, impartial civilian review board that reviews the work of the voter platform. Ideally, a voting platform constituent assembly made up of any registered party, not just geeks who turn out mainly to be technocommunists and libertarians and Democrats, but all parties, should be involved in the decisions about the coding and features, and allowed to vote on feature requests and bug prioritization.

7. NGOs, movements, trade unions, astroturfs like moveon.org or Daily Kos or Red State should also have meaningful participation but not an equal vote to registered parties that developed platforms which their members get to vote on at conventions.

8. No repeal of Citizens' United, and allowance of any political speech in the forum of ads.

9. No one can close anyone else's proposal or proposition, or suggest that it "can't be done" or devise a minimum necessary number of votes for it to be featured or looked at. Surfacing of proposals can be done all kinds of ways, from automatic 15 minutes of fame at first posting, to random features in one column, to most popular displayed. But this has to be looked and debate constantly as to its fairness, or flashmobbing takes over and only the popular get popular attention. No vote is removed if it is "defunct," and not voted on. Get over any fear of "clutter" as this is the Internet where it's only a miniature storage issue. Independent free media is the necessary partner of any voting system.

10. No automatic reputation systems, i.e. through downvotes or upvotes, likes or dislikes, or number of postings. The independent and free media and blogosphere can cover people making propositions with the information they gather about them and the judgements for which they take responsibility.

I'm sure there's lots more, but I can see this is going to be a growing battlefield. We need to get the geeks out of this business and have a serious coalition of normal people enter this field and bat away all their totalitarianisms or we will lose our freedom. I'm not kidding.

 

 

 

Why Token Women in Tech Doesn't Promote Women in Tech

Adding more women to this scene doesn't give them more power.

Katrin Verclas has picked up that eternal whining lament, occasionally found on TechCrunch and other tech publications, of why women in tech are not recognized, put on top 10 lists, honoured, feted, and appreciated. Why can't all those nerds in the usual sausage fests open up some space for the opposite sex?

And somebody like Mike Arrington or Robert Scoble always end up gently telling them that it's because, well, there aren't many women in tech. When there are more of them, they will get on lists. Some of them already are. Like Marissa Meyer, former Google VP and now CEO of Yahoo, who is mainly famous now for going on maternity leave not long after accepting the job, and now being widely rumoured to be able to "have it all". Let's hope she has a "good baby". (Everything depends on whether you have a "good baby," i.e. without colic who sleeps through the night.)

My answer below. Basically, using tokenism doesn't work to bring about the desired goals, and if anything, retards progress because it simulates outcomes that didn't arrive naturally and perpetuates the illusion.

But here's an interesting thing about Katrin herself -- she left her own start-up after 7 years and moved to a political organization, the National Democratic Institute. Naturally, she thinks to patronize a leader of her own workplace (ND) in her list -- which is of course, how Silicon Valley works.

And why there aren't more women on lists -- they don't get into the schmoozing with the men at all the barcamps or after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt or whatever it is...   There were so many men at the after-parties of TechCrunch Disrupt -- I was one of the very few women several years running -- that I wondered if they shouldn't deliberately import more women from computer classes at Columbia and NYU with free passes. But then...that would be tacky, wouldn't it?

One of the ways that women get into tech is, well, just getting into tech.  I know a number of women coders in Second Life and related virtual worlds and online games who studied hard, worked hard, worked there way up. How else can it be done, really? Sleeping your way to the top can't work when it comes to knowing technology, you have to know and do the technology.

And then, take Sarah Lacy, once at Business Week and then at TechCrunch, who despite being dissed severely by Mark Zuckerberg at SWSX held on to her guns. And then left TechCrunch herself, to start her own publication, pandodaily.com. She just does it. It's hard. But by staying the course and writing and doing what you like you can make your world.  She's not a technologist. But writing *about* technology does take a lot of technical language and there are also very few women in tech journalism! (Well, there is the Arianna-in-training, Alexia Tsotsis...)

So...Katrin (@katrinskaya) is now at National Democratic Institute, the Democratic Party's institute for supporting democracy abroad, as "senior manager for innovation" -- a contrived new job of the sort you find at many NGOs today, where those older, greyer male officials are scared that they aren't keeping up with the new phenomena, and invent jobs like this -- that foundations are happy to support because they're all worried about being relevant, too.

The people in these nouveau media and "strategic communications" jobs increasingly hold the power in organizations as social media *is* the power -- and the jobs pay more than the old PR jobs they've replaced. They often have fancier titles, like "CCO" for "chief communications officer" on par with CEO, CFO, CTO.

Katrin founded the wildly-feted Mobile Active and basically went around telling everybody that they could have revolutions using mobile phones and also that they'd make it safe enough for everybody to do so with various "aps". And they probably do in some places (except, oh, Belarus.) Mobile Active is part of, or a platform for, the "participatory budget cult" -- which in New York City takes the form of a Working Families cult extension. You go invade city councils and sit alongside elected officials and badger them for your special interests -- like $100,000 for app developers lol -- and then you bypass the voters and make the officials redundant, too.  Someday, somebody will notice the awfulness of "participatory budgeting," a Marxian mash, and trash it properly -- I don't have time now.

I recall clashing with Verclas a number of times on Twitter in the earlier days (I've been on Twitter about one week longer than she on my Prokofy account) -- or at Tech@State because she is a radical supporter of the whole open source software tech cult, Twitter revolutions, etc. and I'm quite skeptical of all this. She's a vehement fighter and she then ends up telling someone who fights back that they are a "troll" blah blah. (As she did in this very discussion). I don't care. But...It's troubling when people with radical tech utopian ideologies invade the world of more mainstream NGOs. This is like Rebecca MacKinnon (@rmack) on the board of Committee to Protect Journalists. Katinskaya is especially voluble on LiberationTech.

The question is whether these more mainstream organizations with solid understanding of human rights and international law will moderate the radicalizing tendencies of these gals, or whether they will radicalize the organizations they get into. I fear the latter, as they are pushed towards taking positions against SOPA/PIPA/CISPA (so far CPJ has resisted, but just barely, and the thread could break at any minute). Now that we're in for Obama II, these types are unstoppable. I expect a certain amoung of shake-up in Gov 2.0 circles and the White House Office of Science and Technology and Hillicon and these other centres of power -- but then we'll see even more funding and more power for them.

And, what is it that makes someone like Verclas leave a start-up like MobileActive built around her own persona that will only languish after she leaves? In fact, collapse after she leaves, as she explains, as it has "worked itself out of a job" in a world where there are a zillion mobile tech things now. (It's like Alec Ross' organization to empower local economies whose website hasn't been updated since he took office).

Well, I think the answer is simple: power. Fooling around in a little NGO that constantly needs fund-raising and has to compete with now 100s of other such groups with more tech expertise as she herself admits is just not going to cut it for someone who is ambitious. And something like NDI lets you become a Washington insider close to those in power while going around doing good developing democracies -- in that method that the US loves so well (especially under the Clintons) -- via elections (which in many places, is not how you get real democracy anyway...)

I'm skeptical of the things she has worked on like SMS data collection for election monitoring. Why? Because I think this job has to be done not by nearly-created tekkie NGOs (like Golos), but by building up local independent media, often suffering in oppressive countries, and making it safe and easy for them to do exit polls as part of their overall role of investigative reporting and keeping officials' feet to the fire. And I think those most motivated in exit polling, like party-affiliated institutes in countries abroad, also need empowerment. What the SMS/tech/mobile phone approach does is create a meta-layer of sophisticates who are outside the process and even whine that they are "beyond" politics (in Russia they are particularly good at this fiction). So they don't serve people. They serve themselves.  Mitt Romney, one of the richest people in the country with a whole political machine of top-paid people behind him, had trouble with his grand ORCA scheme for collecting mobile exit poll data. How much more the case for somebody in Azerbaijan.

My reply to her piece:

Katrin, you've cited these 10 women as "innovators in democracy," but you don't say anything actually innovative that they've done. They may all be great people, and they have important titles and credentials, but most of them just look like the sort of female caretakers of NGOs that bigger, more egotistical, more famous men put at the helm of their organizations to do the donkey work -- like Jimmy Wales re: the Wikimedia Foundation, or for that matter, or Tim Armstrong of CEO re: even the headstrong Arianna Huffington. Ginny Hunt may be an inside-the-Valley celeb, but the public never heard of her. "Spearheading" democracy initiatives at Google (like the campaign against SOPA) are managed by, not conceived by, someone like Ginny Hunt -- Larry and Sergei decide all the big things there, you know?

Again, if the list is about *innovation* you have to put people who aren't just social media managers, because social media itself by itself isn't innovative anymore. You have to be doing something *with it*. Now, you didn't mention Marissa Meyer, formerly of Google, who went to Yahoo. And I wouldn't put her on the democracy list, as just going to Yahoo isn't about democracy, but about....well, some other industry or personal goal. But she belongs on *some* list for her abilities.

Susan Crawford is on everybody's committee and has written an important paper but again, you're not spelling out the case for *democracy innovation*.

The Sunlight Foundation is a lobbying organization for Silicon Valley in Washington. It is a part of the democratic process, yes. But it just lobbies for Silicon Valley interests, it isn't empowering people.

I have a lot of respect for Madeleine Albright and she is definitely an innovator in history, but it really isn't the case that you could say she is "at the forefront of changing the landscape of governance, media, and technology". Does she even tweet?

I care for Hillary Clinton much more than Alec Ross, but he more properly belongs on the list of this nature as she Clinton has not headed any program specifically herself; "21st Century Diplomacy" is a bureaucratic branding exercise involving a lot of people, not just Ross. And in general, it's time for Ross to come off these lists as he has not done anything *lately*.

Re: Catherine Bracy: Running Obama's political campaign isn't about democracy for us all now, is it? It's partisan. And in general, the left (you) haven't told us anything about what sooper kool stuff Obama did in his social media campaigns to win -- you (the left media) have only trashed ORCA and Romney's failures. So spell out what you think she brought to the table other than just being your cool friend.

The Prime Minister of Iceland sounds like she's just engaged in a branding exercise, too -- constitutional reform isn't achieved on Twitter and Facebook, it's achieved by elected officials, and that's how it should be. Social media is a means to engage and call to account elected representatives; it is not a brave new shiny replacement for them, although TechPresident often sounds like it would like them to be.

So that leaves Reshma Saujani -- and if she empwered girls to code, that would indeed be helping democracy and technology.

The reply you got is legitimate. That's because you cannot bring about equality for women by using the Soviet-style identity politics so beloved of Marxists -- let's have 1 Estonian and 1 Udmurtian and 7 mothers of ten children who are milkmaids. They don't bring about actual democracy just by being from a Chinese menu. Just adding forcibly the female gender doesn't mean a damn thing: look at the UN Security Council now. For the first time in history, it has a whopping three women on it -- ambassadors of US, Brazil, and Ghana. This has made not *one whit of difference* in terms of the world's wars, its ability to bring peace or help the poor. And there you have it.

Instead of trying to get on the boys' list, you could start your own, but...is it really worth it? Who cares? Only Alec Ross. Just do good work.

The Myth of Net Civics

Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Beekman Center has a post up questioning the faddish popularity of "crowd-funding," asking whether fund-raising for public projects through your networks can really replace the proper function of government taxaction.

I totally agree that crowdfunding cannot replace civic projects that the government should be funding -- and funding through the democratic process of elections and then appointments and allocations of funding to public works. Ethan's vision for government is never quite articulated, but it seems to be a kind of socialist centrism levened by Soros private funding of progressive nonprofits -- the real debate, of course, is what kind of government and how much taxation.

I reject the civic crowdfunding notions for other reasons than Ethan, however, because I'm concerned about elite leftist and socialist cadres using the accelatorating and amplifying power of social networks to inflict their views on society when they are not elected and not democratic.

Oh, you say, isn't that what America is all about, the conflicting interests of a zillion special interest groups, nonprofits, civic projects, etc? Well, sure, but sometimes we drill down and find it's really only about Soros or the Koch brothers, you know? Doesn't anybody realize that many of the vaunted Kick-starter campaigns in the millions benefit from anonymous rich guys in Silicon Valley, not just thousands of bike messengers building aps donating $5?

Big projects like a streetcar or the Low-line are projects that don't get supported for all kinds of reasons, and some of them good, i.e. not only due to evil special corporate interests "buying government," etc. Maybe not everyone wants the noise and traffic in their area. Maybe not everyone thinks it's sustainable to build big projects underneath Manhattan. While the process to get projects funded and built is "bureaucratic," it is also, at the end of the day, democratic, tied to a democratic voting system. The "vote" of the "net-roots" with its millions of signatures or millions of "crowd-funded" dollars can appear very large and powerful, but it is not a fair vote of the real public.

As flawed as representative government is -- and the tekkies usually find it completely "broken" -- it's still a hell of a lot better than rule by coders and cadres via social media with only one "progressive" perspective. That has to be opposed.

Why should I have endless noise, construction, expense, displacement of business, etc. through something like the Low-line just becuse a handful of hipsters have a huge network that means maybe Jeff Bezos can buy something cool? This is the problem -- the O'Reilly-ification of civic spaces as he and others like him get their hands on the "civic stack" of apps and then go further, to urban projects they find "awesome."

It might seem "awesome" and all about "direct democracy" to some if local kickstarted projects get funded across national and international networks this way, but it is not about authentic democracy, it is only about democratic centralism.

There's also the very real problem that Kickstarter is terribly elitist. It's a closed club. The founders vet and pick the projects they will display for funding and decide which ones get promoted for more funding. There is criticism that they also hide the failures. This is perfectly acceptable behaviour in a nonprofit or private foundation with boards of trustees and fiscal responsibility and filers of 990 tax returns. They can pick and chose their projects -- and the answer if you don't like them is to publicly protest, start another nonprofit, or complain to the government about their tax exemption if they are politicized.

But Kickstarter affects to be "the crowd" or "the people" with this notion of "crowd-funding". It isn't -- it's just elite networks in a netocracy -- but it covers itself with that mantle of "public-ness" -- and without the transparency and accountability of a private foundation (donations can be anonymous and there are no by-laws or procedures or minutes of any meetings deciding what projects to do).

It's not just that wealthy neighbourhoods where hipsters live would get favoured over poor (and not yet cool) neighbourhoods, or formerly middle-class neighbourhoods now declining and becoming uncool.

It's that the cadres get to decide everything, and that's not democratic or fair. The outcome is predictable -- just like it is with the "civic apps" in New York City with all the hustling of the hipsters -- apps for finding bars, designated drivers and condoms, but not apps for finding toilets, safe parks or farmers' markets.

Ethan's list of concerns works to solve the problem of forcing government to be more "progressive" and take on the burdens of "progress". But it undermines democracy and pluralism of different contending political forces and thus is not out of touch with the real world where the Republican Party and even the Tea Party go on existing and organizing. Ethan blithely lauds the Black Panthers' programs of providing child nutrition and education, without subjecting this to any critique as typical patronizing and ward-heeling, or noting the really serious problem of rapes, murders, and drug dealing in the history of the Black Panthers.  I'd also want a second opinion as to whether the radical Black Panthers are really providing programs that aren't provided by the government -- which today provides enormous numbers of social programs via nonprofits in New York City, for example -- or whether they are pursuing a political agenda with tendentious claims. I'd also prefer to get social services, as flawed as they are, from elected governments, and not radical and destructive movements like Occupy Wall Street, whose communal table's health certificate is not just "pending" but absent altogether.

The idea of letting crowdfunding be the design and not the implementation is that it takes the steam out of the notion of crowdfunding bringing actual projects to real fruition that the funders themselves can use, and leaves it -- again -- in elite virtuality. If a streetcar project misses its million-dollar marks and makes $3600, it never has to justify itself with authentic democracy and real public critique, it can just slip into the netherworld of "design."

The idea of having leveraging of existing opportunities, i.e. to get more participation from Latinos, does make sense and in fact follows the example of historical philanthropy in America, which is more about enabling individuals to pursue opportunities rather than become dependent, and enhancing rather than replacing government.

The movement of crowd-sourcing, civic apps, etc. is really a political movement trying to take power outside of democratic channels, masquerading as "the public". It most certainly is not the public.

Then there is the problem of Ethan's blithe Obamaism -- worrying about the "gotcha" that rightly came when the president said "small business successes depends, in part, on government-funded intrastructure" -- a socialist fantasy that implies that the state is prior and public funds are prior, and that they don't in fact derive their funds and legitimacy *first* from people's entrepreneurship and labor.

First people make businesses and make a profit and hire workers, *then* people pay taxes, you know? That's not a page out of Ayn Rand but ordinary liberal democracy and the free enterprise system. The government *comes from* people paying taxes. It's not as if the revenue pool the Obama Administration sits on has no history and comes from the sky. If small business then uses water, roads, public education for workers, etc. it's because it has *first* generated revenue and *then* paid taxes. There's something terribly skewed and scary about "progressives" not getting these basic truths to start with and respecting them organically.

There's also a basic mythology of scare tactics here on the left. Michael Ignatieff writes in a revie of Michael Sanders' book The Price of Everything  that the wealthy rent the wombs of poor Indian women to have babies. Yet the overwhelming majority of people still have their own babies, and this exploitation of Indian women is surely an exoticism (if it's some huge offshore trafficking scheme I haven't heard of, let's see the credible human rights report).

Here's the reality that Internet "progressives" can't seem to grasp.

Last time I checked, I could walk or ride a bike for miles on the Hi-Line walkway on the West Side or the Stuyvesant Cove on the East Side, go to play ball or picnic in nice parks in fact free of garbage or needles; swim on public beaches; go to the library and take out for free the books available or order reserves from other libraries. I could go to free public lectures and movies. My children go to school for free and pay a quarter for lunch; all around me are kids who take out even tens of thousands of dollars of city school loans with little expectation that they will pay them back or even stay in college.

The "progressive" beliefs on display in blogs like this behaving as if the rich have taxed themselves only to provide sidewalks in their gated communities and left poor people in slums lets me know that they don't live down here with the rest of us -- all day long, we walk on public sidewalks and use public services that come out of our taxes. When was the last time the Kick-starter hipsters went to the public library instead of downloading books on their Kindles or went to a public park to the sprinklers with their children instead of to their apartment complex gym?

In fact, if it comes to it, I will be treated in a public emergency room without payment up front, and even as an immigrant I can expect a minimal old age pension and health care. If any politician seeks to change any of these runaway costs, he'll be accused of "social Darwinism".

Rapid, light-weight groups depend on the time and resources of somebody and therefore are paid for somewhere by someone -- Soros? And the enlightened "self-interest" is just that -- selfish, without any debate about what is really enlightened.

The problem with the netocracy is that they are merely like that wealthy community taxing itself for the sidewalks the poor will be discouraged from walking on, but merely having displaced their community to an attenuated network where they martial the resources of their class to make political warfare on localities. It's all the worst features of Citizens United that the left imagines are practiced by the right.

Ethan invokes the campaigns against SOPA/PIPA and Komen, which for him, with his politics,  illustrate lovely "social change". Social change is always about other people changing, you know?

But these hate campaigns represent very troublesome erosions of democracy and freedom for others. The ugly vilification of a Komen that had the misfortunate to publicly debate among themselves the question of using money they themselves had raised for breast cancer on abortions is downright scary. It means only the "progressives" get to "crowd-fund" and other nonprofits can't do as they wish with regular tax-deductible donations. It means that any flash mob can bully any self-organized civic group in society and force them to do their political bidding. We're seeing the same now with the Boy Scouts and Chick-fil-A -- there is no awareness on the left that civil society depends on the First Amendment and the ability of groups to ensure that some other group's freedom of association doesn't trump their own -- and their own freedom of expression.

The left seems to think that if another group in society has opinions and law activities they don't like, they get to harass them on Twitter until their CEO resigns or their VP of marketing dies of a heart attack.

SOPA-PIPA didn't come to a vote; Google-funded and Mitch-Kapor funded lobbies flashmobbed Congress and called it civics. Geeks and hipsters are obviously pleased with this flexing of their social muscle, but it is only that -- it is not pluralistic democracy with democratic voting.]

Can these ideals be restored? I imagine once the right picks up more steam using the same social media tools for their own political campaigns and "crowd-funding" that we will see more appreciation of them on the left.

Anonymous Gets One Year in Jail

We're not hearing an awful lot about this story from the tech media -- but it's interesting that the Anonymous b/tard hacker of Sarah Palin's email was outed and eventually tried and sentenced to one year in custody (apparently his lawyers are trying to get him into a halfway house instead of jail, but their efforts to have him released on parole failed). As we learned this summer, he is David Kernell, son of a Democrat Tennessee legislator. He seems contrite and remorseful, likely on advice of counsel, saying he realizes he will be affected by this for the rest of his life.

Maybe the tech press doesn't cover this so much because they're frightened, or reluctant to publish anything that is politically incorrect and implies that fighting Palin unlawfully will result in law-enforcement  -- but Wired covered it and the comments filled up predictably with the usual hectoring knowier-than-thou morons who tell you that it really isn't "hacking" to use Google and intuition to do a "social hack" to break into someone's email without any actual programming, that Sarah Palin is to blame for having a weak password -- and that therefore it isn't wrong.

Fortunately, there are still police and prosecutors and judges -- and juries! -- who think otherwise!

Even so, anonymous geeks persist in trying to preserve the word "hack" for only positive connotations, and keep it unsullied from the actual world of criminality that hacking really is, with its disdain for the rule of organic law and its infatuation with code-as-law.

Hacking that guesses at passwords based on Googling life details is *still a hack*. It's still *going around the rules*. It's still circumvention. Why that would have to be argued endlessly is beyond me -- but it *does* have to be argued because not only are b/tards and the larger geek milieu in which they thrive all legal nihilists, they are legal nihilists who use legalistic literalism ("Fisking") to argue their points of lawlessness -- which makes them about as eradicable as bedbugs on some forums.

Guess all that nihilism didn't work out for David Kernell. By his own admission, he uploaded a screenshot with the password to the 4chan site, always described cunningly as merely "an image board" although it is actually a forum for organizing unlawful actions against political enemies and disliked laws -- like copyright law.

We're also endlessly lectured by persistent and faux-indignant forums-dwellers that b/tards themselves changed the password again and again to "prevent abuse" (um, except by those changing it who read about the changes lol?) and that the legions of Anonymous helped to out Kernell and bring him to justice.

Baloney. Anonymous *is* David Kernell and David Kernell *is* Anonymous. He did what any other card-carrying b/tard would do and hacked into a hated political figure's email because he believed it was justice -- and more to the point, believed he was entitled to deliver it!

Just like the b/tards hack at Scientologists (certainly not a cult I would endorse) or hack into anything related to RIAA and lawyers and the struggle for copyright (again, criminal behaviour against the law). So let's not get precious here, and suddenly pretend Anonymous *isn't* about this sort of arrogant geek criminality -- and that this particular dude only takes the fall because...he didn't find anything interesting. As he himself said, he found "Nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped".

Er, that means had he found some sort of real smoking gun, like Wikileaks and that washed-out Bolshevik Julian Assuages, then he'd be a hero. Maybe even Man of the Year, eh? The left would forgive him anything if he'd uncover some kind of real corruption of some import in the Palin account. But there wasn't any to find.

What the case shows is that...if you hack into somebody's email, even if they are a figure loathed by the left, even if you use a social hack and not a technical hack, YOU GO TO JAIL. That's a good thing. We're likely to see this awareness that it is a good thing erode in time, but it holds for now.

Another feature of the trial not noticed much by the tech media but picked up by bloggers is that the infamous Moot (remember, that nickname comes from a racist anti-black meme), Christopher Poole (likely a pseudonym from the "pool's closed" meme) actually came and testified at this trial because Kernell uploaded the images to the 4chan site -- prompting the headline "4chan Not as Lawless as it Seems" -- which is all part of the plot, see?

We've seen Poole arrive, deus ex machina, before to declare his group just a lot of good, clean fun with only a few who indulge in "excesses," and really awfully helpful, Mrs. Cleaver, when it comes to real civic assistance to law-enforcement. Snort. This is all part of the giant social hack, of course. Pretty soon we'll hear b/tards are selling Christmas ornaments and chocolates to help little kids with cancer.

Beth Kanter's Networked World at tech@state

I've been reading Beth Kanter's blog for years, and often liked her no-nonsense, no-frills, hype-less approach to her craft, and her convincing connections to real people doing real things. Unlike many of the purveyors of the social media gospel, Beth has also worked in Second Life, the 3-d virtual world platform that most of the social media mavens scorn and ridicule, either because as elitists they hate the mass culture implied with shopping and cybersex or they dislike the highly intensive technical demands of the platform which they believe to be unsuitable for betterworlding, whether in the developing world or their own offices with aging equipment.

So I appreciate Beth, but even so, she's as much enthralled with the "progressive" social and educational theories of the last decades as any in the third sector, and she's merged them the open source culture memes more creatively and practically than most of the "thought leaders". I look forward to reading her new book soon, the Networked Nonprofit.

Like the theories of business and "innovation" that came first from the ecstatic TED-infused tekkies of Silicon Valley, the theories of how nonprofits should change also contain the same constructs -- we should get out of fortresses, we should stop building castles, we should break down firewalls, we should get out of silos, we should network with other people and...um...do stuff. What stuff isn't even always so important, as long as we are all in that lovely constructivist or connectivist Kumbayah of the World Wide Web where All Knowledge is on the Network. Someone's singing, Lord, let's download them from Youtube and rip them to our i-pods!

I have a funny vision of that networked nonprofit connectivist world that Beth limns in her talks that isn't at all what she's talking about (because at the end of the day, she's utopian, too) but what *I* am prompted to think about  -- everybody in fact collectivized and homogenized to mechanically do something called with a term like the Four Favours -- give money to good causes, sign a petition for a right-thinking belief, publicize an injustice, and then...maybe write a congressmen, or as they are supposed to be obsolete given the hatred of representative government, go out and demonstrate in the real world (or even subject a hated symbol of the copyright regime with a DdOS attack -- 4chan is a non-profit too, you know.)

And I see a committee of the very wired and very with-it who set up the jobs for people to do in their Four Favours to wired humanity every day, and there are just a few of them, because we are all networked, all connected, we have all data available all the time (all 1 billion of us on Facebook, let's say), we can all be reached a single drop-down blue screen, like in Second Life, and we can all do What's Right once we're told -- so to be economical and correct and logical, we really only need *just a few people* to determine this for us.

What I don't understand about Beth's vision (and I'll read the book to see if I can get some clarity) is how you preserve the ecology of the NGO world against such a future, that world which has always depended, especially in oppressive countries, on diversity, duplication, redundancy, trusted connections, "the soul of the organization." Organizations that keep up a "walled garden" or a "fortress" for a good reason -- so they are not overrun by coopting or oppressive governments; so they are not merged or diluted by corporations; so that they do not become submerged in globalizing culture of the West, etc. etc. Even in our own country, the kind of diversity of numerous organizations that P.J. O'rourke, as an elitist Republican, finds exasperating is the strength of the Tea Party movement -- they may not have a foreign policy, but they have 100 groups that provide *homes* for people.

What people want more than ANYTHING in a non-profit charitable cause or a political movement is A HOME!

The quintessential networked nonprofit without the supposed inefficiency, redundancy, illogical diversity, walls, fortresses, protective bastions of outdated managers, etc. to me -- in a negative vision -- is moveon.org, with its faceless leadership, its non-interactive site, it's push, not pull mechanisms for influencing policy. I signed up and today I got instructions of what I'm supposed to think and do: I'm supposed to reject the plan not to continue tax cuts for the rich, and I'm supposed to help think of one million reasons why this is a bad idea, with my own particular "story" of hate-on-the-rich.  I could click and write at least 5 ideas on this form here...

I didn't.

Not because I'm not interested in taxing the rich in some reasonable respect and not because I'm not interested in having some social welfare policy needed in any liberal democratic society, but because I didn't see a discussion, a debate, facts from both sides, etc. I saw about 10 links to articles that were supposed to woo me with how mainstream they looked (New York Times, etc.) but...when I read them they were cheerleading for the idea in columns without some argumentation.)

I then had another dystopian vision, thinking about Beth's network (although again, not as she does, only prompted by her writing to think myself), seen from a zoom-out above the earth looking at all those linked people and what they are doing, I couldn't help thinking of this really sad thing about Twitter.

I mean, really sad. Nobody really ever talks about it. But it's there, just under the surface, right next to your neck vein, as it were. And that is the hordes and hordes -- hundreds of thousands -- of people on Twitter who are trying to make a living as SEO consultants, social media gurus, promoters of various work-at-home schemes -- you know the kind of lame, loser, low-life stuff that's out there. And how pathetic and hopeless it is. There are LOTs and LOTs of people doing this -- many women, many blacks and Hispanics in the U.S. and then many Russians, Indians, Brazilians and others in the poor world. All those people who anonymously spam your Yahoo mail with ads for painkillers in by mailorder from Canada and viagra and phen-phen -- now, on Twitter, you can see their faces, even their names, learn about how they are dads and moms and carving pumpkins.

One of the most heart-breaking things I see every now and then on Twitter is a Russian in some blown out forsaken post-Soviet town pushing SEO and social media rhetoric in strangely-understood half-English, half-Russian jargonistic terms that they've grabbed from some other hopeless sap in some similar blown out forsaken post-9/11 town in the MidWest with the shopping strips and the pain clinics and the meth busts. Many people flick these kind of nuisance followers away instantly, or even have programs to get rid of them -- and I block them too. But not before looking at them, visiting their website to at least give them a click-through (I can do that much; we can all wash the feet of the poor so easily; there is the Christ.)

Random Hacks of...Kinda

Photo by Alain-Christian. Mobile providers like Digicel are a valueable asset to a country like Haiti

Two articles came together for me today that really summarize the whole tech@state "Civil Society 2.0" challenge.

First, was David Rieff's piece which he sent out by email with a more urgent heading: "Why We Have Abandoned Haiti. And Abandoned It We Have." There's a lot of validity to this piece, explaining not only the obvious and disgraceful shortfall in funding, but the magical thinking of "human rights mysticism" that says if there were more democracy there would be less disease, a version of Amartya Sen's comment about societies with free media tending not to have famines.

I actually find that David scolds too much about the magical thinking here, as if he doesn't realize that politics is the art of the possible, and human rights is the art of the impossible (my original slogan). There's something more than a little distasteful about the idea that authoritarian governments should be recognized as being good at controlling disease.  Yes, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren't. Innoculated, but then...what kind of life do you have? More to the point,  the divergence between democracy and disease that the Human Rights Watch staffer becomes over-prescriptive about and David shreds is the same divergence operative between authoritarianism and disease. Why would viruses recognize authoritarian governments any more than we should?

You would think a fairly sturdy authoritarian operation like Turkmenistan, rated "medium" on the UN Human Development Index, would have been able to eradicate not just malaria in this desert-covered, swampless nation (winning WHO's praise), but cholera, too. But it hasn't, because of pipes that crack in the winter and muddy holes that people fetch water from because the pump doesn't work and the vandals took the handles.

It reminds me of the time this American military official talked very matter-of-frankly during the time of the Dayton Accords about how "we need a capable Serbia". Indeed. But I wonder how that will work out for the Kosovars.

But basically, Rieff is always a corrective for the abstract and jargonistic international justice jet-set and it's always a good thing. It's good to get a cold shower on magical thinking; now the question is what the magical doing should be. It bothered @KathrynPeters at tech@state that people were listeners, not doers. Er, one problem was, some of the more knowier-than-though tekkies were taking all the oxygen out of the room -- but that's common.

The reality is, as David Rieff often writes, it's not lack of information that explains lack of humanitarian action, it's lack of political will. You seldom find out that a genocide unfolded because nobody knew about it (remember the Rwanda fax -- all the technology you could ask for in that day, and all the information, and the international community failed to stop the genocidaires. Maybe if they'd had a Facebook page where they could express themselves better they might have become kinder and gentler -- this is Mark Zuckerberg's actual theory, you know, documented on video during SxSW a few years ago; he spouts it about potential jihadists in the Middle East who if they could "connect to someone" might not blow up stuff.)

Which brings me to Random Hacks of Kinda-Sorta.  I found the cleverly named project "Random Hacks of Kindness" on a gov 2.0 website -- NASA CoLab. I'm sure it's quite lovely. I'm sure it's quite sincere. I'm sure I'll be told I'm ignorant and haven't gotten my facts straight about these lovely projects and am uninformed about them for saying this:

Why couldn't all those mobile aps and stacks and programming and "we have/you need" stuff (now an admitted graveyard) prevent or mitigate the cholera outbreak? Well?

What, you couldn't design a FourSquare for Haiti where people could "check in" to clean water supplies and "share" with "geolocation"? Guess not! Those people could have been twittering, but I guess they were busy.

Ok, then, why doesn't this stuff work as planned? And is it possible to get all these tremendously busy and self-important geeks, and their terribly special social media consultants to NGOs actually doing good? No doubt they will defensively say yes.

There's quite a bit of room for doubt, however given the actual "facts on the ground" as "people in the cloud" in places like the UN or hackathons phrase the story.

And this amazing article on the Boston Review explains why.

It's been so long since I've read anything sane like this, I almost couldn't believe my eyes.

It's worth reading and re-reading, because he has the solid life experience and field investigation to back up what he is saying -- here are the pull quotes:

o Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.

o The myth of scale is the religion of telecenter proponents, who believe that bringing the Internet into villages is enough to transform them.

o When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.

Not exactly what you're used to hearing at your usual wiki tikki api woo session, I realize, but...there it is.

Basically, what Kentaro Toyama is saying is that technology alone, even in large quantities, can't save people and better their lives if they don't have other ingredients in their society to help them take advantage of it -- money, education, and that term "capacity" that foundations use to gently describe a host of complex psychological and social problems from trying to get people to stop shitting into their water supply and understand the germ theory of disease and boil water to trying to get men to stop getting drunk and beating or burning their wives.

I'm recalling now this interesting special issue on water that the National Geographic had a few months ago with an article by Tina Rosenberg. She studied the difficulties of women having to walk for hours and climb mountains to fetch water and bring it back."If the millions of women who haul water long distances had a faucet by their door, whole societies could be transformed," she exclaims in the pull quote.

Just put in an Oxfam team or a Jeffrey Sachs project and fix it with technology.

To be sure, Rosenberg explains how all these factor to blame -- indifferent or corrupt government, rapacious international mining companies, etc. But in this situation, you could look over Tina's earnest and politically-correct shoulders and see something else. There was something else making the lives of these women really, really hard that wasn't the impersonal socio-political factors that the international justice set loves to highlight. In fact, it was that such scare water as there was, was made into a fermented drink like beer and served as the beverage for the males of the village who sat around getting drunk and chatting all day, while the women humped up the mountain and back with the jugs of water. Yes, they were unemployed and yes, they were divorced from their ancient patterns of subsistence farming...or whatever. So, it was complex. Even so, there was this classic case simple universal human problem of, er, "capacity" too -- a problem that teams of relief workers broke through by doing things like getting everybody in a village to donate some money to buy a pump and a pipeline and install it -- when they managed to persuade them to do so.

There weren't any apps for this.

Here's where, as with Rieff, I don't get as starkly depressive as Toyama, or Morozov.

Evgeny Morozov's problem is always that he almost seems to delight in the fact that he's found out that this or that new social media widget wonder can be used by totalitarians, too -- oops, another one bites the dust. But...so what? His role in telling us that seems merely to a) feed the potential of those cynical totalitarians to go on ruling in glee by making it appear inevitable and b) reinforce his status as the Cassandra of woeful widgets. One of Morozov's latest works speaks admiringly of Angela Davis. Angela Davis, the goddess of violent Marixst revolution...

Toyama is a lot less cynical and quietist as he recognizes that technology can play a role and that other elements have to be combined with them; his article is something people can put into training binders and try to get some dimension under the do-gooding enthusiasm.

But let's face it, it's a lot more sexy to think of women accessing health care rhizomatically via the Internet from some "all knowledge on the network" node for free from some...telecenter than to think of how a salary might be paid of a medical worker who has to circuit ride through a lot of villages without clinics. The first thing is fun for geeks and doable for philanthropic planners; the second involves expenditure of grant money in those dreaded "direct costs" that foundations find so hard to cover because they aren't "building capacity" or "sustaintable" -- except through plans like Grameen bank that involves browbeating debters and a good deal of international bureaucratic lending to keep it going.

Toyama says that you could add and add computers to a poor village and it wouldn't go anywhere. I totally agree. I have worked in countries where they were warehoused or only used for gaming and chat, too, or where they broke down or where the Internet connection page said "dialing...1 out of 99 tries". Everyone wondered why the servers were always down. It turned out Dyadya Vanya was unplugging them from the only socket where the vacuum cleaner would reach.

Even so, among the many things that you would budget for aid would indeed be laptops and even laptops for children, and the proliferation of them has a certain "emergent behaviour" that might or might not favour the goal of education and advancement.

But Toyama betrays his hand as one of the international elites of civil society so well described by Ken Anderson when he seems to chafe at people who can't select health care information over a game, who chose the purchase of cell phone minutes over clean water. This happened with victims of Katrina, too, remember? Journalists covering the do-gooders got mad along with them that some families blew money on stereos or fancy clothes instead of education or nutritious food.

I've always been interested to watch how poor people began to get cell phones faster than rich people in the circles I could observe. I might not have one, but the poorest welfare mom waiting on a bench in an office would have at least a cheap one. It's not just that it's the sort of status symbol of the rich world (like expensive sneakers) that become attractive to poor people to have for reasons of esteem, it's that poor people just have more need of phone networking and socializing than rich people -- that's my theory any way, like the Russian saying "If you don't have a hundred rubles, have a hundred friends."

Each time this discussion of tech and humanitarian work comes up, I think of Oleg Bebenin, the Belarusian journalist who was found hanged under suspicious circumstances some weeks ago, whose death was investigated by OSCE experts after his colleagues reports about discrepancies and strange aspects of the crime scene -- to the point where even the wily and wacky president of Belarus, Lukashenka, says he was murdered. As the director of charter97.org and one of the chief aides to a leading independent presidential candidate, Andrei Sannikov, Oleg was in charge of all the wires and widgets -- I worked with him on explaining and setting up Twitter accounts in English and Russian some months before he was found dead.

When a long-time colleague and friend like that is so brutally killed, you really understand where the wires hook up: to human beings. They don't really go anywhere else; connectivity isn't to other machines, but to other humans, and wires aren't the only way they connect. When all the ideas and facts and connections suddenly are eclipsed, you realize that all knowledge isn't on the network. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had the experience writing a protest letter about a killed colleague that, as you're writing it, you reach to IM or email that person because they'll know the fact about something...and realize they are gone...

So, random hacks of kindness may save the day, kinda, but the old-fashioned acts of unwired connection to people matter more. You can often add tech on to human situations when they work and improve them. You can't add humans to tech without something reduced in the process.  This isn't just a Hallmark card saying, it's a lived truth.

This is why I'm hugely dismissive of One Laptop Per Child and call it One Bad Idea Per Adult. It's fetishistic and superficial. I call it placing a tech's totemic object in third-world hands as part of globalizing first world power. It angers me to think of spending money on a laptop that a kid will play games on -- like my kids do and kids the world over -- instead of *salary for the adults*. It's part of the excision of the cute child out of the family situation that is less attractive for which relief organizations have been known for decades as a gimmick to fund-raise. The child is cute; the adult with AIDS isn't.

When I say it's a totemic artifact that doesn't connect to anything, I don't mean that these OLPC zealots haven't planned for how they can get wireless and go on a network. Duh. I mean they don't connect to the larger set of issues for that society and help them, as Toyama is saying.

When I tweeted about "not connecting" here's the usual tech thug response I got on Facebook from Chadrick Baker, a former Linden (amazingly, with his, um, arrogance and "people skills," formerly in charge of Governance (i.e. anti-griefing):

Ummm... It connects to other OLPC laptops so they can talk to each other in local intranets. The world is used to you talking about things you know nothing about, but to spout incorrect information about a non-profit that helps children is just ignorance. Typical from you. http://laptop.org/en/laptop/start/connecting.shtml

Gosh, Chad-rick, do you realize that if the cell tower is knocked down, then they don't connect to anything? if there is no electricity in the village then they don't connect to anything? if they are stolen or broken then they don't connect to anything? if they are used for gaming they don't connect to anything?

You simply don't know where to start with people who can only understand "connection" in a binary and linear way as a series of Internet tubes.

 

Oh, That Sneaky Tea Party! Tech@State

 

Tea Party demonstrator's poster by wstera2

Another breakout discussion with a presentation at tech@state where the Ustream isn't labelled and I didn't know the speaker on this video, so I will have to treat him as a detached ethereal spirit expressing an idea and take it on that basis, although he did give a few identifiers in his talk.

This man formerly worked at ABC in the 1990s in television production, and he is now in a "left-of-center" think tank, as he described it.

This fellow made the rather strange claim that before social media, people had no political engagement, and merely watched TV, listened to the political ads, and voted accordingly.

With the Dean campaign, however, all that changed. For the first time, people became *citizens*. The speaker wrote of sitting in his underwear late at night on the web site and a lady in Seattle would write in that she had just picked up her paycheck and was donating $25, and then the man in Louisiana was saying something, and so on...Thrilling...(It reminded me of the old Dr. Gene Sullivan telethons...)

Maybe what this speaker meant to say was that working on the Dean campaign was the first time *he* felt like a citizen, but there are plenty of people who were actively participating in social movements and not merely watching TV long before and in fact during that time, unrelated to Dean.

There were the 1960s, of course, and even the 1970s anti-apartheid movement and beginnings of the human rights movement. And the 1980s Freeze and nuclear disarmanent movements. Even in the self-indulgent 1990s there were demonstrations; one thinks of the Women in Black in the Balkans and their counterparts in NY. All of these were very much tied to electoral politics, even if the needle wasn't moved as it was for him in the Dean or Obama campaigns. That's unfortunate, that he only judges politics narrowly by whether it fulfills the "progressive" (stealth-socialist) mission or not, turning out the "masses" who send in their $25 PayPals.

What he couldn't seem to understand is why all that Internet citizenry didn't translate to a win for Dean. I was on the Internet just as much if not more than anybody at that time. I was in touch with ladies in Seattle, too. But I didn't vote for Dean. Dean was too extreme. Vermont isn't New York. The latte-sipping yuppies up all night in their underwear didn't impress -- they irritated (the New York Times Magazine feature of them in that era clinched it for me, just like the similar feature on Jared Cohen -- a strange adultation that in fact preceded the retreating from public office of that figure, too).

I voted for Kerry; the Catholic vote still matters in this country, even for candidates that maybe shouldn't be taking communion. Kerry would know which Testament to locate the Book of Job in. I probably agreed with Dean more about Iraq although I don't fault Kerry. But mainly it's not believing that the netroots are really grassroots; there's Astroturf usually associated with the right, and then there's the grass produced by "community organizing* that always feels like a hustle.

So with that curious view of civil society as being stunted or unborn before the end of TV and the beginning of interactive social media, I couldn't be surprised at this speaker's great discomfort at the Tea Party doing something he and the others found outrageous. They harnessed the new media! How dare they! They refused to give interviews to mainstream media (they call it "lamestream media") and have their own alternative media! Sneaky! He really thought this was terribly non-transparent and secretive and it really made him -- and others in the room -- angry.

I had to marvel that he couldn't see that they were behaving no differently than the left, which moved its narrative to YouTube or Huffington Post or Democracy Now! instead of trying to get every calibrated "progressive" nuance sufficiently covered by the Times editorial page or Olbermann. And oops...guess they had the right idea there.

Obviously, if people go on their own alternative media -- their own radio talk shows (big on the right), their own cable TV shows, and of course Fox News (which this speaker also called "alternative media" [stifles laughter]) then they can hardly be accused of being secretive and not open! There they are for all to see.

What he means is that they aren't *framed in the liberal media the way he thinks they should be framed*. And why should they consent to that frame? That frame -- like the speaker! -- takes people who many find simply ordinary and down-to-earth and calls them "crazy" -- just as this left-of-center fellow called Sharron Angle "crazy". Call them what you will, but somebody who raises $14 million dollars, largely out of state, on the strength of ideas and an alternative platform, is no more crazy than Tim O'Reilly *ahem*. They just don't think like you do.

The speaker felt this was "wrong" -- but there's nothing he can do about it -- oh, except to go on doing what was done for the Dean and Obama campaigns, which was to network more meta trans-state wired elites on mobile and i-Pad and blogs and try to ram them through. As is his right. It's a free country.

But there's the backlash problem, of course, because the more the cerebral stealth-socialists ram "progress" to the lady in Seattle the more she might turn on them. I sure turned on moveon.org -- the sorriest piece of non-social-media there is out there! -- when I found I couldn't talk back there. You're not going to bring me back to moveon.org -- ever -- after all their lavishly funded hatetubes and when I see the Big Lie on the front page, "Don't Stomp on Me" as if the Rand Paul security guy actually stomped on someone somehow unilaterally  without a prelude before that. Does somebody else need to come with a sign that says "Don't shove a poster into my car window twice and try to rush me?"

We've already see the Monday-morning quarterbacking of @jayrosen and co. Praising the Washington Post with surly glee for them "growing a pair" and reporting the numbers of those in the Jon Stewart march -- which it refrained from speculating about now that the parks service provides no estimate -- and explained why -- until they had the CBS estimate. But ever the sectarian, whining that Jon Stewart was promoting, dubbed "the View from Nowhere" by Rosen, is practicing moral equivalence in his book. And this... in response to a guy's tweet who said that Beck was close to playing with his own poop. Why does the left *get like that*? Do they realize that whatever sign-ups they get with their gang colour-waving like that, they don't win? They just lost, because they are like that.

So what the tech@state speaker means is that the Tea Party *must*, in his view, submit to the kind of harrying questioning that Jon Stewart might subject someone to. Yet his "alternative media" Fox TV (!) has pretty normal anchors for the news that are perfectly capable of keeping a straight face instead of a Stewart sheeshing five-minute face-palm (he really should shorten those up, it wastes air time), and who are perfectly capable of asking normal questions to figures like O'Donnell, in such a way that there is no cheer-leading for this colourful figure, either.  But of course, those on the left judge Fox by its talk shows and that "other O'Reilly," not by the news anchors.

We're in for a time of fractured news, that's for sure, but that's ok. There are competing narratives, and there should be, given the vast disparities in experience, and that's ok, too. So much of the geekitude I hear in different settings these days is about insisting on telling "a story". They are more fictional than ever! Everything is becoming "a story".

Jay Rosen had a blog a few weeks ago that seemed at first to be rare sanity from him, but it was only half right -- it was congratulating NPR for taking off the veil of pretense of a "View from Nowhere" for firing Juan Williams -- but then, it's only because he wants NPR to have the kind of narrative amply visible in his own "free paper" filled up by his students -- that obsesses about Israel/Palestine and carries the "progressive" line to the left even of NPR.  I don't care for the "View from Nowhere" myself, but it isn't the worse thing in some contentious settings -- and there's nothing wrong with ethics rules. Rosen thinks analysts have to tell you what they think. Only in his sectarian hothouse world. Most readers appreciate getting analysis that lets them *make up their own mind*. You take the events, you re-tell the story, but you try to provide enough of the different perspectives so that the reader *has space to see pluralism*.

Of course, one of the reasons this bunch gets so exercised and hateful about the "View from Nowhere" is they believe (as Media Matters in America typically states) the mainstream media cravenly sucked up to Bush and Cheney in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and in the years afterward -- and you can't shake them from that view and it seems to be a view that if challenged, would undermine their manhood and challenge their quest myth:

When that didn't happen -- and when so many of the nation's best-known journalists not only failed to expose the lies surrounding the invasion of Iraq but enabled them -- it radicalized me, and radicalized my ideas about journalists and our responsibilities in a free but fragile society.

You simply aren't persuasive when you rattle on about sell-outs at the Times, given all the intensive coverage they have done over the years of Iraq, which is self-evident; when you have to keep hammering on this insanely, you only highlight all the more your necessity for a narrative that fits your radicalism, not the facts. If anything, the overbearing narrative of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich in the Times these days, perhaps given such leeway because of the incessant pounding the editors feel from this "radicalized" complaint lobby, begins to beg the question of how well this news establishment is able to hold up against these pulls to the left.

Who would have thought that Olbermann would be fired *this way*.  Ethics are ethics, Jeff Jarvis hastens to tell us.