Brian Frank » general

Why Truth Matters (Not Just About WikiLeaks)

Brian — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 20:22:20 +0000

We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. #

This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront.

Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into deeper obligations and tighter constraints — we’re choosing to have to keep more secrets in the future — because some seemingly innocuous piece of information could raise questions or reveal something we assume people shouldn’t know.

It’s like the principle that one lie inevitable leads to more. Lies and secrecy are both forms of deception: additional, superficial layers of information we’re forced to keep feeding. As if the world isn’t complicated enough already.

Secrets aren’t just passively kept, they’re actively maintained, and maintenance incurs a cost — a cost that’s not getting any cheaper, as Will Wilkinson explained:

Consider what young Bradley Manning is alleged to have accomplished with a USB key on a military network. It was impossible 30 years ago to just waltz out of an office building with hundreds of thousands of sensitive files. The mountain of boxes would have weighed tons. Today, there are millions upon millions of government and corporate employees capable of downloading massive amounts of data onto tiny devices.

One major factor is digitization.

It isn’t just easy to get information out; once it’s out it can go everywhere — within minutes — and keep circulating, virtually forever. Sure, Joe Lieberman successfully got Amazon to remove WikiLeaks from its servers (which is yet another whole issue), but it was up on someone else’s servers in just a few hours (well, only to be taken down yet again, but cables have already been reported and copied and pasted all over the place anyway). [Update: and mirrored... Second Update: Dave Winer suggests BitTorrent is where it could eventually end up, which will be virtually impossible to police.]

The second major factor is the size and complexity of today’s organizations.

Does anyone remember the major report on U.S. intelligence services the Washington Post ran in July?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

When we talk about “the government” or “the state” (in this case the U.S.) trying to keep these secrets we’re actually talking about 46 different organizations. And the computer hardware and software they use has to come from somewhere, so like almost every other organization in the world they deal with outside venders and contractors — about 1931 of them altogether — many of whom require the same security clearance.

Altogether, over 850,000 people have “top secret” security clearance (according to the Post‘s report back in July). As for the clearance required to have had access to these leaked cables — not “top” secret, I suppose – around 3 million people have that.

I’d expect that number to keep going up — especially if they’re trying to keep more secrets more reliably.

The alternative is to lower the threshold: decrease what needs to be secret or increase our tolerance of what can be public (Jeff Jarvis’s latest project).

I imagine there’s some sort of optimum.

If we keep hiring more people to maintain secrets, at some point so many people will have access to those secrets that it won’t even be worth it: might as well then give everyone the same clearance — along with the same corresponding degree of responsibility, ideally.

Maybe that’s an option. But it would mean expanding the state and channelling energy and resources to enforce rules (and endlessly interpret, debate, game and rewrite them) instead of letting citizens choose where to invest their energy and resources in endeavours that solve problems, create value, drive prosperity and improve quality of life.

America would essentially be trading in its famed aspirational attitude for the sake of mere preservation — which seems to me like an even more radical (and far less promising) shift in American values than the push towards transparency.

The third major factor is human nature: we’re endlessly inquisitive.

We have a deep, innate need for information (as well as for being a source of information). We want to know what other people know. We notice patterns and narratives in our world — and we feel uncomfortable when something seems to be missing or distorted.

The internet supercharges these human needs. What might have been a passing curiosity for someone twenty years ago is more feasibly an ongoing obsession for the same person today. These tendencies aren’t going away.

Authorities can channel this energy constructively, working with citizens, or they can continue to unintentionally entice people into games of cat-and-mouse and hide-and-seek. In some ways, efforts to maintain secrecy are counterproductive: if these cables weren’t secret we probably wouldn’t even be talking about them right now.

So the answer, I think, is to lighten up a little. I’m not saying open the floodgates, but the existence and success of WikiLeaks indicates the U.S (and probably the world) is becoming bloated by excesses of secrecy.

Glenn Greenwald put it excellently, building on Matthew Yglesias’s point that “it’s just routine for the work done by public servants and public expense in the name of the public to be kept semi-hidden from the public for decades.” As Richard Posner explained:

Our process of classification is undisciplined, because the incentives of public employees in sensitive positions are distorted from an overall social standpoint. Information in government is power, and public employees, like other employees, like to cover up their mistakes. They are in a better position to do so, they think, because they can classify documents—which are then rarely declassified until long after they have ceased to hold any interest for anyone—so they overclassify.

Posner sensibly suggests that maybe much of the answer is just for diplomats to be more, you know, diplomatic.

Because we should also consider that if Julian Assange can get this information, how much of it can be (or is being) milked by real enemies with a sophisticated expertise, way better resources and far more nefarious aims?

Regardless of how this particular episode is dealt with, it’s happening and it’ll happen again.

Any system that can’t survive the truth is a system that can’t survive. #

Above all, this is about respect for truth. It feels like we’re losing it — or maybe society never really had it.

Either way, I know which side I’m on.

I don’t mean truth as something absolute. I’m not saying, “Lets figure out the Truth and then our system will survive forever.” What I mean is that every idea and piece of info we have now will be subject to falsification eventually and need to be verified regularly. The world changes, our ideas change accordingly.

If an idea or practice or institution can’t survive a little scuffing up by facts and experience then it isn’t something I’d put much faith in.

Of course there are things that don’t change, but somehow our ideas about those things keep changing and turning out wrong and improving over decades and centuries anyway.

Read the engaging list at Edge.org of the wrong ideas that people believed to be true. Consider what happened when people still believed the Sun revolves around the Earth. As their observations got better they found other planets doing all kinds of seemingly strange things. In order to maintain the idea that everything goes around Earth they had to contrive increasingly complicated explanations (there’s a good demonstration of pre-Copernican inquiry into the problem in Agora). By then it would have been simpler to give up the main idea and accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

This doesn’t just happen in scientific and religious thinking but in politics and just about anything else we do.

Something we did yesterday might not be the best practice tomorrow. In any given situation we might get a choice between contriving increasingly complicated explanations or simplifying things (this is close to the point Clay Shirky made a little while back): letting our mistakes and emerging opportunities be revealed through abrasion by hard facts so we can cut through the layers of outdated assumptions — habits of mind that were helpful when information was limited but aren’t robust enough to handle very microscopic observations or conciliation with other ideas.

Of course there are risks involved no matter what we decide.

When you distort the truth there’s a risk that one day someone will call you a liar or a fraud and you’ll have to deal with those consequences. When you admit the truth there’s a risk that it won’t matter: let’s face it, people can still call you a liar and a fraud whether you are one or not.

But that points to the pivotal problem here: we live in a world not just of wildly proliferating information but wildly proliferating bullshit.

How do we cope?

Just look at the astonishing range of opinions about WikiLeaks itself: How do we place arguments that WikiLeaks should be listed as a terrorist organization beside arguments that Cablegate actually helps build a case for war? How do we accept that this is a net gain for human rights when human rights groups are against it? How do we reconcile the presumption that WikiLeaks promotes transparency (because it exposes secrets, duh) when smart people argue WikiLeaks will increase secrecy and even Assange himself has said so?

A rational case could be made to argue almost anything. It’s not inconceivable that within a few years there’ll be a Demand Media or Mechanical Turk for editorial analysis — some desperate, anonymous grad student might one day make 1¢/word to quickly churn out an argument that Assange is a hero and then another arguing he’s a villain…

Ultimately all we know for sure is that WikiLeaks is bad for old habits of thought and good for people who like disrupting those habits, regardless of the cost. I’m not quite supporting the latter but I’m sure as hell not going to stick myself with the former.

Because in this atmosphere there’s little we can really trust. Verifiable facts are the best we’ve got.

People are losing trust in government — both prior-to and because of WikiLeaks. People are losing trust in media — which increasingly seems fused with power interests. It’s disorienting. It feels like there’s nothing solid or stable to grab onto. So we need to be skeptical and incisive — and regardless of the havoc caused by WikiLeaks in the short term, we urgently need to improve how we access, filter and verify information.

Maybe “truth” is the wrong word; perhaps “veracity” is better: it’s something we actively pursue and maintain, it’s elusive and unstable, not something permanently given.

WikiLeaks isn’t the answer but it’s at least a clue to where things are going. Respect it for that, at least.

Let us trace information back to the source for ourselves: let citizens participate in legitimate processes of inquiry so individuals and groups don’t feel the need to go rogue like Assange has done — not just to satisfy that human need but to add valuable resources to the challenge of developing better ideas, strategies and institutions in a world awash with information.

Even Sarah Palin ludicrously demanded more transparency from the White House and U.S. intelligence to explain how such an egregious act of transparency could have been allowed. (I’m paraphrasing Daniel Drezner).

So lets all just give our foreheads a good slap and get on with adapting to an open, 21st century world.

Make sure you follow me on Twitter and subscribe to more posts like this by RSS (if you’re into that) or directly to your email (about one per week).

Here are links to some of my favourites on the topic so far:

Dan Gillmor: A few questions about the wikileaks release.
Will Wilkinson: In defense of WikiLeaks and especially Missing the point of WikiLeaks.
Glenn Greenwald: The moral standards of WikiLeaks critics.
Richard Posner: WikiLeaks and the Art of Shutting Up.
Evgeny Morozov’s assiduous real-time curation.

And note: I hate overuse of the suffix “-gate” but that’s what WikiLeaks named this particular release.

Preserving Our Problems vs Changing to Learn

Brian — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:15:01 +0000

A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate:

Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But over time as capital increased in complexity, unions complexified as well, until unions needed management. The two became one system — union/management. So now the problem with unions is that they are locked into the old framework, the old system. They inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them, and so the two became co-dependent

But I think it goes even deeper than institutions and bureaucracies. It isn’t just organizational, it’s conceptual: it’s personal

Consider Shirky’s claim that in bureaucracies, “it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one”; now consider that our minds are organized in complex ways, and it tends to be easier to make our ideas more complicated than it is to make them simpler — because making them more complicated only requires attaching new imperatives and exceptions, whereas simplification requires reorganizing everything in relation to everything else: unlearning a lot of what we’ve learned, killing a lot of our “darlings” (ideas and projects we’ve become personally attached to), and in some cases re-aligning our social and professional affiliations.

Then there are the burdens, which can actually make us feel more important — especially if they’re the conceptual kind. When we have to constantly work to keep our complicated schemes in order, that feeling that “this would all collapse if I wasn’t here to keep it together” is a source of meaning and personal pride.

To put it in terms of the model I developed in Truth, Will & Relevance, we come to rely on the sense of efficacy and relevance that’s generated by being an integral part of a sophisticated system.

It requires a lot of discipline to be wary of these hazards while we learn to use new tools and develop solutions to emerging problems. I’ve noticed this in conversations about open government and citizen engagement. I’m seeing people focus too much on the old problems, or adopting new tools without adopting new mindsets and goals.

Look at a lot of politicians who’ve adopted social media but keep broadcasting the same old messages. For those people, Twitter and Facebook accounts merely add complications and burdens. Instead of using social media adoption as an opportunity to reset their whole approach, to learn to communicate more openly (which is ultimately simpler than trying to be controlling and clever), by merely glomming a new set of practices onto existing systems they’re making it even more difficult to change when it finally becomes do-or-die.

Which is why most people and organizations don’t manage to change fundamentally: instead, they become irrelevant.

As I’ve become more involved in these things I started to notice myself getting caught up in ideas and affiliations that would lead down that road. We get seduced by awesomeness and novelty and before we know it we’re becoming the old guard, incomprehensibly defending institutions that aren’t sustainable in a world of new challenges. Because along the way, rules develop, roles and relationships become structurally defined, and then you can’t change in a fundamental way without affecting the networks of trust and relevance we rely on. In other words, it would piss people off and turn them against you — and then you become powerless and virtually nothing positive is accomplished.

Instead of being seduced by any particular concepts or schemes, I’m attracted to what might be behind them. If something isn’t generative — if it doesn’t afford opportunities to learn, change, discover, or create something new; if we aren’t actively exploring those opportunities — it isn’t merely uninteresting to me, it’s dangerous.

Update: deleted part of first sentence, June 18.

Feed Frenzy: More Ways to Subscribe

Brian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:54:53 +0000

I’m becoming more promiscuous as a content-producer. Several people have joked about how many blogs I have going. Then Bill suggested I should publish an all-in-one feed. I decided to set up a few more while I was at it.

Most are now listed on a new Subscribe page.

First I burned a new topic-specific feed. If you only want posts about London Ontario you can subscribe to this and that’s all you’ll get.

WordPress is already generating feeds for every individual category and tag, but now if you want all of my London-related posts sent to you by email you can set that up here.

Next I merged all of my posts from all of my blogs into one feed.

There’s also an even bigger feed that includes most of my comments (thanks to Backtype) — even comments from Google Reader, surprisingly. Those tend to be sort of buried, but Backtype finds them via FriendFeed.

Then I got a little more adventurous and spliced together a feed full of stuff I’m putting together on digital democracy. It delivers only relevant blog posts plus relevant stuff I bookmark in Delicious and share in GReader. It’s also set up to import any tweets tagged #a2bb.

I tried Yahoo Pipes but the Reader items came through looking like my own posts, unattributed to their actual producers. The Delicious bookmarks weren’t very well identified either. So I ran that stuff through FriendFeed, merging Delicious, GReader, and Twitter into one feed and then merging that with the blog stuff through Pipes.

Take a look.

Through FriendFeed sources are clearly identified by service and original URL (even from tweets with shortened URLs). As an added bonus people can potentially comment on and like stuff by going directly to the FriendFeed “group.”

There was some discussion over the weekend about FriendFeed’s decline. I still see a big future for it (or something very much like it) but not in the way it has mainly been used. I have some thoughts on that and where things are going, but I’ll do that in another post.

Unplugging 2009

Brian — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 05:00:26 +0000

Just like last year I’ll be away from blogging for the first part of August. I’ll still be using email and Facebook… I think I might actually use Facebook more than I have before.

My brother is getting married on Saturday so this is a perfect time to focus on the more ‘real’ and fundamental, interpersonal stuff.

I’m pretty well in the that mode now after I spent a great long weekend with the lads, cruising around a lake in bunch of houseboats. There were no computers in sight (no clocks either, come to think of it); I didn’t miss being wired at all.

It won’t be totally non-digital, just non-nerdy: Twitter, out; Facebook, in. (Btw my Facebook username is bd.frank — same as my Google Profile/Gmail – and if you’re reading this we’re friends-enough for Facebook friends.

I’ll see how it works out and report back in a week or so… My provisional non-blogging plans include:

going to the blogger meetup on Wednesday
maybe ‘working’ on the first-tan-I’ve-had-in-six-years
finally putting the rest of my CDs into iTunes; listening to more music and setting up decent playlists
playing guitar
playing bass guitar
exercising: maybe going for a run or two and thinking about getting a bike
or maybe not… maybe just walking somewhere and reading Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and thinking about turning my experience into a cleverly written book… and then not doing that either
surfing the web without Google Reader: actually browsing and ‘experiencing’ all the different sites
listening to podcasts
maybe looking more into doing a podcast too
watching Fast and the Furious 4
getting a proper amount of sleep

Good night.

I’m not great at math but…

Brian — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 21:31:18 +0000

When a person orders four books at once from Chapters.Indigo.ca — all of which were “in stock” — why did they ship one of them a day before the other three… which, because of the weekend, resulted in all four arriving via the same delivery anyways… with the result that the latter three were in front of my door when I came home today, accompanied by a delivery notice referring me to the “nearest” Canada Post outlet to sign for the fourth, er, I mean the first one.

And why do I have to take a 10 minute bus ride to the “nearest” outlet, located in a gift shop in Oxbury “Mall,” when I could easily walk 10 minutes to a dedicated Canada Post outlet on Richmond St?

And why does it rain every damn day?

Opinion-Free July

Brian — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:23:42 +0000

Partially inspired by this post at Rockinon, I’m going to go opinion-free for the rest of July.

I was working on a follow-up to the Gladwell post, and after several versions I really didn’t like what I was writing, nor did I like myself very much for writing it.

And what would blogging be without self-love?

If you aren’t falling in love with yourself via your own words, then you’re not blogging… ;)

Anyways, I’m going to give myself a couple of loopholes.

The first is that I have an opinion-oriented piece about London’s economic future that has been germinating for a couple of weeks. I might do something on that, allowing myself the exception by saying, “but I thought of it before July, so technically…”

The second loophole is that if anything crazy happens — like an election — I’m duty-bound to blog myself into a ranting fury.

And I’ll add a third: sometimes a little opinion is needed for framing and context, e.g., when you share a link it’s helpful to explain why you shared it, what you think of it, where it fits into your life and work, how you’d improve on it, etc.

I’ll be trying to keep that up, daily, at Open/Conceptual.

Komoka

Brian — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:13:41 +0000

… is where I’ll be Saturday night for my brother’s (and his fiancé’s) –

– Dana & Dan’s Stag & Doe

If you find yourself in Komoka (after the Poplar Hill Picnic?), I can tell you there’s no place you’d rather be than the Community Centre (map) for Late Lunch and a cold beverage served by yours truly. $5 for beef on a bun and potata salads and fix’ns, honestly, anyways, is better than what you could get downtown after the bars.

Learning is Personal, Knowledge is Social, Truth is an Adventure

Brian — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:32:19 +0000

I tend to go through new mottos every few months. Background on some of the old ones are here, here, here and here.

“Learning is personal, knowledge is social, truth is an adventure” came to me while staring at a blank description field in the settings of thinkingalive.com, a new WordPress-powered site I set up for more personal, philosophical, literary-inclined writing.

Here’s the post hoc deconstruction:

I’m a big fan of Michael Polanyi’s notion of personal knowledge. I used to develop a lot of ideas about “personal education” but that was before I blogged so those didn’t see the light of day. A couple weeks ago I stumbled on Polanyi’s Study of Man and his ideas crept back into bed with mine — all the stuff about “learning alive” I’ve been writing… Ergo the spontaneous association of “learning is personal.”

Then that thought reminded my of Polanyi which reminded me of “personal knowledge” and when I wondered about poor old “knowledge” getting left out, I thought:

If A is x, then maybe B is y… and if x = personal, the first thing that comes to mind for y is social. Therefore learning is personal, knowing is social.

I went with “knowing” rather than “knowledge” because it’s consistent with “learning” and I’m in the habit of turning as many words into a verbs that I can. I changed it to “knowledge” because it sounded too consistent (softening the coarse dialectical edge), plus it has more resonance in the mind and relevance in search engines.

Speaking of resonance and relevance, is there a bigger buzzword than “social”?

Normally I tend to avoid buzzwords but I’m trying to shake that aversion as part of my ongoing effort to soften my logical edges. Besides, the practice of social is a genuinely central aspect of my new attitude.

In that spirit of renaissance and growth, “truth is an adventure” came along a couple days later after I had the urge to resolve the first two statements in a complete triangle.

Then more geometry: learning is a verb, knowledge is a little more concrete… the next step in that linear trajectory would be truth — or maybe “Truth.”

But I’m not a believer in the conventional kinds of concrete absolute truths. I’m a pragmatist; I constantly remind myself to beware of what Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: even the firmest truths (like those in geometry in math) are abstract, not concrete.

So my thought about the problem with “truth” led to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness which led to Whitehead which led to Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas which led to… “truth is an adventure.”

Summing up, “learning is personal” refers to my strong belief that we should all be personally responsible for what we know (and what we don’t); “knowledge is social” refers to my strong belief that all of that knowledge should be shared and improved through conversation, and especially in writing (e.g. on blogs); “truth is an adventure” refers to my strong belief that ultimately the process of learning and dialog is worthwhile in itself.

Counterintuitively, I think it’s more effective to simply love learning than to deliberately set out to solve things as the primary purpose.

The love of learning needs things to learn about, so it naturally reaches for opportunities and challenges — the most fruitful of which happen to be the same problems that need to be addressed; through the love of learning we can hit the world’s biggest challenges with a lot more speed and momentum than we do now.

And we’ll see where this leads…

Whatever

Brian — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:17:17 +0000

This is just sort of a half-assed update.

Expect changes (or maybe a slow gradual change) as my employer has seen fit to cut off almost all internet access (down to only a half-dozen sites I know of) and my information diet is affected — ie reduced to a fraction of what it was.

(I should mention that my job involves a lot of unpredictable and inconsistent downtime. Scrolling through Google Reader was actually the most effective way to stay sharp. Now I’m back to chatting with coworkers, reading books, pacing around, or simply falling asleep in my chair, making me less productive than I was with usable internet access… And it was already limited: Gmail, Facebook, YouTube, Meebo, Twitter and all the usual suspects were already blocked.)

Whatever.

Maybe I need a change anyways. It’s good to be back reading more from books again but I’m not going to be able to maintain anything close to the knowledge of current affairs I had before — not to mention my ability to comment on things.

Maybe that will turn out to be a blessing. After all, it isn’t like blogging was generating a lot of direct, measurable benefits. (Though I’m grateful for the few readers I have and the connections I’ve made, and I’ll continue to do what I can to keep posting things.)

It comes at a time I felt due for some adjustments anyways.

One is that I’m getting sick of preaching and proscribing all the time — sick of listening to myself talk, I mean. I’m really more of a bystander (in the same sense Peter Drucker perceived himself.) In most cases I’m more satisfied to learn from other people’s failure than by getting involved to prevent it. I’m just more curious than committed.

For example, I was going to come home and write about how municipalities could (and should) change their mindset about engaging with citizens and generating feedback and proposals: with the advent of social media there are new opportunities for interaction that greatly surpass the effectiveness of the stodgy old committee-mindset. Public sector organizations need to think more like private sector companies — like the ones “putting Twitter’s world to use” — and go to where the discussions are rather than expect busy people to come pay deference to process and formality at damn meetings…

But really, what do I care?

It would be nice if the municipality I live in did something admirable — or at least remarkable — but it isn’t worth my while to spend a lot of energy arguing and sticking out like a sore thumb. I’m not committed to London (or anything in itself) that doesn’t really affect me all that much.

What I’m really committed to is the principle that people ought to make an effort to contribute to the general good around them — wherever that may be.

So as long as I’m in London I’m all for making London better — likewise for Canada. But if a company in Toronto (one with internet access, perhaps) or anywhere offered me a job my bags would be packed tomorrow — in fact I think I still have bags I haven’t unpacked.

So, whatever.

Instead of promoting principles with reference to specific issues I’m turning back to working on them in a more general, creative, detached way — which was my preference to begin with.

I mean, maybe.

I’m a Rational Ass

Brian — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:39:36 +0000

Buridan’s ass is a figurative description of a man of indecision. It refers to a paradoxical situation wherein an ass, placed exactly in the middle between two stacks of hay of equal size and quality, will starve to death since it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one rather than the other. The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan.

[Thank you, Wikipedia.]

That’s me right now. I just finished doing all the basic setup of a new site at openconceptual.com (powered by WordPress but it’s not really blog), capping off a fairly productive weekend that saw me improve this site a whole bunch and learn more about what’s running “under the hood.” Not really any massive accomplishments but there was a lot of gratifying convergence — a lot of little tweaks that aren’t much in themselves but each go a long way on behalf of the whole.

Anyways, what I’m getting at is that now I just want to relax. Problem is I can’t figure out how. I’ve got the start of the London Knights game on — but if it’s a bad game I’ll be annoyed. There’s also a Raptors game starting but I know that’ll be bad.

So I’m thinking of going to get a movie.

Now the problem is whether to walk to the Daisy Mart at Oxford and Adelaide for a $1 movie, but all of the best new releases might be gone, or I can walk the same distance the other direction to Blockbuster at Oxford and Richmond where they’re more likely to have all the movies, but at six-times the price.

View Larger Map

If I was an economist I’d probably have a way to calculate the optimal movie-renting strategy. Maybe I’ll start collecting data — i.e. what’s the probability of Daisy Mart having the movie I want, etc.

The other option I have is to watch the DVD I picked up at the library the other day — Hamlet.

Ontario in the Creative Age: First Thoughts

Brian — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:22:59 +0000

Disappointed but not surprised by the report that came out yesterday (summary, via).

I had a bit invested in this since I wrote about the expected proposals back in January. At first glance I would seem to be proven wrong because I suggested that London risks being marginalized if we don’t assume more responsibility for our own destiny, and lo and behold — London was *mentioned* in the report!

But when I see London’s leadership celebrating the fact that the city is *mentioned* in a 46 page report on Ontario’s economy, my bullshit alarm goes off.

Look at it the other way: would it be remotely acceptable if London was not mentioned? This is a comprehensive report on the future of Ontario’s economy — more specifically, a report with a focus on the role of cities in Ontario’s economy. London is the unambiguous centre of one of the most populous regions in Ontario, that’s not a case we have to make or a citation we should be celebratory over; to not be mentioned in such a report would be a gross oversight.

When London is mentioned as part of the “Toronto/Greater Golden Horseshoe/Ottawa/London” mega-region I have to wonder… I don’t suppose many Londoners consider themselves as part of the same cohesive region as Ottawa — except that we’re both in Ontario and Canada — so that mega-region (perhaps we should call it a “meta-region”: a beyond region) is just another way of saying “cities in Ontario”… except for a handful of ’left behind’ cities like Sudbury and Windsor (sorry).

Also note that in the media release, Richard Florida claimed that the meta-region ”from London through Kitchener-Waterloo through Toronto and Ottawa — together comprises one of the world’s largest economic mega-regions that helps make Ontario one of the most advanced and productive jurisdictions on Earth.”

That’s clearly part of a sales pitch — a pitch for Ontario, not London. We’re all lumped together to boost the stats so we can say we’re one of the “largest… most advanced and productive jurisdictions on Earth.”

In fact, I wonder, how many times is London mentioned in that report anyways? Five times, by my count. But twice it’s London England, not London Ontario. So, three times.

One mention is in the long mega-region designation I already quoted. Another is on a pie chart of the proportion of “Ontario’s creativity oriented occupations in city-regions” (Toronto has 47%, then Ottawa with 13%, Hamilton with 5%, then London and K/W each have 4%, then it just says “all others” with 27%). The third mention lists London as an example of a city with “commuters inside a community (e.g. inside Toronto or London).”

Hardly compelling stuff.

But compelling enough for the London Free Press to run the headline, on Page 1 of today’s paper, ”City cited as new-economy maverick.” The mayor was impressed too. She says (according to that article), ”the province is seeing London on the radar much more than ever before.”

On the radar? How about on page 34. If there is anywhere it actually means something to be mentioned it’s here, where they list the regions that are “well positioned for the creative age” (compared to the other two types of places: ”older industrial cities like Windsor, Hamilton, Oshawa…” and rural/remote or inner-city areas “that are increasingly disconnected from the creative economy”).

The three regions cited as “well positioned for the creative age” are Toronto, Greater Ottawa, and the Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge/Guelph region. Not London…

Then when you consider this:

Creativity and innovation are generated by talented, skilled people – people who increasingly see greater benefits from living in larger, denser regions where people and ideas are fast moving. While a slower pace and non-metropolitan living will appeal to some, it’s clear that they do not offer benefits to enough creative workers to sustain these smaller more distant locations. These disconnected places face a future of decline unless they are better connected to the first Ontario.

Ontario needs to find ways to connect those regions that could potentially be left behind to the winners and build more connective fibre. Some weak connections are already in place, but we need to build more substantial connections and further unify the Toronto/Greater Golden Horseshoe/Ottawa/London mega-region. At the same time, we need better connections between the mega-region to outlying areas. [my emphasis]

So where do we fit into that? We’re not specifically cited as “well-positioned for the creative economy,” nor are we specifically cited in any other category. London is simply mentioned — when we come down to it — as being a city in Ontario. That’s it.

The rest is up to us. The category London will fall into a decade from now depends on our own resourcefulness and will… and creativity. If we leave it up to Queens Park or Parliament Hill and U of T academics to decide what London has to contribute, we’ll surely fail. Stop celebrating and create…

More coverage on the report from The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star.

Part of an ongoing series on London’s future… there’s still a lot more to discuss.

Back on Facebook

Brian — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:52:03 +0000

Just reactivated my Facebook profile, which I “deactivated” in September. Everything’s still there — where it’ll be forever: all of our moments and memories and Scrabulous scores owned by Facebook ’till long after we’re gone.

It still doesn’t suit me but it’s impractical and countersocial not to be on Facebook. I kept wondering if people were wondering.

We’ll see how it goes. The business of deciding whether to friend-or-not-to-friend seems a little more morally loaded and stressful than it needs to be. I can never tell if someone’s wondering why I haven’t friended them or if they’re one of those people who prefers to keep their friend list as perfectly pruned as a Japanese garden.

Something between the guardedness of Facebook and the promiscuity of MySpace would be perfect. Like Twitter. I learned a lot there in the past few weeks. Before I got on that I had no idea how to send those short Facebooky messages.

Now, after bringing my blogging a little more down to earth and started to enjoy using the Twitter, I have an urge to take the conversation further, or wider, with a little more sustenance. I wanted to do more with FriendFeed but nobody’s on there (only the core social media mavens). Facebook groups seems to be where the conversation’s at – or at least where the party’s at.

As an aside, FriendFeed seems like the wrong name for FriendFeed. Even FeedFriend would be more appropriate. FriendFeed is more about the “media” half of social media. I mean, it’s social as anything but the friendly-friend stuff happens more on Facebook; FriendFeed has been embraced more by an emerging class of social media professionals. The pictures and videos shared on Facebook are of people having fun or otherwise just doing their thing. The pictures and videos shared on FriendFeed are like, “I’m an amateur photographer, check out my Flickr stream,” or “Here’s a video of the presentation I gave on how companies should be using social media.”

Anyways, I look forward to staying in touch with my friends’ great normal lives on the Facebook, and I welcome anyone to come stay in touch with whatever exactly it is that I do.

Wanna Publish a Crazy Book?

Brian — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:15:27 +0000

So I just finished a bibliographical outline of the book I’ve been working on for a few years.

Sometimes I call it an “autobibliography” because it pretty much took over my life — I don’t have much of a biography apart from this. Around 2004 I got the sense the book was writing itself and I was just doing the typing. It’s as if the book is telling its own story. Gimmicky or whatever, but the “autobibliography” thing worked as an organizing theme to keep it together and moving forward.

It begins and ends as a philosophical project. Don’t ask me why I felt like I had to do it. In fact, that’s essentially what I’ve been trying to do: understand and explain why I’d even begin such a thing. (This is where the idea of a “book writing itself” came from.)

I was encouraged to learn that other people have had the same feeling — and that those people are none other than David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein (among others, I imagine… though, no doubt others who are far more obscure and may have died miserably on account of it). Both of those great philosophers went away from the world for a couple of years in their mid/late-20′s because of an urge to understand everything. It wasn’t even a choice — just as it wasn’t a choice with my experience. William James went through the same thing at the same age but wasn’t so inclined to document it right away. Emerson and Nietzsche went through it a few years later after being successful in (and then abandoning) careers that provided almost-but-not-quite enough intellectual freedom.

(Check out the Essays I’ve marked with three or four stars to get a sense of where I’m going.)

Whether or not the philosophical outcome was worth it (it would be ridiculous to hope it measures up to any of those giants), the education it put me through has surpassed my dreams and would have been impossible any other way. That’s why this bibliographical account I just finished is important to me.

More important than the books I’ve read is the practice of finding, evaluating, understanding, synthesizing, and adapting them to specific uses. Personal responsibility, self-discpline, and creative freedom cannot be taught. By definition, any education designed and directed by a system of set grades and credits cannot be creative in the fullest sense of the idea.

Part of my original aim was to develop a “creative education” that could be systematized. I certainly failed but I wouldn’t say it wasn’t a success. After all, I managed to get a creative education myself, and I couldn’t create something approaching it until I got that much at least.

Along with the 6000 word bibliographical essay I just published, I have 16,000 word essay on the “career” aspect of it (one particular argument is excerpted here). That makes reference to a lot of management and business theory, which ”grounds” the high-flying philosophy in the context of real-world, practical opportunities and challenges.

I’ve also made some progress with some of the softer, more literary or “thematic” aspects of it. The big picture has been germinating in my head for a half-decade, and the rough structure is taking shape in these outlines (also see my Résumé/Manifesto — a kind of pre-outline mission statement). My recent post about my old notebooks was a bit of a walk-through.

There are a lot of interwoven metaphors involved in order to make the philosophy work. The autobiographical and autobibliographical stuff is part of that (a few links to particular notions are here). The danger of mixed metaphors is not as great as the danger of philosophical tension. Besides their poetic quality, the metaphors assist the philosophy by soften the ideas without weakening them. They’re like complementary muscle tissue that release and stretch to help the body move effectively.

More to come… including a new Autobibliography page to accomodate the latest work.

More Retooling

Brian — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:57:45 +0000

With all the newspaper stuff happening I wanted to write something along those lines, like, “Citizen Journalism: Your Civic Duty,” or something lame like that.

I was going to recommend PodCamp London (not lame) coming up in April, tip my hat to the encouraging progress the London Free Press is making (with people there starting to appreciate citizen journalists a little more), and twist your arm to start using using Twitter so you can get involved in these exciting developments too (not to mention the increasingly fluid and lively local debates between pros and indies).

But then it occurred to me that the only people who would read this are already part of the community I’m trying to introduce you… er, I guess, what I mean is you already know all this, because if you’re reading this you probably got here via Twitter and are already signed up for PodCamp London, etc.

I feel like I should do more to drive traffic your way, but I don’t really have any traffic to drive anywhere. I have you (certainly not to be sneezed at) and maybe the odd vagrant passing through, care of errant Google searches.

So building on last night’s post, I’m thinking I’ve got to park this ”thinking smart and good and sensible” routine for a while and hustle some love up in this biatch – starting by using more 90′s gangsta rap slang, which the kids seem to go absolutely crazy over.

Expect to see some obvious attempts to clone Chuck Klosterman, along with plenty of failed and unfunny jokes, offensive language, things that just don’t make any sense, celebrity sex videos, posts titled “UFC 93 Free Live Stream!” that make your cheap ass go around and around in circles, exclamatory statements, and much more as I explore fantastic strategies for success!

Socialists in Business

Brian — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:45:57 +0000

Great insight from Matthew Yglesias:

The thing about this is that if this were generally true — if the CEOs of the Fortune 500 were brilliant economic seers — then it would really make a lot of sense to implement socialism. Real socialism. Not progressive taxation to finance a mildly redistributive welfare state. But “let’s let Vikram Pandit and Jeff Immelt centrally plan the economy — after all, they’re really brilliant!”

But in the real world, the point of markets isn’t that executives are clever and bureaucrats are dimwitted. The point is that nobody is all that brilliant. Nobody really has a reliable method of surveying the scene and accurately gauging What Is To Be Done. But in a market economy, we don’t need anyone to have such a method. Instead, a bunch of people get to do some inquiries into the issue and then give it their best shot. And the ones who are wrong will fail. And the ones who are right will succeed… The world is just too complicated and too weird, the future too uncertain, for economic decision-making to be put in the hands of planners and visionaries. That’s why you have capitalism. But it also means that the people who control the firms operating in the market economy probably aren’t brilliant planners or visionaries either. They’re imperfect people making imperfect decisions based on imperfect information, and the ones who rise to the top are the ones whose bets pay off.

It should be said as a point of criticism that as bet-after-bet pays off in the long term, free markets do tend to select more talented and competent individuals and shift them into positions of power. So maybe, to some degree, executives tend to be more clever and high-level bureaucrats tend to be less competent, motivated, and resourceful, because they haven’t been exposed to as many chances to fail.

But then on the other hand, exactly what kind of competence is necessary to become a successful, high-level executive? What is it that people prove themselves so good at on the way up the ladder? Are corporations much different from bureaucracies?

I’ve been thinking about this notion– that huge capitalist organizations are guilty of some of the same flaws that make communist governments so unviable – since people started blaming the financial crisis on capitalist free markets. The problem isn’t free markets, the problem is corporations like General Motors and Citigroup that get so large they turn into quasi-socialist regimes, ruled by insulated and spoiled leadership cadres and populated by hundreds of thousands of complacent serfs.

This is still just the early phase of this line of thought. I’m almost sure there are a lot more substantial insights to be generated from this.

Worst Cars Ever

Brian — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:43:42 +0000

Time has an entertaining list of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time.

No Related Post

Auto Sales Drop, WTF

Brian — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:19:46 +0000

We’re way past “canary in the mineshaft” stuff, this kind of bad news from the auto industry is the miner in the mineshaft. From the AP story in the Globe and Mail (via Gordon), GM’s October sales dropped slightly by 45%; Ford and Chrysler “weren’t far behind.” Or to put it in perspective:

If GM’s sales were adjusted for population growth, October would be the worst month of the post-World War II era…

Felix Salmon explains the complex ins-and-outs of the situation:

GM isn’t very good at making the kind of cars that people want to buy.

He points to Justin Fox at Time, who a few days ago argued why big American automakers should file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy:

A GM bankruptcy would possibly pave the way for a rebirth of the company as a lower-cost, slate-wiped-clean entity with an actual chance of succeeding (I’m not making any guarantees here), and it wouldn’t threaten the systemic collapse of anything. What it would threaten are jobs, dealers and suppliers, and pensions.

Doesn’t seem like an easy political sell though, considering that little bit at the end about “jobs, dealers and suppliers, and pensions” — in other words, all the stuff that voters can actually see first-hand. Seeing those go can’t do much for consumer confidence…

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Sweet Prank Call on Palin

Brian — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 02:58:42 +0000

Canadian comedy comes through again. Two Quebec radio hosts prank-called Sarah Palin pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

I literally spit a mouthful of coffee out at the start when she thought she was talking to Fake Nicolas Sarkozy but it was only Fake Nick’s assistant. “Oh, it’s not him yet,” she said to her own assistant, “I always do that…”

Audio is here.

Jeezuz I’ll miss this election… and the John McCain appearance on SNL is coming later tonight.

Principles of Swearing

Brian — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:13:37 +0000

There’s a good article in The Atlantic by Steven Pinker about swearing on TV. Here’s what the man says:

I noted that over time, taboo words relinquish their literal meanings and retain only a coloring of emotion, and then just an ability to arouse attention. This progression explains why many speakers are unaware that sucker, sucks, bites, and blows originally referred to fellatio, or that a jerk was a masturbator. It explains why Close the fucking door, What the fuck?, Holy Fuck!, and Fuck you! violate all rules of English syntax and semantics—they presumably replaced Close the damned door, What in Hell?, Holy Mary!, and Damn you! when religious profanity lost its zing and new words had to be recruited to wake listeners up. [Atlantic via NYT Ideas]

There were a lot of articles and reviews on this when Pinker’s Stuff of Thought came out last whenever. This just happens to be a perfect time for me to revisit it because of issues I’m currently facing — trying to figure out how much swearing is appropriate on this blog.

Some people have a problem with it and I have to decide whether I can afford to lose them (or more accurately, whether I can afford to not get them at all). Then there are people who think swearing is great and will read any shit with the word shit in it because it’s naughty and — well I don’t really know what the appeal might be.

I’ve been trying to figure out whether it works out better to gain punks at the expense of fogeys, or vice versa, or if there’s a way to appeal to both. I think the resolution to that is to accept that I’m too much of a punk myself to give fogeys what they want, and I’m also too much of a fogey to write like a genuine punk.

But there’s a third group: people who don’t have a personal vendetta against swearing but are careful listeners and readers. I’m thinking especially of writers. Swearing can be used effectively but it can also betray a lack of discipline. On the other hand, never swearing can indicate a lack of autonomy or talent [or objectivity]. Using tamed-down ‘doo-doo’ words makes people look powerless and scared.

[The best way to put this might be, swearing can be a sign of immaturity, but at some point in our development we ought to become mature enough to swear appropriately.]

I’ve experimented with swearing (which sounds funny: swearing is supposed to be all about letting go) about a half-dozen times, most aggressively in my post on Stupidity vs. Fucking Stupidity. My intention there was to drive a point and, yes, to generate attention. It also happens to be a genuine account of my thinking. But it didn’t really generate much attention, and when I looked back at it a day later it just didn’t look right. I seemed angrier and crazier than I wanted to sound.

Part of me wants to swear a lot, just to put my thumb in the eye of people who have hang-ups about it — as if to say, “Hey look, I swore. Nobody died. What’s the problem?” I also don’t want to have too many filters and cosmetics between my thinking and my writing. I want to be ‘authentic’ and ‘real.’

But then I don’t want to appear impulsive. I’m not impulsive – I’m naturally deliberate and cerebral — and writing in a way that looks impulsive is the least ‘authentic’ thing I could do.

As with anything, there’s no way to resolve this dilemma in principle. I just have to continue experimenting and evolving (like language itself). All feedback is welcome, as always.

Brian Frank » general

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