Brian Frank » civics

Ugly War, Pretty Package

Brian — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:58:53 +0000

Here’s a fascinating article about the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue at Firdos Square in 2003 – a great case to examine how our desire for compelling stories and images makes us deceive ourselves. Some argue it may have made things worse — enabling the infamous “Mission Accomplished” announcement and causing people to overlook real problems.

(More insights about self-deception in general in a interesting post by Tim Carmody.)

A lot of spontaneous little decisions in specific moments add up to something altogether different and beyond anyone’s control.

A few separate media feedback loops converged for this story to happen. The first is the symbiotic relationship between journalists and the Marines. Journalists get valuable first-hand accounts. Marines get bragging rights and leverage through media exposure to survive as a proud and distinct branch of the military. Going out of the way for a photo-op and selectively cropping the results has benefits for both.

The second feedback loop was between Iraqi citizens and journalists at the scene — both of whom had been cooped up and anxious hoping for a positive outcome of the invasion. So when Iraq’s military cleared out, civilians showed up in the public square to see what might happen and possibly be a part of something (basically why public squares exist in the first place). Photographers followed — which pretty much assured that something would happen…

[Update: accidentally edited out the most obvious part! the Marines showed up with tools and the massive vehicle that was used to eventually topple the statue. They might have moved on if the civilians and photographers weren't in the square. Either way, the event wouldn't have had the symbolism it did without all the presence of all three groups, reinforcing each other.]

The third feedback loop was (or still is) between media outlets and the audience. Editors and producers know what will keep people’s attention and people are mostly happy to have their attention kept by compelling images. Nobody forced people to watch the footage replayed on CNN every 7.5 minutes (4.4 minutes on Fox), as cited by the New Yorker article:

Primed for triumph, [news editors and anchors] were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war. It was an unfortunate fusion: a preconception of what would happen, of what victory would look like, connected at Firdos Square with an aesthetically perfect representation of that preconception.

At the same time, it’s tempting to look at these media-made messes and exercise the same sensationalist tendencies to deceive ourselves into believing there’s some kind of orchestrated collusion or deliberate conspiracy afoot. Because it’s kind of fun to tell that story, and easy. It’s comforting to infer conscious designs behind big, complex things in life.

Even saying “media-made,” as if “the media” is a coherent entity, is kind of lazy. It’s helpful in a blog post, but only as a provisional place to start.

When we dig deeper we’ll usually find that all of the alleged conspirators are just regular people trying to live as best they can from one day to the next. It’s important to keep coming back to this likelihood.

Because one day some of us might find ourselves caught up in events being distorted to symbolize something they’re not. If we care about truth and meaning we should think about how to recognize these things from the inside, before they reach their tipping point. One voice to dispel an encroaching myth at the right moment might make all the difference.

Thanks @DougSaunders for the link.

“Ugly War, Pretty Package” is the title of a book mentioned in the article.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

WikiLeaks Reveals! What Happens When Anyone Can Be As Annoying As Michael Moore

Brian — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:29:00 +0000

The WikiLeaks story is really becoming a saga. It’s like a new chapter is added every week, with new characters and new ethical questions raised. The latest one helped me work out at least one big answer to move forward with.

The answer hinges on trust.

It used to be that knowledge was power: it was difficult to acquire, so relatively few people were able to control it. Which meant that people who had it were more likely to be trusted. Because if you’ve invested a lot (in infrastructure, political capital, etc.) gaining access to information, you’re damn well going to make sure what (and how) you eventually communicate is trustworthy.

And there was little risk in being more careful before sharing something, because so few people had access to information, and there was already a considerable process involved in getting it out. If the first print run or broadcast didn’t start for another few hours, you might as well check all the facts again and craft it to make sure you told the same story better than your two or three competitors.

Trust used to be more or less given (but could be lost through mistakes) — owing to the fact that people with information already distinguished themselves and appeared trustworthy simply by having it.

But now knowledge is everywhere (or at least information is everywhere): it’s easier to get and harder to control. It’s also easier to share once you have it. So simply having information isn’t an effective way to distinguish oneself. There isn’t much advantage to having it.

But we’re still working according to old assumptions. We’re still competing as if the best advantages go to whoever simply has information (I’m including blogs and a lot of us who essentially “compete” for attention and reputation through social media). That’s largely why there’s such a race to know something FIRST — for that brief moment of advantage, albeit fleeting — and why fairly minor developments are sensationalized on cable TV news into stories in themselves.

The latter amounts to thinking and saying you know something when there’s really nothing to know. When you can’t compete on access or speed, you can still compete by seeing stories that others don’t see — and embellishing the shit out of them.

Which brings me to Michael Moore.

I’ve just been catching up on the #MooreandMe chapter of WikiLeaks. To simplify a complex and ambiguous story, Moore put up $20,000 of the surety (like bail) on behalf of Julian Assange, who’s facing extradition to Sweden on suspicion of sex offences.* As one might expect, Moore’s using the opportunity to generate attention. The complaint against Moore, led by Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown, is that his rhetoric insinuates that accusations of rape are relatively unimportant, and that he’s enabling (or at the very least turning a blind eye to) some pretty vicious personal attacks against Assange’s accusers — who, as suspected sexual assault victims, i.e. people who’ve gone through a very personally invasive experience, could probably do without the added scrutiny and abuse.

(Best background on the details of the suspected crime is here, and there’s more here.)

One of the accusers has been called “the most hated woman online.” There are allegations that she has CIA ties. Bianca Jagger (who also put up part of Assange’s surety) tweeted a link to a post that identified the accuser and outlined the rationale for suspicions about her motives. The link was retweeted by former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and at least 100 other people.

I looked it up and did a bit of extra Googling and everything I found eventually referred back to the same post by Israel Shamir (not an uncontroversial figure) and Paul Bennett at CounterPunch. The basis of the claims is that the most high profile of Assange’s accusers wrote a couple of “anti-Castro diatribes” that were published in a periodical that’s financed by a group that “is connected” to a Cuban anti-Castro group that’s led by a guy who was alleged to have CIA ties.

Got that?

To put that into perspective, as a writer, apparently I need to be careful not just of the kind of periodicals I might submit to, and not just who’s financing those periodicals, and not just the “connections” of who’s financing them, and not just the individuals running those groups that are connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in, but also the alleged ties of those individuals running those groups connected to the groups that finance the periodicals I might publish in… lest I be accused of having those same ties myself.

The post also claims she was deported from Cuba for “subversive activities,” and while she was there she allegedly “interacted” with a group called Las damos de blanco (Ladies in White) that apparently receives funding from the US. They’re allegedly “supported by” a group that’s run by a guy who “has ties” to another guy who allegedly has CIA ties.

Or maybe, just maybe, her “interactions” with a Cuban group espousing principles of justice and freedom of speech are somehow “connected” to her “interactions” with WikiLeaks — which espouses the same sort of principles.

Why’s it implausible for someone to believe that while we’re demanding transparency from the US we should also demand it from dictatorships?

A stronger case for conspiracy is made by pointing to an apparently disproportionate amount of zeal with which Assange’s offenses are being treated. Naomi Wolf has been especially persuasive:

for all the tens of thousands of women who have been kidnapped and raped, raped at gunpoint, gang-raped, raped with sharp objects, beaten and raped, raped as children, raped by acquaintances — who are still awaiting the least whisper of justice — the highly unusual reaction of Sweden and Britain to this situation is a slap in the face. It seems to send the message to women in the UK and Sweden that if you ever want anyone to take sex crime against you seriously, you had better be sure the man you accuse of wrongdoing has also happened to embarrass the most powerful government on earth.

There’s a compelling argument that Assange’s case is an anomaly even within the Swedish justice system. Wolf made that argument too, pointing to a somewhat damning report by Amnesty International, and Moore added more. There are some scary stats — though I must say, much less scary when I went directly to Amnesty International’s report.

On one hand I find it hard to believe that such a progressive society as Sweden’s would “love” rapists, as Moore put it. There’s an equally compelling argument here that Sweden is very serious about rape, pointing out that positive government measures could be responsible for the statistics:

Sweden has had an active and vocal discussion (can’t really call it a debate) in the last 10-15 years, on getting rape charges higher priority from the police and prosecutors, to getting women to report the crimes more often, and so forth. This includes active campaigning by the government.

So, is it any wonder then that the number of reported rapes has increased?

I’m reminded of scenes in The Wire, in which statistics perversely disincent the police from taking new complaints — especially if they were unlikely to lead to an arrest (say, a crime like rape that often comes down to one person’s word against another’s). The optimist in me hopes that Sweden is fighting against that attitude and working to make it socially acceptable for women to complain about sexual abuse — despite the challenges that creates for authorities and despite how bad those statistics for non-convicted crimes may look.

I can’t really say. There are stats and statements in the Amnesty report and quoted in the above arguments that make me too skeptical to guess either way. And I’ll never say that any country is doing a “good enough” job fighting sexual abuse and rape.

Regardless, I’m not sure why Moore is complaining that Sweden needs to get tougher on sex offenses by way of affiliating himself with a suspected sex offender. If he really wants Sweden to get tough on sex crimes he’s doing it the wrong way. And if Sweden is as bad as he says it is (and even if it’s not), I’m inclined to think the disproportionate attention given to Assange would be the best thing a critic could ask for: that’s a very high profile precedent to use as leverage. Future accusers and activists can say, “but you went after Assange, now you have to do it for the rest.”

As for the likelihood of Sweden cooperating with the US, consider that Sweden may have hidden motives here that are entirely self-serving — nothing to do with pressure they’re imagined to have received from the US.

Sometimes countries make a show of strength just because that’s just what countries do. It helps maximize their bargaining power and autonomy. (Remember Saddam Hussein’s refusal to fully cooperate with weapons inspectors — making it look like he was hiding something even though he wasn’t?) Maybe Sweden is fighting for Assange for the same reason Canada is fighting for a deserted and completely symbolic island: because it’s within a country’s rights to make that claim; rolling over tends to weaken a country’s bargaining power in future negotiations. And they know the world’s watching this one.

(And for all we know it could simply come down to one prosecutor’s careerism: hoping to build a reputation and get promoted by reeling-in a big fish.)

I know “it’s a coincidence” and I know it’s easy to wonder if there’s “American politicial manipulation of a foreign legal system” involved, but the simple fact is that Swedish authorities are following the letter of their law in seeing this through.

Besides, to not see this through would also look like they were bending to foreign pressure — not by American authorities but by celebrity opportunists. There are pros and cons to both sets of optics. Ultimately I’d say they cancel each other out.

The fact that (as far as I know) Swedish prosecutors are doing exactly what their job description dictates they should do seems sufficient to explain why they’re doing it.

And until we see something more substantial to support suspicions that Assange is the victim of a “honeytrap” (his lawyer’s word), a coincidence is nothing more than a coincidence.

Of course it would be nice if we had more access to information that could help us establish the truth one way or the other, and it’s ironic that that’s what Assange and WikiLeaks promote.

So do we need Assange to keep working towards more transparency? I doubt it. If Assange can’t build an organization able to persist without him then I’d rather see it taken apart and rebuilt sooner than later. And the broader movement towards open government is more than robust enough to move forward without either Assange or WikiLeaks. It can and will continue to move forward in the same distributed, incremental, somewhat accidental way that the internet has always developed.

To put it bluntly, open government — which may or may not be Assange’s genuine motive — is precisely the wrong movement for iconoclasts.

Don’t let sensationalizers and ‘isn’t it all a funny coincidence’ status-seeking opportunists like Michael Moore distract us from more important aim: seeing through all artifice and theatricality to find verifiable and useful truth.

The paranoid left and paranoid right enable each other; government institutions and corporations are enablers too. They’re still mainly still competing with knowledge as if it’s scarce, attention as if it’s precious, and control as if it’s still as easy as it once was — while taking trust for granted.

The change won’t happen overnight, but this trend of Tea Parties and DDoS attacks and anti-institutional sentiment keeps going, eventually trust will become so depleted that institutions and people will recognize that trust is more precious than mere information or attention. At some point trust — through the judicious use of knowledge — will be the main source of influence and power, not just knowledge.

That’s what we need to be building. Governments and organizations need to think of how to continually re-earn people’s trust. Playing whack-a-mole with WikiLeaks is counterproductive: it feeds the narrative that governments and organizations are untrustworthy. Likewise for the likes of Michael Moore (who is behaving a lot like his own targets: evasively) and Keith Olbermann (who evaded for a while and came back clumsily). They’ve been focused on criticizing (or merely raising doubts) and getting people riled up against others, but now it’s easy for anyone to do that — which means anyone can do it to them, which is what’s happening with #MooreandMe.

The diminishing returns on attention produced by that cycle can’t go on forever. At some point people will look a little deeper for more sustainable value.

The tougher and ultimately more rewarding thing to do is not to attack but to build — to motivate people for something — and to continually re-earn trust not by smearing other people’s faults but by demonstrating one’s own integrity.

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.

My Dundas: Transforming London’s Sentimental Centre

Brian — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:03:04 +0000

Revitalizing downtown is an ever-relevant topic in London, as I’m sure it is in most cities.

(There may be cities where downtown isn’t an important part of the story; those are cities I don’t want to live in.)

Last night we had a bit of a thing here as part of Downtown London and the London Downtown Business Association’s annual general meeting. It was billed as an opportunity to start planning “Visions of Dundas” for 2020. Input was solicited on Facebook, and the early risers among London’s emerging leaders kept it going this morning with an ideas salon.

The City’s planning department has also been facilitating discussions for a year or so, starting with some downtown visioning sessions last summer.

One idea that gets a lot of attention is eliminating vehicular traffic on Dundas Street for a few blocks. I’m not sure I know enough to oppose it, but I’m not sure what exactly it’s supposed to accomplish either.

I walk the main stretch of Dundas at least two or three times every week. Not once have I thought my experience would be better without cars. Drivers already avoid it, and it’s one of the easiest streets to walk across (compared to, say, Richmond St., which is far less friendly for pedestrians — and that doesn’t seem to discourage many people).

My other concern is that cars actually add a lot to the feeling of vitality.

Dundas has a buzz and much of it comes from cars. That energy is part of the reason I like being there. There’s a real sense that something’s happening. I don’t know what would replace that with the cars gone — or more precisely, I’m not sure how cars are currently a barrier to any other sustainable activity (in the broadest sense) moving in.

I support the sentiment that says we should change society’s attitudes about cars, but I’m not seeing how closing Dundas Street to traffic is the most effective action to take at this point. I think a lot more narrative, strategy and education has to happen before we see the right shift in public attitude.

The only thing I can really see improved by removing traffic is the livability of second and third floor apartments along the street. I often think it’d be great to live (or work) there but couldn’t stand the constant sound. But it’s the buses that create most of the noise. If we get rid of cars and make it a public transit-only street (like Granville in Vancouver — at least I think it’s Granville, correct me if wrong) then I still won’t want to live there. And if it becomes like Hess Village in Hamilton — a strip of bar & restaurant patios — the noise might be even more disturbing.

Another model of rejuvenation was presented last night by Ron Soskolne, a development consultant who specializes in large mixed-use projects like the Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto: a “bright lights, big city” destination and public space.

There are certainly lessons to take from Yonge-Dundas but I think we should be careful not to fixate on the most prominent features.

For example, I look at it and the first thing I notice is dazzling visual displays. That’s appropriate for Yonge St. with its history of ostentatious facades, but sticking a jumbotron up at Richmond St. would be a bit like bringing in circus elephants to mix with the squirrel population in Victoria Park. It might overwhelm the natural environment.

The other prominent feature at Yonge-Dundas is the large open space.

The key to making that work is that it wasn’t simply conceived as a “build it and they will come” idea; it’s purposefully situated and “programmed” to keep activity flowing through it.

Where would a proportional flow come from in London?

(Consideration of flow is essential, whether we’re thinking of large spaces or small.)

The big lesson I think we should take from Soskolne’s example is that public investment led private investment.

It wasn’t just about tenants moving in and using what the City built; property owners and developers became more ambitious to initiate their own improvements after the City led by example and signaled long-term commitment.

And the funny thing is, we don’t even have to look elsewhere for that lesson.

Look at how the “Market District” has developed since Covent Garden Market’s renewal and the construction of the John Labatt Centre. Look at how Galleria (now Citi Plaza) was rejuvenated as a mixed-use facility since the Central Library moved in.

This line of thought leads me to wonder about a Performing Arts Centre… It isn’t something I’ve felt the need to settle an opinion on yet, so I’ll leave it at the mere mention for now.

Shifting mindsets, something more immediately feasible I have in mind is some kind of location-sensitive digital portal.

Think about how fast mobile and location-based technologies are progressing. I’m not overly optimistic about usefulness or adoption right now, but it’ll quickly become far more powerful and affordable. It has to be on our radar. We have to start to envision the role it’s going to play — and it will play a role — in the way people live, work and play in coming years.

(This is another area where public investment might be needed to lead before private investment catches on.)

Now’s the time to think and talk about possible uses so we know what we want when we see it — so we know which questions to ask and we’re not seduced by something inferior. Let’s not be caught playing copy-cat or catch-up on this one.

Ironically, a lot of the appeal of location-based technology for Dundas is its potential to highlight the City’s history.

Heritage and historical character differentiates London from other cities. We can use as a point of civic pride as well as a selling feature.

A lot of our heritage runs along Dundas Street, or adjacent to it — going all the way back to the day John Graves Simcoe set up camp at the forks of the Askunessippi River (the “antlered river”; we now call it the Thames), where he hoped to establish the capital of Upper Canada.

Et cetera…

I mean, there’s probably at least one good story every 20 feet. Why can’t we use today’s technology to engage with this history on-the-spot, in the present, instead of having to go digging into the archives? (It doesn’t have to cost a lot. Hypothetically a prototype could be done with a free blog and a bunch of QR codes printed off at home).

When our city’s stories are made digital they’re more likely to spread. We have to think of stories as infinite resources or gifts that people are naturally inclined to share; what can we do to ensure they get shared an extra degree or two into people’s social networks?

Stories proliferating outwards means attention, interest and flow coming back in…

But ultimately a digital solution won’t be enough — only part of how we should think of the overall concept.

My vision of Dundas is not a bunch of people staring at Blackberries and blundering into each other. Our focus has to come back to the physical spaces where we meet, work and play.

We also have to think holistically.

There are poverty and substance abuse challenges to address — and not simply brush aside to some other place. There’s also the question of cars and buses, which leads to questions about transportation in general. We have to keep thinking and talking about these issues on a large scale.

What we do on Dundas Street won’t solve those problems, but at the very least we can’t let it become the symbolic centre of something getting worse.

It’s enticing to activists of one cause or another to see Dundas as an opportunity to win a victory. But as the sentimental heart of London we have to be mindful of everyone’s cause. A commercial plaza that wipes out heritage and marginalizes the underprivileged is a net failure. A shelter or clinic that scares away tenants is a net failure.

We should work to improve commerce, social justice, heritage, culture and healthy living as one connected set of initiatives — just as the city ultimately functions as one big system.

What we do on Dundas Street sets a standard for the rest of the city. It has to be part of the narrative, if not the symbolic start or heart of our narrative. Most people don’t visit it every day, but it’s the area most people will visit eventually. Nowhere else has the same symbolic value.

As long as Dundas thrives, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is thriving. If Dundas dies, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is dying.

And finally, it should represent the city’s vitality — and not just our ability to do big public projects. The heart of the city needs genuine dynamism and energy in constant circulation. It’s ok to experiment, make mistakes and even let things happen in messy, unplanned ways.

From what I can tell it looks like the City and Downtown London are doing it right. It won’t be right all at once, but as long as we’re moving forward, we’re doing exactly what cities are supposed to do.

If you liked this post, contact me about writing and developing original, persuasive and enduring ideas with you. Get a copy of my book and visit openconceptual.com for more about my work.

Dundas Street Party photo by Scott Webb at nuwomb.com. Heritage photos via the London Public Library Image Gallery.

Follow the ongoing #mydundas discussion on Twitter.

How to Lose Elections and Alienate People

Brian — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:14:16 +0000

It took me most of my young life to figure this out.

After growing up as a precocious political junkie I got jaded pretty early. I grew up in a rural conservative family but somehow, deep-down I’m an urban technophile who often hopes there’s no problem that walkable neighbourhoods and Twitter hashtags can’t solve.

In high school I went through a phase of believing that communism would work if only the greedy capitalists would stop sabotaging it. Thank god nobody hooked me on Noam Chomsky. By the time I finished university I was in a phase of believing that a pure form of libertarianism would work if only the naive socialists would stop meddling in the free markets. Thank god nobody hooked me on Ayn Rand.

In the course of not committing to anything I’ve learned what it’s like to believe just about everything. The political philosophy I have now is very close to the philosophy of pragmatism. I’ve taken it seriously enough to write a book about it, but most of it’s on an inaccessible theory-level. Thankfully there are more and more real-world cases I can use to explain what I’ve come up with. Yesterday’s municipal elections in Ontario are perfect.

Rob Ford is not someone I’d vote for, and I think Toronto will be worse in many ways with him as mayor. But I know this: there are people who chose to support him and I have to respect that.

Ford’s an especially vivid example but I’ll say the same for everyone here in London and anywhere, at all levels. Think about this as we refocus our attention towards other challenges and debates.

If an issue is controversial enough that people strongly disagree, then assume that your opponents are just as self-assured, just as honest, and just as well-intentioned as you are. They’re not rubbing their hands together, deliberately scheming to screw people over (well, there may be exceptions — but there are always exceptions and almost certainly a few bastards on your side too).

The people who disagree with you probably aren’t evil or stupid, just different. Even if they are stupid and evil, you won’t win them over for long by dictating right and wrong. Stuff like high speed rail and ubiquitous bike lanes might be the best ideas ever — back your proposals up with all the research you want — but what matters most to people isn’t the idea itself, it’s whether they feel like they had freedom to disagree and an opportunity to change the outcome.

Take that sense of relevance away from people and you’ll lose their support — it doesn’t matter what for.

This is the key to everything. Not just in politics but at work, at home, everywhere. People look for ways to feel competent and autonomous; they’ll thrash against whatever or whoever makes them start to feel like robots or puppets. People don’t want to merely follow instructions, no matter how good the instructions are.

Of course believers in ideas often seem to behave like puppets, but how they got that way is important (and remember to think about how you came to believe in your ideas, and that your behaviour probably looks pretty puppet-like to others).

The way beliefs work is that once people identify with them, those ideas and sentiments generate a sense of relevance on one’s behalf, so we don’t mind trading-in autonomy on behalf of your beliefs because it pays off when we see our beliefs winning, or simply when we’re able to live and work within those structures (like soldiers, gratified by the sense of duty, discipline and honour that comes not just despite sacrifice but because of it).

It’s not the physical city we’re wrestling over so much as its soul. That’s probably not news to fighters for justice and change, but keep in mind a lot of your opponents believe they’re just as righteous. It’s not the visible structures we’re trying to build or protect so much as our vision and values, or sense of purpose — all the reassuring little reminders that what we do and what we believe actually means something and makes a difference.

When I was trying to figure this stuff out I was heavily inspired by Jonathan Haidt, the influential moral psychologist. Conveniently, last week Haidt published an excellent article on what motivates the tea-partiers in the US. It can be adapted to understand conservatism more generally and Rob Ford’s victory in Toronto specifically, as well as Joe Fontana’s surprise upset here in London.

Haidt argues that to understand the Tea Party we have to appreciate the protestant work ethic — deeply rooted in North America’s up-by-our-own-bootstraps immigrant lineage (I point out) — by which it’s important that a person be rewarded for hard work and discipline, while people who are irresponsible ought to suffer (and learn from) the consequences of their mistakes.

Here’s how Haidt put it, brilliantly I think:

To understand the anger of the tea-party movement, just imagine how you would feel if you learned that government physicists were building a particle accelerator that might, as a side effect of its experiments, nullify the law of gravity. Everything around us would float away, and the Earth itself would break apart. Now, instead of that scenario, suppose you learned that politicians were devising policies that might, as a side effect of their enactment, nullify the law of karma. Bad deeds would no longer lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break apart. For tea partiers, this scenario is not science fiction. It is the last 80 years of American history.

Substitute the specifics and reflect on the broader notion of “social engineering” and how government programs are perceived by many people — the “silent majority” — as dangerous and naive, even evil.

Rightly or wrongly there’s a common perception that taxes basically transfer justly-earned rewards to people who are cheating or otherwise getting off easy. It’s about fairness — same word but different meaning than the “fairness” used by people on the left.

The belief is that if you earned the reward, it’s only fair that you get to choose how it’s spent. If people want to build houses and businesses in growing suburbs, it’s their money and it’s socially just to give them that freedom. If people want to drive their own car, it’s socially just… etc. If people start perceiving that taxes are too high, then things like streetcars and public art become symbols of injustice and distraction — choices earned by good, hard-working folks being taken away and given to a people who didn’t earn them and therefore aren’t qualified to make them.

I’m as guilty of progressive idealism as anyone, sometimes. It’s easy to get in these bubbles where we talk about hope in great ideas and building a better society, but we still need to engage in dialog, listen to people’s fears (whether warranted or not) and genuinely address their concerns.

Perception is reality in politics. It doesn’t matter if there’s a surplus of downtown parking, for example; if someone has trouble finding the perfect spot one day and perceives there’s not enough parking, if you don’t take them seriously they’re going to think you’re messing with the city’s karma…

Sometimes it feels like you absolutely know we’re right — we don’t just have the best opinion but the only opinion — and if we believe in our hearts that our ideas are valid and our cause is just, we’ll get the outcome you hope for. They have to change their mind because we’re right.

And as elections prove again and again, eventually we get just what we deserve.

Note: this is certainly not the only way to lose elections and alienate people. I haven’t even started to figure out exactly what happened here in London…

The Solar Power Tree and My Civic Dilemma

Brian — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:11:27 +0000

Woke up the other day and read this story about a hideous metal tree (it’s actually London’s logo — maybe one of those things that doesn’t look right on a different scale) with awkwardly-attached solar panels to symbolize London as a “clean and progressive community.”

There were already some complaints on Twitter. When I saw it for myself my first response was to make a wisecrack — in all sincerity I thought it looked like something one might have seen at Expo ’67: an exhibit to make people think “the future” which is already our past.

But then I said “no, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I worried about the effect it would have on my non-London followers’ impressions of this city. It’s not like I’m immensely influential, but what I say does have the potential to reach people and I don’t want them all chuckling about London as one of those stereotypical backwaters that brags about convoluted “world’s biggest” attractions.

And then I realized, gosh aren’t we supposed to be spreading the word about this tree? Isn’t that the whole reason it exists? (It’s featured prominently on the lawn of Tourism London and will be seen, I assume, by most out-of-town visitors coming in off the 401.)

So here I am trying to keep it a secret for London’s sake and London wants the world to see it.

Maybe my crowd isn’t who it’s supposed to appeal to. Fair enough. I do have a cynical bent, like a lot of the people I tend to connect with. I’m sure there are many others who think it’s great. I’m not trying to dictate good and bad taste — though I’m not really interested in keeping my taste a secret either, so here we are. Watch the video at LFPress.com and come to your own conclusion.

But this is just one case in what feels like a higher level problem I’m facing.

On one hand I know it’s not nice to criticize, and in most cases I prefer to see people actually doing things and making mistakes, rather than over-thinking plans and talking about hypotheticals and going nowhere. Criticism like mine can stifle action which is not something I want to do.

On the other hand I think a lot of us have ideas and suggestions that are worth considering and the last thing I want is everyone going along with mediocre projects to get along.

I’ve been trying to figure this out since over a year ago when went through my open government phase, arguing that social media is a natural way to promote London’s culture and conduct ongoing conversations about what’s great and how we can improve.

I also know that we need to maintain real, face-to-face social integrity and that requires a lot of private conversations. But, to me at least, the results of things that don’t emerge through conflict and tension are mostly contrived, ugly, boring and unadventurous. I don’t want to perpetuate the habit of assuming that nothing will happen if we don’t speak up.

This “solar tree” isn’t really that bad. It just happens to be an especially salient and straightforward example. Since its main purpose is symbolic anyway, I might as well use it to represent the more general dilemma I’m trying to deal with:

How should we navigate the narrow space between complacency vs. unhelpful complaints?

I think the answer is something like this: instead of taking the initiative on these types of things so they just seam to appear as if out of the blue one day, government ought to focus on enabling initiative to emerge from the ground up. An empowered base of citizens and private enterprises can produce more ideas (and more constructive criticism early in the process) which results in better ideas eventually being advanced.

For that to really work we need accountability and dynamism built-in. We don’t get great results when we’re all being optimistic and nice to each other; we get great results when we challenge each other to do better. And the process should be documented — i.e. what naturally occurs when we hold (or at least share) these discussions in digital spaces.

I know other people might not share this sentiment, but before I’ll buy into something I want to know the story behind it. I want to be able to follow the breadcrumbs back to the originator and get a sense of their motives, why supporters preferred that idea over its alternatives, what exactly they’re trying to accomplish and how we’re supposed to assess whether the thing actually follows through on its intended promise. I might not agree but at least I’ll get a sense of who they are and how to start reconciling our disagreements.

As things are now, the sense of powerlessness that comes from seeing things land fully-formed down from the sky makes me anxious and cynical — trees are supposed to grow from the ground, up — and I suspect it makes us even more likely to complain, even when things aren’t so bad.

Of course, I could be wrong. But it’s by articulating these thoughts and subjecting them to your scrutiny that they get better.

Btw, if you like this post, consider hiring me to help express your ideas.

What You Might Be Getting Wrong About “Meaningful”

Brian — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:23:03 +0000

It’s great to do “meaningful work” and have “meaningful dialog” and make “meaningful contributions.” But do you really know what it means?

It’s often just a synonym for “good” — which can be , um, good — but at its worst it merely means that something “feels good” or “resembles good.” When it’s done right, “meaningful” means benefiting or empowering others and serving a purpose greater than oneself.

But even that can be problematic — or at least unsustainable.

Because unless the purpose of a “meaningful” project or idea is clear and progress towards it can be accounted for, then doing “meaningful” things devolves into a kind of moral hedonism or ideological narcissism. We start to help people in ways that hold them back (e.g. make them dependent on our help) and cling to ideas that are outworn and counterproductive.

Without realizing it, you might be helping people not because it really helps them but because it satisfies your need to feel masterful and relevant. Likewise, your ideals and values might be parasitically biasing you, leading you to make problems in the world conform to your ideas rather than adapting ideas to handle the world’s problems.

If helping others and serving a greater purpose is worth doing, then it’s worth doing in a way that enables us (and others) to see in real terms whether our efforts are really accomplishing anything or not.

It’s partly because good people can sometimes make mistakes — because everybody does (and believe it or not, a lot of the most reviled people genuinely believe they’re doing good) — and we need ways to recognize and correct these too-common but forgivable errors.

More dangerously, when a “meaningful” idea or project isn’t grounded and accountable to concrete outcomes, it’s easy for free-loaders and opportunists to ape the “meaningful” rhetoric.

E.g. I doubt there’s a single despot in the world who doesn’t insist they are their people’s champion of “freedom”; the slimiest online marketing douchebags preach gospels of “community”; and in our local election the rhetoric of “change” has ubiquitously and perniciously replaced substance.

It isn’t enough just to vilify those shameful abusers of language (“he’s just a greedy idiot who doesn’t mean what he says”); as long as the distinction is framed sentimentally or ideologically then the worst people can just spin things around and return the accusation.

Worse, if you aren’t carefully keeping your course according to real landmarks (and clear goals), then there’s a danger that you might stray from your purpose without realizing it. You might have done it already. Maybe your opponents have a point.

So remember that doing something meaningful (without the quotes) means doing something that’s a means to something else — something better — that others can clearly recognize and use to ground their own participation.

Before meaningful stuff can prosper and displace short-sighted greed, we have to prove that it isn’t just another short-sighted kind of self-gratification.

Inspired by: When Going Viral Is Not Engagement by Umair Haque.

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Brian — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:07:10 +0000

I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort of a wannabe screenwriter myself — just enough to have wrestled a lot with attempts to balance accuracy and meaning. I look at this as just being the Internet’s turn to be misrepresented by Hollywood. I mean, does Hollywood even get itself right?

Sadly, truth isn’t as important as we like to believe. If truth was important, Hollywood wouldn’t exist. What matters most in the long run is a compelling story.

Apply a kind of Darwinian principle to it: there’s no iron law dictating that the stories that survive have to be true; they just have to be coherent, attractive, adaptable, resilient, and reproductive (of course truth helps most of those, but it isn’t necessary and is sometimes counterproductive when based on complex facts that the audience isn’t familiar with).

“Fidelity to storytelling” essentially means giving the audience something they can take home with them and use in their own social interactions. That’s what makes stories and movies successful: people can “remix” them into their own personal, social stories and conversations (think of how much meaning can be communicated with a single quote from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare).

Here’s the irony: this is pretty close to the principle on which the social web works. It’s the insight that Zuckerberg understood early on: content is merely a means for people to connect; create a platform where people can exchange social objects and “likes” and the network generates its own value.

If The Social Network was absolutely true to reality, far fewer people would see it and even fewer would have much to say about it. It would lose its social function. It would only serve a small elite that simply wants to preserve their authority and control, afraid that the ignorant masses might make things impure and imperfect…

Sound familiar?

There’s a bit of “what goes around comes around” here. Some of the most outspoken proponents of blogs, wikis, and creative commons — e.g. Jeff Jarvis and Lawrence Lessig — are also the most outspoken critics of The Social Network’s creative liberties.

As far as I’m concerned, creative liberty is creative liberty.

Either we let ignorant, bitter trolls comment on news articles and write Hollywood pictures or we don’t. Either someone has to be an expert to participate or they don’t.

We could say, “fine, they have a right — but then we have a right to challenge them with criticism,” which I 100% approve of.

But there’s another irony here. Read this post by John Hagel — with lots of interesting points and a conclusion with which I sentimentally agree — and see if you pick up the dissonance:

… the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

But the new media’s caricatures of the filmmaker’s motives seem every bit as distorted as the caricatures described in the film’s reviews, and both sides are advocating on behalf of a revolution or regime. It isn’t one constructed old media narrative vs. the righteous Internet; it’s two narratives clashing with each other — both resorting to simplistic cause-effect explanations and two dimensional characterizations.

Jeff Jarvis accounted for the filmmakers’ motives with statements like ”old media resists change” and “these guys want to deny the internet credit for it.” Scott Rosenberg quotes Mark Harris’s description of the movie as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” and added he thought “it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail.”

I think those are fairly valid, but far from the whole picture. I can’t imagine Sorkin single-mindedly rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sticking it to the Internet any more than I can imagine Zuckerberg creating Facebook simply out of spite.

They’re handy caricatures for telling more compelling stories. We couldn’t do much without them.

Of course a Hollywood movie isn’t the most generative platform — but then again, neither is Facebook.

If we keep working at it, eventually we’ll stumble on the right story.

Journalists, Politicians & Citizens: Who’s Responsible for What?

Brian — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:26:38 +0000

We had an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day, about the lack of attention given by the media to lesser-known election candidates.

Partially aside, it was the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see for a while — a lively backchannel discussion about how local politics news is covered — and I hope this is the start of more meaningful conversation that generates momentum, character, continuity… and actually goes somewhere.

Here’s how this one started. Joe Ruscitti, newly confirmed editor-in-chief at the London Free Press, fired up the old Editor’s Blog to poll readers about perceptions of bias in their mayoral campaign coverage, generating the following reaction from commenter Noah:

This has been a large source of frustration for Eric Southern’s mayoral campaign, as I’m sure it has been for others. You need to look no further than the August 18th article written by Patrick Maloney. The article starts by introducing Eric as a the latest candidate and then proceeds to dismiss his campaign entirely, along with the other 9 people running at the time it was written. This was entirely without cause or justification, unsupported by logical argument, without any examination of his platform. Eric was first to post his platform online, first to propose a serious vision for the city, but was shot down before he even had a chance to introduce himself to the people of London.

I know Noah and I met Eric once and I think they’re both good guys. Southern has ideas that are worth serious consideration and I like some of the creativity in his campaign (e.g. encouraging anyone to photoshop his picture; I’m not sure how that will turn out but I like the initiative).

But…

A sensible platform in itself isn’t leadership. Ideas aren’t leadership. Ideas are everywhere; everybody has them. Platforms and ideas don’t qualify anyone to be mayor. It’s what someone does with ideas — whether their own or others’ — that really matters.

If a candidate can’t make an impression on the local City Hall reporter, best of luck balancing all of the egos in council meetings, standing up to unions and developers (or anyone else), unifying citizens around a coherent vision, persuading the provincial and federal governments to fund programs in London, selling the city abroad as a place to do business, or any of the things that mayors do every day.

I don’t mean to pick on Noah’s comment. It might have had some effect. Whether or not it did, Patrick Maloney wrote up a piece on London’s lesser-known mayoral candidates. Between the lines it reads like a clever exhibit of reasons why every candidate does not deserve equal space (which is exactly how I would have tried to write it too).

(I was going to list their shortcomings here but it got to be too long and depressing.)

If you’re a somewhat competent and organized wild-card candidate, enough diligence and persistence can eventually build a reputation and more frequent mentions in the media, and maybe even being the focus of some articles.

That’s how someone like Toronto’s Sarah Thomson can go from being effectively dismissed behind the phrase, “other candidates include,” to being the subject of influential endorsements and first tier billing on high profile television debates.

Or think of Barack Obama. He was relatively unknown in 2004. He became president four years later not with ideas and complaints about “fair coverage” but by doing what leaders do: he commanded people’s attention and earned a reputation, he created a story that journalists and citizens wanted to tell, he recruited a stellar team and delegated tasks to build a strong organization, he solicited advice from a wide range of prominent citizens and turned those strangers into supporters — not just supporters at the polls but people who opened doors and generated support along the way.

Like it or not, the best politicians tend to emerge through positions of prominence. That’s where people learn the soft skills needed to do the job. It isn’t for everyone. Also consider, as recent research shows, power changes people. A lot of swell folks turn into assholes once they’re given authority. It isn’t hard to imagine some of the fringe candidates becoming downright dictatorial if they were ever elected. Good intentions and a few decent ideas aren’t enough.

In many ways, the person with the best ideas might be the least suited for politics. Charm consistently beats intellect — if not at first, at least eventually. Even Plato’s thinking (the foundation of Western political philosophy) was painfully ineffective in the practical realm of politics.

Now if ideas don’t come from politicians, where do they come from?

They come from anywhere, at any time. Ideas come from all of us. Ideas come from “the community” — from experts and people with first-hand experience, as well as from novices (who haven’t learned enough to be biased by outdated assumptions), people who are passionate, people who couldn’t care less but see things differently, people who’re already invested in a challenge (financially, emotionally, professionally), and people who have nothing to lose — in the process of conversation, not as an abstract moral good, but as a practical means of filtering out mistakes, recognizing biases, turning ideas into actions, and (this is important) following up to identify emerging opportunities for correction and improvement.

This is where social media comes back into the picture.

People come up with brilliant ideas every day — in coffee shops, in the shower, around the water cooler, wherever — but they evaporate. Nobody’s around to hear them, or the people who are there don’t have the right knowledge or contacts to push the ideas forward. But when something is shared online, it’s “capital” that people can continue to build on later.

When we had the Twitter conversation about media coverage on Wednesday, people came and went and came back and everything we said was still there for everyone else to see. The next day I heard one of my arguments used on the radio (close enough to my wording to know it was cribbed from my tweet). Nothing groundbreaking but it’s a concrete example of an idea spreading. Maybe someone who heard it on the radio is in a position to make something more out of it, or maybe someone hears it and thinks “what a stupid thing to say; what he should have said is…” and it becomes something better, which gets passed along and so on.

The biggest problem with that [informal side of the] process right now is that most of it is still offline and unaccounted for. It isn’t concrete. People don’t really “get it” because they can’t visualize it and can’t see how — for example — Bob Smith’s tweet about introducing more rigourous nomination criteria turned into a conversation that got people thinking and researching what other provinces require.

Still a very modest example, but there are tools being developed (like ThinkUp and Storify) to document these conversations more coherently, and we’re still just finding our legs on these platforms.

Another challenge is traditional media constraints. There are too many stops in the conversation. When a print or radio person repeats an idea without pointing back to the source, they’re not just preventing others from finding and participating in the conversation, they’re subtly encouraging their audience to do the same. It perpetuates an atmosphere in which people hold onto their ideas rather than exchanging them.

On that I’d recommend the speech Felix Salmon gave at a recent CJR breakfast, on “teaching journalists to read“:

We need much more critical reading, and we also, desperately, need much more linking from Old Media to outside sources. Links aren’t something cute to relegate to a blog ghetto — they’re an intrinsic part of what journalism has to be in the 21st Century. And most journalists are very, very, bad at linking.

Another benefit is that it might encourage citizens to exercise more discipline in what they say online, aspiring to have it taken seriously by credible journalists and prominent politicians in conversations that really matter.

And maybe then people like Eric Southern won’t think they have to run for mayor to have their ideas heard and treated seriously.

It would be great if politicians were better at linking too, but it doesn’t fall in their area of responsibility. They’re responsible for turning the ideas into action and results. It’s journalists who are responsible for how ideas and stories are accounted for and shared; journalists have to lead by example here.

As for the rest of us, I think our responsibility is to think of ourselves as politicians or journalists (or both) in the making. Even if we don’t intend to become politicians or journalists ourselves, if we care about the civic sphere we should think of our ideas and opinions directly and explicitly contributing to the same production line that the professionals are on.

Above all we need to reinforce the notion that it’s worth putting a little extra effort into these conversations, because the next idea you have might be one that gets passed up the line — might improve both the common good and your personal stature.

What My Nephew Taught Me About Nurturing Change

Brian — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:51:04 +0000

It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday.

Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the rest of us pretty chipper too. It sounds like circus music: jaunty and jingly with a lot of irreverent little flourishes.

We laughed about it but we also couldn’t help bouncing and whistling along like goofballs.

I have no idea what effect the music has on the baby — I’m pretty sure nobody does, exactly — but I do know the effect we had on the baby, via the effect the music had on us. All of our playful behaviour affected by the music creates a positive environment of positive energy and contagious smiles.

I don’t presume to know anything about infant development, but think about it as an analogy for nurturing growth and positive change in the grown-up world.

Sometimes we try to change others directly without changing our own behaviour (hat tip @jamesshelley). Without changing ourselves, we might keep sending signals that trigger precisely those behaviours in others we want to change!

I’m thinking this way after reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip & Dan Heath. They astutely observe that, “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” Good people can do bad things and smart people can do stupid things when we’re surrounded by signals that induce that behaviour. By changing those signals, our behaviour follows.

As the Heaths say, change requires tweaking the environment and building habits before “rallying the herd.”

For more sustainable change and growth we need to address the environmental factors that affect everyone’s behaviour, especially our own.

Then we get into cycles of mutual reinforcement that become more resilient and genuine — like the way our cooing and goofy faces make babies smile and their smiles make us even happier in return…

[Note: I'm not always this mushy (must be leftover baby effects). Don't be sad if I follow this up with a pessimistic post about knowing whether our changes are the right changes...]

Consider the changes we hope to see happen. Forget how right we are and what’s wrong with others. Start by turning the dial that will create that change in yourself.

Voting is Contagious

Brian — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:26:48 +0000

The gist of Connected, the excellent book about the power of social networks, is that the most important factor in whether a person will do something — e.g. donate to charity, gain weight, steal a car, or simply smile — is whether the people around them are doing it too.

It isn’t true of everything, but yes it certainly is true of voting, according to the book:

It is well known that when you decide to vote it also increases the chance that our friends, family, and coworkers will vote. This happens in part because they imitate you… and in part because you make direct appeals to them. And we know that direct appeals work… This simple, old-fashioned, person-to-person technique is still the primary tool used by the sprawling political machines in modern-day elections.

Interestingly, authors Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler manage to address the “rational” notion that one person’s vote doesn’t really count (in a purely rational sense, it doesn’t) by showing that one vote counts because of the network effects it can cause: when you vote, your friends are more likely to vote too, so “instead of each of us having only one vote, we effectively have several.”

They took the probabilities found in existing research (i.e. if one person you have regular discussions about politics with votes — people have about 5 such “partners,” on average — then you are 15% more likely to vote too) and plugged them into computer models to see how one person’s vote might “cascade” through social networks. On average, one vote would generate about three more votes. And in some cases, cascades reached as high as one hundred additional votes!

(They found that the more polarized a network is — which is to say, the more connected we are to like-minded people while being less connected to people with different views — then cascades will have a greater effect. Results would also depend on how “central” the first voter is, i.e. if their friends each have a lot of friends, then their vote will affect influence more people at two and three degrees of separation.)

Perhaps the most interesting study was done by researchers who went to the doors of two-person households encouraging people to vote. As a control group they encouraged other households to recycle. They found after the election that people who answered the door and were encouraged to vote were 10% more likely to do so than those encouraged to recycle. Most interesting was that their partners and housemates — though the researchers didn’t speak to them directly — were also more likely to vote (about 6% more).

It’s important that voter mobilization initiatives take note of this research. Otherwise efforts that aim to have a mass effect may be counterproductive: i.e. the time spent pulling people together to plan and manage big initiatives might be better spent spreading out across neighbourhoods and engaging people where they’re already congregating.

I suspect that programs like Rock the Vote work insofar as they serve as venues or points of reference for communications between individuals, or for people to spread the message to more of their friends. For example, an event can bring people together, but if the people at the event aren’t saying, “I’m voting and so should you” — not just to others at the event but to other people in their network — then it’s just theatre. Likewise, if everybody participating in the event was already going to vote anyway, it’s an exercise in mutual self-affirmation.

In other words, the message needs to be contagious: the question isn’t how to mobilize people, it’s what do people need in order to mobilize their friends…

One way of thinking about voter mobilization is something like a “two-step flow” approach, based on findings (note: from the 1940′s) that political messages in mass media didn’t affect everybody directly, but rather affected “opinion leaders” who then spread the message through their social networks. (People who have read The Tipping Point may be reminded here of connecters, mavens & salesmen).

I don’t necessarily subscribe to that theory exactly as it is, but it certainly has heuristic value: instead of thinking in terms of what the message is, think in terms of what people will do with it to ensure the message will be contagious and spread through the second and third degrees of participants’ networks.

Tell a story people will tell their friends…

Note: To readers in the London Ontario area, some voter mobilization ideas were discussed at ChangeCamp and a group is gathering to try developing some of those projects on Tuesday, July 6 at Gig’s Grillhouse, 6:00 pm.

Here’s Nicholas Christakis’s TED talk about some of the ideas in Connected — notice that headline writers loved the obesity angle: newspapers are good at writing stories people will want to tell their friends…

Police at G20, and After

Brian — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:02:50 +0000

They’ve done a good job of making moderate people critical. I tend to give police the benefit of the doubt, and I was one of the people thinking, “well it’s not an easy task” last week, but the way complaints have been handled (i.e. not) since then is deplorable.

Both the police and people in all levels of government seem fairly confident that the letter of the law was adhered to, but that isn’t enough. Their faith (or gamble) in technicalities leaves two wounds festering:

our perception of police
our awareness of the police’s perception of themselves

On the first point, their performance last week has diminished what many of us think about their competence, courage, and trustworthiness. I don’t even live in Toronto, but I find my attitude towards police very different than it was two weeks ago…

On the matter of competence, the property destruction that was allowed to occur and the hundreds of innocent citizens who were arbitrarily detained makes the cops look clownish. I was dumbstruck watching events unfold at Queen & Spadina Sunday night. And the fact that nobody could provide any explanation of what was happening might be tactical (being unpredictable and withholding information can be effective… or so I gather from TV), but those tactics work best when there’s, like, real opponents; but used against an non-cohesive group of sightseers just looks moronic.

On the matter of courage, I don’t doubt that there are many brave cops, and I don’t forget that they risk their lives every day — not knowing if the next car they pull over or the next domestic disturbance call might be deadly — but last week we saw police take every possible precaution to protect themselves and virtually no risk to protect Torontonians in their own neighbourhoods. The only time police didn’t outnumber everyone else in their radius were the few times that police were actually needed, and then they vanished.

In one video I saw a couple of security guards challenge a guy trying to throw a magazine box through their building’s front window. All it took was one lunge and the guy went scurrying away. Likewise, some random samaritan with a camera around his neck tackled a punk coming out of the Bell store. After kind of laying on him for a few seconds they both looked like they didn’t know what to do, so the samaritan got up and the punk dragged himself away in shame. Imagine what those brave souls could have accomplished with riot gear and hundreds of others able to provide backup almost instantly…

And the cops lied, which makes it harder to trust them. It’s going to going to give conspiracy theorists and overboard state-haters some extra room to play with — e.g. I won’t be surprised if I see more tweets like, “The chief of police says they didn’t interfere at polling stations on behalf of the fascist agenda of global capitalism… WHY SHOULD WE BELIEVE HIM?! #policestate”

All of this affects their ability to do their job. I expect they’ve bought themselves an increase in the number of “I know my rights” smart-asses with cameras they’ll have to deal with.

As for what we know about what police think of themselves, we know they think they’re above all of this — as if none of this matters.

People make mistakes, and sometimes plans go badly — even the best plans. It happens to everyone, in every institution. The people who can’t say “we can do better” are the people I worry about. If professional athletes can say it, public servants can say it too: Toronto, Ontario, and Canada deserve better. [Update: speaking of owning up to mistakes, that last "can't" was originally pubished as "can." My bad.]

It’s wrong of me to paint all police with the same brush like this. No doubt a lot of cops performed their duties last weekend with discipline, integrity, and courtesy. Unfortunately the good ones have to feel pressure from critics too. Hopefully they pass it on to those who deserve it and need to change.

G20/G8 Protests: Getting Beyond Mutually Reinforced Failure

Brian — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 23:53:41 +0000

Let’s be honest: G7, G8, and G20 meetings have historically accomplished very little. They’re big, expensive opportunities for powerful people to get their pictures taken, trying to remind everyone how important they are (or how important they suppose themselves to be).

We’ve known this for a long time.

We should also admit that the corresponding protests, for their part, have accomplished even less [and I certainly don't prefer pushing high level correspondence among world leaders further into their backchannels; let them meet face-to-face for a bit of social grooming and relationship-building like any other professional network].

Why do the protests keep happening? I think we could say the people going into those are just as affected by a desire to be photographed looking (and feeling) like they’re doing something important.

I mean, I can’t really say I “blame” them — it’s just human nature.

And when so much of our world is sterilized and controlled by faceless conglomerates that co-exist with opaque networks of political elites (or whatever terms you want to use) doing senseless things, a lot of us start feeling like we don’t have a voice unless we take to the streets en masse and shout.

There seems to be a general sentiment that, “Well, at least we’re doing something…”

Sometimes “doing something” and taking action comes at a high opportunity cost. It can (and often does) actually prevent more effective things from being done — or at least imagining and working towards more generative accomplishments (I’m addressing both the politicians and the protesters with that criticism — and I should probably add police to that as well).

Now security costs look somewhat more justified, Torontonians are pissed about vandalism and violence they’re seeing on the streets of one of the world’s most peaceful cities, and the image good people crusading for social justice is (rightly or wrongly) being tarnished (for now).

No doubt most of the protesters have the best of intentions and feel passionately about making the world a better place. That’s excellent. But they still share responsibility for the outcome.

We can’t keep blaming bad guys for everything that goes wrong in the world. If we really want to make things better we need to be smarter, more foresighted, more pragmatic, and more compromising. There will always be bad guys, it’s the outcome of what we do about them that matters.

It’s absurd to suggest that politicians and other delegates can’t have good intentions too. Sure they act like a bunch of douchebags most of the time [and the G20 security arrangements seemed overly antagonistic: justifying the protests just as the protests in turn justified the aggressive security], and they fail to deliver on the vast majority of their promises, but does anybody have a shred of evidence that anyone else could do a better job?

Honestly. Put aside particular problems and failures and seriously think on a big scale about what the alternatives are.

The simple fact is, making decisions that affect millions (if not billions) of people is a very, very difficult thing to do. And knowing the right answers is the easy part. Getting other people to agree is even harder. Turning ideas into sustainable systems is even harder than that, and keeping them going is more difficult still.

But I take it the people leading the protests think they’re more capable. So what’s their track record for managing large, complex initiatives?

Well, let’s look at what happened today.

If plans for a rally with a few thousand people results in failure, how can we trust their thinking about what’s best for millions of Canadians and billions of people worldwide?

I appreciate that most protesters were peaceful, and they were spoiled by a few bad apples. I’m seeing a lot of comments on Twitter like, “Don’t confuse the protesters with the anarchists!”

And I fully agree, on a sentimental level.

On a practical level, isn’t every single thing we try to do going to be susceptible to exploiters and free-riders with selfish, misguided intentions.

How we deal with them in seeing our plans through to fruition is ultimately what matters.

Not that we should overlook the waste and suffering caused by the political institutions we have now, but we need to recognize and improve on the progress those represent, not disparage them and vilify their practitioners for not looking as righteous as our perfect ideals and dreams.

It doesn’t matter whose ideas sound nicest. If you can’t prevent a few exploiters and thugs from undermining your whole plan, your plan will ultimately be no good to anyone.

That’s why we have power structures [including corporate ones, and the networks of transactions that support them], legal systems and police forces — flawed as they may be. It’s why authorities have to act like ignorant, heartless, phony assholes. Unfortunately there are always going to be people trying to exploit people’s good intentions, and we need jerks to deal with those jerks.

Unless you can point to something that has worked better on anything close to a large scale, it’s an unfortunate fact we need to cope with while we painstakingly work out incremental improvements.

My own hopes, for now, are invested in the promise of collaborative democracy. It involves articulating our ideas and subjecting them to scrutiny and refinement by others, following through with real solutions to practical problems, which we then test and improve collectively, objectively— as in science.

(See Creating an Open Society)

This post is itself kind of a demonstration of that process. You can point to real evidence to help me correct or improve what I’ve said: real, positive accomplishments that protests (or summits) have made are welcome. So are suggestions for new opportunities.

However, I know a lot of people are sentimentally attached to the idea of fighting (rather than creating) for social justice. I can’t say I dislike them for it — it is, after all, an admirable cause — but that approach only reinforces the cycle of failure: it justifies and amplifies the perceived need for police barriers and political smoke and mirrors.

This vicious cycle has been perpetuated at global summits for over a decade now. It looks like nothing more than a big, expensive game of cat-and-mouse — or a playground battle: a grown-up continuation of the age-old war between “slackers” & jocks.

When are we going to learn to get beyond it?

I think those of us who see both sides owe it to ourselves not to be passive about this anymore. Don’t hesitate to call bullshit on someone — whether they’re a politician or a protester — promoting something for theatrical value at the expense of something more generative.

Certainly as Canadians, we owe it to ourselves to do better. We can’t call ourselves the world’s peacekeepers if we can’t keep peace in our own streets.

Learning to Be Open By Default

Brian — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:20:30 +0000

This is my first post following ChangeCamp London (there will likely be one or two more) in which I’m suggesting points for probable improvement: mostly things I actively promoted through the planning process, and which I hope to see emphasized more in the future.

This post argues for the need to be open throughout the process. There are some specific benefits I’d like to highlight:

Efficiency: the more eyes on a project, the faster you’ll find mistakes (per “Linus’s Law“) and opportunities (per Zittrain).
Simplicity: assume everything is already public and you stop having to worry about it; by comparison, managing who’s allowed to know what and trying to protect everything costs a lot of time, attention, and lawyers’ fees — and in a digital age is often futile — that could otherwise be used to create value.
Accountability: a preemptive strike against critics and mudslingers (though without context and narrative, people might lock onto one or two pieces of info that look bad on their own).
Sustainability: individuals who select their own role in a project to suit their strengths and recognize their personal contribution are more motivated, and the group as a whole is more adaptive and resilient.

Obviously not everything can be done openly, but it’s a lot easier to manage balanced approaches when we have experience at both extremes (i.e. we need to make the mistakes and appreciate the benefits of both in order to fully understand the nuances in play when we combine them into new projects and enterprises).

ChangeCamp ought to be the vanguard of openness & engagement in the city. Wherever we think politicians and City Hall should be on a scale of openness, we need to set an aggressive example several degrees further along. If, for whatever reason, ChangeCamp can’t be the vanguard (i.e. maybe I’ve grossly misinterpreted the example set by ChangeCamp Toronto) then we ought be using the momentum from ChangeCamp to develop something else to serve that purpose.

We need to create examples that are open-by-default from start to finish: assume that everybody can listen, actively provide opportunities for people to do so, actually adapt to new information as it comes in, learn continuously in dynamic social contexts, iterate the general aspects of the initiative to embody new contributions coming in at each phase, and when some exceptionally sensitive or mundane work needs to be done we can always choose to be strategically closed for those specific tasks and decisions.

The experience with ChangeCamp London was, after an initial burst of self-organization (nudged by Mark Kuznicki, ChangeCamp’s founder), the process in London reverted back to a closed-by-default mindset: we became mired for almost two months as we spun hypothetical scenarios around in isolation. Things improved immensely, but there’s still a lot to learn before we really master the open approach.

My understanding is that in those early stages there were worries that openness would make decisions too difficult — though nobody actually advocated seeking community consensus on every single decision (I’d already called attention to the hazards of trying to do that, not just on this blog but later in print as well). There was a misunderstanding of the difference between the providing information about the process (good) vs. explicitly framing requests for feedback on everything (ineffective).

When you say, “hey, here’s what we’re doing” and indicate that people are welcome to respond and participate, then you’ve provided an opportunity for people to self-select (i.e. conversely for organizers it’s an opportunity to start identifying people who are most committed, or have special attributes to contribute, to start nudging people into complementary roles), to start developing a deeper sense of responsibility for the outcome, and maybe point out potential problems and opportunities.

Maybe you get a few bad suggestions but addressing those is a part of doing things now: at least the interactions will be out where everyone can judge for themselves.

(Charlene Li’s Open Leadership has a lot of practical guidance on maintaining confidence while relinquishing control. As in Groundswell, she advises establishing the objectives before choosing strategies and tools…)

It also means the process is accountable — so for instance, if someone now wants to claim that ChangeCamp was designed to promote a particular group’s agenda (not inconceivable, given the political atmosphere and the fact that “perception is reality” in politics), we can refer back to show how the process developed over time, instead seeming to emerge fully-formed out of the ether one day, casting long shadows of doubt and providing the impetus for potential opponents to speculate about our aims and motives.

(We witnessed the kind of commotion and conflict this approach can cause when ActionLondon launched.)

As long as key organizers make accountably sound decisions and are willing to listen to people who have the best knowledge that applies, when appropriate, then there won’t be many complaints about the few closed discussions and unilateral decisions that have to happen sometimes.

What everyone wants is a way to contribute according to their unique interests and abilities; people will happily defer as long as they’re occupied in a role that’s personally gratifying. But if people feel thwarted or ineffective, then they tend to become more generally agitated, critical, uncooperative, and apathetic.

As a local example of a good, fairly open approach, I’ll point to Kevin Van Lierop’s PARK(ing) Day initiative (Kevin or anyone can correct me if I’ve misrepresented this slightly):

after hearing about the worldwide movement and being inspired to try it in London, he started mentioning it on Twitter and in conversations;
based on the feedback he got from that, he decided to present about it at PodCamp;
based on the validation & momentum generated there, he organized an orientation & brainstorming session that was open to anyone to attend;
people who attended that session felt a greater sense of responsibility to help make it work by investing their time, knowledge, and interpersonal capital to grow the network…

Kevin doesn’t seek everyone’s endorsement for every decision. But the fact that it’s open enough for anyone interested to stumble upon it, then self-select and participate in a way that’s appropriate to them, then nobody resents Kevin’s authority. It’s also working because Kevin has been listening to feedback rather than arguing that people’s suggestions are wrong.

It’s also essential to be aware of the unique knowledge, interests, and style of the people you’re asking for suggestions (if and when you do ask explicitly).

If you make an open-ended request to me (for example) for feedback or advice, you’re almost certainly going to get advice about the big picture, your project’s vision, concept, and strategy — because that’s what my background and competence is — rather than what kind of sandwiches to serve or what font to use on the website. My advice on tactical and cosmetic things like that will have a negative value to both of us: the information will be bad and I’ll feel uncomfortable giving it. Other people might be delighted to offer advice about food or web design. It all depends on asking the right person — which in a lot of cases means asking nobody in particular, but rather just getting it out and responding appropriately to whatever signals come back from people.

More positively, by being open-by-default, Kevin is feeding off of the energy that’s freely circulating about PARK(ing) Day as word gets around and cycles back to him in the form of inquiries, encouragement, and offers to help. Like a financial investment, it’s working for him while he’s busy with other things.

People are more willing to share it with others because they aren’t afraid they might be over-sharing, stepping on Kevin’s toes, undermining his leadership, or violating his confidence (notwithstanding what might be said in private conversations): virtually everything’s already out there.

Note that being closed has important functions too. There are often good reasons not to be open.

Other than the obvious need to respect confidentiality and not affect negotiations in progress (e.g. not talking about a specific venue until arrangements are finalized), withholding info before formal announcements is an effective way to generate a spike in attention and enthusiasm. But for something like ChangeCamp I’m not sure that’s necessarily beneficial. I’d prefer to have a relatively small number of participants who’ve seen the process develop, understand the aims, and feel personally responsible for the outcome, rather than draw a larger but perhaps less committed crowd.

No doubt we can (and should) have both kinds of events — workshops and spectacles — just as we ultimately need to combine closed with open approaches. And we should continue to discuss the relative merits and applications of each.

Nobody expected ChangeCamp London to be a perfect event: everybody expected it to lead to ongoing conversations and projects.

As we proceed, I hope we’ll be more explicit about our objectives, so we can have grounded conversations about best practices as we expand the network and build momentum — as efficiently, simply, accountably, and sustainably as possible.

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.

What I’m Reading

Brian — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 17:02:47 +0000

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration.
A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which are cut-and-pasted and paraphrased from others (in most cases the reader has to flip to the end-notes to learn who).
My must-read list has grown by at least a dozen books after this…

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail

I picked this up from the library a couple of days ago while wandering aimlessly through the stacks, kind of frustrated that I’m having trouble being interested in anything. I gravitated to the shelf of “big history” something I’ve wanted to read for a few years and finally got nudged towards after watching the doc based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel last week (excellent, btw).
It combines history, anthropology, neuroscience (and other disciplines) into a very fascinating account of how we cope with “deep time” — i.e. all those hundreds of thousands (or millions, or billions, depending on where you decide to start your story) of years of so-called “pre-history.” The notion of a Deluge was a way to deal with all of that uncertainty: people didn’t have to explain much of what came before (other than the cause of the Deluge itself) because it wouldn’t have effected anything that happened since. More recently, historians talked about the Dark Ages as a point at which history was apparently reset. I’ve noticed the First World War can be presented with Deluge-like qualities in some accounts of 20th century history.
No doubt the time we’re living in right now will have the same sort of effect on future people’s historical consciousness…

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

I skimmed this at the book store enough to know I’ll have to sit down and actually read it. It isn’t merely a rant or an expanded version of his famous Atlantic essay. The takeaway from most of the reviews I’ve read is that Carr makes a fairly good case, but he leaves some very big questions open: “So what?” and “What should we do about it?”
Ultimately I think when we try to answer questions like those, we’ll end up discarding much of Carr’s argument as essentially moot. At the very least it’s supposed to be well written and apparently a pleasure to read, and I’m grateful we have at least one source of lucid and somewhat sensible dissent…

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Not out in Canada until next week, so I can’t say much about it.
Shirky’s concept of “cognitive surplus” (which he presented at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo) was a great boost to my general point in Truth, Will & Relevance. I get a sense that my thinking is very close to Shirky’s — albeit lacking his brilliance in formulating simple phrases to convey complex, moving ideas.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler

The promotional push behind this book focused on their “obesity is contagious” idea.
The single-word title led me to expect Connected to be a the kind of non-fiction book that only needs to be 25 pages long but stretches out with + 175 pages of anecdotes and repetition, but there’s a lot of sociological substance in it — more like Bowling Alone than Blink.

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida

Skimming the book and reading the reviews suggests it brings together much of what Florida was blogging around the worst of the economic crisis in 2008 (much of which I re-blogged here).
I’m honestly having trouble motivating myself to read something I assume I’m already in full agreement with — though I certainly recommend it to anyone else…

Notes on Satire

Brian — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 17:42:17 +0000

I worry I enjoy ambiguity, irony, “meta” and satire a little too much.

I’m worried my last post about copyright laws might seem too resentful (it is somewhat resentful — regretfully) because I genuinely sympathize with all sides.

In the case of copyright, I appreciate the economic [and social!] stability it enables, and I want to explore ways to sustain that in the most generative way possible.

I usually resort to satire when I want to take a side in a debate but I also want to recognize the contradictions and negative aspects of what I support (as well as the other side’s positive points). To really commit to something requires a kind of blindness: a willingness to lie to oneself, or circumscribe and settle on an arbitrarily small selection of imperfect knowledge.

We pick a side and then we find the facts and arguments to support it, unconsciously overlooking contrary evidence and considerations. Then we argue. Nuance gets trampled and kicked aside. We get pissed-off and energized by the confrontation, and the confrontation itself generates a sense of justification for our original ideas, and we come back harder.

A Huntsville area man was on the CBC news last week saying he was going to join the protest against the G8 summit because he didn’t want protests in his quiet community. Activists are seeing security efforts as verification of their cause — or rather, the barriers become a focal point that galvanizes a broad variety of grievances.

Then security folks point at that sentiment and say, “See, this is why we need all of these barriers.”

I have to laugh…

Some of us see these ironies and nuances and have trouble picking a side. It makes us awful leaders — and even worse followers. So we criticize and try to triangulate positions towards some kind of resolution (or dissolution) of the conflict.

But sometimes I find myself already within the conflict — as is the case with debates about the Web (see my first attempt at satire) — and I feel obligated to defend or promote my own interests. I have a hard time doing it with blinders on. The urge to articulate the nuances is still too strong.

It isn’t necessarily due to a higher degree of integrity; I think I just enjoy identifying and describing situations that are paradoxical or otherwise absurd.

And then again, maybe that sense of enjoyment points towards a deeper love of truth.

Satire Humour helps sweep away stock ideas. Occasionally events happen that either, in their purity, can’t be rationalized — like a guy getting hit in the balls – or create tensions that compel us to reconceive our stocks of ideas.

Sometimes the process hurts. The instinct to laugh and satirize ideas is like an intellectual anesthetic: it helps us work through these painful episodes, rather than letting wounds fester until they’re inoperable.

Besides, ultimately our victories afford us the freedom to share laughs. Let’s make time to pause and laugh along the way.

In Praise of Copyright

Brian — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:42:46 +0000

Yesterday’s announcement of new copyright legislation in Canada was met with the expected array of complaints from complainers, aka bloggers, slackers, n’er-do-wells, social deviants, hipsters, and cultural parasites. They received the news as an affront to their supposed “freedom” to exchange intellectual and aesthetic work and reshape existing artifacts into new “creations.”

The dispute comes down to different perceptions of “rights.” One side claims primacy of the right to share and participate in the creative process, rather than consume info and entertainment via the terms carefully chosen for them by the wisdom of corporate and governmental bureaucracies; the other side claims primacy of the right to own and control bits and pieces of information and experience. One side is composed of (or at least ideologically infected by) parasites maximizing their own ends thanks to the creativity and information provided by others; on the other side are people who are primarily motivated by creative, intellectual, and social development.

What the impatient hackers and remixers don’t appreciate is that not everybody can be as creative as they want to be: some people just want a 9-to-5 job, some people just want to be rich, some people just want the sense of status and control conferred by a job title. Organizations have evolved as comfortable nests for many of these people to sit on their eggs. A lot of these organizations are in industries affected by copyright — think of record labels, TV networks, publishers and newspapers — and they absolutely depend on all of the barriers and constraints provided by copyright law for their survival.

Of course it’s somewhat ironic that copyright laws originally protected writers and composers from exploitation by printers and distributors; now it’s the means of distribution that are being protected. Anyhow…

You only need to walk into your local cineplex, or turn on the radio or watch network television for an evening to recognize how much cultural value is being produced by large organizations and protected by rules and regulations. And look at the artists themselves: it’s hard to even argue about the system’s fairness when Ben Stiller and whatshisname from Harry Potter can each make over $40 million in one year.

These are the sorts of realities that copyright rules are meant to preserve. Especially in Canada. Our creative economy has become a safe and comfortable place for a lot of executives, administrators, lawyers, IT and HR staffers, various people who like clip-boards, PowerPoint, and a sense of orderliness, occupying offices owned by deep-pocketed foreign conglomerates that are apparently more innovative and aggressive than Canadian companies. It wouldn’t be very nice if that system changed and all of those people had to give up careers they so dearly and passionately love.

Now that writers, musicians, film-makers (and people inventing whole new categories by mashing-up different mediums) can easily produce and distribute their work independently — now that organizational structures are becoming increasingly outdated and redundant — if we want to conserve the non-creativity of our creative economy it’s imperative that the Canadian government empower organizations with the ability to maintain the artificial barriers and conditions of scarcity on which their existence depends.

/satire

A Book About Truth, Will & Relevance

Brian — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:16:13 +0000

My book is finished and available for purchase, download, or reading online. Sorry if you don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, where I already mentioned it a few days ago. This is the formal “announcement.”

Description:

Truth, Will & Relevance outlines an innovative way to understand human nature and conduct — conceived specifically to address today’s complex opportunities and challenges using the technology that defines our time.

Reading Options:

purchase the printed soft-cover book priced at US$9.99 at Lulu.com
download a free PDF via Scribd
read chapter-by-chapter online

Background:

This is a unique book. On one hand, much of the content originated in the form of essays and blog posts; on the other hand, most of the research and tough thinking behind all of them — the “heavy lifting” — was done earlier, before any of these essays were written, with an eye on eventually fusing everything into a single, “big picture” argument.

So now?…

The rest of my writing will focus largely on the ideas outlined in the book, which is really a germ or a seed from which to expand. A lot of sources, arguments, and elaborations were left out of it — consciously (though somewhat unwillingly), knowing that I would have ample opportunity to develop those in blog posts and maybe articles.

In the process of putting this together I also managed to spin off a couple of rough outlines for books with more mass appeal, as well as more comprehensive rigour, which I would approach in a more conventional way, i.e. looking for financial and editorial support.

Thanks to everyone who provided comments & encouragement along the way.

Some Things Happening

Brian — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:06:21 +0000

Truth, Will & Relevance

Regular blogging has taken a back seat for the past while as I finish book. I know I suggested I’d be self-publishing something months ago, but every time I get it into the shape I want it, the impression I get from ‘the whole’ inspires vast improvements — not just being picky about things, but substantial improvements in coherence, credibility, etc.

What began as basically a blog-to-book collection of posts has morphed into something that reads like a somewhat carefully plotted argument, or proposal — though it didn’t come together arbitrarily; I have a lot of old outlines in my head. It’s the book I tried writing a few years ago (before I started a blog) but kept getting hung. The intervening practice and real-world points of reference have been just what the doctor ordered. It was also a matter of being right too soon, I think. Most people (myself included, most of the time) only want to hear what we’re already starting to think but haven’t quite managed to articulate.

Anyway, it’s called Truth, Will & Relevance. It’s about how we think about the profound challenges and opportunities in our world, which continue to surprise, energize, and inspire me with awe every single day. From crazy stock market crashes to crazy elections, riots against hard economic realities, to massive oil spills and tension between industrialism versus whatever-we-call-what-comes-next, there’s a lot to think about — a lot I’ve already thought about — and a lot of opportunity to radically reshape the way we think and talk about these things.

That’s what I love. That’s what I’ve done… In the mean time I don’t have a lot of spare words to blog with. For now here are a few more things I’m getting out to do:

PodCamp London 2010

Is tomorrow! (Saturday, May 8)

I’m on the organizing team — though my contribution is embarrassingly meagre compared to what Bill Deys, Titus Ferguson, Kevin Van Lierop, and John Leschinski have done. (They’re probably working on it right now while I’m sitting here writing about it.) Regardless, I’m tremendously proud and looking forward to a great day. The schedule is almost full of diverse, interesting sessions, and the Convergence Centre at UWO’s Research Park looks like an awesome venue (and I look forward to more cool things happening there).

That’s all I really need to say for now. If you don’t know, now you know. The plan is to stream the sessions, so if you’re curious check PodCampLondon.com for the link on Saturday. You can follow on Twitter via #pclo10 (there will be a lot of volume on that).

GenNext Timeraiser

Is Thursday, May 13.

The folks at the United Way are doing a lot of creative things to get younger demographics involved in philanthropy. Timeraiser is an especially interesting one. The idea is that instead of pledging money, people pledge time — perhaps an even more valuable form of capital. The good thing (I think) about framing it like this is that when we donate time as volunteers, we aren’t just giving, we’re getting something back as well — not just as reciprocity, but largely by way of the social capital we create in our communities.

To pull it off, GenNext has partnered with Pillar Non-Profit Network, London Community Foundation, and the London Arts Council, in order to coordinate an art auction that will be the focal point and driving force of Thursday’s event.

I’m usually too reticent about volunteering — as I am about nearly everything — so things like this are a great nudge to get more engaged. More details here.

ChangeCamp London

Is coming together — though I’m not sure how much I can say at this point. We have a date and a few possible venues. If you have suggestions or want to contribute in any way, contact me and I’ll let the other organizers know. Some background is available via london.changecamp.ca and my post about it is here in case you missed it.

The idea is to “re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation.” That includes citizen engagement, open data, encouraging government to use open standards and open source software — and just having a more open mindset in general — while we as citizens need to assume more responsibility and initiative.

Note that ChangeCamp London is just one aspect of a lot of great, related projects that are gathering steam in the city. Open data is on the radar, thanks largely to the guys at rTraction and their EatSure project.

We’ll hear about other things happening in the near future as well… For now I have to say it really feels great to be a part of all of this with people who are actually making things happen.

Brian Frank » civics

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