Brian Frank » media

History, Perspective & Speed: 2001 – 2011

Brian — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:16 +0000

September 11, 2001. I remember staying up past midnight, flipping through my hundred or so cable channels. Everything covered the attack. I went for a walk. TV light flickered from windows of every house. Everyone was up but nobody was out. Except one guy, on a payphone, highlighted by a street light glowing over him, speaking into the silence: “they flew into the World Trade Center.” I thought about staying up until 4:00am to see what the newspapers would say.

Our world got a lot bigger after that, and a lot faster. Papers and cable news covered every conceivable detail while the weekly and monthly magazines worked on the longer narratives. Heros and villains were made — mostly by their own deeds but also by how the stories were told.

From the other side of the world, the Arab Emirates-based network Al Jazeera gained notoriety by airing footage that came directly from the terrorist themselves. They became almost synonymous. Whenever American networks uttered “Al Jazeera” you just knew it would be something terrible — another beheading, more threats, another diss against Western civilization — as if the network was the PR arm of al Qaeda.

May 1, 2011. Future generations will say it was 10 years: 2001 – 2011. Days and months aren’t much of a difference in the long run.

Here we are, staying up past midnight. This time scrolling through hundreds of tweets every few minutes. Every one is in reference to Osama bin Laden. I’m not going for another walk, but if I did it’s unlikely I’d see anyone on a payphone. And I already know what the papers will say. I watched the process become the product. I watched the story go from word of a mysterious presidential announcement to the first report of Bin Laden’s death through phases of speculation and gradual confirmation and finally — as of now — images of people celebrating at Ground Zero and in front of the White House.

It didn’t take long for people to find the compound Bin Laden was at and even *tweets about the raid from nearby.*

And then it occurred to me: I watched the official announcement through Al Jazeera.

My perspective isn’t just at a different scale now but a different angle too. I was watching a US spokesman play down the celebrations to a foreign network — ‘just a few dozen young people…not something the American people will gloat about’ — but a foreign network that feels very familiar to me. Al Jazeera has become my go-to source for live video of breaking global events. That’s where I watched the Egyptian people oust a regime that ruled for decades. That’s where I watched the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Japan.

I wouldn’t have imagined in 2001 that Al Jazeera would be where I’d choose to watch *this* announcement — and I certainly wouldn’t have imagined watching it with over a hundred other people on the internet.

It’s amazing what a massive wave can do: so much force and momentum, so fast, and so ephemeral, but the effects linger long after the wave recedes. Days and months aren’t much of a difference in the long run, but somehow all the instantaneous events add up to something huge.

It’s big to us now, seeing it through a tiny scope, and it will have symbolic importance when people look back at our time from the distant future, but in coming days and months its importance will gradually recede (or get washed away) and we’ll realize Bin Laden had become a small part of much larger stories — events with plenty of momentum to go without him.

It’s pretty incredible to think about it all happening so fast, this close up. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be though: watching history emerge at this speed and range of perspective.

What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?

Brian — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:24:49 +0000

The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend:

What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?

This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after another, concepts that I feel obliged to think carefully about. But I poked around and eventually a pattern started to emerge (perhaps not coincidentally very similar to the ideas I laid out in my book). And so without any further preamble, here’s what I came up with:

The most common response to the question is some variant of uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, etc… It’s neatly represented here by Carlo Rovelli as The Uselessness of Certainty:

There is a widely used notion that does plenty of damage: the notion of “scientifically proven”. Nearly an oxymoron. The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’.

Tania Lombrozo describes the process through the concept of Defeasibility:

Recognizing the potential revisability of our beliefs is a prerequisite to rational discourse and progress, be it in science, politics, religion, or the mundane negotiations of daily life. Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course, I could be wrong.

So instead of thinking of “truths” as certain, Neil Gershenfeld’s answer is to understand that Truth is a Model:

Building models is very different from proclaiming truths. It’s a never-ending process of discovery and refinement, not a war to win or destination to reach. Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. Bugs are features — violations of expectations are opportunities to refine them. And decisions are made by evaluating what works better, not by invoking received wisdom.

Even the vocabulary used to describe truths is composed of mere shorthand abstractions (“SHA’s”) that are useful in only limited ways.

As Ernst Pöppel explained, our Cognitive Toolkit is Full of Garbage that needs to be cleaned up (or at least checked over) from time to time, even the shorthand abstractions we use to describe science itself:

Let us look back in history (SHA): Modern science (SHA) can be said to have started in 1620 with “Novum Organum” (“New Instrument”) by Francis Bacon. It should impress us today that his analysis (SHA) begins with a description (SHA) of four mistakes we run into when we do science. Unfortunately, we usually forget these warnings. Francis Bacon argued that we are — first — victims of evolution (SHA), i.e. that our genes (SHA), define constraints that necessarily limit insight (SHA). Second — we suffer from the constraints of imprinting (SHA); the culture (SHA) we live in provides a frame for epigenetic programs (SHA) that ultimately define the structure (SHA) of neuronal processing (SHA). Third — we are corrupted by language (SHA) as thoughts (SHA) cannot be easily transformed into verbal expressions . Fourth — we are guided or even controlled by theories (SHA), may they be explicit or implicit.

And to put it in more general terms, science evolves too. Ideas and discoveries introduce new possibilities that emerge from life, not from some timeless realm of possibility that we often imagine exists outside our termporal world. This is what Lee Smolin insists on in his answer: Thinking in Time vs Thinking Outside of Time:

Darwinian evolutionary biology is the prototype for thinking in time because at its heart is the realization that natural processes developing in time can lead to the creation of genuinely novel structures. Even novel laws can emerge when the structures to which they apply come to exist. Evolutionary dynamics has no need of abstract and vast spaces like all the possible viable animals, DNA sequences, sets of proteins, or biological laws. Exaptations are too unpredictable and too dependent on the whole suite of living creatures to be analyzed and coded into properties of DNA sequences. Better, as Stuart Kauffman proposes, to think of evolutionary dynamics as the exploration, in time, by the biosphere, of the adjacent possible.

I love that term: “the adjacent possible.”

Our minds are capable of imagining more possibilities than are actually possible in the world, which we then need to eliminate by Inference to the Best Explanation (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s answer):

I’m alone in my home, working in my study, when I hear the click of the front door, the sound of footsteps making their way toward me. Do I panic? That depends on what I — my attention instantaneously appropriated to the task and cogitating at high speed—infer as the best explanation for those sounds. My husband returning home, the house cleaners, a miscreant breaking and entering, the noises of our old building settling, a supernatural manifestation? Additional details could make any one of these explanations, excepting the last, the best explanation for the circumstances. Why not the last? As Charles Sanders Peirce, who first drew attention to this type of reasoning, pointed out: “Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted.”

What if we just stopped coming up with bad hypotheses?

Whether or not that would be desirable, I’m pretty sure it would be impossible. Why? Because we think in time, as Smolin argued. We don’t get to stop the clock. Our hearts keep pumping and our neurons keep firing and our thoughts keep happening.

One of the results of that, in Sam Harris’s words, is that We are Lost in Thought:

Our relationship to our own thinking is strange to the point of paradox, in fact. When we see a person walking down the street talking to himself, we generally assume that he is mentally ill. But we all talk to ourselves continuously — we just have the good sense to keep our mouths shut. Our lives in the present can scarcely be glimpsed through the veil of our discursivity: We tell ourselves what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, and what might yet happen. We ceaselessly reiterate our hopes and fears about the future. Rather than simply exist as ourselves, we seem to presume a relationship with ourselves. It’s as though we are having a conversation with an imaginary friend possessed of infinite patience. Who are we talking to?

Thomas Metzinger answers that question: perhaps a Phenomenally Transparent Self-Model:

A self-model is the inner representation some information-processing systems have of themselves as a whole. A representation is phenomenally transparent, if it a) is conscious and b) cannot be experienced as a representation. Therefore, transparent representations create the phenomenology of naïve realism, the robust and irrevocable sense that you are directly and immediately perceiving something which must be real. Now apply the second concept to the first: A “transparent self-model”, necessarily, creates the realistic conscious experience of selfhood, of being directly and immediately in touch with oneself as a whole.

Ok so that’s one of the more philosophically ambitious answers — i.e. maybe not the easiest to understand right away.

For that to make sense we need to appreciate our experience of selfhood as an emergent process; we need to Think Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down, as Michael Shermer reminds us:

Almost everything important that happens in both nature and in society happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Water is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen. Life is a bottom up, self-organized emergent property of organic molecules that coalesced into protein chains through nothing more than the input of energy into the system of Earth’s early environment. The complex eukaryotic cells of which we are made are themselves the product of much simpler prokaryotic cells that merged together from the bottom up in a process of symbiosis that happens naturally when genomes are merged between two organisms. Evolution itself is a bottom up process of organisms just trying to make a living and get their genes into the next generation; out of that simple process emerges the diverse array of complex life we see today.

I think emergence may be difficult to grasp because even when we think we know how it happens, we don’t intuit why it happens. We’re so used to thinking in terms of “a cause” — as in something top-down, some single thing to which we ascribe purpose or volition — that it takes a lot of extra work to learn to intuit how distributed causes come together to form a common effect.

We must learn to think of these processes playing out in what Sean Carroll calls (correctly but apparently not with any great compulsion to inspire us) in his answer, A Pointless Universe:

Things happen because the laws of nature say they will — because they are the consequences of the state of the universe and the path of its evolution. Life on Earth doesn’t arise in fulfillment of a grand scheme, but rather as a byproduct of the increase of entropy in an environment very far from equilibrium. Our impressive brains don’t develop because life is guided toward greater levels of complexity and intelligence, but from the mechanical interactions between genes, organisms, and their surroundings.

I think the key insight to bring all this together and move forward can be found in the fact that, as James O’Donnell adds — essentially the same concept that Lee Smolin proposed – Everything Is In Motion:

I’ll make my pitch for what is arguably the oldest of our “SHA” concepts, the one that goes back to the senior pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus.”You can’t step in the same river twice,” he said; putting it another way his mantra was “Everything flows.” Remembering that everything is in motion — feverish, ceaseless, unbelievably rapid motion — is always hard for us. Vast galaxies dash apart at speeds that seem faster than is physically possible, while the subatomic particles of which we are composed beggar our ability to comprehend large numbers when we try to understand their motion…

Things happen because things always happen. The question, instead of why something like bottom-up emergence happened at all, should be, Why does emergence happen instead of something else happening? Oxygen and hydrogen have to do something, why not make water?

Here our hope for a simplistic answer might get in the way.

Kai Krause’s answer is to put Einstein’s Blade in Ockam’s Razor and be aware that behind simple effects we’re likely to find complex processes, not simplistic ones:

Designing a car to ‘have the optimal feel going into a curve at high speed’ will require hugely complex systems to finally arrive at “simply good”. Water running downhill will take a meandering path instead of the straight line.

Both are examples for a domain shift: the non-simple solution is still “the easiest” seen from another viewpoint: for the water the least energy used going down the shallowest slope is more important than taking the straightest line from A to B.

So the best we can do is observe the world around us and build models from the facts we see. We can be pretty confident that oxygen and hydrogen atoms will continue to form water molecules, and we can be pretty sure that water will continue to move down the shallowest slopes available as adjacent possibilities, we can be pretty sure everything will stay in motion and just as sure that we’ll continue to get lost in thought — looking for purpose and meaning and often simplistic reasons where none are necessary or even feasible.

What we can’t be sure of is how all of factors behind our models and SHA’s will interact in more complex ways, what new possibilities will emerge, and what we’ll think of them. We have to let the process play out, observe what we can when it happens, and work from there.

I like how Rudy Rucker breaks it: we’ll have to accept that The World is Unpredictable:

The universe is computing tomorrow’s weather as rapidly and as efficiently as possible…

It’s a waste to chase the pipedream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can’t predict and we can’t control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We’re part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.

We’re suspended in so much Ambient Memory and the Myth of Neutral Observation, as Xeni Jardin adds:

In our networked mind, the very act of observation–reporting or tweeting or amplifying some piece of experience–changes the story.

And finally:

The history we are creating now is alive. Let us find new ways of recording memory, new ways of telling the story, that reflect life. Let us embrace this infinite complexity as we commit new history to record.

Read the rest (99,000 words) at Edge.org.

As I mentioned at the top, this synthesis is pretty similar to the main ideas in my efficient little book, Truth, Will & Relevance which (you can read completely online). I did this fairly fast; the book elaborates these ideas and suggests a better-defined conclusion — though I love how these answers have each added something.

If you’re more interested in how I pulled this together, get in touch and we can talk about what to do with your research, questions, and conceptual challenges you’d to see finished and shipped.

So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar…

Brian — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:41:16 +0000

So I saw this SEO copywriter joke a bunch of times yesterday. I love it:

“So this SEO copywriter walks into a bar, grill, pub, public house, Irish bar, bartender, drinks, beer, wine, liquor”

(If you don’t know what SEO copywriting is, it means writing with specific keywords in certain orders to help sites rank higher in search engines like Google. Hence writing “bar, grill, pub,” etc. to get into more searches. I’m tempted to demonstrate it here but I don’t know what I’d want to optimize for — other than the joke, the funny joke about the SEO copywriter on Twitter.)

It was weird, because usually we don’t keep seeing the same joke. It kept being attributed to different people in retweets. It wasn’t like @alqaeda’s classic, ”not falling for that one,” and other big hits that keep referring back to the same source.

So I poked around and the earliest “SEO copywriter walks into a bar” I found was by @lahaff, who tweeted it last Thursday. That’s as far back as Twitter’s search would go. He has 47 followers and his tweet has been retweeted and mentioned a grand total of 8 times — only once with the new style:

But then on Friday it was tweeted by @mickjkpg (who cut off “four loko” and the period from the end, making room for a couple of hashtags. Note that was still a few days ago. I never saw it until today, when it blew up.

It’s funny that subsequent users — e.g. @cun and @LAWeekly – copied exactly what @mickjkpg tweeted: same list, same order, in quotation marks, and with no period at the end. It’s clearly cut-and-pasted — so it’s not like any old “walks into a bar” joke you might hear in a bar and and forget where you heard it. The fact that anyone can do a quick search and see it all over Twitter didn’t stop people from effectively taking credit:

Well who’s going to complain… Because it’s been around a lot longer than last week. Someone put it on Reddit back on December 4, adding,

This was stolen from a friend’s Twitter and he might have stolen it from someone else, but I still wanted to post it.

(At least he tried. Speaking of which, thanks @JayFredin for looking that up.)

So who knows? Maybe it is one of those old standard jokes — just one limited to a small, specialized community until now.

Funny how long things can stay unknown until they hit the right nodes and suddenly go fully-blown.

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.

See Who’s Using the Internet to Make Life Less Meaningful

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:26 +0000

I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link.

The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing collection of crafted pieces by good writers who don’t get it.

I used to agree with Lanier, for one, but here’s what happened: I stayed open, I was still curious, I kept looking for bright spots, I kept trying things, I adopted the best and rejected the worst, I found ways to make it work for me, I kept learning from mistakes; I cultivated a productive, rewarding and meaningful way of working and living with the internet.

Like everyone else who actually understands it.

What works will be different for everyone. Facebook works for some but not others. Twitter works for some but not others (or not even most). Even within Twitter there are as many different ways to use it as there are users. The people who know the most about the hazards and challenges are the people using this stuff and learning from mistakes.

I went along with the skepticism for a long time and I appreciate ongoing criticism, but these people (Gladwell too) who are standing around outside, watching us instead of jumping in and learning how to swim, fretting, “OH NO, we all might drown!” keep looking more and more ridiculous.

Smith tried Facebook and didn’t like it, so she quit after two months. Well same here. It wasn’t right for me at the time but I’ve changed, Facebook has changed, the world has changed, I went back and approached it differently. It’s working ok for me now.

Don’t just give up if you swallow a big gulp of water the first time you jump in. You can either keep trying or leave it alone. But if you walk away you can’t come back with a diatribe that basically argues what we already know: it isn’t perfect…

These sentences from Smith’s NYBooks piece finally put these fears into perspective for me:

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.

I think I see where the problem is now.

Have you ever met anyone who has been reduced to data? Do you know anyone who’s had their desires, their fears and messy feelings get swallowed up by Facebook? No. What happens is, when some aspects of our lives become data, we expand — we use that as part of a platform or framework to create new opportunities and objects for new kinds of fears and desires.

In other words, humans will always find new ways to be human.

We’re not just resilient, we’re ingeniously assertive. Our species has been surviving for ages: crawling through deserts, trudging through swamps, climbing over mountains, hacking through jungles, sailing across oceans, careening down rapids, launching into space, clawing in the dirt, driving as deep as we can into any visible challenge, making our mark on the world however we can, fabricating tools with whatever we can find, etc.

After all that and more for thousands of years, do you think Facebook is really so dangerous?

If love and friendship are so delicate that Facebook can undermine them and consequently tear apart the fabric of humanity, would they be worth saving? Or is this just about particular kinds of love and friendship that happen to be near and dear to some people at one particular place and time?

Whatever makes us special is too deeply engrained in our nature to clearly distinguish and articulate. Facebook and Twitter aren’t going to take it away from us — nor, conversely, is it so adjustable that Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or any philosopher can swoop in and save it.

They’re not against technology being used to objectify and reduce human behaviour; they’re merely against any new kinds of reductivism emerging to surpass their own favourite brand of it.

Perhaps it’s a symptom of people who’ve become “gadgets” — reduced and enslaved by two-hour movies and two-hundred-page books.

Elsewhere people have feared that photography and the written word would steal souls. But instead of reducing the breadth and depth of human experience, technologies keep creating opportunities for expansion and enrichment. I don’t see any reason to assume this time will be any different.

Here’s our choice: moan about the inevitable and miss our chance to grow, or look for the bright spots and make the most of our opportunities. Pretty easy, I think.

Part of me wants to be diplomatic, but another part is getting tired of so many fussy, timid, whiny, precious complaints coming from otherwise intelligent and talented people.

Pushing forward into the unknown, using the internet won’t reduce the meaning in life; it’s in many ways the most meaningful thing we can do.

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.

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’s the Future of Reading & Writing?

Brian — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 06:56:52 +0000

“Books are being replaced by reading,“ to borrow a phrase from Jack Shafer. Digital technology “distances us from the old magic conjured by books” by giving us better ways to get what’s inside them.

Of course the tactile experience is lost, but that’s only a sentimental attachment — not without genuine value, but not without considerable influence from purely subjective historical and sensory biases either.

We seem to be at the same stage of this discussion that we were at about music when the iPod really took off: we’re finally certain that the new hardware will be with us for a while, but not quite ready to let go of the old, and not sure what implications the change in distribution and storage will have on the content itself. I was still buying lots of CDs in 2005 — I “liked the experience” of looking for them in music stores and displaying them at home — but that ended abruptly.

I’m still buying a lot of books (almost all used, for a few bucks each) because I’m poor and haven’t invested in a digital reader yet, but based on my shift in music consumption I have to assume that my book habits might change pretty suddenly, pretty soon — which isn’t to say I’ll completely stop buying them. There are books that are about more than just reading.

For example, a few months ago I stumbled on a used, two volume edition of Plato’s complete works — in inferior translations I struggle with, and with expired copyrights that enable them to be available freely online. But that big old block of atoms pays me back in the form of inspiration, decoration, and meditation, even if it’s an inefficient way to store and find information.

Pertaining to the points of inspiration and meditation, I often find myself pacing around, trying to generate words and ideas; picking up books, physically looking for pieces of information and insight, turning and scanning pages can occupy the conscious mind just long enough to clear the head of whatever’s blocking the way. The manner of interaction in those instances is more important than the content, so I expect I’ll always have books — but then again, I can get rid of 99% of my current library and still enjoy the same tactile benefits with a few essential, personal selections.

Now I don’t want to float too many predictions but it’s worth reading Kevin Kelly’s description of the sensory experience of his own fresh physical book — exhibiting his proposal that embodiment is a quality that’s “better than free.” I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rise in “collectible” publishing, like the increase in vinyl record sales. Not an original suggestion but there it is anyway.

More interesting to me than buying and reading is the way books will be written.

Kelly developed What Technology Wants over the course of years putting ideas together on his not-quite-a-blog. I’ve noticed Eliezer Yudkowsky deliberately taking the same approach (to very difficult, complex subject matter); I did the same to develop my own book; Seth Godin’s Linchpin was largely composed of advice that first appeared on his blog. David Weinberger is currently taking a slightly different but related approach: not developing the content of his book on a blog, but thinking out loud about the process of writing it.

And it isn’t just the books themselves that are being developed in public, but their readerships — in some cases (e.g. Godin’s) consisting of a core group of fans who buy multiple gift or loaner copies, and are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to hear the author speak in person.

I’m not that kind of fan — at least not of Godin’s — but after following Kevin Kelly’s progress for years I’m intellectually and emotionally invested in his book. It’s as if I watched it grow up: I want to see it do well — and I’d love to own a physical embodiment to display and thumb through from time to time.

I’m not suggesting this is an original line of thought. I’m just trying to probing and re-synthesizing, hoping to turn over an insight…

There’s a lot of brain power going towards figuring this stuff out. Godin notably announced he’d published his last traditional book and would move on to explore new formats. I’m also thinking about bookfuturism, recently described by Tim Carmody as “not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture.”

Note that we’re not just developing more formats and distribution channels for books as we know them; we’re reconceiving what we mean when we say “book” — perhaps from something completely static to something more dynamic, or at least from something anticipated and aimed for to something that’s gathered up and left behind as a landmark, like an Inukshuk…

I don’t know.

Unlike a lot of what I write, there’s almost nothing abstract about this for me, or you. We’re both engaged in an experiment by writing and reading this.

We’re into a phase in which every act of writing and reading is affected by uncertainty and speculation.

The sooner we discover opportunities and make all the necessary mistakes, the sooner we can get back to stable traditions — albeit different traditions than we have now.

Culture, Anarchy and the Conceptual Value of Links

Brian — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:34:24 +0000

Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration…

This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of posts, “In Defense of Links.” There was a lot of discussion after Carr proposed that we should stop inserting links within the text; he suggested we could save them all till the end instead — like footnotes, or a list of suggestions for further reading — because they add to our “cognitive load” by making us decide whether to click or not.

I can’t really complain that someone wants to experiment a little with conventions — after all, the Web is a work in progress — as long as the aim is to improve communication and collaboration, i.e. as long as it promotes learning and development across a wider community, rather than reinforcing outmoded practices and mindsets.

There are a few places I sometimes feel links would be unnecessary and unwelcome distractions: long pieces of “lean back” reading that run up to several thousand words which I can read purely for pleasure. I enjoy the long form experience; I practice and promote extended periods of deep, immersive, focused thinking. I’m not sure links would add any value to James Wood or Michael Lewis, and I’m perfectly happy reading an NYBooks review with all of the links at the top.

But those already conform to Carr’s proposal. He was referring to things like this, complaining that every link requires us to make a decision, which becomes distracting.

But it’s good to have strategically placed interruptions (see Jonah Lehrer‘s point: ”focused attention is not always ideal”). We should be making decisions as we go along: when we hesitate to consider whether or not to click, we’re thinking critically, judging for quality and relevance, and using it as an opportunity to reassess the rest of what we already know — i.e. whether we need to learn more or ‘re-place’ some basic assumptions.

Look at science: look at how Darwin “discovered” his theory of evolution. He couldn’t just focus on a single object, he had to arrange a lot of evidence in relation to other evidence — species in relation to other species, fossils in relation to other fossils, offspring in relation to parents and those in relation to their parents and so on — until a story, a synthesis, and a conclusion emerged. Of course a lot of tasks in the scientific process require acute focus, but it’s the opponents of science who stress the importance of comprehending a single text as a self-enclosed source of value, while the way science is communicated is among the most distraction-packed, extraneously referent styles around.

Similarly this style of writing for the Web is as much about organizing links from the ongoing, surrounding discussion as it is about the ideas or opinions expressed in the piece itself (if any, yet). I start with some sources and things I want to share with people and then I try to tie them together into a bit of a story, and then hopefully I can add some kind of conclusion.

This notion of “placing” links in relation to each other is something I’ve adopted from Richard Rorty, the late philosopher-turned-literary critic. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he suggested that critics don’t evaluate things for merit,

rather, they spend their time placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures. This placing is done in the same way as we place a new friend or enemy in the context of old friends and enemies. In the course of doing so, we revise our opinions of both the old and the new.

To demonstrate I’ve picked James Wood’s review of some recent books relating to Alexis de Tocqueville:

Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better.

Those names aren’t just being dropped to show off the author’s erudition. “Darwin,” “Flaubert,” “Renan,” and “Arnold” represent specific ideas, and the reader needs to make those associations (i.e. links) to appreciate the meaning of Wood’s review. Comprehension isn’t merely about keeping track of those references, but rather pausing to reflect on, inquire into, and posit the meanings behind them. Matthew Arnold points to Culture and Anarchy and “sweetness and light” meaning beauty and truth — “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” in a process of constant cultural diffusion.

Linking is a way to make those associations more vivid and rich. It makes me more careful as a thinker and writer to consider what people might find by clicking through. Of course I should always think about specific references — even in mediums that don’t afford actual links — but in this medium it’s essential: it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses that the affordance to link nudges me to keep my expressions concrete and relevant.

It’s often all that we can do. Information can change so fast and the truth can be so fleeting that our careful judgements and explanations can quickly become worse than no judgements or explanations at all. Better to identify key points of reference — like constellations — we can use to orient ourselves and communicate with our collaborators as we go along, constantly checking our bearings and staying alert for new factors instead of staring down at a book that was written at another time and place.

Skeptics dwell on one or two premises — “in this medium… it’s so easy to merely express a bunch of opinions and guesses” — and urge against innovation instead of recognizing that their anxieties are virtually identical to those of so many past generations. As Lionel Trilling wrote:

[Democracy in America] made John Stuart Mill modify is faith in democracy, and Sainte-Beuve, Renan, Scherer, and Arnold himself, foresaw for Europe a wave of Americanism–by which they meant vulgarity, loss of distinction, and above all, that eccentricity of thought which arises when each man, no matter what his training or gifts, may feel that the democratic doctrine of equality allows him to consider his ideas of equal worth with those of his neighbor.

As in Tocqueville’s time, we’re trying to retain a semblance of authority in an age of expanded freedom. And we’re coping not just with Cheeto-eating bloggers but a priesthood of scholars who appeal to their authority to hide (even from themselves) the fact that they’re often wrong, and professional marketers and scam artists (not necessarily in the same category; not necessarily different either) who are adept at influencing people in potentially harmful ways.

Complain if you want but the fact still remains that we’re caught up in that and eventually need to do something about it, beyond fretting and complaining.

Now that the traditional means of establishing authority and trust are increasingly obscure and misleading, the practice of linking (both actually and metaphorically) is the most effective way to earn it. Links in a text aren’t just about connectivity but credibility and readability as well, as Jason Fry argued [update: forgot to mention Scott Berkun's point, essential to the argument for embedding links: "In a glance I can see the link density of a page – too much and I might pass, but none at all, and I might wonder if the writer has thought much about the topic, since they didn’t bother to show they’d found a reference to support or counter their own claims"]. Rosenberg didn’t explicitly go as far as I do but I’ll certainly echo what he wrote in the third part of his series:

The links you put into a piece of writing tell a story (or, if you will, a meta-story) about you and what you’ve written. They say things like: What sort of company does this writer keep? Who does she read? What kind of stuff do her links point to — New Yorker articles? Personal blogs? Scholarly papers? Are the choices diverse or narrow? Are they obvious or surprising? Are they illuminating or puzzling? Generous or self-promotional?

So it’s about quality and discipline as much as it’s about quantity, equality and freedom of expression. Above all it’s about getting past the myth of perfection: we learn to assume that value is in the process of questions, corrections, and connections. Ironically, concentrating on the wrong books for too long is ultimately the worst distraction of all. In most cases, we’d be better off if we skimmed.

Even if Carr’s worst fears are realized and the Web destroys people’s capacity to concentrate, I’ll happily say fairwell to extended one-way lectures and screeds foisted on submissive publics (heaven forbid we have to pause to make decisions in the course of learning). I’ll happily welcome conventions that compel readers to take responsibility for finding and filtering the best knowledge, forming their own interpretations, and weaving those ideas into our cultural fabric for others to criticize, correct, or corroborate. (Steven Pinker and Steven Johnson made arguments that complement this.)

It isn’t techno-utopianism. It isn’t quite a compromise either. It’s more like a “third way” forward. And it’s the same old notion that Matthew Arnold advocated in Culture and Anarchy in the 1860s: preserve the best of the Church and the aristocracy but let the static aspects fall away; allow the best democratic values to flourish but exercise discipline against democracy’s excesses:

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality… who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time…

So but what exactly is “the best knowledge and thought” of our time? Maybe we spend so much time arguing about what the Internet “is doing to us” that we neglect to actually use it (or quietly decline to use it) to generate knowledge and thoughts worth sharing. So let’s get on with it…

The general conclusion of my book (and several years of soul- and truth-seeking) was provided for me by Charles S. Peirce:

… it may truly be said that there is but one thing needful for learning the truth, and that is a hearty and active desire to learn what is true… No matter how erroneous your ideas of the method may be at first, you will be forced at length to correct them so long as your activity is moved by that sincere desire.

If we really care about making our knowledge the best it possibly can be, we’re not going to let links or anything else distract us as long as we have a choice. My choice is to have choices, and to see how much information we can synthesize. It isn’t easy, but with practice a lot of people might be surprised.

How to Make the Web Better by Sharing Selfishly

Brian — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:42:24 +0000

I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least affect them).

Leo Laporte got this stream of thought flowing on Sunday when he complained about Buzz (and the ephemerality of microblogging in general). For two weeks, nobody noticed that his posts weren’t getting through to Twitter. Here’s one of the money quotes (in case you missed it):

I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void… How demoralizing.

I had the same sort of awakening once, about a year ago: looked at my Twitter profile and saw that two weeks of updates were gone. For a second I was like, “Oh God…” until I realized how little was lost. Nothing, really. So I took a break, re-calibrated my centre of gravity and managed to keep a modest balance ever since: taking advantage of Twitter’s benefits without getting yanked into [too m]any hedonic black holes.

This kind of semi-crisis happens (I imagine) to virtually everyone who works and lives this much online. Robert Scoble went through a similar process last year… And here we are again. Paul Carr put it in (what I think are more widely and deeply compelling) terms of giving up too much of our life stories:

… for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having “woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands” – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

Scott Rosenberg reiterated the same concerns, addressing a specific social network that might “know” more about us than we do, and is keeping it that way:

Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.

But I wouldn’t say everything is lost. At least nothing worth keeping…

Part of the problem might be our obsession with efficiency, and our innate aversion to loss. The Web turns thoughts and remarks into discrete, measurable objects. We never missed them much till we could pin them down and count them. We see the theoretical capacity — the Internet can store everything — so we’re inclined to feel that it should be used to its fullest. But nature has plenty of redundancies and processes that go on wastefully, or uselessly for long stretches. Plenty that dies too. Evolution wouldn’t work if everything lived forever. Sucks but that’s how it is. Same with creativity…

My own solution is to think about “inter-temporal sharing” as much as I think about social sharing. In other words, I’m filtering the present for the future, rather than insisting every check-in and tweet be saved for posterity. I’m sharing more links through Delicious — which I can export and keep on my own computer — than I do through Twitter.

You might say that’s more like “saving” than “sharing,” but isn’t saving essentially like sharing something with your future self?

[If you're interested in the theory side of this, read your Harold Innis on temporal and spatial biases. Note: I use "spatial bias" in a completely different way, more consistent with psychology than medium theory. Hat tip to Edward Comor at UWO for re-acquainting me with Innis's ideas. Also see #9 on Tim Carmody's excellent piece on 10 Reading Revolutions.]

Last year I wrote about this in response to some fears about “digital sharecropping“; I advocated thinking of it as an ongoing education and actively taking ownership of it:

Most obviously, there are opportunities for artists, writers, musicians, social entrepreneurs, etc., to nurture projects and enterprises that support our offline endeavours…

Of more universal value is our emerging ability to take responsibility for our own continuing education, and in the process — unlike in the past when “self-teaching” meant being socially isolated, with little to show for one’s labour — we can cultivate relationships and representations (i.e. measurable accomplishments) that allow us to actually use what we’ve learned.

Instead of asking how a link or remark will be received by your friends and followers within the next hour, ask yourself how it will be received by you in the future: Is it likely to be signal or noise?

To do that you need to have a sense of purpose and a mindset aimed at building something, which I think is good in itself, not merely a technique for improving the quality of the content you share. After a while this investment starts to pay off: it becomes the future, and when you’re feeling like you’re not getting enough value from the ephemeral web you can find meaning and relevance in the stocks you’ve been investing in and refining, “sharing with yourself” and turning into enduring objects over time.

Ideally, it won’t be entirely selfish. See the interesting discussion at the Lifestream Blog about changing value propositions and approaches to sharing our “likes.”

Instead of damning or resenting the mob and its whims, understand that we’re each partly responsible for those whims, and if we make an extra effort to exercise better judgement and think about investing our attention over the long term, we should find that we’re building things with our friends instead of helping each other spin the treadmill so fast that people have to jump off.

P.S. Any suggestions for tools? I use Instapaper and I’ve tried Evernote but it never quite clicked with me. My main “tool” is blogging about things and starting to tell stories while they’re still fresh…

Cee-Lo Green: Quality vs. Hype

Brian — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 21:57:29 +0000

Bob Lefsetz wonders whether Cee-Lo’s “F**k You” is going to be another here-today-gone-tomorrow novelty. He uses the song as a jump-off to appeal for music with more staying-power and quality.

His point of comparison is the popular series of TED talks:

These TED talkers didn’t start yesterday, most have spent years dedicated to their field, to the point where they could be selected for a TED speech. That’s the new paradigm. Don’t ask how you can accomplish world domination right away, but keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

It’s the right sentiment but I think he picked the wrong analogy.

We can’t compare “F**k You” to the whole series of TED talks; we have to compare “F**k You” to one TED talk — and there have been a few instant sensations, if memory serves. I saw more links in my Twitter stream when Jamie Oliver’s talk came out then I’ve seen of Cee-Lo’s song so far.

In fact people make the same complaints about TED that Lefsetz makes about “F**k You.” Nassim Taleb comes to mind (most recently: “I am starting to get uncontrollably angry when I encounter TED-style phony humanitarians.”)

Photo by Scootie

And isn’t Cee-Lo Green’s career a model of this advice?

… keep woodshedding, creating great shit until finally, everyone wakes up and anoints it, welcomes you into the pantheon, agrees you’re great.

He started releasing critically acclaimed music in 1995 with Goodie Mob (a group known to me for years mainly as ”that other group from Atlanta,” being close with OutKast). There was some attention and maybe some minor hits (“Closet Freak“?) but it took more than a decade for him to find the mainstream with Gnarls Barkley and “Crazy” in 2006 — the same year he released a greatest hits album!

Now I know Lefsetz probably knows all of this, and he doesn’t explicitly say Cee-Lo exemplifies shallowness, and I agree with his overall sentiment, so I’m not going after him. I’m trying to develop something here.

I think what we ought to take away from this is that we don’t have to be the same artist or the same creative person/group/organization all the time. We can accomplish different things with different projects: we can use some projects to cultivate enduring quality and then we can use others to, you know, pay the bills and get people’s attention so we can keep making quality stuff.

There’s nothing wrong with silliness and hype. Getting excited about things once in a while is good, even if the excitement doesn’t last.

It’s only a problem for people who can only generate hype.

But contrary to a lot of fears, I don’t think the Internet is going to make things worse. I don’t think it will diminish long-term quality. I don’t think it will increase the volume of “mere hype.” Counterintuitively, it’s the proliferation of mere hype that’s going to eventually kill it.

At some point (if we aren’t there already) it’s going to be too costly to keep up with constant turnover: it’s too chaotic; it’s fatiguing. Once we cross that threshold, people who know how to develop long-term value will be the ones getting and holding people’s attention. I think we already see this with emphasis being placed on reputations and relationships online, rather than merely focusing on the last thing someone did.

We ought to let ourselves love the last thing someone did without fixating on it — without sitting there waiting for more hype to fall in front of us. We can use the rare successes as opportunities actively get into what they did before and explore the stuff they like and so on…

And so now speaking of which — this f**king song is awesome:

“Discovering Narrative and the Value of Beginner’s Mind”

Brian — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:54:41 +0000

Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]:

Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to write it, either. In fact, I try to preserve that state of mind. There’s this teaching in Zen called “beginner mind,” which says if you want to be original and creative, then you have to approach each new project as though you were an amateur, as though you had never done this before. And obviously, it’s not completely possible — or Zen would be easy, but I try to approach a story without knowing how I’m going to — often I honestly don’t know how I’m going to report it; I certainly don’t know how I’m going to write it…

That’s Mark Bowden, a well known long-form journalist and the author, most notably, of Black Hawk Down. His remarks resonated with what I’ve been thinking lately about writing and reading and life in general.

Last night I finally read “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” (a.k.a. “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) and before that I LMAOd through “Big Red Son,” a rather over-informative forty-eight page account of Wallace’s trip to the annual porn convention and Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Like Bowden, Wallace wasn’t sticking to a strict plan when he researched and told those stories. No doubt he had a timetable and a sense of what he might come up with, but both stories exude innocence (and no lack of discomfort) as he finds himself participating in episodes he apparently would have preferred not to have been a part of.

The obvious precedent is the “gonzo journalism” popularized by Hunter S. Thompson. He tended to insert himself so far into a story that his presence there became the story — or created the story by taunting hapless bystanders with lies and incapacitating his associates with whiskey and Mace (e.g. “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved“).

When Gay Talese used the buffer around the subject as his angle in “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” it must have seemed radical. Now I wonder why Gay Talese didn’t spend more time on himself. Now we expect celebrity profiles to include the reporter’s account of calling on the phone to set up an interview, dealing with publicists, driving up to the house, ringing the doorbell, getting hassled by security, being peed on by the dog and having to borrow pants from someone in the entourage, etc.

I wouldn’t say it’s “self-absorbed” (at least not in a derogatory way), because they’re also giving us what we want: we identify with the naive outsider trying to find a way in.

And a lot of us want to be the outsider — an impulse that draws a lot of people to journalism and writing (and science and art and entrepreneurial endeavors) in the first place. There’s something about the human spirit that thrives in the face of the uncertain and unknown…

We’d do well to let this impulse run a little more freely, both for motivation’s sake and for improving the quality of our shared experience. Exercise the beginner’s mind instead of hiding it, learn to discover through adventure and self-discipline instead of locking it in an office [or a fixed plan].

Read the rest of Bowden’s talk. HT The Browser. There are more great magazine articles via Kevin Kelly’s collectively compiled list.

Bibliography

Brian — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:56:11 +0000

Here’s the completely unrequested bibliography for Truth, Will & Relevance (minus a few cosmetic references):

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Barzun, Jacques. Of Human Freedom. 1939.
Barzun, Jacques. Clio and the Doctors. 1974.
Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll With William James. 1983.
Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence. 2000.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. 1907. Mitchell, tr. 1911.
Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Andison, tr. 1946.
Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web. 1999.
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories. 2009.
Brockman, John, ed. Creativity. 1993.
Brown, Tim. Change By Design. 2009.
Christakis, Nicholas; Fowler, James. Connected, 2009.
Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma. 1997.
Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. 1946.
Cowen, Tyler. Create Your Own Economy. 2009.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self. 2003.
Dash, Anil. “Nobody Has a Million Twitter Followers.” dashes.com. Jan 5, 2010.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 1976.
Deci, Edward; Ryan, Richard. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. 1985.
Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 1991.
Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. 2003.
Dewey, John. “What I Believe.” 1930.
Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. 1916.
Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. 1929.
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Dweck, Carol. Mindset, 2006.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Plato.” Representative Men. 1850.
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Florida, Richard. The Great Reset, 2010.
Freeman, Eric; Gelerntner, David. “The Lifestreams Software Architecture.” 1997.
Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps, 2003
Gelerntner, David. Mirror Worlds. 1992.
Gruber, Howard. “An Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work.” Gruber & Wallace, eds., Creative People at Work, 1992.
Hagel, John; Seely Brown, John; Davison, Lang. “Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.” blogs.hbr.org/bigshift. Jan 27, 2009.
Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail.” Psychological Review. 2001.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis. 2006.
Hanson, Robin. “Wanting to Want.” overcomingbias.com. Oct 28, 2008
Haque, Umair. “The Builders’ Manifesto.” blogs.hbr.org/haque. Dec 18, 2009
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Jarvis, Jeff . “Product v. process journalism: The myth of perfection v. beta culture.” buzzmachine.com. June 7, 2009.
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Lapham, Lewis. “The Gulf of Time.” Lapham’s Quarterly. 2008.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. 1979.
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McAdams, Dan. “Personal Narratives and the Life Story.” Robins & Pervin eds. Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research. 2008.
McAdams, Dan. “The Redemptive Self: Generativity and the Stories Americans Live By.” Research in Human Development. 2006.
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My New Favourite Phrase

Brian — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:52:00 +0000

I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!”

But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become famous?”

I soon realized that famous quotes are famous thanks to the person or the work they came from, not simply on their own merits. There’s no committee accepting proposals for “ideas for a good quote.” So I let go of the dream — though I wasn’t the least bit discouraged. Learning the truth and moving on was more gratifying than clutching a few random, pseudo-profound utterances.

My entire life’s narrative is pretty much like that: a few spontaneous thoughts will build me up with high hopes, then after recognizing how absolutely delusional those ideas are, I’ll work them out into a more realistic platform for further growth. All of the divergent, harebrained ideas become material to analyze and practice being critical on, and once all that’s straightened out there are suddenly new opportunities for open-ended experiments, and the cycle keeps going around and around.

A few years ago I even stumbled on a quote to describe this whole process, from Three Philosophical Poets by George Santayana:

The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline is for the sake of freedom, and conquest is for the sake of self-possession.

It probably isn’t something that works for everyone, but it became my motto for a few very pivotal years, marking the moment I stopped inquiring about things separately — finding my bearings, basically — and started reading more systematically, towards long-term goals.

Now I’m due for another change.

The phase of self-disciplined reading and rumination has run its course. Now that the objectives of that phase have been met there’s nothing to provide structure for ongoing discipline, and I seem to be casting around somewhat arbitrarily, trying to find possible uses for my ideas.

The process has become divergent again. I’ve got all of these ideas, but my ability to communicate them persuasively isn’t up to the task. All of my practice and thinking about writing has been focused on precision and clarity — though since I’ve been blogging I’ve worked hard at being more relevant and meaningful as well (losing a bit of precision by doing so) and I’ve always followed and absorbed the main conversations around business and marketing, but since I got deeper into philosophy I lost the habit of thinking with persuasion or “stickiness” foremost in mind. I want to get that back.

For the sake of being consistent with the big strategic shifts I’ve made in the past, this calls for a new motto to mark another turn towards discipline.

But here’s the thing: if I’m supposed to be learning to think about writing more persuasively — i.e. constantly trying to develop better turns-of-phrase to capture and express ideas — then I probably shouldn’t settle on a single quote. Instead, I should aim to improve on today’s motto with a better one tomorrow, and so on…

So my new favourite phrase hasn’t been written yet. Instead of something already written, it’ll always be something I’m working on.*

* See “good artists borrow, great artists steal.”**

** See “fake it until you make it.”

The Indispensable Amateur

Brian — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 05:34:24 +0000

How much do I love Jacques Barzun?

The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs:

A world of professionals is an image to shudder at; it would not be a world peopled, and hence capable of novelty; it would be staffed and rolling in accredited grooves. We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateur’s natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.

Taken from “The Indispensable Amateur,” 1949; published in Critical Questions: On Music and Letters, Culture and Biography, 1940 – 1980.

No doubt professionals are equally indispensable, and Barzun spent much of the essay on professional merits — just as he spent much of his life instilling them in his students. But as a sensible observer, he appreciated that the best ideas, inventions, and works of art (virtually every innovation of lasting value) came out of the dynamic interplay between the two types:

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius—inspired heretics—and orthodox professionals.

Amateurs can do great things but they have to work hard to overcome their limitations:

[The amateur] wastes time, rediscovers what is known, and makes colossal blunders.

(Don’t I know it.)

But professionals shouldn’t show too much scorn for those shortcomings. Professionals have limitations, biases, and blind spots to overcome as well. They can learn from what amateurs bring from other perspectives (perhaps even from their professional experience in other disciplines: e.g. journalists can stand to show a little more respect for bloggers, many of whom are subject matter experts). And as Professor Barzun put it:

No one but a mediocrity has ever been heard to approve his own education…

Characteristic of Barzun, there’s too much good material in the essay for excerpts or a summary to do it justice. I intentionally left out some of the best quotes.

Looks like you can probably read all 8 pages via Google Books.

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…

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…

Brian Frank » media

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