Brian Frank

Favourite Essays and Articles of 2011

Brian — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:44:40 +0000

I have trouble keeping up with all links to great long-form journalism and essays that stream past every day, but here are my favourites (out of the ones I managed to catch and read and either remember or save (thank you Longreads & Instapaper)).

In not much of an order:

How the Internet gets inside us, Adam Gopnik

I love Adam Gopnik’s writing more than I like his underlying analysis. I had the same feeling about his recent piece on fantasy literature. He gives a rich impression of substance — and I mean, there is real substance, intelligently pulling together a lot of material — but it’s too soft and somewhat shallow to support a durable understanding of the subject. Which is fine. This was a joy to read and good to muse on:

All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.

Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?, Paul Ford

Paul Ford was new to me this year. He’s been around the internet for a while — he links! — and knows how to use a word or two (also read his personal, quite personal essay, The Age of Mechanical Reproduction). So Ford managed to convey a lot more nuance and detail on this topic than, for example, Gopnik (see above). He’s funny, insightful and grounded:

Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion. The Epiphanator sits in midtown Manhattan and clunks along, at Condé Nast and at the Times and in Rockefeller Center. Once a day it makes a terrible grinding noise and spits out newspapers and TV shows. Once a week it spits out weeklies and more TV shows. Once a month it produces glossy magazines. All too often it makes movies, and novels.

Hollywood: A Love Story, Clive James

Clive James on David Thomson, “the film critic’s critic.” You have to be a movie buff to love it, but there’s also lots here about criticism and writing. Self-recommending:

Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start. Writing at his best, Thomson is well qualified. You have to know about more than just the movies to see the “nobility” in Denzel Washington’s best acting; to isolate Al Pacino’s characteristic of “outrageous inner size,” you have to be up to speed with short-legged Napoleonic warlords since Alexander the Great; evoking Warren Beatty’s “puzzled look” is a nice way of describing catatonia, but it proves that the critic’s eye for aesthetic value can penetrate a surface; and it takes a knowledge of the American class structure to make the correct observation about Katharine Hepburn that she “loved movies while disapproving of them.” Thomson just loves them, but he knows there is a world elsewhere.

The suburb that changed the world, Jaron Lanier

This one from Jaron Lanier surprised me. When he’s writing about the culture around technology like this it’s usually more polemical, but this is just a really enjoyable mix of personal reminiscence with objective history and just the right amount of moral questioning. It also anticipated some of the history-telling after Steve Jobs’s retirement and passing:

The overlap between the late stages of hippie bohemia and the early incarnations of Silicon Valley was often endearing. There was a sense of justice in the way that males who had been at the bottom of the social ladder in high school were on track to run the world. Greasy cottages with futons on the floor, with dustings of pot and cookie crumbles rubbed into cheap oriental rugs, a carnage of forgotten dirty clothes in the corner, empty refrigerators and tangles of thick grey cables leading to the huge computer monitors and the hot metal cabinets where the silicon chips crunched. Asymmetrical, patchy beards, shirts part tucked, prescriptions for glasses powerful enough to find life on a distant planet. This was the new model of hippie nerd, supplanting the ascetic fellow with the pocket protector.

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?, Steve Silberman

When Isaacson’s biography came out, I was impressed by how useful its omissions were. It became a central point of reference for everyone to contribute their own stories from unique perspectives. This one by Steve Silberman would be a good read about Buddhism even if you weren’t interested in Steve Jobs, or if you’re just interested in Jobs and Apple, it offers a new angle on those well-known success stories, all nicely woven together:

The physical environments Jobs practiced in at Tassajara and other Zen centers offered breathtaking juxtapositions of highly cultivated traditional craftsmanship and wild, rugged California landscapes. I doubt that the Japanese joinery (no nails!) that held up the walls of the zendo was lost on the aspiring design geek, or that he was unmoved by the vibrant, airy layout of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, punctuated by an enormous, twisting redwood burl (rescued from a beach in Marin) that had been sculpted to sprout tables and chairs. Zen Center’s aesthetic was a harmonious fusion of East and West — as Apple’s would be.

A Rough Guide to Disney World, John Jeremiah Sullivan

I’d never heard of Sullivan till this year but he made a big impression. His new book (which is getting great reviews) will be one of the first I pick up in the new year. I also liked his DFW review and his story about his house being a set for One Tree Hill, but this Disney story was the one I enjoyed the most in 2011:

Lil’ Dog and the ladies were sailing by up above on the Dumbo ride, in three successive elephants. Mimi had a tentatively happy face. It said, “I’m ready to think of this as fun, as long as it doesn’t go any faster or higher.” Trevor and I leaned on the railing like bettors at a track, smiling and waving every time they went past, as if we were dolls with arms hooked to wires. Trevor had his phone out, with the Internet dialed up to “the guide.” He consulted it when they were on the dark side of their orbit. Checking it against a map of the park, we determined that one of the spots mentioned wasn’t too far away, a little-used maintenance pathway with trees alongside it and some Dumpsters. Given a properly positioned lookout, you could have a puff in relative calm. We slipped away.

The King of Human Error, Michael Lewis

Another self-recommending one. Lewis profiles one of the most influential psychologists of the last half-century, the guy who partly inspired Moneyball (the best book I read in 2011, finally) and wrote one of the big books of the year, Thinking, Fast and Slow:

When I first met Kahneman he was making himself more miserable about his unfinished book than any writer I’d ever seen. It turned out merely to be a warm-up for the misery to come, the beginning of an extraordinary act of literary masochism. In effect, the psychologist kept trying to trick himself into doing things he didn’t want to do and failing to fall for the ruse. “I had this idea at first that I could do it easily,” he said. “I thought, you know, that I could talk it” to a ghostwriter, but then he seized on another approach: a series of lectures, delivered to Princeton undergraduates who knew nothing about the subject, that he could transcribe and publish more or less as spoken. “I paid someone to transcribe them,” he says. “But when I read them I could see that they were very bad.” Next, he set out to write the book by himself, as he suspected he should have done all along. He quit and re-started so many times he lost count, and each time he quit he seemed able to convince himself that he should never have taken on the project in the first place. Last October he quit for what he swore was the last time. One morning I went up the hill to have coffee with him and found that he was no longer writing his book. “This time I’m really finished with it,” he said.

Yep, writing is hard.

Google+ and the False Sense of Privacy

Brian — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:48:05 +0000

I’ll probably use Google+ for sharing photos, but not much else, for now. It seems great for that, giving me enough reason to recommend it. For conversation and news sharing I’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve wanted a way to share family photos, etc., without sharing everything with every acquaintance — not because I don’t like sharing myself but because I’m never sure how comfortable the other people are with it (whether it’s people who’d rather not see themselves and their kids all over the internet, or people who don’t want to see pics of people and kids and pets they don’t know).

Since even the latest adopters I know have Google accounts, it should be pretty easy to start without putting everyone through the nuisance (small as it is, but big enough to be a barrier) of setting up yet another account. Google+ is easier than emailing photos, and every bit as intimate (after all, there’s no guarantee that emails won’t be forwarded around beyond your control), so I’ll be strongly encouraging friends and family to use Google+, even if it’s for this alone.

(And the Hangout feature, which I haven’t tried yet (successfully) should be useful once in a while within those same intimate circles.)

A note about privacy, while I’m happy to use limited sharing for things I might be uncomfortable with if they were 100% public, I still wouldn’t trust Google+ with anything that might actually be damaging.

Not that I’m worried about anything specific, personally, but there are times that call for caution. A few months ago, in the lead-up to this, I remember Google used the example of a closeted gay being outed by pictures of them partying at a bar. Another scenario that comes up is the person on worker’s compensation caught skiing.

But even with limited sharing features, there’s still no absolute safeguard against accidents — nothing to prevent someone from copying a photo and emailing or posting it on another service, or making it their wallpaper. As Jeff Jarvis posted there this morning, it’s still a matter of personal, not technical liability.

Unlike Jarvis, I still like limited sharing. I’m learning to work with the big ambiguous expanse between the two hypothetical extremes: things I want the whole world to see and things I should keep to myself. It’s all about understanding and trying to optimize the risks vs. benefits of sharing. Sometimes accidently exposing something you’re uncomfortable with turns out to be worth it — helping build new relationships or professional leads.

Also, at least making an effort to be discrete sends a signal. It’s one thing to make a mistake or be associated with something others believe is problematic, but it requires a whole other level of poor judgement to willingly draw attention to it.

So I see Circles not as a safeguard for privacy as much as a way to clearly indicate to others how comfortable I am with something, how much risk I’m taking and entrusting with them, and what my expectations are.

Originally posted in Google+.

Update: looks like Gina Trapani was making some of the same points as I wrote this, and Trey Harris (who works at Google, apparently) wrote an excellent response to Jarvis on privacy, secrecy, safety, and signaling.

Also… sorry if you can’t access Google+ to see those posts. You can email me and I’ll try to send an invite.

Making a Scene, Creating London’s Identity

Brian — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:00:33 +0000

Some of what I said to Randy Richmond for his essay about London’s identity doesn’t quite ring true to me a month after I said it (my fault, not his), but it isn’t wrong either.

[Read this if you're interested in the conversation. It's not at the finished stage of, like, "10 things you need to do for London tomorrow!" But there's a lot of thought behind it (and believe it or not, a fair bit of editing). I might polish parts of it up later. Or I might not. Depends how it goes…For background, here's a list my best older posts about London.]

The first possible mistake I noticed in yesterday’s essay was what I said about youth culture appreciating irony and “celebrating the ordinary.” It’s true that hipsters have embraced some pretty mundane and unexpected things — PBR, fixed-gear bikes — but ordinariness isn’t the most important factor.

It’s more accurate to say that youth culture (I wish I had a better term) has a capacity to embrace anything, regardless of how ordinary or extraordinary it is.

What matters most is that it’s chosen, not imposed or overtly sold by someone we don’t identify with.

Affinity for these things comes down to whether we can reshape, repurpose or reinterpret objects and use them to express (or make us think we’re expressing) who we are as individuals and members of a close-knit group — especially for creative people. It’s about how much autonomy we feel by adopting and incorporating something into the identities we’re creating for ourselves.

Same goes for choosing a city.

Most people don’t seem to mind buying something sold through an overt marketing approach, and that’s fine (I’m not passing judgement; nor do I presume that my argument here applies to everyone). I guess because they more or less would have bought what’s being sold anyway (things designed for mass appeal: Top 40 music, processed food, generic stuff… anything we associate with middle-class suburbia, I guess — including suburbia itself).

But if we’re talking about encouraging creative young people to flourish then the first thing is simply giving them space (literally and figuratively) to create something in. And that includes letting them help create the city’s identity.

Whether it’s entrepreneurship or the arts, support through the creative process is a huge help, but I think (at least in the earliest stages) most support comes more from peers, or at least individuals (teachers, mentors) providing encouragement and guidance outside formal protocols, so all that youthful creative energy doesn’t get stifled by established ideas about what a good idea ought to look like.

Being genuinely creative isn’t just about getting on stage. Setting the stage is where a good chunk of the satisfaction come from.

Think of how punk and grunge musicians repurposed make-shift venues and seedy dives to build their scenes, rave culture came up in warehouses and illegal venues, hip hop came up in self-organized street parties. Here in London a couple of indie collectives — 379 and Open House — have repurposed venues and organized successful events and have played an invaluable role building the city’s arts and music scene (i.e. identity).

We’d be usurping half the value of the city for creative types if we said, “Hey creative people, here’s what London’s identity is, so bring your crayons and you can colour inside the lines we made for you!”

I don’t mean that we should invite everyone to the table to talk about London’s identity. I mean a city’s identity ought to emerge from what people are doing and making.

Of course what a city makes and does should be planned and subsidized to some degree — but I’m just glad I’m not on any committee that might be remembered for making bad plans and subsidizing sub-standard results.

If we look at a city like Waterloo that successfully planned ahead (so people tell me) we have to think of it as making successful bets. Luck had a fair bit to do with it. They couldn’t have really “known” how big tech was going to be. And even in London’s own past I’m sure there are plenty of examples of faulty foresight and bad execution to make us wary of our ability to sit down and collectively make good bets.

I’m a big believer in taking risks and betting on the future but I think it’s best left to people and organizations that can swallow the potential losses without causing too many harmful ripples.

City Hall can and should cultivate an entrepreneurial, artistic and adventurous spirit without taking on the risks and usurping the gratification that goes with actually being an entrepreneur or artist.

That goes for every large institution on-down:

Enable the enablers. Let the process and dialog play out. Observe and listen. See what emerges. Enable the next cohort of enablers to contribute — provide a background to continue from but let fortuitous accidents and discoveries happen — by building on past successes but not necessarily determined by them: let each new cohort give it their own interpretation. Observe and listen again. Keep looking for what emerges. And so on.

At this point it’s important to say that merely telling someone their contribution is important isn’t necessarily enough.

Contribution to a community has to reflect a person’s identity — their competencies and passions — and people need to see their contribution manifested in a concrete way. As in, “hey people are using something I made…there’s where my suggestion was picked up and used,” etc.

“Show, don’t tell,” I wish I’d said in the interview.

And more generally, “underpromise and overdeliver.”

It often it feels (to me) like too many initiatives in London start with a list of brags, and then we decide how to back up our words, instead of doing and making things that are worth doing and then figuring out how to communicate their value to the world.

That’s certainly not an indictment of every initiative. There are a lot of great things happening in London that are genuinely worth bragging about (and more all the time, I think).

And I know that a lot of things do need to be born out of a brag. Maybe it’s unavoidable (I know it happens everywhere, I’ll admit) but if you want to know what I’d most like to improve, this is it — what I feel tends to stifle new ideas as much as anything: the need to package everything into a pitch as soon as possible.

I’d like to see some things germinate a little longer.

(And one final caveat here. If you asked me what my biggest complaint is about myself, I’d say it’s the opposite: I’m incapable of turning my ideas into polished pitches. I never get projects past development. Anyway, we all have something to work on.)

Both in my own experience and as an outside observer I’ve been frustrated to see opportunities to cultivate deeper and broader value trumped by desire to celebrate smaller, immediate, symbolic wins at the expense of longer term strategic vision.

We absolutely need small symbolic wins — but not at the expense of the small symbolic failures that can help us learn and understand and adapt to bigger challenges: i.e. failing early on small projects, when it’s relatively harmless, to root out new opportunities (new ideas, new ways to organize and collaborate) to avoid bigger failures down the road.

There are simply too many questions we can’t possibly answer until we try things and see what happens.

Much of the ongoing visioning process requires an ability to work with uncertainty: comfort moving forward without knowing exactly where the destination is, yet being willing to move forward on hypotheses — “strong ideas, weakly held” — combined with a keen eye for clues and signs along the way, ingenuity to navigate and adapt with an emerging landscape, the ability to perceive and describe general patterns, and finally, decisiveness. so we don’t languish in ambiguity forever.

I’m not entirely sure how to execute it at a group level, but that’s my experience, at least. I know that vision definitely does not mean, “let’s spend 6 months coming up with something overly-comprehensive, which presumes too much [and then 10 years gradually forgetting about it and finally deciding it was entirely wrong -- and eventually using the example to make a false case for futility]“.

The tail wags the dog when try to assume too much about a distant destination we know very little about.

We don’t know what the world will be like 20 years from now. We don’t know what the best opportunities will be in 10 years. We don’t know which industries will grow or decline the most. We can’t foresee disruptive events around the world (whether oil prices, trading boundaries, etc. will be more or less congenial). We don’t know what will happen with Detroit and other cities on our map. We don’t know what future federal and provincial governments will do. And so on.

On one hand we can’t assume too much with any certainty (no decision or investment is guaranteed to pay off). On the other hand, we can’t navigate all that uncertainty without at least some sense of who we are, what we’re good at, where we came from, and where we want or need to go.

Working that balance between holding fast and letting go isn’t something to be afraid of. Even something as simple as picking up your pen requires flexing some muscles while relaxing others.

Vision is an ongoing process. It’s a balancing act, like everything important in life.

Don’t smother it but don’t let go either.

Like love and fishing (two very different things, obviously, but the same in this regard), chasing something that isn’t ready to be caught is often counterproductive. Watch, feel, and adjust accordingly.

Just get on with it, make things, enable others and get far enough out of their way, pitch in when you can without becoming a barrier, ask better questions, pay attention for answers and keep going forward.

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.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

Brian — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:38:18 +0000

I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting.

And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality.

The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write — and maybe vice versa. Like the way David Remnick said it a couple weeks ago:

You have to learn to read like a writer, in the same way that a doctor looks at a human body maybe a little bit differently or a painter looks at the human form differently than the rest of us.

So “I’m going to read more books that people who read books read,” was how I phrased it: my New Year’s resolution: a deliberate reference to Richard Posner’s famously hostile review of Malcolm Gladwell:

Blink is written like a book intended for people who do not read books.

So no more over-simplified and monosyllabically titled books about “surprising truths!”

By “books” I guess I mean literature, or “literary books” — or perhaps just “respectable fiction.” I was getting too stuck in a marketing mode: too comfortable, gradually losing my imagination. I felt like a car that’s been driven the same safe speed for to long and had lost its ability to pass on the highway.

On the other hand I already spent years reading high-quality stuff — some of my favourites: Jacques Barzun, José Ortega y Gasset, William James, A. N. Whitehead, John Dewey — and it’s been great and challenging and very fulfilling for me personally but isn’t in fashion with the type of audience that’d be willing and able to read what I’ve produced from it. The stuff I really love, the stuff I “curl up with” and lose track of time when I read, the stuff I’m most inclined to emulate (and have in the past), doesn’t endear me to many readers.

So I have to keep reading and working away…

The first name on my reading list this year was Borges. I certainly wouldn’t say I “get” Borges now but even after our short acquaintance I found myself writing differently (or thinking differently when I write). I could suddenly withhold important details to create surprises later on in a story (i.e. actually creating a story) instead of just laying out all the information in the most logical, predictable order.

Writing is about not-telling as much as it’s about telling (or moreso, not-showing as much as it’s about showing). Working the balance between what’s known and what’s not-known is what makes it joyful and interesting.

Something similar happened when I read a couple of Chekhov‘s short stories. I was struck by how much he left out of them. He gives us a few seemingly casual but skillfully sketched bits of info; our minds fill in the rest: enriching the story with a sense of relevance within a larger unknown narrative without quite making us feel deprived at the end.

Recently Robin Sloan shared something that captures this notion pretty well, quoting William Trevor:

I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

At the other end of the spectrum is David Foster Wallace, whom I (like a lot of people) have been trying to catch up on before reading The Pale King. I’ve been infatuated with his journalism for a while but I’ve found it tougher to get into his fiction (mainly because almost all fiction is tough for me to get into).

I’ve got Infinite Jest here (the precise location of my bookmark is a detail I’m happy to leave out of this story) but what I really loved was a Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky. It’s essentially just a transcript of five days of interviews and camaraderie between Wallace and Lipsky at the end of Jest‘s promotional tour in 1996. Beyond being about David Foster Wallace it’s a glimpse into the business of writing and publishing, and simply just an insightful and fun conversation between two guys I’d like to have a beer with.

(Like most books I’ve ended up loving, I didn’t go looking for it. It caught the corner of my eye — the newest, shiniest object on a pile strewn on a desk — part-way between two points in the library.)

Unexpectedly, I found myself less inclined to want to write like Wallace. I love his style, I admire his skill, his creative process interests me and I’ve adopted some of his influences (lately becoming a fan of Don DeLillo), and I sympathize with some of his experience. But instead of emulating him I’ve found the net effect has been to emulate his courage and confidence — courage and confidence to write like myself.

Or maybe I’m just making excuses for not finishing Infinite Jest.

Yeah, I’m not afraid to give up on a book (though I rarely quit altogether; I just put them aside, hoping for a better time, e.g. perhaps after I’ve read more of what Wallace read). Mainly I feel like I’m a bit too old for the intense romantic devotion it requires but still too young to have read enough of what I need to have read first…

I guess that’s just the nature of wanting to read excellent books. Geoff Dyer describes this dilemma in his wicked essay on reader’s block:

The strange thing about this is that at twenty I imagined I would spend my middle age reading books that I didn’t have the patience to read when I was young. But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty. At that age I plowed through everything in the Arnoldian belief that each volume somehow nudged me imperceptibly closer to the sweetness and light. I read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Ulysses, Moby Dick. I got through The Idiot even though I hated practically every page of it. I didn’t read The Brothers Karamazov:I’ll leave it till I’m older, I thought—and now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Dyer is another writer who’s helping me write more like myself. Though whereas Wallace helps me by being different, Dyer helps me by coming close to what I’m already trying to do on my own.

Read Out of Sheer Rage, for example. It’s a book about procrastinating from writing a book, and in the process of doing everything except write the book, he ends up writing the book in a different but probably more interesting way.

Like Dyer, most of the more creative things I really want to write are that same type of paradoxical, ‘tried doing one thing and failed but by the time I recognized my failure I turned out to have succeeded at something better.’

I’m especially sympathetic to what motivates him:

I wanted to know more – and the best way to find out about anything is to write about it. If I’d known what I needed to know before writing the book I would have had no interest in doing so. Instead of being a journey of discovery, writing the book would have been a tedious clerical task, a transcription of the known.

I’ve been trying to explain that to people for years, but after reading him say it I was like, ‘ok, now I don’t have to, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way,’ and more importantly, ‘oh crap, it’s already been done.’

But what’s funny is that the realization of non-originality wasn’t a disappointment; it was relieving. It freed me to move forward and find new things to write about — to find joy in what got me into writing and reading in the first place: not just writing what I know but trying to put together the pieces of what I don’t.

For me, not-knowing is what makes the writing process joyful and interesting — like the experience of reading. It’s most compelling as a sequence of glimpses waiting to be found — glimpses not just of a story or a book but of an author or creator.

We keep compiling influences and references but ultimately it’s how we synthesize and represent them through ourselves, in our own, way that matters most.

Update: This is too relevant not to tack on: Geoff Dyer on David Foster Wallace and “literary allergies” (via @newinquiry) — sometimes there are writers we respect and want to like but can’t read without getting a rash and watery eyes:

Maybe in some homeopathic way reading Infinite Jest would cure me of my allergy. Perhaps I just haven’t consumed him in sufficiently large doses. But even a small dose is, in my experience, an overdose. He’s funny, he’s hip, he has this whopping supply of verbal energy. His braininess and virtuosity are as hard to avoid as a 747 on a runway—and almost as noisy. He’s one of those writers who won’t let the reader get a word in edgeways.

But we’ve all got to try, at least — not just Wallace but anyone. What works out and what doesn’t is often a surprise.

Transcendent Man Delayed

Brian — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 03:23:29 +0000

Just noticed there’s a new documentary about Ray Kurzweil and his big ideas (transhumanism, artificial intelligence, technological singularity, etc.). The movie’s called Transcendent Man:

… offering [Kurzweil's] vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent…all within the next thirty years.

I saw him talk about it in a Charlie Rose segment and I got thinking…

I want to be fair because I think it’s worth considering all the possibilities. I also think there’s a risk of getting carried away by AWESOME IDEAS. But then again I think the risks are exaggerated by a mainstream cultural bias for thrills, glorification of the “human spirit” and badass CGI baddies annihilating cities with ion canons and other sorts of heavily art-directed doomsday scenarios.

And that cultural factor, I think, is more important to the future of technology than people realize.

There are all kinds difficult-to-foresee factors that can (or inevitably will) disrupt expert predictions, which is why experts keep getting things wrong (read Dan Gardner’s Future Babble).

Remember past predictions about overpopulation and resource scarcity. It’s natural to look at a graph of population growth and imagine that one day it’ll get so high that we can’t sustain ourselves, but what early theorists like Malthus didn’t anticipate was that population growth would plateau in societies that achieve the degree of prosperity we have now. Not only do we keep coming up with clever ways to use resources, but we’re so busy inventing things and making things more efficient (i.e. pursuing careers) that we have less need — and less desire — to have kids, so the population bomb hasn’t gone off and we’ve got little reason to believe today’s prophets are right when those in the past were so wrong.

Likewise, it’s natural to assume that processing speed, memory capacity, etc. will keep going up the way they’re going now until they reach their intrinsic limit or culmination, but that virtually assumes that technology has already unhitched its fate from humanity — as if to assume a kind of singularity has already happened — as if the machines are capable of determining their own future without our intervention.

But technology still needs us — it needs us to develop and test it, to write and enforce policies, fund it, buy it, use it and sell it, talk to friends and audiences and Twitter followers about how awesome it is — and all of our wet and periodically messy human variables aren’t stable enough to base solid long-term predictions on.

Now look at how many people have deep distrust of science and technology (or at least espouse distrust of technology as part of some conflicting agenda).

There are the fringe types — Unabombers and Al Qaedas — but even more worrying are popular protests against vaccines, wifi, and worse: serious legislative battles over the teaching of evolution, genetic research and climate science.

So as long as we’re making big generalizations, let’s look at the possibility that the more sophisticated science and technology become, the more we’ll have to address knowledge gaps, and the more likely people are to distrust progress — and this limitation could preempt the realization of true artificial intelligence, singularity and whatever else tech-focused futurists come up with.

Progress isn’t only limited by what technology itself is capable of, but our collective will to take it that far.

Whether or not you agree, there’s still the problem of a pretty widespread anti-scientific sentiment, not in the future but happening right now. It might be worth spending a little less time dreaming about what can be, at least to preserve the progress we’ve already made.

Design Update: A Dialog

Brian — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 04:19:39 +0000

“You changed your website again?”

“I know, I can’t help it. Once a year I get bored on some Saturday night so I start tweaking stuff and one thing leads to another and 10 hours later I’ve been up all night changing basically everything.”

“Haha — you’re an idiot.” I love her honesty. “I like it! I wish I had the time to make my site look pretty. But you know, I’m one of those people who needs sleep.” :) “Do you actually know what you’re doing when you do your website?”

“Nope,” I said with a proud-guilty grin, “not really.”

She tilted and turned her head, giving me all of her raised right eyebrow.

“I mean, I’m learning as I go. Most of it’s just basic settings and plugins that don’t take much, but sometimes I’ll see something I like on someone else’s site and I’ll search for tutorials and discussions in forums for how to do it. Usually I screw it up — which is why I accidently stay up all night — but I mean it’s kinda good because I like to learn by doing things myself and solving problems.”

“Like what?”

“Uh–”

“Like, what was the hard stuff you did for your site? What did you learn?”

“Oh, uh, probably the hardest part for me was just getting stuff in the header and footer. I guess ‘hard stuff’ is maybe a strong word, I mean it’s relative. It’s more like — people who know what they’re doing probably do it easily — um, like I’ve always just cut-and-pasted things where a tutorial told me and then I just had to go, ‘Ok, this looks like it changes the colour, so what happens if I change this to something else? Nice, it worked. And maybe if I delete this line that weird space will go away,’ and that type of thing: just trial-and-error. But this time I’ve actually been reading up on it so I’m not just trying random things and seeing what happens.”

“Cool, yeah, I should learn more about that too. I noticed you don’t have your blog on your main page anymore. What’s with that?”

“Oh,” I said, “yeah, I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. The problem with the blog, for me, is that I keep posting on very different topics. One week about creativity and psychology, the next week about politics and media, two weeks later about philosophy. I think I should do a post about these design changes but I’ve been thinking of turning it into a creative writing exercise to make it more interesting… Any post by itself could give someone the wrong impression. I used to always feel like I had to write a new post because I thought the last post sucked and I didn’t want it to be the first one people saw. I don’t have the juice or time to keep doing that forever to I made the switch so make sure people saw my About page instead of a bunch of complicated and maybe controversial posts. It’s the same reason why I show Related Posts instead of Recent Posts in the sidebar now.”

“Or you could blog about the same thing all the time.”

“Yeah, no. I tried that and it didn’t happen. I ended up with like five different blogs. Instead — I’m not sure how many people notice — 95% of my posts are pretty focused on recognizing our own fallibility, working with uncertainty and articulating change.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I noticed ‘articulating change’ on your main page. Is that like your slogan now?”

“I’m afraid to use the word slogan anymore, but I guess so. It’s a quick way to describe what I do, and it covers what I do as a freelance writer for clients plus what I do with creative projects, as well as advocacy and activist-type stuff. It’s all about the same thing: making the most of change by knowing how to articulate what’s happening at a given time and place — not relying on abstract theories or old habits.”

“That’s what your book is mostly about.”

“Yes! The book is really — it’s like the operating system for everything else I might write. I think, I hope, if people get that then everything here should seem more coherent. All along I thought of it as an investment — a bit of capital that can do stuff for me instead of like a blog that has to always be updated.”

“I like your blog posts,” she said.

“Thanks!”

“Except the dialog about your design is a little corny.”

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.

My Dundas: Transforming London’s Sentimental Centre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where would a proportional flow come from in London?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Et cetera…

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

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

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

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

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

We also have to think holistically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow the ongoing #mydundas discussion on Twitter.

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.

How to Lose Elections and Alienate People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Solar Power Tree and My Civic Dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You Might Be Getting Wrong About “Meaningful”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where social media comes back into the picture.

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

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

The biggest problem with that [informal side of the] process right now is that most of it is still offline and accounted 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.

Brian Frank

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