Blogging With the Enemy
If you disagree vehemently with a blog's point of view, why would you spend
time there? Do you go there to get along a little better or to work yourself
into a lather?
I thought of this when I came across Eric
Norlin's rant yesterday. Eric's had it up to there with the whiners (lower
case, with an "h") who wish the world were better than it is and who
think the Internet's protocols contain the seeds of a fairer, more collective
society:
There seems to be this highly vocal contingent of bloggers. Oh they're
nice enough—until you offend their smarmy, alan alda/gloria steinem/woodstockian
sensibilities. That's right—these folks (you know who you are) are inexorably
stuck in either A)1968 or B)some bad new
age seminar. So, just for the record, let's review this little bugger we call
the internet:
If, Larry Lessig is right (as he recently alleged), and the NET IS NEUTRAL,
then it has absolutely no moral imperative to:
- increase the peace, love, harmony and economic and social justice
on the planet
- help you "find yourself" (how hard is that?!)
- explore more deeply the beauty that is dialogue (i think i'm gonna
throw up)
- fight the power/stick it to da man/whatever
Bottom Line: thinking the interent should be some tool for helping us
all get along a little better amounts (at the end of the day) to the same
kind of draconian thinking that the worst upholders of copyright expansion
subscribe to. Its a tool for human society — which is ugly, messy, beautiful,
offensive, disgusting, lovely, awe-inspiring and about making money (at least
sometimes).
So. Eric's bottom line is the bottom line. Fair enough—Xpertweb is intractably
focused on its practitioners' bottom lines. But I can think of no finer attribute
for a business tool than that it helps us all get along a little
better, so I'm not clear how that might be a negative.
The obvious lack of a "moral imperative" doesn't mean that the Internet
cannot function as if it has a pre-determined purpose. Richard Dawkin's important
book, The
Blind Watchmaker, speaks directly to this effect, raised by "the
18th century theologian William Paley, who made one of the most famous creationist
arguments: just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung
into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater
complexity, be purposefully designed.*"
Where Reverend Paley divined (literally) a celestial Watchmaker, Darwin and
Dawkins demonstrated that tiny changes to a species over eons of time can generate
mechanisms of mind-numbing complexity and seeming purpose. Dawkins originated
the notion of the gene's cousin, the meme
and, as Br'er Hussein might say, the Internet is the mother of all memes.
In other words, just because the Internet has no moral imperative doesn't mean
that it does not intrinsically support certain modalities of behavior. Anyone
can observe that email drives an organization away from hierarchy. That force
is true even if there is no moral imperative.
Eric's rant seems to be directed as much at books as blogs, linking only to
his buddy Chris "RageBoy" Locke, which cites his current reading,
"Shoshana Zuboff's latest recipe for overhauling capitalism,"
The
Support Economy, which sounds like an Xpertweb
rant :
Zuboff and Maxmin would eliminate the "little murders" of customer
service interaction by replacing the current transaction-based model with
a form of "distributed capitalism" based on a customer-supplier
relationship, so semi-anonymous customer service reps will be replaced by
"advocates" fully emotionally involved in their clients' needs.
(Publisher's Weekly)
My instant sense was that no one's forcing Eric to submit himself to those
blogs' (or books') intellectual pollution. When an attack is so vitriolic, ya
gotta wonder why.
Doc's House Call
Then I found Doc
Searls response, pointing out that Eric seems to be describing Eric's Internet,
not others', and that the Internet is what you want it to be—the summer
of love or the simmer of cash flow:
About making money. Ever asked yourself what the business model of rocks
is? Of dirt? Of trees? Of rotted plants? Of reproductive urges? Last I looked
the building, concrete, lumber, oil and porn businesses were doing pretty
well. The difference with the Net is: its resources are infinite. They don't
need to be renewed, because they're not scarce. You mine and harvest them
by processes like duplication. Take all you want; just don't buy the illusion
that you "own" any of it. You don't, any more than you own the air
you breathe or the jillion-ton wedge of rock and lava between your yard and
the core of the Earth. Deep down, it's a commie kinda place. Deal with it.
Think of the Net as a laboratory for human nature, because it's the
first world entirely made by human beings. And as Craig
Burton says,
we've only begun to
terraform it. It's like we created a parallel planet, occupying the same
space and time as the one we already inhabit. We're there already and have
to make the most of it. Including the fact that some of our founding dreams
were wet.
[Later...] Eric
pushes back, basically laying out exceptions to my descriptions of the
Net's character. More later. Meanwhile, re-read Britt Blaser's Bloom
on the Peach. It's related.
Not To Scale
This sounds like a religious controversy, and economics often lies just beneath
religious passion. That point supports Eric's view that we bloggers need to
be less touchy-feely and more about business that works.
The Internet can be irritating to managerial capitalists. Even while it supports
huge reductions in communications expense (internally, or with vendors and customers),
it also so distorts the playing field that the Old Boy Network seems like a
childhood dream. And managerial capitalism doesn't seem to scale well to the
Internet. Organizations often spend far too much on sites that few customers
visit or, conversely, their business model can't meet the demands of too many
customers who want their emails answered and to take delivery as promised. It
seems like Amazon's the only one who's nailed it.
The genetics, anthropology and history I've read, as suggested in my peachy
essay, describe a relentless march from thuggery to "getting along
a little better". Clearly, this Xpertweb
design study is about building protocols that let buyers and sellers get along
a little better in the marketplace, not through draconian thinking, but by exposing
every promise and every outcome to (dare I say it?) collective
review. As Doc says, that's a commie kinda place.
The Slippery Slope of Power Sharing
In the movie Stargate, a distant
world was literally owned by a Pharaoh wizard-god with all the power and no
one else with any. Sorta like our early monarchies. By 13th century England,
the nobles, whom the monarchy relied upon to hold power (and who had therefore
been granted some power) were able to wrest concessions from King John in 1215
by his execution of the Magna
Carta.
Well, there went the neighborhood. Since then, the inevitable has progressed:
those who control assets and work have been forced to grant concessions to those
who actually perform the work, and we're not done yet. I believe we're at the
cusp of recognizing what's been hidden in plain sight for 5,000 years:
Assets are an accumulation of property rights based on organizing others'
toil.
Now, organizing work has been no mean trick, since managing workers is like
herding cats. So it's not surprising or even unfair that huge fortunes have
been amassed by those who've organized work productively in the presence of
raw materials, factories, distribution and accounting. The question on the Internet
table is whether the self-organizing protocols we're seeing and anticipating
will be sufficient to interest the cats in herding themselves. This is precisely
the point of this microeconomy design study.
Self-organizing workers are a death threat to managerial capitalism. If managers'
primary purpose is to do things that are more easily and elegantly accomplished
by an incipient web application, they're in deep doo-doo. In many ways they're
acting that way, and why not? Ask yourself: How many managers do I know who
are replaceable by a reasonably programmed web application? Yeah. Me too.
If the cats can herd themselves, what is the purpose of the managerial class?
When work must no longer be organized into jobs,
what is the need for external organizers? The homes of people I know already
have better Means of Production than their cubicles—faster CPUs, comparable
broadband, chairs, desk space and coffee. Is management as we know it simply
another intermediary whose franchise is questionable?
Those are economic and humanist questions. It's premature
to dismiss the humanists as inadequate because they're not discussing economics.
The Federalist Papers never discussed the Uniform Commercial Code because the
UCC is just details. John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence boldly,
so King George wouldn't have to put on his spectacles to finger him. The important
work done, he went back to work on his little insurance company.
As will we all.
12:21:08 AM 
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