Escapable Logic

Yesterday, Doc Searls admired wisdom from G.B. Shaw:

Quote du jour 2
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw

Not sure I ever heard that before. Sounds familiar. But Chris Heuer just brought it up in the “Economics of Free” discussion. And it sank in.

Even if he saw it 4–1/2 years ago, Doc could hardly remember my praise for Age of Unreason, a business book based totally on Shaw’s praise of unreason. I extended the book’s premise as praise for open source software:

Open Source - the Impossible Dream

Open source software is an economic anomaly: it shouldn’t be possible. But then, neither should soccer moms. According to economists, all work must be compensated through a managed accounting system or it doesn’t count as real work. Twelve years ago, this point was questioned by Charles Handy, Britain’s foremost business writer, in The Age of Unreason. He pointed out that an immense portion of the useful work in a society doesn’t show up in the GDP, performed by people who aren’t paid for what they do.

Handy’s point is that we need to be purposely unreasonable in order to do the most-needed things. For support he cites Shaw:

George Bernard Shaw once observed that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. His argument was that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, while the unreasonable persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore for any change of consequence we must look to the unreasonable man, or, as I must add, to the unreasonable woman.

Unreasonably, not only is Linux gaining ground against capitalism’s poster boy, Windows, and a patchy open source web server (Apache) delivers 66% of the world’s web pages, one of the world’s great software architects, Mitch Kapor, formed the Open Source Applications Foundation last week. Its purpose is to spend no less than $5,000,000 to give away a first class Personal Information Manager.

“Thanks for not pulling out.”

[Later] It’s a broader meme than I knew. I liked the telephone version best.

John Doerr is a VC extraordinaire, a Master of the Universe, who invested in Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Lotus, Intuit, Genentech, Millennium, Netscape and Amazon. He creates worlds and then helps those worlds absorb other worlds. But last year, his daughter asked him to fix global warming, and it’s not clear he has an answer. Trust me, a daughter will do that to you.

In this video from the TED Conference, John Doerr lays out his challenge. Halfway into his 20 minute talk, his voice starts cracking as he makes the case for immediate response. At 17 minutes in, his appeal resolves to a kind of existential despair as he says,

“If we succeed, it’s gonna be the most important transformation for life on the planet since we went from methane to oxygen in the atmosphere. If [the current rate of response] is not gonna be enough, what are we gonna do? [catches breath] I. Don’t Know.

“I can’t wait to see what we TEDsters can do about this crisis.”

A mid-life crisis, actually. John Doerr, Master of the Universe, loses it at 17:15 into his talk and leans on the back of a chair to steady himself. His tears confirm his words: he’s not sure he can meet his daughter’s challenge. This is one of the most noble and human presentations I’ve ever seen. Witnessing this, one feels compelled to help him find a way to respond to his daughter’s plea, lest we signal our personal impotence to respond to our own progeny.

What strikes me is his half-hearted appeal to the TEDsters to engage their social networks, presuming methods they do not actually have, about 15:30 into the video. Social networking is more honored in the observance than its reach.

The fact is that neither they nor he have a clue how to engage their networks. These guys show up at tech conferences with other guys, even richer than we are, but they have no tools to make a difference except a vague appeal that the audience should email their friends. Is that an appeal that will survive the cocktail party?

Further, it’s stunning that the John Doerr video is actually a BMW ad.

The image of an impotent rich guy should not distress us. Each of us is impotent in the face of our child’s most fervent hope. That’s just karmic retribution - no biggie.

What’s striking is that the mechanics of mobilizing citizens to swarm over a problem to overwhelm it should be such a mystery. We Netizens seem so confident in the ability of “the Internet” and “smart mobs” and “Emergent Democracy” and the “Second Superpower” to right all wrongs that it’s stunning that it’s largely a religious issue: a matter of faith. But “the Internet” is not a social engine or a force in politics or society. “The Internet” is, basically, Home Depot. It’s got tools to fix things, but we’re largely dependent on several guilds of craftsmen to put the pieces together. If youy’ve ever remodeled a house, you know how iffy that is.
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Appealing on a more intellectual level, his friend, Vinod Khosla, presents at Google, and pushes ethanol, convincingly. What’s not convincing is that he and his audience can start the snowballs that Doc has taught us we must in order to effect change.

The three people who read and write this blog are just egotistical enough to believe that we can help Vinod Khosla and John Doerr and the Google guys and Richard Branson and their friends to build a citizen army of advocates to demand what they currently must beg for.

It’s kinda sad, really. They have the money and the data and ideas but they don’t have the political clout to achieve what they feel compelled to sell in these presentations. Notice the part about lobbying Washington, about 59:00 into Khosla’s talk at Google, or at 1:04. He has no clue how to push the politicians.

These “richest & most powerful people in the world” are rich but they are not powerful, having no clue about the mechanisms by which they might recruit millions of citizens to push legislators to do the right thing.

This is a Tipping Point. The “Big Players” represented by Khosla and Doerr are yearning for “bloggers” and social networks (54:20 into Vinod’s talk) to respond. They need bloggers and other ‘Net-based activists more than we need them.

And that’s the subject of our next post.

Lee Iacocca is speaking at the Take Back America 2007 Conference that Michael Melillo and I are attending next week. His appearance is related to his book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

He has said it more plainly than anyone:

Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged. This is a fight I’m ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, “Lee, you’re eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people.” I’d love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I’m going to speak up because it’s my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I’ll tell you how I see it, and it’s not pretty, but at least it’s real. I’m hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don’t vote because they don’t trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

I intend to hand an envelope to Mr. Iacocca telling him that the Blogosphere is behind him and that there are untapped resources that were unimaginable at the time he inked his book contract, that our world–yours and mine–moves that fast. And that in that dynamism is the chance to make a greater difference than any of us can imagine. The fact is that Lee Iacocca needs us more than we need him, and he knows it.

In that envelope, I want to present letters from as many of you as possible. Since Lee is old school (a state I resonate with), these letters should be proofread and sensible and compelling. Naturally, I’ll include a link to an index so he can peruse our thoughts online. If he has an associate with him, I’ll hand the same envelope to him/her.

So, send me a PDF of a letter you would like Lee Iacocca to glance at or, if it grabs his attention, maybe even read. Send it to britt@blaserco.com.

If you want to be taken seriously, mock up a letterhead, which people of Lee’s age and experience relate to better than plain text. The usual Executive Suite standards apply: one page, lots of white space, demonstrating that you took the time to be concise.

Present your credentials, which are probably more impressive than you think, ’cause these Rich White Guys are beginning to get it that they don’t know how to get a large group of people to do anything, unless they’re employees.

And we do.