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.

After a recent physical exam, my doctor said I was doing “fairly well” for my age.

A little concerned about that comment, I couldn’t resist asking him, “Do you think I will live to be 80?”

He asked, “Do you smoke tobacco or drink alcoholic beverages?”

“Oh no,” I replied. “I don’t do drugs, either.”

“Do you have many friends and entertain frequently?”

“I said, “No, I usually stay home and keep to myself”.

“Do you eat rib-eye steaks and barbecued ribs?”

I said, “No, my other doctor said that all red meat is unhealthy!”

“Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, sailing, hiking, or bicycling?”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have a lot of sex?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t do any of those things.”

“Then why do you give a shit?”

Tip o’ the hat to Jerry Vass

Well, this is a review of David Weinberger’s presentation. Tamara and I went to David Weinberger’s talk this week presenting his new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, which was released Tuesday. It’s been getting some great reviews, from Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing and by Ethan Zuckermann at the book’s Amazon page, where it’s already ranked #79!

David’s presentation is a must-see: if it comes to your town, make sure you catch it, he’s refined it since his presentation at the Library of Congress. Like the book, it’s a tour de force. His slides make all the difference. He really oughtta post a video of this, because it helped me understand what most of you got right away but had not been obvious to me:

Tagging is a social grace, incumbent on each of us.

Tagging is the Triumph of the Commons.

I’ve never been a tagger because I didn’t quite see the point. But David’s talk was inspiring. His message is like, “When you see something, say something!” Actually, it’s more like, when you see anything, say something. When you’re wandering the world of of ideas and impression and you stumble across a metaphor, throw it in the right metaphor bucket.

I’m lazy, and I treat my sloth as a reasonable option. It’s not.

Not tagging a relevancy is a little like being a litterbug. I go (slightly) out of my way to pick up a piece of trash and throw it in the designated receptacle of our collective sensibilities, because I have a visceral sense of the consequences of not doing so. Likewise, it’s irresponsible to not add my Aha! moments to our collective receptacle of understanding and metaphor.

To be fair, tagging a candy wrapper as trash is a binary event, while tagging my or another’s writing requires higher-order decisions. A candy wrapper on the sidewalk is categorically wrong, so it’s an easy choice to nab it, knowing a trash container is always a few steps away. In fact, the ubiquitous trashcan is a grace of 21st Century urban design (UI). Its proximity is a support for one’s choice to be part of the solution. I remember a time before ubiquitous trash containers, because hardly anyone littered, so there was a built-in bias against solving someone else’s oversight. One was simply repelled rather than useful.

After his talk, Tamara and David and I had an enjoyable Indian vegetarian dinner at one of the many Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue north of Gramercy Park. Shortly after Joi Ito’s Eat To Live Diet conversion, Tamara and I jumped on that bandwagon. We’re not as strict as Joi, but reasonably so. I’m down 20 pounds and 3 inches at the waist, and I love how Tamara looks. So it was fun to do veggies with David, because the last time we sat together at a restaurant, it was a Brasilian steakhouse in Cambridge. I was wolfing down dead cow parts while David was stalking the virtual pampas for sprouts and condiments.

George Bush is a brave man. He’s invited a country singer named Natalie to sing at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner tonight, Saturday, at 8 ET (CSPAN listing).

The good news for him is that this Natalie is a lowercase dixie chick from Nashville, not that Dixie Chick from Lubbock. Natalie is my future daughter-in-law, Natalie Stovall (MySpace, GarageBand), an up-and-coming country rocker and songwriter, whose CD is available at the iTunes Music Store. She’ll be singing America the Beautiful, a capella, just after the Star Spangled Banner. As far as I know, Natalie is apolitical, having been raised in Tennessee balanced by four years in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. But even if she had loaded up on Boston politics, the Prez need not worry. Natalie is a wise and empathetic soul who takes care of stray puppies and would never be uncivil to a guy who’s lonelier than he once was.

Here’s Natalie and Tamara celebrating Tam’s birthday at the Bitter End in 2005, and Nat and my daughter Kelly at the after-party here at the East 43rd St. HQ. Them’s some real swell women and it was a real swell clambake.

Flashback

Natalie’s father, Larry Stovall, was an Army Lieutenant on the ground in Vietnam while I was flying C-130s. We shake our heads a lot.

Tom Stites tried to comment on my post after our great lunch meeting Monday, but had to send an email instead. You’d think that blog software would be more tractable but not yet - it’s not like I’m a luddite, eh?

Here’s Tom’s message:

Hi Britt — I’m finally back from the dial-up purgatory of my New York B&B stay and have had a chance to go spelunking in the links in your nice post about our lunch and conversations. There’s always much to learn from the links smart people stick in their writing, which is why I’ve come to believe that the Web is a much better way to deliver quality journalism than print.

I set out to leave a comment on your post but I couldn’t find a door on your blog that would open to let me register to do so. Do you have this feature disabled or am I overlooking something?

(Memo to self: create a web framework that makes blogging and commenting easy.)

In any event, the main reason for the comment I was imagining is this excerpt from Tom Piazza’s excellent but unfortunately titled book, The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz:

In a jazz group, as in any community, certain roles need to be filled. Someone has to play the melody, someone has to keep time, someone has to suggest the harmonic context. Often these jobs overlap. In jazz, each instrumentalist has to understand his or her role in the group well enough so that he or she can improvise on it and not just follow directions. Playing in a jazz group involves both responsibility and freedom; freedom consists of understanding your responsibility well enough to act independently and still make the needed contribution to the group. As such, a jazz performance is a working model of democracy.

This certainly supports your sense of jazz as a fine metaphor for OSS2. And the metaphor extends to where old-school journalism and the BSphere diverge: Not everybody can play jazz. No small number of superb musicians are lost without the score in front of them. For related reasons no small number of music lovers have zero appreciation of jazz.

I share your faith that in an Open Source Society “the right person will show up with the right contribution at the right time” and that “the value of that ad hoc contribution will be obvious.” I just don’t see any evidence that this phenomenon will be distributed evenly across all the topics and political geographies that people need to be informed about to make solid life and citizenship decisions.

Common sense, at least what passes for common sense in what’s left of my mind, tells me that people are quite likely to show up with the right contribution at the right time in communities of geography and interest whose population is disproportionately endowed with easy and continuous broadband access, certain thinking, writing and technical skills, and the motivation to take part. Municipalities with populations like these — Westport, Conn., is an excellent example — have excellent Web gatherings where the right people show up with the right contribution at the right time. But this works less well up the road in Bridgeport, were such folks are scarce. And it works hardly at all in the Global South, where billions subsist on $1 a day — or in highly secretive institutions like the World Trade Organization, which play their music only from the score and only for an elite private audience. Perhaps someday there will be an eschatological moment and the needed OSS2 skills and resources will be evenly distributed across our communities, nation, and globe, and old-school journalism will become unnecessary. But until then, if old-school journalism were to vanish whole aspects of our political and economic life would go dark, and all hope of democracy would go dark with it.

Old-school journalism certainly has its failings. Editors and other mediators inevitably have biases, and some will always be intellectually or otherwise corrupt. To my mind the OSS2 approach is no less flawless, but its main flaw is wildly unequal distribution ensured by the inherent inequalities of our society and global society. That said, OSS2 is a huge and growing gift to democracy and thus to the world. The stronger it gets the more it corrects the weaknesses of old-school journalism. As Doc wrote in that post that’s so generous to the old school, “we need AND logic, not OR.” Hooray for all of us. We be synergistic. The universe is not inherently binary.

And I appreciate your citation of Bro. Surowiecki, whose very independent mind I admire and from whom I have learned a lot. His thinking on the failure of crowd intelligence start with crowds that are too homogenous. I suspect that this applies to people who groove on the seductive mantra that information wants to be free, and who think that OSS2 makes old-school journalism obsolete or soon will. I know of no one who shares this mindset who does not have the previously enumerated skills, motivation, and easy and continuous broadband access. As a corrective: Remember, 80 percent of Americans work for hourly wages. People who punch time clocks and work at retail, or run machines, or drive trucks, or build things on construction sites, many of whom work more than one job, have no chance of digesting RSS feeds from their favorite bloggers all day as they sit at their desks, and very few will be reading them on their Treos.

I don’t mean this as ungenerous, but I sense a shared belief among information-wants-to-be-free folks that in time all people will be like them, or at least want to be like them. It’s a universal human trait to think the world is composed of people like us and the folks we deal with routinely, but the truth is that people ain’t all gonna be blogger/jazzers unless that eschatological moment comes along. I know of no economist or demographer who expects the percentage of hourly-wage workers, or the nature of their work, to change much in the foreseeable future. Further, there’s for sure not going to be any sudden change among the global poverty population, or in the adherence to secrecy of the corporate elites whose power directs the global economy and the government in Washington. So OSS2’s reach is limited by the number of folks we can realistically expect to have the skills that its jazz requires.

Here endeth the comment for the day.

As much as a pain as the ORGware delay must be to you, as a reader of your blog, I find it a blessing that you have more time to post these days. I’ll savor it while I can.

It was a blast to see you. We have lots more conversation ahead of us, and I look forward to it.

Tom

P.S. Please let me know if there’s a way for me to shape what I’ve written here as a comment; if not, and you’re so moved, feel free to put it, or parts of it up yourself however you wish.

The View from the Frontier

So spaketh Thomas. The issue we’re grappling with is how fast and skillfully might the next several waves of Web-struck newbies embrace and extend the power of connectedness to unite the people who most need its leverage. As Archimedes might have said, “Give me a web that’s wide enough, and I’ll lift the world.”

Tom knows that we pioneers who went west first desperately need the next wave of settlers to show up and populate this wild country with real families and infrastructure and town marshalls and schoolmarms. Since they won’t put up with the wildness we’ve embraced, it’s our job to provide a safe haven among the cactus and sagebrush and Indians.

However, Tom and I diverge a little on whether the skills and values of the pioneers will be adopted by the subsequent settlers. When we talked today, I suggested that, his Bridgeport example notwithstanding, the next wave of settlers may respond to the web’s delights just as we have: that we’re not really so special, simply early. Although we were quick to adopt the Internet’s protocols and values, it doesn’t mean that those who show up next (and next and next) will be any less skilled in embracing these collaborative tools. Despite that possibility, it’s likely we should build easier tools for them.

Tom sent me a book a while back: The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America by Lawrence Goodwyn. Though most of us have heard of the Populist Movement that emerged in America after the Civil War (was it really so civil?), it’s Goodwyn’s remarkable insight to describe it in a book titled “The Populist Moment”, because it demonstrates that movements are dependent on unique moments in time. Tom is convinced that America is in such a moment today. As a journalist, he is committed to serving the people who may not have a voice yet but who will certainly find theirs, moments from now, as reckoned by Internet time. Roughly speaking, his audience is hourly workers.

But actually, he yearns to rescue all of us. It’s a good thing, ’cause we sure need it.