November 2004

… Google.

This is the best line I’ve heard so far while watching David Weinberger’s presentation at the USA’s Library of Congress titled “Blogs and Knowledge”.

I’m only about 2/3 of the way through it. I’ll update this post if I come across a better line (as Doc Searls points out, another very good line was that “newspapers have learned the technique of stripping voice out of stories”).

The world is getting more real and less real all the time … every day that goes by.

One of the key reasons, I believe, is that we thought we knew something about other parts of the world before the Internet came along … there were newspapers and telvision shows that showed us something about those other parts. But of course they were just what the filters that are newspapers and televsion shows decide to tell us. Now, the Internet has spawned email and these ungainly, awkward, not-yet-approved things called blogs, which are supplementing and complementing web sites.

Information flows much much faster, and from places around the globe, and it’s not filtered as it was until very recently, by journalists, editors, scriptwriters and producers. There are more versions of what “truth” or “consequences” might be, out there. It’s not quite as official as it used to be.

And of course there’s the workplace and corporations, where many adults spend most of their waking hours. What has the Internet brought to this component of the modern world ?

Back in the olden days, pre-Internets (as George Bush would say ;-), corporations went to significant lengths to protect corporate secrets … as one would suppose they should. Maintaining a competitive advantage depended upon it.

Not only that, but the customers and clients of a corporation were outside the walls of the fortress corporation. Employees planned products, built what they would offer to clients and customers and delivered the same, all from the protection offered by the walls and turrets … whatever came inside depended upon the scouts and other means the corporations had of reconnoitering outside the walls of the fortress.

Even the introduction of information systems into the corporation … generally to create efficiencies … didn’t change this dynamic all that much. Oh, they opened secret trap doors to allow electronic data interchange with suppliers and certain vendors, but what the corporation did was still inside the walls, and the doors at the entrance to the fortress were usualluy pulled up. Every once in a while, they might lower the doors - in the form of … oh, let’s call them focus groups, or maybe even outside consultants … but basically the front gates stayed pulled up tight.

But, along came this thing called the Internet … followed by the Web. And people everywhere started using it. First and foremost they used email … to communicate with each other, and even to communicate with people in other corporations, and sometimes even their friends. Gradually, people outside the walls who were their customers started using it … both amongst themselves, to check what others’ experiences had been with that corporation … and also as a means of asking questions of the corporation about their products and service ,… or even worse, to make demands of the corporation with respect to the design, usefulness or other practical aspoects of the corporations products and services. This all started happening in about 1996 or 1997.

This was followed by a quaint social and not-quite-commercial phenomenon called the dot.com boom. At first it seemed like this would be quite the revoultion in the conduct of normal affairs. New companies were started, the uniforms forced upon workers began to change as they went and worked for these new companies, which often seemed as if they wanted their worketrs to be more like humans and less like semi-mindless robots .. young people actually thought it might be more interesting, more fun and more challenging (in positive ways) to do this for a living than what they thought their parents, the school authorities and the people who were thinking of emplying them, had in mind. But it wasn’t quite the right mix of ideas and capabilities yet … the sociology hadn’t yet caught up to the possibilities that seemed clear and accessible. Thus, there was a dot.com bust.

And the old fogeys who were the proprietors and the custodians of the fortresses wiped their brows, saying “whew, that was close” … and cracked the whip. Back to busyness, everybody … and don’t get any smart ideas like that again … you’re here to work for us. This retrenchment was followed closely by an event that galvanized the world - 911 - and the subsequent actions … of protecting everyone against the possibility of a raining down of fire and brimstone from all directions occasioned a very real reaction of corporations everywhere “battening down the hatches”, and making it a very risky thing indeed to consider innovations, or sharing information.

However, corporations did not count on a significant aspect of the earlier problem remaining in play. No one thought to take down or dismantle the Internets. Oh, some actually did think of it, but because it was ostensibly supposed to be for everybody and not just for the coproations, they actually tried to find all sorts of ways of controlling its use through legislation. And some corporations actually volunteered to put protection-and-coontrol mechanisms (usually called DRM, or digital rights management) inside the machines that connected people to the Internets and thus to each other. The governments got involved with this issue pretty quickly too, as a few smart wags realized that the possibility of openness and transparency afforded by the Web was threatening the ways things had always been done.

but because the Web fundamentally connects people to other people, via email and access to web sites and blogs, it began to become apparentto everybody that the walls of the fortresses were actually much more like permeable membranes, through which awareness and knowledge could, if permitted, flow as if aided by osmosis. This of course was rightly judged to be dangerous, as control of peoples’ activities and energies depends on the information and understanding available to them. This was a risk to be managed.

These types of risks had been managed quite effectively for at least a half-century by the reward and punioshment schemes and dynamics of hierarchically-structured organizations … reporting relationships (wherein the guy who sat behind you in English Lit at university was only a C student but had a more sizeable dollop of ambition and ruthlessness or sycophancy in his soul) or compensation and performance management schemes whereby one could acquire more whuffie for fitting in, going alonmg, or sucking up. But again … the Web began to be perceived as threatening this setup. Beware the smart dude who had ideas about how things could be done better, or who might blow the whistle, or who might point you to other sources of information that might contradict the corporate story.

And as blogs began to proliferate, in the mid ’00’s, and people even began to talk about how they might be used to give individuals … smart people who cared and knew how to find things out, or were smarter than their bosses .. avoice, it became clear pretty quickly that when all was said and done, blogs might be a democratizing force for people who worked with ideas and knowledge. Perish that thought ! and by all means don’t share it.

As it began to seem as if there might be a real possibility that employees working inside the walls (well, actually permeable membranes, as we’ve seen earlier … the walls are really only the vision, values and logo of the corporation) might begin to use blogs to work, interact, collaborate, along came the notion of “managing the risk” that this new form of communication had created. And, as with all good management science, a research report, complete with recommendations on appropriate generic policies, sprang forth on offer to the marketplace. Janus Risk Management, for example, used a proprietary methodology called Enterprise Threat Index (ETx ™), which uncovers and assesses Causal Threat and Risk Factors (CTRFs).

With respect to the threat posed by people thinking and then talking to each other on blogs, Janus analyzed and qualified the CTRFs, and issued a strongly worded recommendation (warning ?) that corporations undertake to address Blog Threat Management. The key recommendation ? Treat blogs as another form of computer virus (thought viruses, I guess). While it’s probably already clear to most readers that this research analysis and report is essential at $995, notably for the “homeland” protection it offers to corporations, here’s a summary of why it’s so timely, important and valuable to upper management.

Blogging is rapidly emerging as a threat to Internet users.

This presentation provides specific information about how employees can reduce the risks associated with blogging and also at the end of the presentation there are three versions of a web log or blog policy.

My recommendation ? Whistle while you work .. it’ll make your day, and your life, go by more quickly.

But I’m an iconoclast, it seems.

… global competitiveness, anyway ?

Can someone tell me, in clear and understandable terms ?

We’re all on this one planet, spinning on it’s own axis. Where is the finish line, and what does nation “X” win when the race is finally run, anyway ?

A gold medal ? The right to control all other nations ? Where’s the fun in that … seems to me that in such conditions, once won it will take all of nation “X” ’s energy to defend that right.

What exactly is the point ?

… is what a couple of colleagues and me want to to do with a concept we are calling QuCards. It’s about adding an additional form of “presence”, I think, to one’s blog, in that there are some times when a blog post that you may have written is central to theme, or to an exposition of your core thinking.

This came to mind yesterday and today, when I came across the by-now infamous Janus Risk Management report on why blogging is dangerous to your employees’ mental health, if “you” are a corporation … or at least so says the coprporate blogging policy they seem to be suggesting is state-of-the-art.

What also came to mind was this blog post I wrote last April in Paris … the proof of my prescience (feh about how welcome blogging would be in the corporate mindscape is found in the last paragraph.

Emergence and Organizational Structure and Dynamics

First, thanks to Euan Semple for lending me his copy of Emergence.  I think I’ll have to get him a new one - I am really using this copy.

To borrow some wisdom from a poem that was popular about fifteen years ago, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, I think we all need to learn how to “hold hands and stick together”, ’cause it’s probably going to get bumpy before the ride smooths out.

… James Wolcott’s latest blog post, titled Headless Body In Topless War.

As far as I can figure out, the citizens still in Iraq only have three things they can do on a daily basis, now:

1. Sit around watching American soldiers patrol their streets (most reports I have read that I trust suggest that the Iraqi troops are not trained and are either next to useless or actively subvert when they have a chance)

2. Fight the occupying forces, in one way or another, or

3. Cower somewhere, waiting to be captured, threatened, bombed or accidentally killed

I doubt many young adults are going to school, I can’t inmagine much commerce is going on there, and I doubt that the preparations for elections are proceeding as they should.

Here’s an excerpt from Wolcott’s piece, to which I pointed above:

So thick is the euphoria and triumphalism post November 2nd that I wonder if most of our media, never mind the bovine American public, have any inkling of how ghastily Iraq is going down the drain, and taking the American military with it. We’ve been so bombarded with “Failure is not an option” that few are willing to assert, as van Creveld and Lind do, that failure may not be an option but it damn well may be the outcome, and quicker than anyone contemplates.

Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Friedman can petition for more troops all they please. It’s too late for more troops. We don’t have troops to spare as it is, but even if we did, it’s too late. It’s too late for everything. The blundering mistakes that were made in the first days and weeks of the occupation can’t be reversed now–they’re incorrectible. The window of opportunity dropped like a guillotine while Donald Rumsfeld was regaling the press corps with his pithy wisdom.

This quote, offered by Tom Matrullo from Arundhati Roy’s speech and article titled Peace and Corporate Liberation Theology, stimulated me to think about a question I often ponder.

We know very well who benefits from war in the age of Empire. But we must also ask ourselves honestly who benefits from peace in the age of Empire? War mongering is criminal.

But talking of peace without talking of justice could easily become advocacy for a kind of capitulation. And talking of justice without unmasking the institutions and the systems that perpetrate injustice, is beyond hypocritical.

What I wonder about is this … today Alan Greenspan evidently voiced some concern about how long America could continue running a trade deficit that seems to hover above $50 billion per month. I believe that it is well-known that various insttitutions and investors in other countries keep buying American paper of various sorts.

But, the market seems disquiet these days, eyeing the American deficit and making noises (observed through the rapid drop-off in the value of the greenback) about their growing lack of confidence.

Isn’t it the case that this deficit financing by foreigners (what your banker would call your approved overdraft, in your case) … isn’t it the case that financing this current account deficit enables the U.S. to keep spending $5+ billion per month in Iraq ?

Aren’t foreigners - essentially Japan, China, the UK, Germany - aren’t these economies and people effectively financing the US invasion and occupation of Iraq ?

If they put an upper limit on the overdraft, won’t it become clear that the USA is basically …. bankrupt … particularly if it insists on carrying on in Oraq ?

Noticed on the web site of the Heritage Foundation, the announcement of a new blog by their Director of Media and Public Policy. The foundation is beginning to wonder if all this publicly visible opinion, as well as links to research, analysis and other forms of documentation will have some impact on government transparency and accountability.

Let’s call it an early weak signal of something or other .. the “something” being transparency and accountability, and the “other” being increased control and manipulation of information to keep general and widespread control operative.

Seems clear to me that over the next ten years or so, one or the other of those two eventual outcomes will predominate … either the corporations and the government will get the upper hand, or the humans will exert the force inherent in what Jim Moore has called “The Second Superpower”.

Can the Blogosphere Transform Government?

11/17/04 02:03 PM

Tapscott’s Copy Desk is the new weblog of Heritage’s Mark Tapscott.

Tapscott is director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at Heritage, a longtime journalist and media critic, and an expert on FOIA and government information.

Tapscott asks in his first post, can the Blogosphere do for government what it has done for the mainstream media? We think this is the most important bit:

Tapscott knows, more than most, the extremes to which bureaucrats will go when threatened with having to release information to the public.

I wrote about this about a year ago … honest, I did .. though probably not as clearly as has danah boyd, in a blog post titled “Life Is a Game” or something like that. I’ll have to see if I can find it and link to it.

From danah boyd’s blog on Corante:

In September, Joel on Software crafted a blog entry entitled It’s Not Just Usability that can be read both as a positivistic call to action and a scathing critique on the current methods used for understanding how design should connect with people. Personally, his words brought me great joy and should be deeply considered by designers, technologists and users of technology.

Social tools don’t fit well into the HCI paradigm. While the interface is important, it is not as important as the way social relationships are negotiated. Napster was not a good interface, but the social desire to share overcame that. Many of the Articulated Social Networking tools are the same - a pain in the ass to use, but worth it because of the social component.

Having discovered a new (to me) blog - George Monbiot - I’m just nosing about.

1. I wish I had read this 25 years ago

2. I’m glad I “came back to life” before it was too late, even if means quitting work I knew how to do well, and living more simply than I might otherwise.

George Monbiot on careers … “Choose Life !”

So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car.

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?

For deep and extraordinarily comprehensive synthesis on zombiehood - living deadness - and how it enures to the benefit of those who have put wealth and power above all in these current times, see Inspector Lohmann’s serial essays I think of as The Zombie Files. I’ve linked only to the first installment - the second is up on his site as well, and I’m betting release 3.0 is coming soon.

… argues George Monbiot in this fascinating article titled Religion Of The Rich.

He notes that there is much talk these days about the advent of “soft fascism” following Bush’s election as President of the USA, but argues it just isn’t so. In fact he points that finger at “us”.

“If Bush wins”, the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, “fascism is possible in the United States.” Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.

It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.

(note to Monbiot - George, it depends upon which horde of voters you’re attempting to describe here, methinks).

He goes on to unwind his perspective, looking back at history, about how the commercial classes - traders, merchants, lenders, bankers, industrialists - developed a theological justification for commercialism, which had at its core an “idealization of personal responsibility”

From there he continues to unbundle the historical evidence of how capitalism has developed, unfolded and evolved, and finishes with a grand flourish of inevitability.

All this was in the 1630’s or so. Looks like history is back, and she’s hungry !

Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that “the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.”

So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.

I remember a moment about a year ago when some report or academic article came out suggesting that there was some evidence of workplaces becoming more democratic, in a general and widespread sense. I ddn’t believe it, and said so, somewhere.

Thanks to Euan, linking to Suw Charman’s Strange Attractor, here’s a more realistic … imo … but hard to believe example of what management and executives generally think of the potential of blogs. Like Suw, my flabber is gasted.

At least now it’s clearer that many workers are cuaght up in the adult version of grade school … detentions if you step out of line, no recess, and for sure don’t read any nasty blogs that might have something resembling information on them … and heaven help the employee who blogs. The cited report even has some prison (er, school) rules in case some employees DO blog.

Thank goodness I am no longer a management consultant who might have helped to create and implement such idiocy - or at the very least nodded and said something like “it never hurts to be careful” .. so that the billing would continue.

From a report titled Web Logs: Blog Threat Management, by Janus Risk Management

Blogging is rapidly emerging as a threat to Internet users.

This presentation provides specific information about how employees can reduce the risks associated with blogging and also at the end of the presentation there are three versions of a web log or blog policy. You can select the policy version most appropriate for your enterprise, brief employees on the need for the policy and the actual policy, and integrate it into the existing enterprise acceptable use policy.

This picture was taken from the roof of a building at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. It is the worl’ds largest panoramic photograph, and it allows you to zoom in right to the level of setial of a car licence plate.

I didn’t take it.

… is powerful.

Clear, articulate and to the point. From the team who built it:

The initial success of original Mosh video was driven by messaging and timing that connected with people in ‘our final hour’. It was this generation’s call to arms in the lead up to the fiercely competitive presidential election. But, even though the election’s outcome was beyond our reach we must not let it stop our momentum or undermine how we perceive the effectiveness of our collective voice. An alternative ending for the video provides the opportunity to remind all those who were inspired by the first version to not give up the fight. So if you are still searching for answers, know that our opinions still matter. We here at the GNN bunker have kept our chins up and heads down these past two weeks and have come back at you with a brand new ending. Our hope is that it will show our battered teammates and the rest of the world that we are not here to say sorry but instead, the fight continues and we will be heard.

Go see the new ending here

My Dad just sent me this, via email

Kids Answers to Bible Questions

Pay special attention to the wording and spelling. If you know the Bible, even a little, you’ll find this hilarious! It comes from a Catholic Elementary school test. Kids were asked questions about the old and new testaments.

The following statements about the Bible were written by children. They have not been retouched nor corrected. (i. e., incorrect spelling has been left in).

1. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis. God got tired of creating the world so he took the sabbath off.

2. Adam and Eve were created from an Apple tree. Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark. Noah built an ark and the animals came on in pears.

3. Lots wife was a pillar of salt during the day, but a ball of fire during the night.

4. The Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had trouble with unsympathetic Genitals.

5. Sampson was a strongman who let himself be led astray by a Jezebel like Delilah.

6. Samson slayed the Philistines with the axe of the Apostles.

7. Moses led the Jews to the Red sea where they made unleavened bread which is bread without any ingredients.

8. The Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert, Afterwards, Moses went up to Mount Cyanide to get the ten ammendments.

9. The first commandment was when Eve told Adam to eat the apple.

10. The seventh Commandment is thou shalt not admit adultery.

11. Moses died before he ever reached Canada . Then Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.

12. The greates miricle in the bible is when Joshua told his son to stand

still and he obeyed him.

13. David was a Hebrew king who was skilled at playing the liar. He fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in bibical times.

14. Solomon, one of Davids sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

15. When Mary heard she was the mother of Jesus, she sang the Magna Carta.

16. When the three wise guys from the east side arrived, they found Jesus in the manager.

17. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

18. St. John the blacksmith dumped water on his head.

19. Jesus enunciated the Golden Rule, which says to do unto others before they do one to you. He also explained, a man doth not live by sweat alone.

20. It was a miricle when Jesus rose from the dead and managed to get the tombstone off the entrance.

21. T he people who followed the lord were called the 12 decibels.

22. The epistels were the wives of the apostals.

23. One of the oppossums was St. Matthew who was also a taximan.

24. St. Paul cavorted to christianity, he preached holy acrimony, which is

another name for marriage.

25. Christians have only one spouse. This is called monotony.

Dave Pollard recently challenged me, in an email, as to what we all could DO about the current situations. I replied that building awareness, and then facilitating understanding on a wide-spread scale, were imo actions, and that blogging is and remains important in that role. But obviously not enough, not the whole story.

And I regularly muse on what various forms of civil disobedience might look like in North America. I suppose we know that marching in the streets does lead to freedom enclosures, and might end up with some form of Kent State situation … just a matter of time and place.

And Tom once suggested to me that we would never see a France-like general strike in North America, that it’s de facto illegal (?)

But I suppose if enough people formed a silent, organized, systematic and sustained silent, credit-card based civil action directed at the corporate world, we’d see some interesting question marks float up.

Then this morning, Euan Semple sent me by email one of the most articulate and beautifully-thought-out pieces connecting the dots between the “war on terror”, corporate profits, the schism between justice and human rights and the ongoing traumatization of the less fortunate in society. It was written, and delivered as a speech, by Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist who has my everlasting respect.

Here are two moving, haunting pieces from her speech, which she titled Peace and the Corporate Liberation Theology.

This first excerpt is one of the clearest and hardest-hitting denuciations that shines a bright light through the three years of bullshit crammed down peoples’ throats by the Bush administration in cahoots with the corporate media. The Bush people are too far gone to be chastised, really, but the coproate media in the States deserves villification, and they deserve to be put out of business.

The invasion of Iraq will surely go down in history as one of

then invaded it, occupied it and are now in the process of selling it.

This second excerpt is the one that makes me wonder - hard, and in a flash of insight, made me realize that even if 50% or more of Americans don’t support this war, and couldn’t unseat George Bush … if they all decdied to take economic action, non-violent economic action (which is clearly in their power to do, on a daily basis) major change could be made to occur. Major change could be made to occur much more quickly than planning, scheming and organizing for elections in 2006 and 2008.

If you really want to climb out, there’s good news and bad news.

Why not?

over at What Really Happened

One of the items at that blog links to uncensored footage of the US Marine killing a wounded resident of Fajullah (my term - rather than “insurgent”). I didn’t watch it … I don’t need to to decide that it is despicable, should not have happened, and represents both a war crime, and because of the psychotic decisions and policies responsible fort hat Marine being there, a crime against humanity.

As you watch this video, and the older ones I relinked, just keep these facts in mind.

So, why is the US in Iraq at all, let along committing war crimes?

I just received an email from Tom Matrullo titled “Re: holy shit”. I guess this email is flying around a fair bit tonight.

It’s with respect to some of the ongoing digging into voting irregularities in some counties in some states in the USA.

Please read this. I believe this is unfolding at this present time.

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