March 5, 2007

Just for the heck of it .. and as a slight prompt to all of you out there who do not like saying anything about politics out loud.

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."

– Dante Alighieri –

Powered by Qumana

David Weinberger reports on Yochai Benkler’s presentation at Freedom To Connect (F2C), the conference originated by David Isenberg.

The noticeable takeaway for me … his report that Benkler says "The Internet democratizes.  That’s boring by now, but it’s important".

Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a "theme-setting" talk.

He points to the wide distribution of computer power and "insight, intuition and experience" across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see "commons-based production," i.e., production without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. "The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides."

It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See "Sharing Nicely.") He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process ("Martian clickworkers"). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: "We’re beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phenomenon." There’s a "load balancing of motivations over time" — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.

"Building such platforms is hard." "Coase’s Penguin" says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he’s been working on seeing how this works. He’s looking at experimental literature on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. "There are more design levers than I initially thought." Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.

So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were limited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we’re seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange … a parallel form of production.

[Snip ...]

But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there’s a battle on.

Yochai shifts to politics. "The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves." And they can do more in loose association with others. When it comes to democracy, our experience "is purely with a mass mediated public sphere." We’re beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.

The Internet democratizes. It’s boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: "The Daily Me" fragmentation hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t polarize the way claimed.

For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.

Read the rest here …

Powered by Qumana

"In John Dewey’s words, "a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood — particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. In certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists. They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the fields of physical science and technology. It is much more difficult in the fields of politics and religion and ethics. Here the relevant facts often elude us. As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends upon the particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose to interpret them. And these are not the only difficulties that confront the rational truth-seeker. In public and in private life, it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasonings offered for our consideration by others.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely similar terms. Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained, if the whole population were able to read, and if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word or in writing, and if by the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All is safe, all would be gained!

Once more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson, it is true, was a realist as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. "Nothing," he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper." And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him), "within the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and civil liberty." Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man.

As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast of a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions."

Powered by Qumana