I’m participating in a group blog about what the government of a connected people might look like. It’s at GreaterDemocracy.org.

For example, the latest entry is from Jon Lebkowsky:

Langdon Winner explores how the technological complexity of our infrastructures has made the U.S. (et al.) vulnerable to attack, and how, having seen a demonstration of that vulnerability in 9/11, we have hardened social and political systems and accepted a sacrifice of fundamental rights and freedoms that would have been unthinkable before the terrorist attack. Winner suggests better ways to deal with the perceived vulnerability. [Link]

Other members of the blog team include Jock Gill, Peter Kaminski and David Reed.

Adina blogs about why she’s been blogging about politics more than she expected to:

My personal feelings about these issues come from the fact that my dad is a holocaust refugee…[O]ne of the questions that I had about approaching adulthood was — if the place that I lived started sliding toward totalitarianism, would I be one of the people who spoke up, or would I be one of the people who kept silent until life became unbearable.

When the government rounds up immigrants on excuses of incorrect paperwork, and is able to detain them indefinitely without evidence or trial…

Every political decision says something about who we are but also about who we are becoming. And that’s what’s truly scary.

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Seth Johnson, in an email, points to a fascinating paper by David Walker called “Heirs of the Enlightenment: Copyright During the French Revolution and Information Revolution In Historical Perspective.” From the introduction:

During the Enlightenment, two conflicting viewpoints on the nature of authorship, creativity, and copyright emerged. One view, proposed by the French thinker Denis Diderot, advanced the notion that literary works are unique creations of the individual mind, and thus should be protected as the most sacred form of property. The other view, advanced by the Marquis de Condorcet, saw literary works as the expression of ideas that already exist in nature, and thus belong to all and should be made available to all for the common good. Both viewpoints had a profound influence on the changing legal status of intellectual property during the French Revolution. Even more, this paper will argue that these two conflicting viewpoints, both of which were firmly grounded in Enlightenment thought, still continue to have an influence into the present, and the tension between the two continues to be played out in the arena of copyright in the United States in the year 2000.

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Kevin’s got some smart stuff to say about Eric’s argument about the Net’s economic value. Kevin even manages to explain what I put so fumblingly.

Kevin points to a NY Times article that concludes:

The same economic forces that lead to premium and discount sellers in the offline world are at work in the online world. But the differences in transaction costs make the price differences both more extreme and easier to observe,

This suggests that the Net is both commoditizing some businesses and leaving room for added-value providers.

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RageBoy now has two — count ’em, two! — blogs. His new one is at the Corante site and sounds a lot like the RB of Gonzo Marketing and Cluetrain, a voice I’ve missed. Here’s a taste:

…We’re making up stuff and feeding it to each other. Lies and fictions and contrafactual fabrications of the worst sort. Or the best sort. We think we’re hiding behind all these random words we sling around. Then we’re horrified to realize we’ve betrayed ourselves. Our masks have given us away.

Scary. And beautiful….

Meanwhile, over at his first blog, RB’s monkey-boy is still pulling up the maenad’s skirts, diddling with the guy’s hammers, and engaging in various forms of satyre. It is what you might call a shadow site.

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I just published a new issue of my (free) newsletter, a mere 5 weeks late.

I blame blogging. And I don’t know what to do about it. Really.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke writes tenderly about the new baby in his life. Congratulations to Michael and Leona.

Woohoo!

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Some Big Thinking in admirable rough draft form is goin’ on over at Norlin’s place. He’s working through an argument that’s important if right.

Point #6 is crucial: The Internet is economically destructive because it’s hard to make money when so much stuff is entering the commons.

Eric gets there via a pivot point (#3) that he notes he needs to clarify: the lack of scarcity on the Net drives things towards the public domain. That seems intuitively right. But the question is: what on the Net is in such abundance that it drives goods thusly? It’s not the abundance of goods but the abundance of access to goods: you don’t need a lot of capital to create and/or distribute digital stuff. (BTW, in such an environment, what is the remaining virtue of capitalism?)

Then Eric raises a fascinating idea (#7): “Digital identity is a (somewhat subconscious attempt) to solve the lack of scarcity.” How? “[Y]ou’re able to rebuild some of the channels and points of distribution.” That is, if you can be put in jail for getting a copy of Eminem’s latest via Kazaa, then the recording industry can re-establish its chokehold. (My loaded language isn’t Eric’s.)

Why does Eric see “the lack of scarcity” as a problem to be “solved” (#7)? Because it drives down prices and thus drives businesses into the dirt. But there are at least two types of business here. There are those whose value has been nullified by the ease with which digits can be manufactured and distributed; there’s no good economic reason to prop them up (sez I). Then, there are companies that provide real value in a digital world that may not be able to make enough money to survive if their products become free. In the first category is the recording industry. In the second are recording artists and newspapers. I don’t know how the second category will survive, but I’d rather let the market innovate than impose artificial scarcity. We’re still at the beginning of this journey. I hope and believe that the solution will not be to re-centralize control and introduce artificial chokepoints. That’s not what drives an economy of abundance.

So, I don’t yet agree with Eric when he says “the internet is *truly* economically destructive…” (#6). Destructive of what? Businesses that no longer provide value, sure. But even if bsinesses that do provide value make less money (assuming they make enough to survive, which I admit is still at issue) then we also have to factor in the enrichment those creative goods provide to you, me and everyone else in the market. Overall, the Internet could turn out to be tremendously economically constructive.

(Eric, thank you for having the guts to post your ideas in rough form so that we can all chew on them.)

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Ruth Lipman sends us to a site that she knows will raise the blood temperature of those of us who believe in animal rights. It’s quite graphic so I urge you to shield the monitor from young and impressionable minds.

(BTW, I prefer to eat them head first.)

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Jonathan Peterson writes in response my request for some travel tips:

Check out virtualtourist, I used them a lot 2 years ago when we went to France. Very bloglike community with a lot of english content.

The navigation can be a bit confusing, as it mixes individual with commercial content. The best stuff is in people’s travelogues, off the beaten path and restaurant reviews.

It’s especially great when you get a local who has spent some time talking about their city

I’m amazed at how much more content there is than last time I looked. Viva la camera digita’l!

Yes, I’m a fan of VirtualTourist also.

Meanwhile, David Forrester of Molecular points to an article in NTK:

It’s always good to see a thriving new community springing up in Usenet’s barren wasteland – especially ones with interests as specific as those of “Richard Craft”, “Kevin Steward”, “Kyran Goring”, “Danny Farrell”, “Sean Rogers”, “Mike Harding”, “Oliver Hammond”, “James Goodman”, “Cameron Ellis” et al. Take it from us, these guys have a *lot* in common: they all post from a Mailbox Internet account, they all have Hotmail addresses, and the products they just can’t help recommending to each other include student info-hub thesite.org, the musical output of Elvis Costello and Afroman, plus the Activision games Wreckless, Rally Fusion and Minority Report. All of which, any idiot with a search engine can see, are clients of new media marketing agency DIGITAL OUTLOOK, who define guerrilla marketing as “participating within a variety of carefully targeted online communities […] and initiating ‘unofficial’ discussions about our clients’ offering”. They’ve yet to confirm or deny whether these individuals are Digital Outlook employees (or their aliases), and whether they have any kind of code of practice on the use of false identities for promotional purposes. Or maybe the company intranet was down, thus forcing the staff to communicate with each other via alt.internet.providers.uk.free? …

The only good news is that bastards like these do eventually get found out. But the technique undoubtedly still “works” in some instances since more people will be fooled than angered.

See you in Hell.

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John Husband in an email points to an article in the NY Times yesterday:

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

A group of prominent scientists is challenging the leading scientific journals with the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals this week….

The way the Web has broken the lock between perfection and eternality is quite remarkable. We can go public with work in progress and not have to wait for the Wite-out to dry on our masterpiece before we acknowledge its existence.

And all of this is made possible through the magic of metadata: so long as we know that it’s a draft, we’re willing to make allowances and read it for what it is. (And the great virtue of blogs is that they’re understood to be perpetual rough drafts.)

So, let’s get syllogistical. Metadata allows for imperfection. Imperfection hastens time. Haste leaves little time to erect defenses. Therefore, metadata lets us be who we are. QED.

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