John Sculley moderates. The speakers are Andrew Rasiej, Joe Trippi and Adrian Wooldridge. They each get ten minutes.

Andrew: “Politics is broken. Our democracy is broken.” There are 513,000 elected officials in this country. The relationship has been top down. What we learned from the Dean campaign is the power of the person to person connection. “There are 513,000 egocentric politicians in the US. Not one of them is netcentric.” If they were netcentric, they’d say: “My constituents know more than I do.” [Shades of Dan Gillmor.]

We can use the Internet to support the status quo, which is how it’s been up through now. Or we can use it to d something new.

Adrian Wooldridge: “Connected power is not necessarily leftwing politics.” Internet tools will shift the country further to the right. Goldwater inspired the biggest political revolution in recent history. It was a populist rebellion. And the center of gravity of the US is very much to the right. We jail 5x more people than Britain. We are far more anti-abortion than Europe. 45% of us believe in the devil while only 13% of Britain does. And it’s going to get more right-ish.

Trippi: Presidential candidates are different from us. If we were asked to carry a box for four years and not drop it or else the world will end, we’d say no thanks. But every four years, ten guys come forward and say, “Gimme that box.”

The only hope for our democracy is the new community and trust-building that’s happening on the Internet; we need to form power at the bottom to change a system that’s not working. And it’s not an ideological fight. It’s about it becoming a more powerful democracy.” The Net allows us to come together and “have faith in strangers.” [Yeah!]

Sculley: Brooks says that Republicans like their presidents to be people of soul, above the fray. Democrats feel otherwise. Are issues not really as important as we usually think?

Trippi: The real problem is the broadcast media. The 6-second soundbytes.

Adrian: People dislike CrossFire because people are craving more subtlety and nuance.

Q: What good does connected campaigning do if you don’t have good candidates?

Andrew: Netcentric means that the candidate arises from the group itself.

Trippi: The system is set up to keep interesting people from succeeding. Everything works against insurgents.

Adrian: Anti-Americanism will rise even if Kerry is elected because there it has structural causes.

Trippi: If Kerry loses, there will be a huge demand to change the Democratic party, either from within quickly or from without.

Trippi: It was the voter-to-voter connection that made Dean different. Kerry and Bush are both running topdown campaigns.

Q: Adrian, you say that the Republicans have the big ideas and the big think tanks. Will that change?

Adrian: The Republicans did that consciously. The Democrats need to do that, too. they need to agree on a simple set of goals, but it’s not clear that the Left has that. The Left needs the sort of blodbath created by Goldwater so they can sit down and decide exactly what they want.

Trippi: If Kerry wins, my fear is that there will be a sigh of relief.

Adrian: The best thing would be if both lost.

Andrew: In a netcentric ecology, it’s less necessary to label yourself as left or right.

Q: Why didn’t Kerry take advantage of the Dean machine?

Andrew: Because they’re idiots. But mainly because they’re afraid. I wish someone had said during the debates that the thing we have to fear is fear.

Trippi: We’re in the infant stages of this. We need to be talking about the common good. We need leadership to talk about this. And only the trust being built online will let this happen.

Trippi: The big shock of 2004 may be the importance of cell phones. Pollsters can’t poll ’em.

Q: What rules could we change?

Andrew: Funding limits. Encourage local activism. [I missed some … and all of these reports of answers are compressed]

Trippi: The system is set up to prevent insurgents. There’s lot to change. It could happen in a single election cycle: If a third party candidate started splitting the vote with the Democratic candidate, momentum could move to the third party rapidly. “That’s what happened with the Whigs.”

Q: Will more transparency make it harder for politicians to take tough positions?

Trippi: The problem is due to people wanting to be in office permanently.

Q: What about the power of the special interests?

Andrew: Schumer has $20M in the bank which means he’s subservient to special interests.

Q: What are the features of communities where source flourishes.

Andrew: Learn from open source. You’ll find all the elements there.

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Gabriel Chafetz, the son of a guy I love, has created a 28-minute film. I haven’t yet seen it, but Gabriel says: “It’s sort of a hip hop “get out the vote” documentary/musical starring Walter Mondale.” How could it be bad?

There’s a streaming version here. It’s being broadcast in Minnesota on PBS.

Broadcast Times:
TPT 17 Saturday, October 23 at 8PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 24 at 11PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 31 at 5:30PM

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David Bornstein went to Bangladesh to learn about the Grameem Bank that makes loans primarily to women. He discovered that the program is working: Women are building businesses. Social entrepreneurship is important, he concludes enthusiastically.

He talks about a project to bring electricity to poor people in Brazil: single wires going to houses, grounded in the soil, low voltages. The project is also bringing solar panels to rural areas, renting them for what people generally pay for candles, kerosene, etc.

He talks about “child line” in India, now in 55 cities. It’s a number you can call if you see a child in distress. It started with one woman who spent 3 years trying to get the equivalent of an 800 number for it. It’s deeply affected India’s child protection policies.

Ideas don’t break through resistance, David says. Ideas are passive. Ideas need champions. They need marketing. They need to be shepherded through the system. And the government ought to fund social entrepreneurs.

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Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center (yay!) talks about the global digital divide. He puts up the GeekCorps business plan:

To benefit from the Internet, you need geeks
There are few geeks in Africa
Geeks beget geeks (“Geekery is one of the last apprenticeship industries”)
Geek + plane ticket = Geek in Africa

We need to spend on both plantains and PCs, he says — the immediate issues of feeding people and building a connected economy.

“Electricity turns out to be a massive part of the digital divide.” Likewise, so is conectivity — there are 12 phone lines per 1000 people in Ghana, compared to 700 per 1000 in the Us. Plus, 78% of web content is English, but only 12% of the world speaks English as a 1st or 2nd language. This all ends up making a “relevancy divide”: What is a rural farmer in Ghana going to get out of the Internet?

GeekCorps took a different tack. Rather than looking at the rural, unconnected poor, they worked with those who were readier to adopt technology. He points to the “Busy Internet” internet cafe in Ghana — 200 seats filled 24/7. An hour of use costs the price of one beer. And he tells about a local guy who builds wireless systems.

From this experience, Ethan learned that there’s a ton of money to be made by bring the next billion internet users online, and it won’t be the current major multinationals because we’re idiots about the developing world. E.g., ilkone is an Islamic cellphone built by people who really do understand what Moslems might want in a cellphone.

We’re idiots but it’s not our fault, he says. Ethan has been mapping the areas the NY Times reports on. Not much about Africa, central Asia, or S. America except where the economies are booming. If you adjust them by population, Iceland (250,000) is tremendously over-covered and the Congo (52M) is under-covered. The best predictor for where the media looks is where the money is.

It’s an old problem, he says, pointing to The Structure of Foreign News” (1965). So, why don’t the media tell us about Africa? Ethan’s looked at what we’re searching for (looking at Overture’s version of AdSense). E.g., searches for Brazil are generally for tourism and pictures of naked women. (He calls this study “internet sociology.”) “We are a feedback loop for mainstream media.” We’re telling the mainstream media that we’re not very interested in the developing world.

Why should we care? Because, as Tom Barnett says, the failed and failing states are the ones that are most dangerous to us, and we’re not paying attention to them.

How to fix it? Hack the media. Peer production. We’re all producers and consumers. The problem is that people write what they want to write, and we’ve shown we aren’t interested in the developing world. So we need consciously to build “bridge blogs.” Paradigm: Salaam Pax. We need to do this not only because Africans need to be on the Net but because we need Africans on the Net.

[Great.]

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I fell into a social black hole last night.

The crowd was exiting from what was probably the best single day of PopTech in the five years I’ve been coming. A bunch of people I know and like were going to a cocktail party about a mile away. I decided not to go because ever since my freshman year in college, I’ve noticed that parties with loud music, people I don’t know, and crudites push me into a recursive mumbling awkwardness that is only cured by leaving. (It’s actually been diagnosed as a mild form of aphasia.)

So, I found myself on the too-pretty streets of Camden with no one to eat dinner with or even to whine to. I poked my head into a few restaurants looking for people I recognized. No luck. I had a quick (but too-expensive) dinner in an Italian restaurant, sitting at the bar (no tables were available), reading a magazine. Then I bought a copy of The Weekly World News (“President Finishing National Guard Service” — that’s what all those long vacations have been about), went back to my motel room, and moped.

I am a social putz, no matter what The Washington Post says.

On the other hand, while spinning the dial last night, I saw a great Sarah McLachlan music video (is that what we call them these days?): “This video cost $100,000.” It shows how that $100,000 was actually spent doing good around the world.

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Grant McCracken argues against the idea that consumers are given “empty choices.” The title of his talk is “More is More.”

1. Many choices that look empty, he says, are in fact structural: they represent actual differences in taste and preference. I.e., “Material culture makes culture material.” Example: “Feminism” has led to so many ways of talking about femaleness that the term no longer has meaning. The profusion of choices in the market reflects the profusion of social and cultural distinctions. The market reflects how furiously inventive we’ve become.

2. Some of these empty choices are exploratory, he says. The market keeps giving things a try.

3. Some choice is not empty but “formative.”

He goes through the Kaufmann Continuum to show that innovation starts out risk, then gets adopted by the mainstream and gets sorta boring. At least, that’s what I’m getting from this. He concludes: Empty choice” is a source of innovation. Empty choicess are adaptive.

[I was never sure what he was arguing against.]

Barry Schwartz‘s topic is “More is Less.” (He wrote the Tyranny of Freedom.)

No, we can’t have it all, he says. The choices we face aren’t empty. That’s why they “torture” us. In his local supermarket he found 285 brands of cookies, 75 iced teas, 175 salad dressings, 40 toothpastes. We are given choices for just about everything, from retirement plans to college curricula. “And I don’t think this is good.”

Americans have more freedom of choice than ever before, we’re richer than anyone ever, yet Americans are sadder than anyone ever before. (Clinical depression is 2x what it was a generation ago.) He says studies show that if you offer fewer choices, people buy more and are happier with their choices.

Too many choices make us unhappy because we regret lost opportunities. our expectations get escalated, and then we blame ourselves.

What really make people happy are close relations with other people. Close relations restrain, not liberate: To be close means to not be free to make choices for yourself. Your choice is limited by the fact that you care about others.

Going from no choice to some choice dramatically increases our well-being. But there’s a point where having more choice decreases our well-being, he says. Being anything you want to be is only possible in world with limits. [Yeah, I hate it when school principles say “You can be anything you want to be.”]

[He makes a great point, and he’s a terrific presenter. But it bothers me that he equates choices about which of 275 cookies to buy with choices about careers and religion. Also, I think he overemphasizes choice and obscures the inescapability of the historic-cultural-linguistic situation into which we are born.]

Q&A

Bob Metcalfe: So, does wealth make us unhappy?

Schwartz: That follows from my argument. It’s another reason to support income redistribution.

Bob: So my drive to have everything is socially responsible, since I’m keeping choices from other people.

[The discussion gets to what I think is the heart: If fewer choices make us unhappy, why don’t we shop in smaller stores? And if we’re not smart enough to recognize that too much choice makes us unhappy, who is going to decide on the constraints of choice for us?]

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Spencer Wells wants to know how humans populated the earth. His research shows that the deepest, earliest split is in the African lineage. Hence, our common ancestor was African. And it looks like the split occurred only 60,000 years (2,000 generations) ago.

So, how did we populate the earth in that time, he asks. The route went from Africa to Australia, he believes. He goes to India to try to find the missing genetic marker — one found in Australian aborigines. He found it: M130, from 50,000 years ago. About 5% of Indians have it.

Why did we leave Africa 50,000 years ago, he asks. The Ice Age may have dried out Africa, forcing us to migrate. Also, we had the “great leap forward” in human culture.

He says there’s a company that will look at your dna and tell you where you hang from the family tree. He says one in 200 men are descendents of Genghis Kahn. [I, on the other hand, trace my ancestry back to Ernest the Vexed.]

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Ben Saunders talks about his solo trip to the north Pole. “I’m not a scientist, I’m not an -ologist. I just drag heavy things around.” 72-days alone. The fourth person to have done this. When he go there, he says that there was nothing there, not even a pole. He said he’d known that, of course, but he still kind of expected there to be something, anything, there. When he was made it to the pole, he called three people … and had to leave messages.

Why does he do this? He’s exploring the limits of technology and human potential. Now he’s headed toward Antarctica to retract Scott’s (doomed) steps.

I can’t imagine doing this. I can’t even imagine wanting to do this.

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Alexis Rockman (more here (thanks Shannon) ) an artist who studies how culture sees nature. “There are very few boundaries between dead, alive, food, pet, and so on.” He provides commentary on images of his paintings.

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Brian Fagan gives a talk that spans several hundred thousands of years, spending some special time on what we can learn about dealing with the climate from 2,000 years of Egyptian history. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is a crime how little we know about how other people see the world and put the world together.”

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