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December 19, 2008
GlobalVoices needs your help. Need convincing? Check out GV’s bloggage about the Mumbai attack. Or, perhaps more important, check GV any day. The world speaks at GV. Worth a listen. Worth some support. [Disclosure: I’m a volunteer adviser.]
December 18, 2008
The Berkman Center’s Media Re:Public project assessing the state of the media (old school and citizen/participatory) is now out. (The papers are here.)
The report points to six issues, which I’m paraphrasing rather crudely:
1. Traditional media are scaling back their reporting because they’re going broke.
2. Their webby equivalents are not replacing all their functions.
3. Online news sources are not uniformly reliable, and not everyone knows that.
4. Not everyone is online anyway.
5. Some of the functions not being replaced online are really important, but we don’t yet have good business models for them.
6. We don’t have good data about what’s really going on.
This status report tries to bring some empiricism to the cheerleading (guilt as charged). It also pairs up nicely with a 2005 report about a Berkman conference that brought bloggers and mainstream journalists together for 1.5 days of frank discussions.
December 17, 2008
In this week’s Radio Berkman podcast, I interview Stephen Schultze about the FCC’s auctioning off spectrum to a national provider who would be required to use 25% of it for free, nationwide wifi. There’s only one catch: That wifi would have to only connect to sites and services that are safe for minors (defined as people between 5 and 18).
After we had recorded this interview last week, the FCC postponed voting on the proposal, and since it’s the baby of the outgoing Chair, it’s probably postponed forever. Still, the idea raises some really interesting issues. Steve and I focus on the free speech considerations, although the opposition from other spectrum-holders certainly could not have encouraged the FCC.
December 3, 2008
Once every three years, the copyright office considers proposed exemptions to the DMCA’s forbidding of attempts to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM) protections. Yesterday at 5pm was the deadline for this cycle’s bids.
And there have been some really interesting ones.
Some Berkman folks have asked for the right to Hack the Dead, although they don’t put it like that. If you have software that checks on line to make sure you are authorized to use it, and if the company has now gone out of business, you can no longer use stuff you paid for. So, the Berkman team has proposed that in those circumstances, hackers should be allowed to hack your content free of the dead grip of the defunct business. Chris Soghoian, one of the petitioners, explains it well.
Chris also explains some of the other 18 requests for exemption, including an EFF (did you remember to join?) request to allow users to jailbreak their iPhones so they can run software that Apple has not approved, and a request to allow academics to hack DRM’ed DVD’s to make compilations that are legit under the Fair Use exemption.
Unfortunately, it’s likely that the copyright office will emerge from its three year slumbers, see its own shadow, and put its head straight back up its own rectum.
November 27, 2008
I sometimes put up a Powerpoint (well, Keynote) slide that says “Control doesn’t scale.”The assumption that large projects only succeed if they’re centrally controls led and managed turns out to have been true because we limited the scope of what we we considered realistic. You can build a Britannica using a centrally controlled system, but you could not build a Wikipedia that way.
But I know that there are some important counter-examples, so I’ll frequently add, “Except at an huge cost in expense and freedom,” for we know all too well that some regimes have managed to maintain intense control over massive populations for generations.
Today there’s an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald with Isaac Mao, pioneering Chinese blogger and Berkman fellow, in which he says the Chinese authorities are unable to keep up with increasing volume of social communications the 108M bloggers, millions in social networks, and people texting and twittering away.
So, maybe control doesn’t scale after all.
November 25, 2008
Here’s an odd thing.
I was sure that when Google China first started cleansing its results, a search for “tiananmen” at Google Images did not return the famous photo of the man standing in front of the line of tanks, or other photos of the Tiananmen demonstrations.
Today it does.
Even odder, I was talking with Lokman Tsui of the Berkman Center about this, and he discovered that if you search for “tiananmen” using the Chinese characters (天安门), you don’t get back photos of the demonstrations but sanitized, post-card-ish touristy photos.
On purpose? Fluke? A crack in the structure of control?
We’re rebooting Radio Berkman, the Berkman Center’s podcast series. First up is an interview with Chris Saghoian about why you get zero hits on some celebrities when you search using Argentina’s Google or Yahoo. There’s also a two-question interview with Craig Newmark about the effect of “nerd culture.”
November 19, 2008
Harvard Free Culture, ROFLCon, and Public Radio Exchange Proudly Present…
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY TWO: THE SECRET HEADQUARTERS EDITION
A Gathering Of Boston TechNovember 29th, 2008, 8:00 – 12:00
Berkman Squared, 50 Church Street, Cambridge MA
RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1369339/Boston is full of cool Internet people. Why aren’t they meeting each other?
INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY is Boston’s monthly party gathering hackers, activists, artists, designers, nonprofits, startups, academics and general geekery to hang out and connect with one another.
*No agenda, no “networking,” no presentations. Just beverages, food, ideas and cool people.
*Best of all the price is free, just like your courtesy black helicopter flight to A Secure Undisclosed Location*This time: come out and meet Boston’s Secret Masters of Hidden Hackspace, Homebrew Mad Science, and Cyber Revolution
*Also: hear about our scheme to rent a decommissioned missile silo. And how you can too, on less than $10 bucks a month. (No, seriously).With Featured Guests and Organizations:
*Jason Bobe, (DIYBio)
*Meredith Garniss and Andrew Sempere,(Willougby and Baltic)
*Alex Hornstein, (NUBLabs) (FabLab)
*David Weinberger, (Joho The Blog) (The Berkman Center For Internet and Society)
*Jake Shapiro, (The Public Radio Exchange)
*Jason Scott (Textfiles)
*Matt Lee (The Free Software Foundation)
November 18, 2008
Michael Heller, from Columbia University, is giving a Berkman lunch-time talk on his book, Gridlock Economy. He says the nutshell version is that when too many people own pieces of one thing, no one can use it. Too much ownership creates gridlock, he says. [Note: I’m live-blogging, getting things wrong, missing stuff, introducing typos, etc.]
Example of gridlock: Too many owners of fragments of mortgages leads to a meltdown because there are too many people for renegotiation of the loans.
Another example: Too many patents to deal with to make advances in bio-tech. There are about 40,000 DNA patents now. Patents have gone up, but fewer “pills in bottles” to cure people. The patents are upstream from the work done to actually save people’s lives.
Another example: “What is the most underused natural resource in America?” A: Spectrum. 90% in this country is dead air. We haven’t updated our allocation system since the 1920s. Geographic licenses with restricted uses and no transfers. That makes it extremely difficult to assemble national wireless networks. We are now almost out of the top twenty for broadband.
Another example: Why do we waste so much time in airports? Why not build more runways and airports? Air travel was deregulated in 1978, and since then only one new airport has been built. If we have 25 new runways, it would end gridlock. But every community is able to block the assemblage of land you need.
We could move from 1% to 20% of energy from wind power, but we can’t set up the transmission from one place to another because of gridlock issues.
Rap no longer raps over samples. Gridlock caused by the recording industry “trying to monetize every shard.”
All of these problems are the same problem. There used to be a fairly tight link between the patent and the product, the land and the subdivision, etc. “That’s the old style economy.” The new style is a funnel. The new style economy is about assembling resources. “The breakthroughs come from assembling multiple pieces of protected property.” The same is true in arts, history, documentaries. “The cutting edge is mashups, is remixes.” “Even with land, the most socially valuable projects require the separate assembly of pieces of property.” But ownership has not caught up with this.
One of the great opportunities is figuring out new tools for assembling resoures, and for updating the structure of ownership to conform to the new structure of innovation.
Tragedy of the commons is that when there’s no clear ownership, shared property may get overused. This was a powerful concept when it was introduced in the 1960s. I was a turning point for the environmental movement because they could see that a bunch of resources issues were really structurally the same. It was also the spur in the push towards privatization: Private property was seen as the solution to the tragedy of the commons: If you own the lake, you have an incentive not to take the last fish out of it. But, privatization can overshoot. But, you can get the tragedy of the anti-commons: Too many owners and not enough use. These tragedies are often invisible: you don’t see the waste of what you’re not using.
Michael’s aim is to make the tragedy of the anti-commons visible by roping together many instances to show they’re structurally the same.
We need to reform spectrum allocation, he says. Patent hasn’t been structurally reformed since 1952.
Q: Pharma and biotech disagree on patent policy. Pharma is more like to change its view. Why?
A: Pharma wants to protect its current pipeline, so it tends to favor strong patents. They are willing to sacrifice more speculative research. Biotech companies like to show VCs that they have patents. They worry about weakening patents.
A: [Jim, who’s written a book on this] Molecules are clearly identifiable. But it’s much harder with software and prcoesses.
Q: [jim] The biotech’s having problems, not mainly because of patents. The joke is that a biotech’s main products are patents. That aside, where’s the evident than the anti-commons is a real problem?
A: So far the best evidence is from Walsh, Cohen. They interviewed scientists who said the anti-commons is not a problem. They’re not blocked by patent law. So, this goes against my thesis. But, those studies wouldn’t get at my concerns. Scientists uniformly say that they simply pirate dozens of patents. That works until they get sued. And the Walsh study doesn’t consider commercial R&D. In pharma, they’d rather extend their current drugs. I don’t think I’ve proven that gridlock is the crucial issue, but it seems to be an issue. By not changing the patent law you’re implicitly making policy as well.
Q: Does what you describe impact innovation driven by money or across the board?
A: Across the board. The open source model gets past this. But even assembling multiple open source licenses can lead to gridlock.
Q: We had an open source CEO summit at Harvard last Friday. There was consensus that this more open approach to sw development would help them economically. Between the commons and the anti-commons, is there a commons that isn’t tragic?
A: Sure. My aim is to encourage people to come up with ways of overcoming the problems, once the problems are visible.
[yochai benkler] This is fabulous. Can you say more about what you think the solution is?For anti-commons to be the problem, you have to assume the problem isn’t with property itself. Is the solution a better idea of property? A better understanding of rights? Transaction costs? Is this about the rapid change of uses so you’re always be behind? How do we move ahead? E.g., what do we do about spectrum? How do you tell what to do? Can you think about this independent of the particular resource?
A: So, Yochai in a polite way is saying, “So what? What do we do about it?” E.g., we all agree that the current telecom model is terrible. Everyone loses. Should the solution be full privitization or a commons? If we have a technological way to get past the scarcity of spectrum, then creating private property is the wrong solution. The freedom-enhancing way is to have a commons, if we can get past scarcity. I am agnostic about this because I don’t know if we have solved the problem of scarcity. But I hope my book moves the debate forward by providing another way of showing what’s wrong.
Q: [yochai] I think the solutions lie in the particulars of the domain. The range for me is models of appropriate based on relations (software services) relative to appropriate based on units that are relatively stable. For me, the anticommons problem is a subset of the spectrum problem, in which rapid innovation renders obsolete. The real problem is that spectrum isn’t a resource. Information doesn’t fall on the floor and get lost.
Q: The public is acquainted with gridlock but frame it through government ownership or intervention, with gridlock arising from regulation. How does your framework frame intervention?
Q: In pharma, ownership incentivizes development. Can you break gridlock into communication and action? You can tell people that the 12 owners of a patent that they’re blocking development. Action would be getting them to do something about it. How do you decide whose valuation is more important?
Q: To what degree is the gridlocked society a description of a set of problems or whether it’s a metaphor. If the latter, where does it get too broad? My mortgage doesn’t really resemble my ideas. What’s the larger mechanism here?
A: On politics: There are lots of areas we deliberately design in gridlock, e.g., criminal justice system or preventing parks from being developed. There’s also regulatory gridlock that stops anything from being built.
On limiting scarcity: When is the right measure the subjective one that lets someone refuse to give up property, and when should you just have to pay the market price? It’s an old question and I don’t have a general answer.
Is it a metaphor? I think there’s more commonality in these diverse areas of the economy. So it’s partially an organizing metaphor, but it’s also meant to describe a new way the economy works.
November 14, 2008
Craig Newmark has dropped by the Berkman Center to chat. He begins by asking us what we want him to talk about. A voice opts for the history of CraigsList.com. [NOTE: I’m live-blogging, typing quickly, not correcting typos, getting things wrong, missing entire paragraphs, etc.]
He says that he got a better education than he needed at Case-Western. In early 1995 he wanted to give back some of what he received, he started some mailing lists, including for events, AnonSalon (a fundraiser) and others. People suggested new categories, including apartments. He was using Pine for email, but it started breaking at 240 mailing addresses. He was going to call the list “SFEvents,” but people said they already call it “CraigsList” and that it’s a brand. Craig didn’t know what a brand is, but he stuck with it.
He says he was a literal nerd in HS. He was not on the AV Squad [I was] but he was on the debating team, which led him to delusions about the effectiveness of rational discourse. He says he’s now comfortable with being a nerd.
Eventually he realized he could turn emails into HTML, an instant Web-publishing solution. Over the next few years, he refined the software. If a task took more than an hour a day, he would automate it. At the end of 1997, he hit three milestones: 1. A million page views per month (he hit a billion in 2004 and now is headed toward 13B. There are 26 people at the company). 2. Microsoft Sidewalk asked him to run banner ads. He turned them down because “I am an overpaid programmer.” 3. People volunteered to help. But it failed because he didn’t lead. So, in 1999 he turned it into a business.
He hired Jim Buckmaster “who is a full foot taller than I am.” He’s a really good manager. “I suck as a manager.” The culture there is that people make suggestions, they listen, and they decide what to act on. Also, it’s continued to try to be simple. And they decided to charge people who are already paying but for less effective ads, so they started charging people listing jobs and real estate brokers. “They asked us to charge them to cut down on certain types of spam, and on the need to post and repost.”
He’s always surprised people are willing to pay for what he does for fun. He’s generalized it to nerd values, including: once you have a comfortable living, it’s more fun to change things than to make more money. His business model: “We can do really well by treating people well and doing some good.”
He says he’s now going to half time as a customer service rep, after 14 years of fulltime. You sometimes see ugly things in customer service, he says. E.g., they saw ugly racist stuff during the campaign. “That takes something out of you.”
“I’ve only regretted giving my email address out once.” It was when he was on The View.
Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. “It has to do with the culture of trust we have.” There are bad guys but they’re a tiny percentage. “People look out for one another.” E.g., you can flag abusive ads. If enough people vote for it, it’s removed automatically. “That’s a flawed mechanism,” but it works better than not doing it. As Jon Stewart says, (Craig says) you do hear from extremists, but that’s because moderates have stuff to do. You should treat people the way you want to be treated. Corollaries: Live and let live, and give the other person a break. Nothing profound, he says, but it’s hard to follow through. “We’re trying to listen to people still.” “We decide on new cities based primarily on requests for them.” (567 cities now.) Novel ideas are rare. Most of what’s on the site is based on community feedback, although the child care section was Craig’s idea.
“I have no vision at all, but I know how to keep things simple, and I listen some.”
“We’re a good example of how people collaborate in mundane ways to make things happen. Not bad.” On his way to One Web Day he realized, “I’m a community organizer. I’m more of a meta-organizer.”
Nothing about CraigsList is, in his view, altruistic. It’s just people giving another person a break. “I figured I should extend this to other areas.” E.g., “I help people smarter than me help figure out the future of journalism.” E.g., Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.
He’s also interested in grassroots democracy. Face to face is a better way of communicating but it doesn’t scale. On the Net, we get millions of people working together to make stuff happens. “This changes the nature of our democracy,” so that grassroots democracy can address the traditional problems with representative democracy. Craig thanks Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout. Now we have this big grassroots infrastructure. What do we do with it? “2008 is the new 1776.”
All sorts of things are happening. “It used to be that the guys with money, power and guns got to write the history and our narratives about ourselves. With Wikipedia, everyone has a shot at doing that…It changes the whole course of human history.” We are at a “singularity,” he says. We’re living in a time like 1776. It’s happening faster because the Internet accelerates everything. “I’m trying to play a microscopic part in it.”
He’s involved with the SunlightFoundation.org. He’s working with ConsumerReports. He was involved a little bit in SF’s 311 number. “Mundane, but it’s part of everyday governance. In my fantasies, I apply that to all levels of government.” A bunch of this is in the Obama platform, he says, and we could see some of it next year.
Veterans have been treated badly by the White House, he says, so he’s on the IAVA.org board. To screen claims faster, maybe they shouldn’t care about fraud so much, since veterans and their families are suffering as they wait for their claims to be processed.
As a nerd, it’s a “crime against nature” to be involved in promotion or communication. But he does it anyway. For one thing, he likes the idea of more people getting involved in service. “I do have one message for the kids: Stay off of my lawn.” :)
“The Constitution will be restored on January 20.”
He says focuses on people who can get things done. He lacks patience for those who can’t get things done.
Q: Are there any ways Craigslist has gone in directions you couldn’t have imagined?
A: I never tried to foresee them so it’s hard to answer. I had to have my arms twisted to create personals. They’ve done much more good than problems. Like “missed connections.” I’ve been asked to perform marriages. In a way, the whole thing has been a surprise. I have no vision. I’ve only responded to feedback. It’s all very surreal, but that’s life now.
Q: Why did CL succeed in the early days, as opposed to doing it over newsgroups?
A: Part of it was that everyone understood mail and Web browsers, while newsgroups were hard to used. And newsgroups were ad-spammed badly.We have a problem with spam, and last week we announced a suit against a company that sells ad-spam software. We aren’t litigious but we thought that was a good way to do it.
Q: Has it been a problem keeping CL simple?
A: Keeping it simple is a habit. There are times when we have to debate whether there should be a specific category, or should people have to register with a valid email on the message boards, but I don’t know how to do things except simply.
Q: What about the deal with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.. How consensual was the deal?
A: Jim knows the details. He felt strongly about it. There was genuine abuse of our site involving minors. We’re not law enforcement professionals, so we got advice from the real experts. There is that sort of abuse and we have to help out. We just started charging for erotic services and we’ll contribute all that to philanthropies. And how do you manage anonymity? Sometimes you need it, for whistleblowers. We tend to the anonymity side. But congresspeople want to know that an email comes from a constituent rather than a mass spammed email. We’re talking about ways to balance anonymity and authentication, but we do need anonymity as a kind of check and balance against an oppressive government.
Q: Does your exposure to some of the uglier aspects has led you to see a more expansive role for government?
A: I have become more balanced, but mainly because I’ve been doing customer service. The best label I can figure is “moderate Libertarian.” I’m looking for a better label. I’m increasing interested in private-public partnerships since I’ve seen market solutions don’t always work, like for health insurance. I’m in the Net neutrality debate and see people misrepresenting it on purpose. (He adds that most lobbyists are ok, and a small number are predatory.)
Q: You’re in many cities but it still seems to be geared towards regional breakdowns. On purpose?
A: Initially we just followed our gut. CL is like a flea market. People get together to do commerce, but really just to socialize. Penelope Green talked about our site being a market in the ancient sense: chaotic and vividly human.
[me] Why doesn’t your company have meetings?
A: We have some. But we minimize them. A meeting of more than six people is already going to be dysfunctional (small group comms theory). Effective communication is a meeting is tough. This also reflects my impatience, a flaw as a human being.
What will be the future of the Communications Decency Act?
A: This is the part of law that says that a site isn’t responsible for what people say on the site, so long as they take some reasonable measures. I think it will stay and possibly be improved.
Q: Have you had any negative interactions with the police?
A: Not really. Once the FBI called asking if we knew there was an ad for plutonium on our site. The result was that someone got a stern talking to from his parents. The police just want to be treated decently and not jerked around. That’s our customer service idea.
Q: Why can’t people search for subsections?
A: Mysql chews up server time doing these searches. We have some ideas for how to do this, but there are bigger things they’re working on.
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