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August 11, 2006
A German podcast — Vier Nasen tanken Super (yes, four nose super tanker, which makes me think I may be missing the idiom) — interviews me for 25 minutes. In English, natürlich! I begin with a rambling, pointless response to a question about identity on the Web that should be fast-forwarded over, and then we talk about blogging and politics, in which what I say isn’t so much pointless as obviously wrong. [Tags: podcast politics]
August 8, 2006
I received a piece from Blue Tiger Democrats the other day, a lovely historical reflection on the idea behind the group. It actually resuscitates Tammany Hall, acknowledging how corrupt it became but pointing to its original virtue: Civic engagement. The Democratic party worked for its local constituency, making life better in tangible ways. The Blue Tigers want the party to get back to these roots.
It’s a terrific idea. The Dean campaign had a similar idea when, in its final months, it was encouraging supporters to do good works in the community, preferably while wearing a Dean t-shirt. But I think Blue Tiger has something more systematic in mind since it talks about building real world and virtual spaces. (It’d be nice if the Blue Tiger site provided a way for people to talk to it or to one another.)
It might be nice to hook up the Blue Tigers with Mitch Kapor’s notion of a space for fair arguments.
By the way, the big pamphlet — a broadside — the Blue Tigers sent presents provocative evidence that Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat was modeled on cartoons representing the noble Democratic tiger (the pre-donkey party symbol) as a corrupt Tammany Hall alley cat. [Tags: politics democrats blue_tiger_dems mitch_kapor]
August 7, 2006
Gov. Mark Warner’s PAC — he’s running for president but he hasn’t uttered those particular words yet — has gone Creative Commons. This is a smart thing. Not only is it a shibboleth (in the first definition sense) for the tech community, it’s a gesture of trust to his supporters. It also makes it easier to get the PAC’s materials out into the world.
So, a tip o’ the hat to the Warner PAC. [Tags: politics copyright creative_commons mark_warner nancy_scola ]
August 6, 2006
Wikipedia challenges the assumption that to create good information, someone has to be in charge and it needs certified experts, Mitch says. “The view people have of how the world has to work is just wrong.” People think Wikipedia can’t work because they assume it’s as hard to remove grafitti there as it is in the real world. But, he says, all this is what the attendees here already know. [As always, I am paraphrasing and paying attention to what happens to strike me.]
Now he talks about blogs vs. wikis. “I find blogs, especially political blogs, on the whole to be quite disappointing. To me, they’re the talk radio of the Internet.” The problem is that they’re a series of atomic utterances, one after another. Rather than building on one another, they’re like billiard balls. Blogs are about individual expression. They increase partisanship rather than increase thoughtful reflection. [Mitch’s got to find himself some new blogs to read.] But, with wikis, people work on the same entry and improve it.
“As a technologist, I had some unlearning to do when I entered the Wikipedia community” because the tools weren’t all that good. But, Jimmy Wales taught him that the “secret sauce” isn’t technology. It’s community. It’s the shared values: NPOV, being prepared to be edited, learning to make your opponent’s case. To become a Wikipedian is to internalize those values.
In the early years, he says, there were more articles in Wikipedia about Middle Earth than about Africa because the contributors were writing about what they knew about. This is no longer true. He talks about the importance of inclusiveness. But, he says, things could be better. E.g., the UI that shows you what’s changed in an article is obscure unless you’re pretty deep into it. Wikipedia needs to be easier to edit if it is to be inclusive. It looks ok to those who are already in the tent, but that’s a self-selected group. “If we want Wikipedia to succeed in its mission, we must find ways to lower the barriers to participation.” He applauds the efforts underway to do this. “I’d make it a major strategic priority for the community.”
Mitch recommends An Inconvenient Truth. [Me, too.] Politics as usual is broken. See campaigns.wikia.com to see what Jimmy Wales talked about in his keynote. Democracy as the experiment in enabling people to determine what’s best is at risk. “Wikipedia is an existence proof of the power of a decentralized and respectful self-governing community to make an impact.” It is an “inspiration for a political movement.” The key attributes should include:
Participatory.
Product and process intertwined. The product is a wiki and it uses the wiki to produce itself.
Aspiration to high standard of respectful dialog.
Citizens of equal stature with experts.
To most audiences, this idea would be absurd. Politics generally shuns facts and collaboration. “We need a political movement that does not practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia does not practice Britannica as usual.” It’s been done before: Gandhi. MLK. Mandela.
But, to succeed, we need an existence proof. We need new tools, especially ones that help us argue better. Argue fairly. That’s what the Wikipedia culture is good at. [Good point.]
There are no panaceas. In the real world, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Facts aren’t enough. The Iraq article in Wikipedia can’t conclude that we should or should not withdraw our troops. This political movement has to have core values. Mitch says he does not have an answer.
Q: If Wikipedia is the metaphor for a political movement, consider that Wikipedia doesn’t yet address the needs of the visually impaired. We don’t have volunteers to do this. How would we get the equivalent problems addressed in the political realm?
A: There are discussions going on about evolving wikis for the visually impaired. “I’m willing to put my oar in the water on that.” For the political movement, it’s like Wikipedia in 2001. We just need a few crazy people.
Q: How might Second Life support these movements? [Mitch is on the board.]
A: It’ll become a fabulous place for collaboration.
Q: Your key attributes are new for the production of knowledge, but they’re old hat in politics. At Wikipedia, there are relatively few active participants…
A: If there were lower barriers to editing, there would be more participants.
[Mitch’s intuition about a tool for fair argument leading to a movement works better, I think, if we assume there are only a handful of parties. But suppose we’re more fragmented than that? A fair argument forum might end as diverse as the blogosphere. They key would be, I think, providing a fair argument platform — an idea I like — that also enables us to come together in movements that accept a range of diversity. Fair arguments don’t always resolve, but we need an ethos that also does not see splintering as the alternative.]
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia politics mitch_kapor]
August 4, 2006
Larry Lessig begins by citing John Philip Sousa’s concern in 1906 that the phonograph would end kids hanging around, singing the old songs together. Larry says he was right. A read-write culture was displaced by a read-only culture. [Paraphrasing, of course.] [The audio of LEssig’s talk is here.]
This is not just about cullture, he says. The Republican party started out believing in free labor. Not unpaid, but free to engage its capabilities as it wants. The return of read-write labor is key to Benkler’s Wealth of Networks and also to Wikipedia.
Same for politics where broadcast politics displaced read-write politics.E.g., the Dean campaign that encouraged people to explain their thinking in blogs.
The 20th Century was weirdly totalitarian: R/O culture, politics and labor.Massiv, massively powerful, controlled, read-only society. But, fortunately, that century is over. The 21st Century is the revival of the read-write.
There are two very new cultures being produced by the Internet. The first is a new kind of read-only culture that facilitates the buying and consumption of culture. Poster child: Apple I-Tunes. Trying to increasingly perfect the power of the copyright holder.
The second is a second culture in which people consume and create. E.g., Anime music video that reedits anime and sets them to music. Larry shows one. It’s a remix. [I worry about the emphasis on remixes. The examples are almost always trivial, even if delightful. Remixes of these sorts aren’t the issue. It’s the subtler absorption of cultural elements that’s the issue.]
Words are the Latin of our time, he says. The vulgar, democratic language is pictures, videos and music. [Which is why Larry focuses on those sorts of remixes.]
The law’s attitude to these two cultures is radically different. Copyright law doesn’t like the R/W culture. It loves the R/O culture. The law’s attitude is that every use makes a copy and thus requires permission. This is made worse by the desire to preserve the business model of the R/O culture. The laws and technology will kill the R/W culture unless there’s resistance.
How to resist? Larry’s first instinct was to litigate. He (we) lost 7-2 when the Supremes said Congress can do whatever it wants with copyright. Instead, Larry decided, we need to ignite a popular movement. We need to take two steps:
First, practice free culture.
Second, enable free culture. Make it possible everywhere, not just in the hacker’s den. Wikipedia is an example. Wikipedia shows that it’s possible.
There are lessons about how this extraordinary potential is possible. There is a proprietary instinct, but we’ve learned that freedom is a bigger, more important value. The Defense Dept. ended the cycle of autistic computing — smart machines that couldn’t communicate — by insisting that computers interoperate. Open, free standards facilitates competition and opportunity. We should remember that lesson as we praftice free culture.
But it’s not enough to build the infrastructure. We have to make it possible. There’s a clear and present danger to this freedom. When they build the locks to protect the R/O Internet, they will lock out the R/W Internet.
At the technical layer: Support free codecs. Support free software that enables free culture.
At the legal layer: Protect free culture. Larry points to Creative Commons as an example. Now there are 140 million link backs to CC licenses.
Larry praises Wikipedia but says he also is here to plea that Wikipedia does what it can to increase free culture. He points to two ways: First, help others spread the practice. He points to the PD-Wiki project (public domain wiki). It will launch first in Canada where a database of all published works is becoming available. From this will come, it’s hoped, a better list of what is and is not in the public domain.
Second, Wikipedians should demand a useable platform for freedom. Free culture products aren’t usually interoperable. We need a layer that facilitates interoperability of content enabling it to move among equivalent licenses. Equivalent = means the same thing. E.g., FDL = CC-BY-SA. Re-licensing would create an ecology of licenses. A market of licenses. The legal layer would become a commodity layer. No monopoly. No single source of failure if a court deems a particular license unworkable. License authors ought to add a compability clause that says that derivatives can be relicsensed under equivalent licenses. The Software Freedom Law Center could be the organization that is the center of this. Even if this isn’t the right platform, Wikipedia could be a strong force for establishing some platform for cultural freedom, says Larry.
[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia larry_lessig copyright]
July 31, 2006
Starting on September 7, two months before the election, we’ll offer the best site we can to support conversation and political activism surrounding the key congressional races. We’ll provide an even-handed place for each candidate’s supporters to appeal to voters, plus an open forum for each race. In that context, I have no idea which candidates will benefit, but I suspect that it will most help the candidates who are not puppets of big business or big labor or zealots of any stripe. We shall see.
At the moment, he’s looking for some angels with money. Come September, he’ll be looking for participants. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to Britt’s non-profit ORG.net project, and am a friend of his.) [Tags: politics britt_blaser]
July 26, 2006
From Salon:
According to a new Harris Poll, 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. That’s a sharp and rather inexplicable increase from February 2005, when just 36 percent of the public held on to that belief. Ready for more? Sixty-four percent of the public still thinks that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al-Qaida.
[Tags: politics]
July 22, 2006
According to a story in the Boston Globe, Gov. Mitt Romney yesterday broke a campaign pledge to index the minimum wage to inflation, rejecting the Massachusetts Legislature’s plan to raise the minimum wage from $6.75/hour to $8 over two years. Instead, Romney proposed increasing it by $0.25 and then have the executive branch study the issue.” Romney called the legislature’s plan an “abrupt and disproportionate” increase. The last increase for the 300,000 workers who make minimum wage was in 2001.
According to InflationData.com, prices increased 13.25% between 1/1/2001 and 1/1/2006. Simply to keep up with inflation, the current minimum wage should be boosted by $0.93, about 3.5 times the Romney proposal.
Someone working full time for the current minimum wage makes $13,500 a year before taxes. Under the Romney Take-a-Quarter plan, this would skyrocket to $14,000. [Tags: politics minimum_wage mitt_romney]
July 21, 2006
The Sunlight Foundation has created a Popup Politicians widget. Mouse over the sun to see the effect:
To see how to do this, visit the Sunlight Foundation’s explanatory page…
July 20, 2006
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales today threatened Dick Wolf, the producer of the top-rated television program, Law and Order, with confinement in the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay for “providing terrorists and organized crime with classified information that will make it easier for them to frustrate the efforts of United States officials investigating their deadly actions.” While the Attorney General stopped short of accusing Wolf of treason, he implied that the government might seek penalties associated with that crime.
At issue is an episode of Law and Order that aired in March in which Detective Nina Gafney and Detective Ed Green (played by Milena Govitch and Jesse L. Martin, respectively) discussed using the “Good Cop, Bad Cop” routine to break down a suspect. After some banter, the two decide that Detective Gafney will be the “bad cop.” The ploy meets with limited success.
At a press conference, Attorney General Gonzales expressed outrage that this investigative technique was exposed by the media. “Now terrorists will know that the bad cop’s meanness, the slamming of his fist onto the table, the outright refusal to get the terrorist a Mountain Dew or even a cup of coffee, all that will look like play-acting,” Gonzales said. “And when the good cop comes in, the terrorist will play along, get the soda and the cigarette, but not give up any valuable information in order to bond with the investigator.” Gonzales claimed that this technique now is “null and void” and that Dick Wolf “has brought comfort to our enemies and has made America less safe.” He added, “This is the type of thing that gets people sent to Guantanamo. Or worse.”
Asked about the popular series 24, Gonzales responded with praise. “Now there’s a show that sends a positive message to our enemies,” he said. “We will stay up all night to hunt you down, especially if you kidnap our comely Canadian daughters.” [Tags: politics television humor]
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