BookBlog

Taxonomy is power

There's a saying, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." Categories reflect social power. This is true even with fictional things. A friend was describing a fantasy novel series. I googled and found its web page and wiki.

Lo and behold, the categories in the left navigation of the wiki read:

A funny set of categories to characterize this fictional world! And there's a backstory -- some of the fans wanted to classify dragons as people, and organize them by nationality, like people. But the maintainer of the wiki wanted to keep the categories of beings separate. Leading to a heated dispute about human/dragon racism.

No word on whether there is a full-fledged dragons rights movement. Or at least a protest t-shirt.

Even more backstory. That quote about dialects? It was a quote by a yiddish scholar, made famous at a presentation in a conference in 1945, while WW2 was in progress.

Only in California

An electronic alert on a Caltrain sign starts "please be considerate..."

The web's "long tail" boosts library use

The Dallas Morning News reports that library circulation has increased since the internet has become mainstream

In Dallas, library circulation – the number of books, magazines or other material checked out – has increased 59 percent from 1998 to 2004, and similar increases have been seen at libraries nationwide...

"Through the Internet, people are finding out that specific items are available that 20 years ago they never would have known about," said Dale McNeill, public service administrator for the Dallas library system. "Then they come to the library to find them."

Dinosaurs and mammals at SXSW

Back to back conversations at an SXSW party last night:
* a multi-billion dollar content company can't figure out how to cost-justify digitizing its content and making it available to fans
* a small web hosting firm with lots of artist customers publishes a blog and RSS feeds full of content from artists who want to get out the word about their creations, like, say this ipod holder.

Mammals are scurrying around the dinosaurs' feet.

Celebrating Celebration

Witold Rybcynski, the writer and scholar of architecture, really likes Celebration, the Disney-built planned town in Florida that raked in controversy for its venture into privatized civic life.

Rybcynski visit and admires the comforting, human-scale houses, streets and sidewalks...

and the thoughtfully laid out parks

and considers it the honest heir to classic garden suburb development in the early 1900s.

The worry about Disney's Celebration wasn't about the buildings and streets (which seem genuinely humane), but about the civic structure -- Disney's attempt to build resort-level quality control over the road, school, and social hall fabric of life.
My question about Celebration, a decade later, is how and whether it is evolving from a housing development into a town.

Lakoff, Metaphor, and the world

Alan Ampolsk on Lakoff, via Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Lakoff's focus on frames is useful, but too shallow to be sufficiently powerful. It misses the depth of emotion and myth, and the reality-transforming power of reason.

I'm interested in metaphor and politics, so I'm supposed to admire Lakoff. But I don't. Sure, he did important work on the central role of metaphor in our lives. Worth a look. But even there, you run up against the problem -- which is that at the end of the day, he's a linguist. That means he's all caught up in the superficial mechanics of language, and has no handle at all on deeper, darker, messier stuff -- such as, for example, values, beliefs, core myths -- the things that drive actions and power movements.

To Lakoff it's all a matter of "framing" -- frame better, and the human sheep will follow. Because, you know, enlightenment has failed, and the best manipulator wins. Being a progressive, Lakoff is angry at the way Republicans frame. But, in despair over the need to frame -- and operating far from the emotional core -- the best he can come up with are tinny alternative phrases. Call trial lawyers "public protection attorneys." Campaign for "poison-free communities." And you've solved it.

Meet the Fockers / Moral Politics

Meet the Fockers is a lowbrow comedy version of George Lakoff's political theory. Ben Stiller's embarrassingly touchie-feely parents -- his mom's a sex therapist for senior citizens, his dad's an ex-radical-lawyer house husband -- meet his fiance's parents -- a macho, uptight ex-cia agent and his repressed wife.

In case you couldn't decipher the contrast in parenting style, the movie has an otherwise gratuitous Byrnes grandchild who's supposed to be toughened up by letting him cry it out before he's old enough to say his first word; the Fokkers soothe him with hugs, and the occasional chocolate and thimble of rum.

Many bathroom and sex gags later, the goofy yet loving Fokker family shows up the authoritarian Byrnes style. Meet the Fokker's was apparently the highest-grossing movie of the Christmas weekend -- I wonder how it's doing in red states?

George Lakoff's theory -- explained in Moral Politics, and popularized in the last election cycle -- contends that conservative politics is modeled on a "strict father" family, while liberal politics is based on a "nurturant parent" theory. Conservatives draw on the parenting philosophy of James Dobson, based on harsh discipline and physical punishment, where liberals draw on the empathetic philosophy of T. Berry Brazelton, where discipline is based on teaching the child to understand the feelings of others and consequences of their actions.

Lakoff's definition of "nurturant parents" includes the notion of responsibility, which stacks the deck, giving liberals too much inherent credit for balance. Extreme viewpoints on the left of the spectrum can be statist and absolutist, not just "nurturing." Not to mention the "nurturing" nature of old-style, big-city spoils-system Democratic patronage politics.

Opposition to big budget deficits has crossed party lines in recent political cycles. When Republicans oppose budget deficits, presumably they wish to cruelly restrict social programs. When Democrats oppose budget deficits, they are being prudent stewards for future generations.

A theory this general can be used like a horoscope to explain any occurrence. Lakoff describes right-wing opposition to Bill Clinton's philandering in terms of defense of the father's moral leadership. Perhaps right wing silence on the moral pecadilloes of Tom DeLay can be explained in terms of authoritarian obedience to the leader. Or perhaps both of these can be explained in terms of aggressively self-interested party politics.

I appeciate Lakoff's efforts to find a coherent underpinning to liberal beliefs. Lakoff is right that liberals need to do a better job of conveying an emotionally and morally compelling story. He's right that recent Democratic campaign messages have been a grab-bag of policies, rather than a coherent vision. He's right that liberals need to reframe issues in a favorable light -- Pell Grant and National Science Foundation spending as investment in the country's future.

But I'm uncomfortable with the psychoanalytic approach explaining people's beliefs in terms very different than ones they would use to describe themselves.

Lakoff's theory doesn't leave room for the very different flavors of self-defind conservative; the corporate capitalists; the small-government libertarians; the socially conservative christians. Conservative message discipline seems to be better explained by publicists effectively crafting and distributing responses than a psychologically driven natural affinity.

Also, the family dynamics theory is blissfully blind to history; the response of Progressive reform to Robber Baron excess, the New Deal to the Depression; the Civil Rights movement to segregation. It can't see the stasis and complacency that afflicted liberal groups after they won major 60s battles.

Compelling political philosophies work at multiple levels -- they resound emotionally, make sense intellectually, and respond historically to the challenges of the time. Lakoff's family dynamics are part of a valuable effort to explain the moral basis of liberal beliefs. They've clearly filtered into mainstream popular culture. But they aren't the whole of a compelling political story.

To respond to Peterme's perennial call for explicit opinion, I found "the Fockers" a moderately amusing and entertainingly silly movie for a Christmas weekend night out. I found Lakoff a bit disappointing for a thoughtful airplane read, against billing that he had the secret explanation for conservative success and liberal redemption. Opinions, of course, are all relative to expectations.

The Long Tail, Creative Commons, and Peer Production

The Long Tail is a fabulous Wired Magazine article that proves the business opportunity beyond the mass market hit-based model.

Amazon and Netflix are fundamently different from Walmart and Sony. People are trained by the mass market model to assume that sales follow the 80-20 rule -- the top few titles will garner the lion's share of sails. But more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson explains the secrets to success at the tail of the curve:

The first secret to making money at the tail is discovery. "Long Tail" businesses aggregate a vast and diverse inventory, and use collaborative filtering algorithms, recommendations, group-forming tools to help people discover things.

The second secret is lower prices. Anserson analyzes the premium in current pricing, which is calibrated to preserve the margin required to advertise in mass media and to stock shelves, even for products that have no shelf rent and are sold by peer recommendation. Anderson suggests that conventional hits distributed electronically are overpriced by 25%. There are opportunities to charge much lower prices for inventory that never incurs mass production and distribution costs.

Long Tail and Peer Production

The article talks exclusively about commercial production. The long tail creates profit from the vast virtual warehouse of obscure, backlist, minor-label, and out-of-print works. The tail extends further with peer production -- blogs, wikis, photo galleries, open source software.

The value model of the long tail applies even more strongly to peer production.

* Low starting price. With peer production, the base price of content falls to $0.
* Discovery. Services like Technorati, Feedster, Freshmeat and CPAN help people discover what's new and what's interesting in the long tail.

The peer production model suggests two more principles that apply back up through the middle of the curve:

* Groupforming. Flickr is great because it lets you invite friends to share photos. One of the secrets of Wikipedia success is how it supports micro-communities around obscure topics like obfuscated programming languages.

* Creation tools. Apple, Blogger, 6Apart and now O'Reilly sell tools that help people make and mix their own content.

The Power Law Red Herring

The Long Tail article reveals the limitations of the Clay Shirky power law model. Several years ago, Shirky explained how the top of the peer production curve segues into the mass market. The aggregation of interest raises popular bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, and popular open source software projects like Linux far above the tail, to join the ranks of mass market mainstream hits.

The Power Law essay amputates the long tail, and translates the head of the peer production curve into familiar mass market terms -- the creation and packaging of celebrities. By focusing at the top of the curve, where peer production segues into the mass market, the Power Law obscures the the economic and social principles that create profit and value from the Long Tail.

The Power Law essay implied that A-list bloggers were the big winners in the peer ecosystem. This incited resentment of A-list bloggers by community bloggers, who are influential in local groups, but who don't reach a mass audience. Anderson's essay suggests that the relationship between the head and the tail is symbiotic instead.

The head's connected to the tail

In suggesting that the tail will wag, Joi Ito is both right and wrong. He's right that companies and organizations that take advantage of the tail will be the next-generation powers, and the hit machine will itself become a niche.

The Long Tail shows how it's profitable for emerging powers like Amazon and Netflix to cultivate the deep backlist. It shows what the mass market content kings are losing by cutting off the tail.

But Joi is wrong with the implication that the tail can succeed without the head. Anderson suggests that earlier experiments like MP3.com failed because they couldn't get licenses from major labels to distribute hits, so they only offered obscure bands. Anderson contrasts MP3.com with Rhapsody, which lets a music fan traverse a recommendation path from Britney Spears to an obscure 80s ska band in 3 clicks.

Popular content gathers audiences and interest; groupforming and discovery tools help people branch out into niches. This insight suggests that with the right ecosystem, the popular and the obscure can support each other, rather than competing.

Longterm win for Creative Commons

The Long Tail suggests opportunities for Creative Commons and copyright reform. The problem we've got in copyright policy is that the Mass Media content kings have purchased the law to try and protect their moribund hit-based business model. Fortunately, the opposing forces aren't just David fighting Goliath.

The good news is that money and power will accumulate over time to the businesses making money from the tail. The Wired article suggests that NetFlix should hire lots of lawyers to clear copyrights on old, obscure works. Netflix and its peers will also have an interest in freeing the back list by making it easier for old material to re-enter the public domain.

Businesses at the tail are getting involved in production too, very differently from their hit-based A&R predecessors. Labels send scouts looking for the next Brittany, who will sell millions of records. NetFlix saw a award-winning PBS documentary and put up the money to get it produced to DVD, because they make money on items that sell tens and hundreds of thousands. NetFlix and it's peers using the Long Tail business model will have an interest and leverage at the front of the the production process to use more flexible copyright terms, because recombination will result in a richer database.

Ecology, not ideology

This feels like the right conversation. It's mildly interesting to see how internet distribution and peer production fits into existing ideological models. It's a lot more interesting and fun to look at what's working, understand the principles and effective practices that make it work, and see opportunities to build further.

Open Source Is/Isn't

Dan Hunter and Crooked Timber have clarified distinctions between Marxism -- the political philosophy of Karl Marx -- and the extensions to Marxism by others professing and practicing Marxism. The belief that private property must be abolished, and the practice of mandatory collective farms and factories, were follow-ons, not part of Marx' original philosophy.

It wasn't clear that Hunter's article meant "Marxism in Marx' writings" rather than "Marxism in the arguments and practices of Marxists" -- perhaps that is clear in the academic discourse that the paper belongs to.

Going back to Hunter's article, here is the bit that I disagree with most.

They suggest, for example, that property rights do exist here, it’s just that these property rights inhere in the wireless devices that transmit and receive. But these suggestions are, with all due respect, largely illusory, and seem to be advanced so as not to spook the horses of capitalism. A commons of any sort is inherently Marxian, even if other types of private property rights still operate within the commons.

"This makes about as much sense as saying 'transportation of any sort is inherently a Honda," quoting djw in the comments of the Crooked Timber post.

The critics of Red Penguin had much more to say about what Marxism is and isn't, than about Open Source.

The next paths to follow are Benkler's sources, and other writings describing open source more directly.

open source is/isn't

Til the weekend, I may not have enough time to respond to the good comments on the Red Penguin series distinguishing the thoughts of Marx from the 20th century implementers of Marxism.

But wanted to add a few thoughts about the motivation behind the series. I first wrote Love and Money and Red Penguin as reflections on Benkler -- and added the narrative link to Marxism because it was the Hunter article that led me down that path.

Peer production -- open source software, wikipedia, weblogs and the rest -- is a new way of organizing creation and people.

What's most interesting is understanding how this wonderful thing works -- what are the principles, properties, processes and passions that make the whole thing go, and that make particular things thrive.

So, the interesting avenues to follow, after the classics by Raymond and Benkler and the FSF crew, are the practitioners and observers who are doing it and figuring it out. Good references welcome.

Analogies to existing frameworks like Marxism are interesting inasmuch as they shed light on this new thing.

Love and Money

Yochai Benkler's classic essay, Coases Penguin, explains peer production as a third classic means of organizing economic activity, parallel to the marketplace and the firm. Peer production has a distinct set of advantages for information products, where costs of communication and distribution are low.

Benkler notes that in the real world, of course, market and firm aren't mutually exclusive. There are many variants and hybrids between pure market and pure managerial forms. Industry ecosystems typically include a mix of big companies, small suppliers and service providers, and market-based commodity purchasing.

Similarly, we would expect to see hybrid forms combining aspects of peer production and the other classic market and firm-based forms. Following up to Benker's analysis, here are some thoughts on some emerging combinations.

At Socialtext, we see companies using wikis to generate peer-created internal knowledgebases to share information, replacing centralized, structured collection and publication processes. Companies are finding that removing barriers to contribution by a larger number of contributors improves the speed, quality, and amount of content.

Another hybrid of organization form is for-profit customization and service on an open source base. This isn't just "rent-seeking" -- the economist's slur for exploitation of freely contributed work. It's a way to fill a gap in the peer production model.

Benkler describes the traditional method of prioritization in a firm as "managerial." Resources are allocated by a manager's dictate. This description ignores a key factor in managerial production -- the customer. Managers gather customer needs, and ensure that production is done to customer schedule.

The advantages of peer production are greatest where the developers are the customers. When customers are separated from developers, by skill set or time priorities, there needs to be some way to communicate the customer's needs to the developers. Customers also bring deadlines, which are foreign to pure peer production. Benkler writes that peer production is more efficient over time because of its ability to marshall vast resources. "Peer production relies on making an unbounded set of resources available to an unbounded set of agents, who can apply themselves toward an unbounded set of projects." But if a customer needs functionality by a specific moment, it won't help that a given free software project will probably develop that capability eventually.

Agile development methods -- where customers and developers work collaboratively to set priorities against deadlines -- take advantage of lowered communication costs to increase customer input and reduce risk. Using these methods on an open source base allows producers and customers to take advantage of peer production low cost and high-quality for things that are generic or non-time-sensitive.

With agile development, money is a measure of practical empathy -- you get paid when you understand and meet customers needs and priorities over time.

Another interesting and puzzling question is the mix of incentives in a hybrid world. Where financial and nonfinancial motivations co-exist, how can money be introduced without discouraging people who contribute for free, for fame, satisfaction, personal need, and other nonmonetary incentives.

As noted in the previous post, some activities, like sports and music, where participating for money isn't seen as mutually exclusive to participating for social rewards and personal satisfaction. There are fields like academia and scientific research, where participants make a living, but choose to earn substantially less than their peers who work in law practice and industry. There are also fuzzy lines in artistic and academic communities between being successful and "selling out" -- tilting the balance all the way toward money, and away from values respected by peers, like unbiased research.

Benkler notes that there are some areas where perceptions change over time. In Shakespeare's time, professional actors and musicians were looked down on; in the 19th century, professional athletes were disrespected. These values have reversed.

Given the substantial economic activity surrounding open source (IBM, anyone?), there are many people negotiating the "love and money" boundary every day. Personally, I like serving customers, and think it is fortunate that it is customer focus that makes money in an open source ecosystem. Much of the innovation in social software is coming from peer production -- the way to innovate is to participate in the game. And, like anyone in a business based on "commons" resources, I want those resources to thrive, for reasons of inherent value, and for self-interest.

What do y'all think?

Anarchist in the Library

I loved Siva Vaidhyanathan's last book, Copyrights and Copywrongs. It's a superb excellent intellectual and cultural history and critique of copyright policy.

His new book, Anarchist in the Library isn't up to his standards. "Anarchist" tries to draw a connection between the spread of peer to peer file-sharing, peer cultural creation, and political anarchy.

The analogy is thin, though. Anarchism is a deliberate political philosophy that opposes central government. My guess is that most file-sharers aren't making a political statement, they just want access to music.

The bigger problem with defining file-sharing as anarchy is that it focuses on what's absent -- central control; rather than what is present -- strong and shifting networks of cultural influence.

After a brief historical period dominated by mass media, we're seeing a revival of folk culture, with new forms of peer cultural sharing and creation -- file sharing, blogging, mashups. The trend has been growing since the advent of cheap photocopiers and cheap videocameras, and accelerating with cheap distribution and improved tools for sharing taste and collaborating.

The portrayal of culture as anarchy is a Romantic notion, shaped by the ideal of the artists as lone rebels or dissident cliques. That concept itself is the result of the mass media dominance. Artists see themselves as an embattled minority, then their work gets co-opted into mass media (Lennon's Revolution selling sneakers).

With the rise of mainstream folk culture, though, the interesting structural observation isn't the lack of central control. It's the emergence of networks of influence that are shaped by taste, by opinion, by identity, by personal connection, by mentorship.

Vaidhyanathan laments the lack of community formed around Napster. But that was just immaturity. We're just inventing tools for groupforming around shared preferences and collaborative creation. Flickr has cool tools for building groups around sharing pictures. If Napster was allowed to live, if music-sharing were legal, we'd see faster growth of social software around music.

"Anarchist" segues from Napster to chapters showing science and libraries under attack by increasing corporate and political control. I found those chapters more interesting and informative, probably because I knew less about those topics than then internet copyright wars.

But the anarchist argument still wasn't all that persuasive. There's a strong case to be made that a balance is shifting toward control. But the converse -- that science and libraries are inherently anarchistic -- just doesn't hold up. David Weinberger recently published an interesting piece on cultural bias in the Dewey Decimal system. Western science and technology has always had an alliance with military and industrial forces.

Also, the book's politics contain a bit of kneejerk Chomskyism. Lets get this straight -- third world unlicensed DVD factories are good guys, fighting US intellectual property protectionism. Meanwhile, the Brazilian domestic aerospace industry are the good guys when they implement protectionism, fighting US free trade. IP production is bad when the US does it, and good when the 3rd world does it.

In summary, Anarchist in the Library has some interesting ideas and information, but is a disappointing book overall. Beyond this book, Vaidyanathan thinks and writes well about interesting and important topics, and I look forward to reading more good books from him in the future.

The Geography of Thought

I've wondered idly whether the naming game between adults and infants was universal, or culturally-specific. It turns out that Western children learn nouns faster than verbs "that's a ball. see, ball" and East Asian children learn verbs just as fast.

Richard Nisbett's "The Geography of Thought" includes a variety of experimental evidence showing how East Asians and Westerners think differently.

When shown pictures of a cow, a chicken, and some grass westerners are more likely to group the cow and the chicken, while East Asians are more likely to group the cow and the grass. Westerners are more likely to organize things in categories, while Asians are more likely to organize by relationship (the cow eats grass).

Westerners perceive things as objects (a bowl), easterners as substances (wood). Westerners will group a wooden bown and a silver bowl; easterners will group a wooden bowl and a wooden spoon. Westerners more likely to group items by rule, Easterners by similarity. Westerners are more likely to attribute human behavior to essential traits, Easterners to social context.

Some of the differences covered in the book are well-known -- the individualism of the west, compared to eastern group identity. Western culture -- particularly US culture -- thrives on debate, while East Asian cultures value harmony.

The book seems naive at times -- ancient Chinese images of bucolic scenes are taken as typical of Chinese life, rather than as conventional subjects of art, produced (I don't know, but guessing) for the wealthy. The book makes broad-brush assumptions about how East Asians are content with the hierarchical structures of their societies, an assumption that's falsifiable with the barest minimal familiarity with literature.

The most compelling evidence in the book was about low-level thought constructs that one might think are universal but aren't.

women, competition, followup

A few good follow-up conversations about the "women and competition" story, two posts down.

Sunir wondered about whether the study reveals cultural bias in favor of single-winner competition.

Just one recent example: Joi Ito's post about Japanese reaction to the hostages in Iraq and ideas about individualism vs group identity in Japanese culture.

Peter comments that the preference for competition vs. co-operation doesn't line up neatly on a gender axis.

(Which is my beef with difference feminism; gender is an illustrative lens to examine human differences, but one of many; gender differences are real, but reflect averages across the population, and don't determine individual behavior).

The more that I think about it, the real, detectable underlying bias here is that of the University of Chicago, the affiliation of the study's lead author. The Chicago school of economics applies the mathematical and experimental techniques of economics to "prove" how the rational, individualistic incentives of "homo economicus" apply to everyday social life. Debatable philosophical assumptions about human nature are baked into the premises of the studies, and the outcomes confirm the premises.

Women and power

Years ago, I helped edit the manuscript of a friendly acquaintance, who was writing a book about Rockwell Kent, a once-famous, now-obscure American illustrator, best-remembered now for his leftist politics. (/alevin edits friends' manuscripts for love and free food.)

The illustrator's producer and collaborator for many years was a woman who was a leading impresaria of American art in the 20s and 30s. She organized gallery showings, nurtured artists, cultivated patrons and critics, and grew a scene around contemporary American art. She's remembered less well than he is, and I'm not remembering her name. (if you remember the details, let me know).

The manuscript paraphrased the impresaria's journals at the time. "Despite the lack of formal education, and mediocre skills, the impresaria was fortunate enough to meet a few talented painters, and, despite her mistake-ridden management, was lucky enough to bring a showing or two together."

"You fell for it", I told the manuscript author. The impresaria used a self-deprecating style to describe her position as the result of happenstance and the skills of others. Given the facts of her biography, she was clearly a powerhouse. She organized a school, a community, a market, as a result of initiative and hard work, diplomacy and management skills.

For various cultural reasons, some women find it hard to take credit for their own achievements. It doesn't mean that their self-deprecation should be taken at face value.

Are women less competitive

Some reflections on a blog post at Misbehaving, where Gina reports on a story that women may be less competitive then men.

..women may be less effective than men in competitive environments, even if they are able to perform similarly in noncompetitive environments. In a laboratory experiment we observe, as we increase the competitiveness of the environment, a significant increase in performance for men, but not for women. This results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments, while there is no gap when participants are paid accornding to piece rate. This effect is strong when women have to compete against men than in single-sex competitive environments.

On the one hand, I feel plenty competitive with respect to real external goals and opponents. Last year, when EFF-Austin was fighting the motion picture and cable industries on the SDMCA, I was dedicated to defeating a terrible plan to restrict the rights of technology users. I sympathize with the cable and content company's desire to stop wholesale theft. But no sympathy for the harmful tactics our opponents were pursuing.

Objective goals and deadlines are incentives. Excellence and recognition are incentives. I also like to do a good job, and don't mind if others notice. (not perfectly noble, but true).

On the other hand, internal competition is a de-motivator. In my job, I participate in a sales team and development team. In contests where one person wins at the expense of teammates, everyone loses.

I've worked in companies where the managers came up in a "star system" that rewarded talented players for outshining their peers. This system rewarded players who were good at their job -- and at sabotaging others. The result harmed the organization overall. The whole would always be less than the sum of the parts.

The study finds that women do as well as men in a piece-rate performance on tasks, but worse then men when the task is set up as a tournament, where one person wins and the rest loses. I wonder whether the study is based the biased assumption that intra-group zero-sum competition is a good thing, and therefore, men are superior to women if they are better at it.

On the one hand, many organizations in the real world work that way. If women are less interested in defeating their peers, they may be less successful in those organizations.

On the other hand, perhaps organizations that don't work that way are at a competitive advantage. Organizations where team members co-operate to achieve external goals might succeed as well or better than organizations where team members are at each others' throats.

That would be an interesting topic for further research.

Censorship != Politeness

Shelley Powers equates community norms with self-censorship. I think Shelley's right in the extreme case, and wrong for the ordinary case.

Shelly writes: "I guess we're accountable to each other, and that's the most dangerous censorship of all -- it's the censorship of the commons."

As I've said in comments to Joi Ito's post on the topic, there's a distinction between groupthink -- when someone silences an unpopular opinion in the face of social norms -- and basic politeness.

I don't think it's a bad idea to use a moderate tone when you're critizing someone's idea, when you're speaking directly to that person in front of others. (Assuming the idea you're critizicing is within the realm of civilized discourse).

Nothing useful is gained by hurting the person's feelings, or embarrassing them in public.

Here's what I said in my blog about Don Park's proposed relationship UI. The post on my blog uses a rant tone to project the idea in a noisy blogosphere.

And here's the more diplomatic version in the comments to Don Park's blog. I had never really spoken to Don before this conversation. I certainly didn't want to insult or alienate Don, though I disagree with his point.

Now that we've chatted a bit in comments here and there, I'd feel comfortable being a bit more blunt, though not yet rude.

In social life, there's a range of ways to say true things, depending on social context. Except at the outer reaches of diplomatic obfuscation, politeness isn't the same as lying or censorship. Being brutally blunt at all times just yields flamewars with no socially redeeming value.

Intellectual Property is the Inquisition of our time

Before modernity, the Church held exclusive rights to authorized representation of the life and beliefs of Jesus. Ecclesiastical prosecutors searched far and wide for unauthorized representations. They issued cease and desist orders to heretics when they found them, and conducted criminal prosecutions when the heretics persisted.

Cory Doctorow reports that Marvel and DC Comics successfully dissuaded GeekPunks comic books from using the term "Superhero" in their titles, claiming they own the trademark on "Superhero".

In our era, we are free to invent stories and interpretations about Jesus or the Kabbalah in the public doman. If an existing religion doesn't approve of the ideas, we are free to tell our non-standard stories in public, and gather like-minded folk to start our own sect, without fear of criminal prosecution.

But in our era, some of the most powerful mythical ideas are owned by corporations, not the Church. Disney, Marvel and DC Comics have the right to search out those who transform their message in an unauthorized manner, and criminally prosecute those who refuse.

We the people have given up ownership of our culture's myths to powerful copyright-holders. And we accept the state of affairs, as most people in medieval times must have thought the Church was right to search out and prosecute heretics.

Future civilizations will consider the corporate monopoly on our cultures myths as absurd and barbaric as we think of the Inquisition.

Sopranos, Season 1

In one of the episodes of the Soprano's first season, baby mobster Christopher Moltisanti, who's trying to write his life into a screenplay, comments that a movie script is about 120 pages. David Chase takes advantage of the story-telling space in a 13-hour season to pull together a form more like a novel: developing characters, unfolding themes, interlocking plots, arcs, and pointed social commentary.

I've been watching the Sopranos for the first time on DVD this past week; it's as good as its reputation.

I love the emotional range in the characters gesture and expression. Tony Soprano at turns affectionate, sarcastic and brutal, honest and cagy. Carmela shows intertwined love and hatred when her chronically unfaithful husband is about to be slid into an MRI machine after collapsing mysteriously. Boss figurehead Junior Soprano reveals insecurity and envy.

In classic novel mode, the show takes on the hypocrisy of the American aspiring middle class. Carmela Soprano strives to be socially accepted in the upper-middle class world, hosting fundraisers, getting her daughter into the ivy league. Gambling rackets aren't all that different from insider trading and stock speculation, except mob debtors get beaten up. Elegant dining room table chit-chat is politically correct, self-righteous, barbed, and snobbish. The suburban world's questionable sources of wisdom include psychotherapy, mixing insight and narcissism; and religion, shown as vulnerable to psychobabble and corruption.

I love the storytelling, and I don't have enough tv/film vocabulary to describe what I like about it. The interlocking plot structure comes from the conventional vocabulary of tv drama. Some of the the addictive quality derives from soap opera techniques -- plot suspense driven by characters -- the tensions in Tony and Carmela's marriage, the ambitions of Christopher Moltisanti. Some of the intellectually satisfying structural symmetry comes from classic theater -- the gun on the mantel in the first act will be fired by the last act.

There's also something about the pacing that seems distinctive. It doesn't have the racing quality of tv hyperdrama; nor does it have the static, echoe-ey feel of soap operas. And it doesn't have the schematic feel of a theatrical play adapted to screen, either. If you're a tv/film fan, and can put your finger on this quality, please write in.

It's definitely addictive -- reading blog entries about the show, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only person who watched in three days spaced over a week.

In contrast to Adaptation's parody and ultimate surrender to Hollywood cliches, the Sopranos embraces and transcends genre, and accomplishes art.

The trouble with the review form

is that it turns the (book, movie, recording) into a commodity and the experience of (reading, watching, listening) into social conformity.

The punchline is a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating. The book is good/bad, and you'd like/hate it too.

This leaves out the subjectivity of the observer. My experience of a work of culture is partly evaluation against definable criteria (the book's plot is predictable), and partly the interaction between the book's content and my emotional and intellectual experience. When I read a book, I evaluate these things somewhat separately. Is it a "good book" -- well-researched, well-plotted, etc. And did I learn something new, did I have an emotional and esthetic experience.

Because the experience is subjective, a recommendation can't be general-purpose. There's a genre of folk ballad that can usually make me cry. Not sure whether it's "good music" or "bad music" -- just that it flips some switches and buttons to trigger a strong emotional experience.

Also, the "book review" format emphasizes the dialog between reviewer and reader, rather than the dialog between writer and reader (this point makes more sense for books than other forms). I experience reading not as an act of consumption but as a conversation, separated in time and space from the writing. (That's why it's so darn cool when weblog trackbacks invoke comments from authors; it becomes a live conversation).

So, the essays about books here aren't really book reviews -- they're essays with esthetic evaluation, and personal emotional/intellectual reaction, and response to the author's ideas.

p.s. This isn't as solipsistic as it sounds. The act of recommendation is an intimate act, not a public one. A recommendation is based on empathy; experiencing a work of culture through the filter of another's intellectual and emotional preferences, and assessing whether the other person might enjoy the work. A generic thumbs-up/thumbs-down public recommendation is a much more pallid thing.

Learning from friends

Halley talks about learning about air traffic control from a friend.

To rely on personal contact to spur your learning or curiosity seems a haphazard way to increase your knowledge, but it happens all the time in our lives once we are out of school. These days however, blogs are doing just that -- making a wide range of subjects interesting, engaging, accessible and fascinating simply by the fact that you sense an intimate connection and a personal voice at the other end of the information.

This only seems unusual because we've been introctrinated with the weird idea that learning is something kids acquire in a school building from professional teachers. Humans have learned from peers and mentors, throughout the human lifespan, for as long as primates have been able to transmit ideas about tools, culture, history, and behavior.

In addition to Halley's good point about blogs, I have a weird theory that wikis will help this renaissance in grownup learning. I know several book club wikis already. Wikis are gaining interest among "communities of practice" -- groups of grownups who want to share learning outside academia. Wikis are great for individuals building a vocabulary in a subject, and wonderful for groups building shared understanding.

Blogs help to discover and browse new ideas, through the lens of another passionate human. Wikis help to build personal and shared memory as people learn.

How you can tell you're reading Village Voice movie reviews

When words of high praise include:
* mad intertextuality
* impressively bleak social satire
* lyrical, moody, and gently discombobulated

Matt and Ben

On Saturday night, I saw "Matt & Ben", the off-broadway play, about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in their pizza, beer, and rehearsal days. The screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls from the ceiling, testing testing the friendship of the aspiring actors, who'd been buddies since Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The play is written and performed by two women, Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, who carry off the drag pretty well, showing the loyalty and rivalry between the buddies, til a fight scene at the end which overstretches their abilities.

My favorite parts of the play were the cameos of eccentric sage JD Salinger, who discourages the guys from adapting Catcher in the Rye, their previous project, while nibbling on a pudding cup, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who encourages them to use the supernaturally acquired script, while making secret love to a cupcake.

The show's set in a grungy Somerville apartment in 1995. The details of the set were mostly spot-on, with period phone and boombox, a plaid couch they must have gotten from the house of some grad student friends of mine, and Papa Ginos pizza. The only flaws in detail were a mismatched Mac monitor and PC chassis, an out-the-window outdoor skyline that was the Village, or maybe Brooklyn, and an issue of Wired that you could tell was later from the thickness of ad pages (it was the 12/96 issue with the brilliant Neal Stephenson Hacker Tourism article).

Went with my host Judith, who is the worlds best date for cultural fun. (Don't get me wrong guys, I'm hetero). Off to more New York tourism.

What is peer media

Scott Jensen has an interesting paper on the impact of peer-to-peer networks on the entertainment business. Key conclusion: movies will be funded by merchandising and product placement, not ticket sales.

Key gap: the essay focuses on the distribution of corporate-created content, and doesn't address the "peer content" -- the blogs and indy bands who'll use the medium to bypass the corporate intermediaries.

Make someone smile on September 12

Tom Munnecke and friends are launching a simple experiment to create a cascade of positive emotions on the 12th: Let's each commit to making ten people smile on that day.

It's not difficult. Read this description of a flash mob action that took place recently in Austin. Made you smile, didn't it?

Bath mat art

Most people who spill bleach on a bath mat would replace the bath mat.

Prentiss seizes the opportunity to make art.

Motivation

The rabbis of the Talmud were troubled by the evil and cruelty they saw in the world.

So they tracked down the evil inclination, and locked it in a cage. And the world was peaceful for a while.

After a few months, people started to complain. Hens had stopped laying eggs. No children were being conceived. No new houses were built. No new fields were planted.

So the Rabbis opened the cage, blinded the Evil Inclination in one eye, and let it free.

Sampling isn't theft, it's recycling

Siva V. , in a brilliant chapter on the clash between African-American artistic traditions, corporate greed, and copyright law.

People really are "bowling alone"

New research provides stronger evidence that social capital in the US is in decline.

In 1995, sociologist Robert Putnam published an article showing that Americans are less social then they used to be. The research was later published in a book, Bowling Alone.

Putnam analyzed attendance at men's clubs (Elks, Lions), parent-teacher associations, and rural 4H clubs, and showed that these signs of social ties had been declining since about 1960.

The trouble with this analysis is that some of the longstanding organizations he studied had gone out of style like poodle skirts. It's likely that there are fewer kids in 4H clubs because there are fewer kids on farms.

But in a somewhat more recent article, Putnam analyzes a wider range of data, including informal activities like going on picnics and eating with friends and family. The trend is still the same -- a uniform decline in social engagement.

As people have become less socially engaged, the level of charity-giving has gone down, as measured by the percentage of income given to charity, and the level of trust in others has gone down, as measured in surveys.

Several thoughts on this, in contrasting directions.

A few data points that could show that things are as bad as they seem:

* if the "eating with family and friends" survey questions asked about eating at home, not eating out, then the questions are still missing the point. A strong study would include data about social meals at home and in restaurants.

* Time for Life is an excellent if rather dry book reporting a study on American's use of time since the 1930s. The study shows that television watching has steadily crowded out most other hobbies and social activities since the 1950s. It would be interesting to measure the level of social engagement among demographic groups who have given up couch-potato TV for human-interactive internet communication.

On the other hand, take a look at new housing developments. Apartment complexes and subdivisions are built with walls and fences around them, even in low-crime areas. People are too afraid to have streets. After all, anyone could walk down the street, without any security checks at all.

Putnam's numbers help explain the popularity of the prison-like architectural style, and the low level of protest at restrictions of freedom in the wake of 9/11.

via Clay Shirky on Corante's Many to Many blog.

Seder "happening"

Thinking about Marc Canter's blog post a few days ago about a online haggadah".

It would be interesting to use the happening infrastructure for a distributed seder.

People could call in and participate, by phone, chat, and hypertext haggada.

As in the "electronic democracy" event, a moderator could use the "hand-raise" convention in the chat space to call on people to participate on the phone, making it easier to moderate a group phone call.

The interleaving of chat threads would be an online version of the interleaving of conversational threads at a same-place seder. If the happening had a wiki back end, people could add commentary as they read the haggadah, and could transcribe and edit the chat into future haggadah material. These are contemporary instantiations of the techniques the Rabbis used to put the original Haggadah together.

Following up on Marc's site, he's been talking with Philippe Scheimann who seems to have thought of the idea too.

I also have some sympathy to Tom Shugart's comment -- there are advantages to the traditional, "unplugged" seder. The food and wine, and seder plate wouldn't be the same, with individuals holding a plate of food and a glass of wine next to their laptop (and the traditional spills would be more dangerous!)

"Everyone who contributes to the telling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt is to be well-praised." Or [green-card] and [thumbs up], as the case may be.

Ants and Jane Jacobs

To continue the ""ants" discussion...

When people talk about the how bottom-up, emergent systems are superior to top-down planned systems, they often quote Jane Jacobs.

In "Death and Life of American Cities", Jacobs writes about the lively, crowded, haphazard streets of her Greenwich Village neighborhood, and compares them to the planned high-rise developments and efficient elevated highways of her nemesis, developer Robert Moses.

In the 50s and 60s, developers like Moses swept into run-down urban neighborhoods bearing a vision of "cities of the future," demolished the houses and stores, and replaced them with sterile projects that turned into slums worse than the neighborhoods they replaced.

Jacobs explains why the organically-grown neighborhoods are better than the planned developments. The variety of newer and older structures help the neighborhood support a diverse population -- elderly folks on pensions, young folks starting out, families with children. The mix of commercial and residential properties helps keep the neighborhood safe, since the neighborhood is populated day and night, weekdays and weekends. The sidewalks and front-porches enable people to stroll, chat, and look out for each other. By contrast, the un-inviting plazas and parking lots surrounding high-rise buildings are often deserts where the ill-intentioned can prey on the unwary without being observed.

Simply by observing local norms, people extend the neighborhood by inviting their elderly parents to move in, buying and upgrading a ramshackle storefront, and sweeping their walk. These activites aren't centrally planned, individuals don't get permission to do them, and, in sum, they add up to pleasant and safe neighborhoods.

But looking at Greenwich Village as an example of ant-like emergent behavior misses a lot of the story.

There is a large substrate of of social and cultural structures that enable these unplanned activities to create a pleasing and diverse order. The neighborhood has sewers and clean running water. Without these, the city neighborhood would harbor endemic infectious diseases. There is a fire department which protects the block if a single house catches fire. There are people with the technical and project-management skills required to design and repair plumbing, heating, and electrical systems.

A colony of ants couldn't create Greenwich Village. Neither could a tribe of hunter-gatherers. There are underlying levels of infrastructure -- some of which require planning -- in order to enable the higher-level decentralized behavior.

In order to facilitate decentralized, unplanned human systems that work, it's important to think about the ordered infrastructure patterns -- like sewer systems, and ordered nodal activities -- like designing an electrical system -- that are needed enable the larger unplanned pattern to emerge.

Haggadah online

Marc Canter writes that for the last three years, he's been composing and using an online haggadah for his family's seder.

I vowed that no more trees were going to get cut down for Passover. You see I was raised a secular Jew and Passover was the only holiday we really celebrated... So despite the assimilation the rest of the year - Springtime was always the time to be Jewish. This meant that the first night we ate as an extended family and the second night we always attended our community seder - put on by the South Side School of Jewish studies in Chicago - our 'religous

Since it was the 60's - we added she with the he's, talked about Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement along with the Warsaw Ghetto and in general celebrtated revolutionaries throughout the ages. The tradition of adding to and changing the seder was predominant.

So when it came to my own seder 20 years later - here's what I realized: I helped give birth to the multimedia world and I was gonna put my Matzah where my mouth is......but when we assembled all these PCs around the table, guess what? Nobody could keep in sync with each other! So we had to devise a way for us all to stay together and enable remote access to the seder. This evolved into a truly on-line version......

Collaborative, hyperlinked media are contemporary instantiations of the traditional genres, which are based on conversation and the interpretation of referenced texts. Discussion groups and hyperlinks, in other words.

Japanese Emoticons

From Takagi Hiroe.

via Gen Kanai

Anti Alpha Male

Level 5 Leadership

We were suprprised, shocked really, to discover the type of leadership required for turning a good company into a great one. Compared to high profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars.

Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy -- these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

From Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Halley's Crush on Alpha Males

Halley Suitt is just gushing about "alpha males" -- CEO types who stride into the room, exude charisma, give orders, get babes.

First of all, Halley. Those alpha CEOs are married. If you've got the hots for some high-powered, Clintonesque pussy-magnet, be ready to be done and be dumped. If you work in the same field, be ready to be done and be dumped and be fired. Who was the editor at Harvard Business Review who lost her job for doing Jack Welch?

Don't come running to us when he dumps you, hon.

Second, Ken Lay was an alpha male by your glowing description. John Sidgemore over at Worldcom was an alpha male.

No, the world does not need more egomaniacs barking commands, nevermind laws and ethics and other people's opinion, lives, and property.

• Why alpha males get pussy galore
  
• becoming an alpha male: giving it
  
• yes, I love alpha males
  
• Becoming An Alpha Male -- Lesson One: Getting It

Traditional Muslim Blessing

"May there always be coffee at your house," wishing ones friends prosperity and the joy of hospitality.

From a web page on Arab contributions to society.