Archive for June, 2004

The Accountable Net had yet another road trip today, this time to Cardozo.  It was a rich and interesting day that began last night with a somewhat raucous dinner.

At one point during the day I announced that we were not planning to revise the paper — that's not the point.  We're trying to get people to think about affecting the course of online life, not to read another draft of the paper.  (Phew.) 

Here's the set of questions that the group today was grappling with:

1) what core values do we want to preserve as the net goes through a phase change that seems directed towards greater emphasis on authentication?

2) what are the technical developments that we can report on and describe that seem focused on requiring more authentication?

3)  given 1) and 2), what are our worries (the word “willies” was used frequently throughout the day) about this phase change?  (there are many)

4) could we describe individual choices to connect to others — and thus to both form groups based on peer recommendations and protect themselves from unwanted messages of various kinds — as a form of rule-selection (“governance” is a loaded term for many, but this is really governance) that could be deferred to by real-world governments worried about spam, spyware, and security issues? 

After all, there is no particular reason online to privilege state actors as the only groups that get respect.  There are other very meaningful groups that could (and do) set their own rules.  The decision to communicate with others and choose those rulesets is both empowering for individuals and helpful to the development of a more complex online life.  

I came away from the meeting with a renewed respect for in-person consultations.  We couldn't have done this by just redlining a draft paper.  We needed everyone in the room.   

I also spent some time this evening thinking about the different kinds of minds in the room.  There were experienced, old-net-hand minds, looking back bleakly at years of mostly failed efforts to influence policy.  There were online company minds, dealing with daily pressures and reminding us all that users rarely if ever change the default settings they're handed.  There were a couple of entrepreneurial, selling-products minds.  There were thoughtful, propositional, logical (and strong-minded) minds.  There were emotional, passionate minds.  There were several musical minds in the crowd. 

It was quite a gathering of different kinds of intelligences, and that made the day even more complex than I had expected.  We had a lot of definitional difficulties and why-are-we-here difficulties.  It's hard to talk about something being governed (or not governed) when there's nothing to point to and say “there it is.”  And nothing “there” to push back.  The words in the paper can be misused and misunderstood to suggest approval of online drivers' licenses.  That's not what we had in mind, and we spent a lot of time defining terms and making clear that this wasn't a “proposal.”  The different minds often stumbled over one another.  

But this group, with all of its different kinds of minds, cared about these questions enough to spend the day talking about them.  That was the collective intelligence in the room, and I appreciated very much being in its presence. 

The human voice is a miracle.  Especially when it's the voice of Audra McDonald.  Opera News said in 1999:

Anyone who's been paying attention will have noticed that the line between opera and musical theater has been blurred in recent years — and one of the big reasons is Audra McDonald. A Juilliard-trained artist, McDonald has avoided the generic, bee-up-the-nose stridency that has become the standard for a whole generation of Broadway performers. She doesn't just sing, she sings, in the most profound sense of the word.

Tonight she was with Ted Sperling at Zankel Hall.  (Going to a concert there is like sitting in a large, friendly picnic basket; wicker and wood on the walls, smooth wooden surfaces around you, clear blue lights.)  She's someone who talks to the audience, makes us laugh, and then sings so fully that it's hard to take in.  It's wonderful to hear.

This particular concert was done under pressure — the commissioned composer buckled and couldn't finish on time, so Audra and Ted called seven composers and asked them each to pick a sin and write about it.  Some of the songs were hugely successful (“Vanity” and “Sloth” brought down the house) and some were less so (“Envy” was a little self-righteous).  All of them were produced in about six weeks.

The challenge:  take the next six weeks and produce a miracle, and put it across in a miraculous way.

If you're looking for online projects that help people find work they're interested in, take a look at MySociety.org.

“MySociety.org is a new charitable project from a mixture of the people who brought you FaxYourMP.com and VoxPolitics. Our aim is to build internet projects which have strong, real world benefits, and which do so at very low cost per person served.”

And if you want to read what the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman said (rather than what the group of journalists who heard him talk reported that he said), you can go here:

1. “Read and search through what the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman actually said at each lobby briefing, in context.
2. Leave your own comments on what was said, and to read other people's.
3. Find out what people across the web are saying about government policy, via those funny trackback links which appear at the bottom of every answer.”

Another prime example of this trend is TheyWorkForYou.com.  Brilliant.

We're really just beginning.  Just some kinks to work out.  It's a matter of finding our collective voice.

People desire metainformational depth — information about information about information.  We're constantly trying to understand the swirls of data and stimuli around us.  We find a face beautiful when it is bilaterally symmetrical, because the face is easier to process that way.  We'll take a little jolt in the symmetry, a small change, just to pique our interest — as long as the overall effect is symmetrical.

So we also love graphics:  triangles showing relationships, lines showing causes, and bar charts showing growth.  We eat these things up.  We find them calming and illuminating.  Anything that helps us clump and find patterns in this confusing world is a good thing.  Any moderator who can take a far-ranging discussion and summarize it in a 2X2 box is a very clever and well-loved moderator.

The research director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Persis Drell, recently told SiliconValley.com:

as the result of the experimental discoveries of the last five years, what we are realizing is this normal matter that we had been studying for 40 years and that we can describe so well actually is only 5 percent of the universe, and 95 percent of the universe is made of forms of matter and energy that we don't have a clue about.

We know nothing about most things.  But we still clump wildly, even about the things about which we know nothing.  Ms. Drell says that in the “bright universe,” the known one,

There are 57 particles, lots of forces. We're now sitting here talking about the rest of [the] universe, the 95 percent, as if it's got two components: dark matter and dark energy. And it's pretty arrogant to think that the dark universe would be so simple when the bright universe is so complex.

We can't take in the dark matter — there's not enough of it to make sense, apparently.  And we're pretty confused about the dark energy too, according to Ms. Drell.  But, true to form, we're finding patterns and clumping away, making sense of our place in the universe. 

Here's the link to internet policy.  Politicians and lawyers constantly simplify what the internet is and what happens there.  It's just a network of networks.  It's a set of IP-enabled applications.  It's a Title I service. 

But it may be that the huge gift economy that has created “it,” and the changes “it” is making in the world, is still invisible to us.  (Steven Johnson talked recently about swarming around good causes; this is just the tip of the iceberg.)  We may be seeing only 5% of the online world, just as we understand only 5% of the elements that make up the offline universe.  We should, perhaps, not be so presumptuous as to claim to understand the internet.  On the other hand, we shouldn't be afraid to make optimistic claims about its future. 

Today was a good day.  Justice O'Connor spoke at Cardozo's graduation.  And the D.C. Circuit said “No” to an FCC request that the court hold off on considering the FCC's jurisdiction to enter the broadcast flag rule [pdf].

This D.C. Circuit order is good news.  FCC argued that their jurisdiction shouldn't be questioned until the Commission had worked through the filings by MPAA and NCTA asking for even harsher rules.  Public Knowledge, the American Library Association, and others, ably represented by Steptoe & Johnson, reasonably responded that all of these filings rested on the assumption that FCC had the jurisdiction to do what it did in the first place.  So there was no reason to suspend an attack on FCC's institutional competence to enter the rule.  

As a practical matter, because the FCC order mandates that all manufacturers snap to attention and comply by July 2005, suspending the jurisdictional challenge would have made it worthless.  Manufacturers have to go into production, and don't have the luxury of betting that a different regime will be put into place. 

I believe that this jurisdictional challenge is serious, well-stated, and worthwhile — and I'm hoping it will result in a Congressional reconsideration of what the FCC has been up to.  The D.C. Circuit doesn't usually turn down FCC requests, and that it has done so in this case shows the importance of what's going on here.

Bravo to Public Knowledge and Steptoe — and here's hoping cool heads will continue to prevail on the D.C. Circuit.

Around the time of the dinosaurs, a four inch long creature named Morganucodon oelheri (“Morgie” to his/her friends), scurried between the feet of the dinosaurs. Morgie, a nocturnal, warmblooded, fur-covered animal, holds the distinction — this week at least — of being the “first mammal.”

Two hundred and ten million years ago, Morgie was scarcely noticed.  Life went on like that for quite a while. Then, as the Smithsonian tells us, “After the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, more than 40 new groups of mammals arose from this common ancestor. As climates and habitats changed, some species adapted, but many went extinct. But this tiny mammal passed on its DNA to billions of descendents, including humans.”

Morgie survived because he was agile, small, able to hunt at night, and adaptive.

Let's suggest to ourselves that an “eBay for services” will soon arrive on the scene, with small, nocturnal, agile, adaptive micro-firms doing work and passing on DNA in the form of metainformation about the individuals and groups involved.  Will micro-firms survive the increasing consolidation (creation of corporate dinosaurs) and changes (global disasters of various kinds) that we face?

Or will the capital commitments that are made in large corporations continue to be unbeatable?   What's important about these commitments — these capital lock-ins — is that they cannot be withdrawn.  Maybe a micro-firm can't attract that kind of capital. 

Maybe the corporate versions of Morgie and the dinosaurs will continue to share the same environment.  This time around, the dinosaurs may be here to stay — particularly if the dinosaurs are capable of taking the long view.

(Thanks to Sarah Brosnan for the pointer to Morgie.)