Posted 17:36 by Mark Federman permanent link
Dean's Hot - and That's Why He's Lost

It's all over but the crying - which, come to think of it, was done after Iowa. The Howard Dean campaign is all but finished for everything it represented. The final nail was the firing - technically demotion and subsequent resignation - of former campaign manager and new-politics visionary, Joe Trippi.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not necessarily predicting whether or not Dean, running a conventional, broadcast campaign, will cross the delegate finish line before opponent John Kerry and ultimately face Bush mano a mano. What I am saying is that this particular attempt to effectively use the ground effects of the Internet in a major electoral race - the iconic "Howard Dean Campaign" - is finished. We can perhaps understand what happened by using the specific McLuhan lens of media temperature, and the relative "hot" and "cool" effects on how people are engaged.

A "hot" medium, classically, is one that is well-defined with lots of information. A "cool" medium is one that is less well-defined, information-wise, for which the user must "fill in the blanks." The classic McLuhan examples are that a mosaic is relatively cool and a photograph is relatively hot. However, empirically labelling a medium either hot or cool by examining the medium, or relying on McLuhan canon from the 1960s, often leads us to confusion. Television is the one that trips most people up: McLuhan called it "cool," and many McLuhanistas still believe that to be true. However, McLuhan's paradoxical axiom, "the medium is the message," tells us that to understand the nature and characteristics of anything we conceive or create we must examine its effects. Television, for example, puts us into a hypnotic state - we all know about "couch potatoes," for instance. Many of us understand that TV can be used to induce a form of mass-hypnosis in which people will believe whatever you suggest. These effects (and others we can observe in television) are characteristic of a hot medium, which is the nature of television today.

Dean, guided by Trippi and a band of illustrious Internet advisors, utilized the cool ground effects of the Internet perfectly. They even managed to get the cross-over effects from cyber- to physical-space completely right with their deft use of MeetUp.org. The momentum of the campaign, and their ability to raise both money and volunteers, stemmed from its inclusive, participational nature. People were encouraged, and were explicitly given license, to "fill in the blanks" within their own natural constituency, whether they were New Yorkers for Dean, Nurses for Dean, or even Punks for Dean. The Internet enabled this sort of involvement, but it was the cool media temperature that attracted the mass of people.

Broadcast politics - the type we have known since that famous Kennedy-Nixon Great Debate in 1960 - was cool then, and is hot now, just as television itself has heated up in the intervening 44 years. The stark difference exhibited by a cool campaign was just the ticket to engage those who had become cynical about the political process and given up on politics altogether.

Dean himself has a hot "look" compared to Kerry. (Just look at photos of the two men side by side to see what I mean - there's more "filling in" to be done with Kerry's craggy/rugged look - even to the clothes he campaigns in. McLuhan noted the same sorts of things during the campaign of one of our great Prime Ministers, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.) The campaign's Internet use, with only the occasional appearances of the candidate himself, kept Dean's image cool. Until Iowa.

In Iowa Dean over-heated in response to the fierce competition over what was, in fact, the run-up to the later main event. He took the bait as he was mercilessly baited by his opponents, letting his fiery temperament get the best of him. In doing so, his cool image, well, melted, culminating in his now-infamous "I Have a Scream" non-concession speech. He was told to tone down; in the days prior to New Hampshire, though, Dean was no less hot, just more subdued. The entire effect was overwhelmingly anti-Howard-Dean-Campaign.

Can he recover? Perhaps, given that an old hand at broadcast politics was brought in as "CEO" - another indication of the super-heating of Howard Dean. But even if Dean wins the nomination over Kerry - and if I had to guess, I think he will not - it won't be the Howard Dean Campaign. It will be just the same old politics all over again.

The HDC strategy was as brilliant as it was simple: Since among committed voters in the U.S. - those who actually go to the polls in November - the vote is pretty much split 50-50 between the two parties. In the 1960 campaign, Kennedy won over Nixon by a relatively small majority, essentially the number of voters who were especially influenced by Kennedy's use of the then-new medium of television. The 2004 campaign retrieved 1960: Use the ground effects (among which are a cool media temperature) of a new medium to attract a demographic that do not usually vote to become actively engaged, involved and ultimately tip the scale in favour of the cool candidate.

Dean caught fire. But it was the promise of cooling down politics that Dean represented (with the concomitant active engagement of supporters) that people liked.
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Posted 13:27 by Mark Federman permanent link
Lots of McLuhan Today - New Introductory Presentation and Understanding Media, Critical Edition

A real McLuhan day today, with the weather cooperating by appropriately obscuring the ground (under tons of snow... sorry about that, folks.) Two new arrivals of wonderful works. Ward Eagan teaches Digital Innovation and Cultural Transformation at the Communications, Culture and Information Technology joint program (between University of Toronto Mississauga and the neighbouring Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning). CCIT is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program for the study of the art and science of human communication, how communication builds knowledge and creates culture, and how information technology affects the way humans communicate. One of Ward's recent seminars dealt with the work and ideas of Marshall McLuhan and, as a graphics designer, he built a great Flash presentation that covers the material in a beautiful way.

And speaking of beautiful, I have just opened my copy of Understanding Media, Critical Edition, and am simply overjoyed at the magnificent job editor Terrence Gordon, with the assistance of Eric McLuhan and design by Julie von der Ropp, have done in reissuing this classic. Terrence's elucidating abstracts at the beginning of each chapter help guide the reader through the difficult jungle, dense with Marshall's ideas, insights, derivations and explorations. The appendix material - and most particularly the addition of subject and name indices, references and a bonus listing of the complete publications of Marshall McLuhan - illuminate some of the ground of the work itself and is a welcome and worthy augmentation. Gingko Press is to be congratulated on a tremendous accomplishment. More than just a reprinting, this edition expands our understanding of Understanding Media, from the clever typographic probe of "Understanding and Media" on the front cover through Tom Wolfe's famous probe - "What if he is right?" - on the back. "What if" indeed! And now, for all of us living in the world that Marshall predicted, What Next?
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Posted 16:28 by Mark Federman permanent link
Creativity Machine

Along the path that led me to the McLuhan Program were two particular thoughts: The first was the realization that Marshall McLuhan had predicted the effects we felt in the mid-1990s from the vantage point of the early 1960s. The second was the notion of putting McLuhan's brain in a jar, as it were, connecting it up to a computer, and having it assist us with predicting thirty years ahead of today. The fascination with trying to figure out how Marshall "did it" ultimately led me here. My friend Arnold recalled those days for me as he pointed me to this fascinating article about Stephen Thaler and his Creativity Machine. If you fear or favour the movie world of The Terminator you must read this article. But any computer who can create the haunting philosophical poetry of "All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night" as it is dying, can't be all evil. After all, two Creativity Machine neural networks invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush!
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Posted 14:51 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Tyranny of Copyright? (NYT)

The New York Times Magazine has a well-written article today that probes The Tyranny of Copyright? (here, for those who don't want to register with NYT.) The author, Robert Boynton, raises the issues championed by people like Lawrence Lessig and Jonathon Zittrain who support the original notion of balance of rights between those who create and the society as a whole from which creative inspiration derives.

Many people have heard me speak of late about the reversal effects of copyright (and other intellectual property regimes like trademarks and patents), from a mechanism to encourage creativity to one that is specifically used to stifle innovation. These ideas are echoed in the article. "Lawyers and professors at the nation's top universities and law schools, the members of the Copy Left aren't wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less creative. While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ''The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain -- this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,'' says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the intellectual hub of the Copy Left."

More than ideology, there is clear evidence that innovation thrives when there is an openness and sharing of ideas and innovation. We need look no further than the Internet itself, and the economic infrastructure that its openness engendered, to understand this paradoxical-at-first-glance notion. Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Yale describes it this way: "Let's compare a few numbers,'' he said. ''How much do people pay the recording industry to listen to music versus how much people pay the telephone industry to talk to their friends and family? The recording industry is a $12 billion a year business, compared with the telephone business, which is a more than $250 billion a year business. That is what economists call a 'revealed willingness to pay,' a clear preference for a technology that allows you to participate in work, socializing and interaction in general, over a technology that allows you to be a passive consumer of a packaged good."

When we are able to observe the essential processes involved, we are able to understand some of the actual motivations involved without being distracted by what seems obvious. Most of the noise and reactionary legislation was driven by the cry of "pirates" by the Recording Industry Association of America. They cried crocodile tears (and later used croc-like lawsuits) on behalf of the underpayed artists whose livelihoods was being threatened by illegal downloading. It was about the music and promoting creative works. But rather than embracing the new connection and dissemination capabilities of the 'net, member companies of the RIAA attempted to hold fast to their manufacturing roots, aiming to protect their business of mass distribution of aluminum disks coated with plastic, caring little for what those disks contained.

But even the more clueful iTunes, the online-jukebox-that-could started by Apple Computer, is moving our psycho-social conditioning to a dangerous place. Effectively seeking to eliminate the concept of ownership of any creative work, iTunes exemplifies the type of "permission economy" that many mass-media and technology companies are seeking to create. We now must seek one sort of permission - or license - to listen, and another to capture what we're listening to, and yet another to transfer what we have licensed to capture to another physical device. This is a clear extension of the "aluminum disk" perception of the music industry - each physical incarnation of the given piece of music (or other content) must be separately acquired through a separate license. Fair Use? Right of First Sale? Lending libraries? Loaning a book to your friend? They are all heading for obsolescence.

Ironically, it was the invention of the book, mass-produced by the Gutenberg press, that led to what we now know as individual thought, the private mind, and our sense of privacy and the self. As regular readers - and those who have attended my recent talks - know, instantaneous communication has revealed the reversal of privacy to publicy. But there is another aspect to publicy that is also revealed through the reversal induced by the extension of copyright - the "permission economy" - beyond the limit of its potential. The concomitant obsolescence of those media in our society, just mentioned above, that encourage private mind, private thought and private identity are indeed manifesting a twisted "new orality," retrieving the Middle Ages dynamic of a societal group mind dominated by the voice of the Church. Today, it is the Church of Convergent Power, created by a concentration of mass-media companies, the dominant technology companies and beholden legislators that are holding a hypnotized, placid and complacent public in their sway. I hesitate to call it a conspiracy - that would presume malice of forethought. Rather, we are seeing evidence of our ability to either notice or ignore the predictions of McLuhan's Laws of Media engendering the type of world we deserve.
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Posted 19:34 by Mark Federman permanent link
Pay As You Know

Is it the irresistible seduction of free-market capitalism? Or is it a throwback to the old "hunter-gatherer" mode of survival, when scarcity was the order of the day and the determinant of value? Perhaps it's a retrieval of the Klondike Gold Rush and the Trail of '98. "Thar's gold in them thar databases..." Whatever the motivation, a cabal of prominent Republicans (wouldn't you know it) in the U.S. House of Representatives has proposed a bill that would establish an intellectual property right in... hold on to your hats... facts and ideas. Yes, you read that right. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court's specific ruling against such a right, the proposed bill H.R. 3261, the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act," aims to correct that little loophole in commercializing knowledge and information.

According to a letter sent by a coalition of the Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Media Access Project, and Public Knowledge, and recently endorsed by some of America's leading constitutional lawyers, Americans "live in a nation in which any individual can become educated, drawing upon publicly available information, to fulfill his or her fullest potential as a participant in democracy. The barriers to achieving that goal should be minimal. Information that falls outside the already-established categories of intellectual property is a shared resource, a public good, and one that is enriched rather than diminished by policies that increase rather than decrease everyone's access to it. This approach to information, and its importance to the opportunities inherent in democracy, informed citizenship, and self-education, stand in fundamental opposition to proposals like [H.R. 3261] ... that create new intellectual property schemes to lock information up and ensure that every individual pays a toll for every fact he or she learns."

NetCoalition, an organization that advises enterprises and legislators regarding public policy and the Internet notes some of the potential effects that may result from the passage of H.R. 3261:

• A price comparison Web site could be prohibited from gathering price information for consumers. For example, an airfare information site would be precluded from gathering flight and price information from various airlines' sites to compile in one convenient site.


• A public-interest Web site could be precluded from gathering headlines with links to news stories of interest to its members.


• A university professor might be precluded from gathering weather information from a variety of Web sites for use in a paper that argues for or against the increase of global warming.


• A car manufacturer could stifle competition by preventing companies who make replacement parts from publishing charts showing which of their products are less-expensive replacement parts for those sold by the manufacturer.


• Searching for information online, which occurs literally millions and millions of times every day for free, could become a fee-for-service activity.

And there are clearly many, many more.

Imagine the consequences: We all will be sued as pirates by the "DIAA" - Database Industry Association of America - for downloading and sharing information and facts. The age-old activity of "fact checking" will have little to do with ensuring accuracy, and everything to do with collecting license fees. The signs that now appear above photocopier machines reminding people of their obligations and limitations under copyright law will become billboards posted at the gates of every university and library throughout the United States, reminding researchers and students of their obligation to pay their literal "head tax" daily to whoever first stuffed a given idea into a database somewhere. And potentially most devastating: Americans will ultimately lose the ability to learn and to think. Right now, that problem seems to be limited mostly to Congressmen, who unthinkingly pass such cockamamie legislation.
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Posted 16:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
R.I.P. - Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan

As reported from Associated Press via many outlets, including the San Bernardino County Sun, "Bob Keeshan, who gently entertained and educated generations of children as television's walrus-mustachioed Captain Kangaroo, died Friday at 76." I grew up with the Captain Kangaroo show through the late 1950s and 1960s, the early years of what was to become the longest running children's show in television history. More than a mere entertainer, Keeshan was an active, and vocal, child advocate. Shortly after his daily program ended in 1985, Keeshan, together with former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, founded Corporate Family Solutions to provide day-care to enterprises nationwide. His lifelong focus on children's formative years was founded in the belief that "children learn more in the first six years of life than at any other time[. He] was a strong advocate of day care that provides emotional, physical and intellectual development for children. "Play is the work of children. It's very serious stuff. And if it's properly structured in a developmental program, children can blossom," he said."
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Posted 01:59 by Mark Federman permanent link
From Blogging Virgin to Blogging Slut

Debbie Galant sure has a way with words, especially now that she has made the trip through the looking glass from print journalism to this interesting and massively interconnected conversation of the blogosphere. And I suppose I have played the role of the White Rabbit to her Alice in leading her down this particular rabbit hole. But really, as I have had opportunity to explain to several people lately, what we do here at the McLuhan Program is hand people the Matrix "Red Pill" of awareness of the world as it truly is - once you have changed, you can never un-change; once you notice, you can never un-notice.
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Posted 15:33 by Mark Federman permanent link
Does Your University INSIST on Violating Copyright?

Congratulations to Jesse Rosenfeld, the 19-year-old student, in his second year at Monteal's McGill University. As reported by the Globe and Mail here, Jesse "successfully fought a growing trend at Canadian schools to make blanket use of Internet tools to check for plagiarists. Jesse Rosenfeld, 19, refused to submit his economics assignments to a U.S. on-line company that vets schoolwork for plagiarism. Instead, he handed them in to his professor and received failing grades. Three months later, after appealing his case to the Montreal university's senate committee, the second-year international development student finally has had his assignments graded. His marks have been changed to B's and C's"

Many arguments have been made against "Turnitin.com," the US-based service company that provides the supposed plagiarism detection. Some object on the grounds of presumption of guilt on the part of students. A senior university administrator, (whom I won't embarrass by naming) attempts to answer that charge by making the following fallacious analogy: "The logic here is to use turnitin.com in the same way that screening is used at an airport or radar used on the highway..." I would give that one a C- for missing the common ground completely. Turnitin.com provides protection for neither life and limb, nor a significant source of non-tax revenue to the public coffers. However, Turnitin.com does profit from the student work that is turned in, and forms the entirety of their database.

A stronger objection can be made by noting that Turnitin.com does nothing to prevent the most egregious type of plagiarism, the original essay created by essay-mills, essentially writers-for-hire. (Well, all those unemployed humanities majors have to do something, right?) The mandatory and ubiquitous use of Turnitin is more analogous to the routine and increasing violation of fundamental rights and freedoms under the collective rubric of "in the wake of 9-11."

Many students object to the commercial aspect of Turnitin.com making money from the collected fruits of thousands of students' collective labour. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake here: Turnitin.com violates the students' implicit copyright in their work. The company is creating a derivative work - their database - from the students' turned-in essays. Any "consent" apparently given by students is not freely given. Often, they are presented with a Hobson's Choice of submitting the essay via this service, or receiving a zero on the essay, that must be appealed via a quasi-judicial process as was recently completed by Jesse Rosenfeld at McGill.

According to many legislators, respected business people, university administrators and informed commentators, those who take copyright works and create derivative works without permission - and especially those who profit from the derived work without paying compensation to the original creator - are pirates. There is a class action law suit waiting to happen, potentially to be brought by the Canadian Federation of Students, on behalf of all those students whose work has been co-opted - dare we say stolen? - for the benefit of a private corporation.

The University of Toronto has just acquired a license for Turnitin.com. Professors who have any regard whatsoever for the value of intellectual undertakings should refuse to participate in this ill-founded initiative. I invite students to complete the following assignment: Create a short, original, well-reasoned and articulate essay, expressing your views on the U of T's use of Turnitin.com, and send it to the Director and Assistant Director of the Office of Teaching Advancement, Professor Ken Bartlett, and Pam Gravestock, respectively. U of T students may not want to be as apathetic as those at Western. "Debra Dawson, director of the educational development office at the University of Western Ontario, said more than 210 professors are using it in their classrooms, and no student has objected as yet." If you fundamentally disagree with the use of Turnitin.com, it's time to object.
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Posted 15:58 by Mark Federman permanent link
Jimmy Carter's Statement to the World, 1977

Peter Deitz, one of the McLuhan Program's research fellows has launched a site that asks people from around the world to "write a letter to America" to express their views on the upcoming presidential election. The thinking behind the project is that the American president has a tremendous influence on how the entire world conducts itself, both for good and for ill. Voices Without Votes 2004 provides a forum whereby those who are affected by US policy but do not have a vote in the election can help to influence the opinion of those who do. The site includes a newsy weblog, plus the submitted letters.

Voices04 has just posted the speech given by then President Jimmy Carter on the occasion of his inauguration in 1977 - his Statement to the World. In it, he promises, "The United States will meet its obligation to help create a stable, just and peaceful world order. We will not seek to dominate nor dictate to others. As we Americans have concluded one chapter in our nation's history and are beginning to work on another, we have, I believe, acquired a more mature perspective on the problems of the world. It is a perspective which recognizes the fact that we alone do not have all of the answers to the world's problems. ...The United States can and will take the lead in such efforts. In these endeavors, we need your help, and we offer ours. We need your experience. We need your wisdom. We need your active participation in a joint effort to move the reality of the world closer to the ideals of human freedom and dignity."

A powerful promise, and one that merits review and reflection today. You may want to consider Peter's blog comments on the relevance of Carter's statement to both voters and non-voters today, before you read President Carter's Statement to the World from 1977.
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Posted 17:35 by Mark Federman permanent link
Is W the New JFK?

Did everyone catch the Bush announcement about moon bases and manned missions to Mars? Regular readers of the blog will recognize this announcement as a retrieval of former President John F. Kennedy's famous speech from May 5, 1961 in which he said, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. " The context of the speech also provides an interesting retrieval: "These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge. Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom's cause. No role in history could be more difficult or more important. We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves-that is our only commitment to others. No friend, no neutral and no adversary should think otherwise. We are not against any man-or any nation-or any system-except as it is hostile to freedom. Nor am I here to present a new military doctrine, bearing any one name or aimed at any one area. I am here to promote the freedom doctrine." He goes on to describe how the space race will help "win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny." So why does President Bush suddenly want to sound like JFK?

Looking at what else we can learn from the retrieval, recall the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. During those frightening "thirteen days that shook the world," America was teetering on the brink of a worldwide nuclear war when definitive photographic proof of Soviet nuclear missiles prompted America to erect a pre-emptive blockade of Cuba. This was, by the way, what current Secretary of State Colin Powell was emulating with his relatively poor PowerPoint presentation at the United Nations prior to the invasion of Iraq. By retrieving - some may say channelling - the spirit of JFK, President Bush may be attempting to link his own pre-emptive action to that of the former President. And we used to think that Kennedy was former President Clinton's hero!
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Posted 17:15 by Mark Federman permanent link
Pre-emptive Politics

So I was over at the BarlowFriendz Blog and was paging through the myriad comments on the pseudo-anti-Dean attack ad, A Few Gentle Words from the Club for Growth... (Why do I say "pseudo-anti-Dean?" It is so over-the-top as to parody the genre of attack ads, essentially pushing an anti-Dean attack into reversal.) Anyway, I noticed this from poster "david marty:" judging from (what i take to be) the massively irrational rightward swaying of public opinion following the capture of hussein, i'd contend that this sort of concern about wmd [weapons of mass destruction] does not at all exist within the realm of consipracy theory ... that is to say: organizing the discovery and timed-release of information to the american (and world) public for the ultimate benefit of a political party or partisan group... Mr. marty goes on to speculate that, "if the bush administration decides to make false claims about wmd right before the november election, there's absolutely nothing that can be done to stop that juggernaut of deception from rolling over the feeble-minded voting public of the united states." Or is there?

McLuhan tells us that "any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary... Prediction and control consist in avoiding this subliminal state of [lack of awareness]. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact..." In other words, if the news of the discovery of WMD - whether a fabricated discovery or a true discovery - hits an unprepared, subliminally unaware America in the crucial weeks before the November election, there will be a predictable swing in popular opinion that will favour the Bush team and assure his second term. The swing in popular opinion, that we observed with the relatively inconsequential capture of Saddam Hussein, was, in McLuhan terms, the message or imposition of the ground effects (political popularity) of the medium "Capture of Saddam Hussein." But what would have happened if dozens of political commentators across the United States had the opportunity to repeat a mantra of "The capture of Saddam Hussein with invariably boost the popularity of the President, despite all the criticism that has been leveled against the invasion lately, and despite the fact that American men and women will continue to die, and be maimed, in large numbers on foreign soil" - for several weeks before the announcement of the capture? The ground effect of "popularity" would have been nullified. Our awareness of the effect that would otherwise occur is sufficient to nullify the effect on actual occurance.

We have seen this for years in the financial markets: When financial analysts say that a future event has been "priced into the market," this is precisely the sort of effect nullification that has occurred.

So back to david marty's concern. The way to limit the Bush team's effectiveness with respect to a future, politically well-timed revelation of WMDs in Iraq is to talk about such a strategy openly. The awareness of the future effect is sufficient to nullify the future effect.

One more thing: Does it matter relative to the justification for war if WMDs are actually found sometime in the future? Some would say, yes, the President has been vindicated. But for those who actually care about their leader being truthful with the public before committing their country to fight and die in a faraway place, remember that it has already been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt (to coin a phrase) that no nominal justification existed at the time the invasion was launched. A future discovery does not change the fact that the White House used political marketing, as opposed to a "clear and present danger" to sell the American public a preconceived policy.
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Posted 17:52 by Mark Federman permanent link
Fate Uses Blogs, Too

For anyone who still believes that blogging has little or no consquence in the "real world" (and I know there are a few of you out in the world somewhere) This entry from S-Train Canvass (via BoingBoingBlog) is a superb example of how the Internet and Physical Space are part of the same continuum of experience. It tells the story of how, quite by happenstance, two people who have interacted only via the weblog meet in physical space. That in and of itself is not news. What is news, and what makes this entry of particular interest, is the way in which Fate itself decided to use the medium of weblog to test the mettle of a person making a new life for himself.
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Posted 11:04 by Mark Federman permanent link
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

I heard a noteworthy interview this morning on CBC Radio's The Current with Amy Chua, a Yale University Law Professor. She has just released a fascinating book called, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. In it, she convincingly makes the argument that installing free markets and "instant" democracy with universal suffrage in emerging countries leads to ethnic violence, instability and massive injustice, what regular readers of this blog will recognize as reversal effects.

In this excerpt from the book, Prof. Chua develops her argument by observing,"in the numerous societies around the world that have a market-dominant minority, markets and democracy are not mutually reinforcing. Because markets and democracy benefit different ethnic groups in such societies, the pursuit of free market democracy produces highly combustible conditions. In absolute terms, the majority may or may not be better off - a dispute that much of the globalisation debate revolves around - but any sense of improvement is overwhelmed by its continuing poverty relative to the hated minority's economic success. ... Introducing democracy under such circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded co-citizens in a national community. As America celebrated the spread of democracy in the 1990s, the world's new political slogans were these: "Georgia for the Georgians," "Eritreans out of Ethiopia," "Kenya for Kenyans," "Kazakhstan for Kazakhs," "Serbia for Serbs," "Hutu Power," "Jews out of Russia."" She goes on to note that no developed country in the West has taken the path to either democracy or free and open markets that is being imposed, primarily by the United States, on emerging nations. "In the west, the phrase "market economy" refers to a broad spectrum of economic systems based on private property and competition, with varying degrees of government regulation and redistribution. Yet for the past 20 years the US has been promoting raw, laissez-faire capitalism throughout the non-western world - a form of markets that the west abandoned long ago. Russia, for example, has a single income tax rate of 13 per cent - unthinkable in a large developed democracy. The measures being implemented today outside the west include privatisation, the elimination of state subsidies and controls, and free trade and foreign investment initiatives. They rarely include welfare or redistribution measures. Democracy, too, can take many forms. I take "democratisation" to refer to the efforts, largely US-driven, to implement immediate elections with universal suffrage. It is striking to note that at no point in history did any western nation ever implement laissez-faire capitalism and universal suffrage at the same time. In the US, the poor were disenfranchised by property qualifications in virtually every state for many decades after the constitution was ratified. "

The underpinnings of democracy, of course, include a free and open press, a fair judicial process and rule of law, encouragement and support of a vigorous (and as we say in Canada, "loyal") opposition, and protection of basic human rights enshrined in a national constitution. Democracies must take care to protect the rights of the minority in the face of an otherwise potentially tyrannical majority. Free markets require strong laws against fraud and corruption, protection of property rights, anti-trust protection, and progressive taxation that a mechanism that ensures income distribution and a healthy flow of capital. Very few of these aspects have been instituted in recently "emancipated" countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Rwanda, Russia, the countries of the former Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe.

This is, in part, the dilemma facing the United States with respect to both Afghanistan and Iraq. While there is a nearly universal call for "free" elections - to allow Iraqis to vote on the future of Iraq, for instance - the circumstances there do not tend to favour a truly democratic outcome to a quick election. Rather, the lack of democratic institutions that would serve as prerequisites to democracy, thereby enabling universal suffrage, would only result in the country experiencing the reversal effects of democracy. Ironically - and predictably through the Laws of Media - the United States will have failed to instill a true and lasting democracy by allowing a simplistic otherwise democratic process.
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Posted 17:23 by Mark Federman permanent link
Weinberger: "Let's Not Retire the Hitler Comparisons"

Gianluca's comment to this post, and our subsequent responses, are outdone today in an excellent short essay by David Weinberger entitled, "Let's not retire the Hitler comparisons."

"Because person A is like Hitler in property P, A is like Hitler in property Q, where Q is Hitler's evilness. That's not only fallacious, it trivializes what is important. But ruling out all comparisons with Hitler and Nazism can also be a way of forgetting what should be remembered. ... But one big lesson I take from this is that cultures that are convinced they are good can nevertheless become evil. And they can be evil when they think they are at their greatest. ... We should learn from the horrors of Nazi Germany that it can happen anywhere, even here. But, we should not expect it to happen in the same way, with concentration camps, jackbooted soldiers and a hypnotic demagogue. In fact, we are so aware of those particular forms of evil that we're less likely ever to fall for them. We need to remember Nazism especially when we're looking at the forms of evil that do not mirror the particulars of the Nazi expression of evil. Before the death camps and the invasions, there were the steps that somehow led a country to embrace great evil. The Nazis came to power not by military takeover but through an election. Each subsequent step seemed justified or was at least so palatable that there was no civil uprising. We honor those who fought Nazism and we remember those whom Nazism murdered by being vigilant about the steps we take, for we understand that some steps can lead a country from good to evil." The entire article is well worth reading. Thanks, David, for your awareness and insight.
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Posted 13:52 by Mark Federman permanent link
AP Meets Steve Mann - "Professor Lives Life As a Cyborg"

Associated Press has a well-written article on University of Toronto's resident cyborg (and McLuhan Program Board member) Steve Mann. The article is a good introduction and overview of Steve's life, work and philosophy. It also refers to Steve's book, "Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. Mann wrote about the surreal beauty he experienced in programming the computer in his vision to alter colors, or alert him to objects behind him. The wearable computer allows me to explore my humanity, alter my consciousness, shift my perspectives so that I can choose — any given time — to see the world in very different, often quite liberating ways," he wrote in Cyborg." The book also discusses Steve's social activism and his ongoing struggle against arbitrary authority. The concomitant Slashdot coverage is here.
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Posted 13:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
Internet-Era Politics: "Because Democracy is not a Spectator Sport"

Steven Johnson has a great article in this month's Discover magazine. He points to the Howard Dean campaign's ability to use the ground effects of the Internet to rally supporters, essentially to organize people. He notes that the potential for the same principles to be used to organize ideas remains in its infancy, but with tremendous promise.

"Using open-source coding as a model, it’s not a stretch to believe the same process could make politics more representative and fair. Imagine, for example, how a grassroots network could take over some of the duties normally performed by high-priced consultants who try to shape a campaign message that’s appealing. If the people receiving the message create it, chances are it’s much more likely to stir up passions. ... The digital world is teeming with collaborative editing tools that enable dozens or even hundreds of users to collectively edit and refine a document. ... That open authorship could be readily applied to a candidate’s position papers, or even to a party platform. The pros seed the document with an initial set of statements, then let the amateurs refine and augment. One might not choose to tack those collective theses on the doors of the Wittenberg church, but they’d no doubt be a rich source of new ideas and inspiration."

Johnson extends the thinking that had its early beginnings in the Emergent Democracy Happening, hosted by Joi Ito, and Adam Greenfield's proposal for a Minimal Compact. What is exciting about the Dean campaign is more than his team's clueful use of the Internet's ground effects. It is the potential for a clueful White House staff that extends the lessons of the campaign to engage the public in a collaborative, open-source-style approach to national policy-making. Let me suggest a tag-line for future administrations throughout the Western world: "Putting the demos back in democracy.
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Posted 18:49 by Mark Federman permanent link
Reversal of America: First and Fourth Amendments Redux, and the Anti-Environment

One of the basic tenets of magic performance is the art of distraction. Make sure the audience is looking over there when you're doing something you don't want them to see over here. The same applies to legislation: While the good citizens of the United States were celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein - one of the most inconsequential acts that has occurred in recent months - legislators in Washington were quietly burning the Bill of Rights, or at least the Fourth Amendment thereof. This article from the San Antonio Current (Hey! They do pay attention in Texas!) describes how portions of the controversial Patriot Act II were signed into law while everyone was looking the other way.

"While most Americans watched as Hussein was probed for head lice, few were aware that the FBI had just obtained the power to probe their financial records, even if the feds don't suspect their involvement in crime or terrorism. The Bush Administration ... included a simple, yet insidious, redefinition of "financial institution," which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters." ... To get the records, the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity. Moreover, the National Security Letters are attached with a gag order, preventing any financial institution from informing its clients that their records have been surrendered to the FBI. If a financial institution breaches the gag order, it faces criminal penalties. And finally, the FBI will no longer be required to report to Congress how often they have used the National Security Letters."

Are you nervous yet? Well, who's on First? The San Francisco Chronicle is, with this piece that describes how the rounding up, and arrest of peaceful demonstrators has increased. "When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us." The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech. The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign... At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a so-called free- speech area. ... At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators -- two of whom were grandmothers -- were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome." One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, "War is good business. Invest your sons." The seven were charged with trespassing, "obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct." Police have repressed protesters during several Bush visits to the St. Louis area as well. When Bush visited on Jan. 22, 150 people carrying signs were shunted far away from the main action and effectively quarantined."

So here's some refreshing relief: The finalists in the "Bush in 30 Seconds" political commercial contest have been posted. My personal favourites are "Child's Pay," "In My Country," and "Army of One." They're all licensed under a Creative Commons license, too. Go see them before they get moved to a "free speech zone."

Update - 8 Jan 2004: The word about the systematic erosion of the Fourth Amendment has spread throughout the blogosphere, and now has been picked up by Wired News and Slashdot.
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Posted 15:29 by Mark Federman permanent link
Figure, Ground and the Kuleshov Effect

Dana Boyd has an interesting entry that muses about the Kuleshov Experiment, in which the juxtaposition of a person's image with other images changes the viewer's perception of the man's emotional state. Dana's comment on the issue speaks to the proposed Creative Commons sampling license, in which a creator gives permission for sampling, that is, placing excerpts from his or her work into a new context, thereby giving it different meaning.

This illustrates Marshall McLuhan's notion of figure and ground perfectly: Meaning is created via the interplay of what we notice (figure) and everything else, in particularly that which we don't notice or pay attention to (ground). It's a way of saying that "context is everything," recognizing that much of what we take for granted is context/ground - our cultural heritage, our parents' birthplace, what we had for supper last night, the clown that terrorized us as a child, and so forth. Some of these may have less influence at a particular time and/or relative to a particular figure; some may have more. But meaning cannot be achieved from the figure alone.

This has profound implications, not only for the new CC sampling license and moral rights (which are recognized in Canada, btw) but for the semantic web as well. Most semantic web metadata, that intends to convey meaning through a machine-interpretable mechanism, focuses on a very small subset of ground-made-figure information (eg. FOAF, RDF), from which all sorts of possibly erroneous meaning can be made. While understanding ground context is essential, and was the natural practice in ancient oral cultures, we are presented with an interesting and somewhat different challenge in a global village age of new orality. "Understand your neighbour as yourself," becomes the new commandment in an interconnected world society.
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