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Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Not an Onion story, but a remarkable simulation 
| | I'd like to see the U.N. more involved in Iraq, but this BBC story makes me want to see them less involved with the Net. Like, not at all. Please. |
| | The secretary general outlined some of the challenges ahead for the more than 12,000 delegates at the conference. |
| | He singled out the use of English as the lingua franca of the internet. |
| | "There is a content divide. Much of the information on the web is not relevant to the real needs of people," he said. |
| | "Nearly 70% of sites are in English, at times crowding out local voices and needs." |
| | The Geneva summit is intended to create the groundwork to overcome these sorts of issues. |
| | But is has been marred by political differences over how to fund technology projects in developing countries, as well as over who should rule the internet. |
| | Earth to U.N.: There isn't a "content divide." There's a content shortage for people who are under-served. There are plenty of ways of addressing that issue (like that technology fund, f'instance) without resorting to unnecessary (also probably impossible, and certainly destructive) regulation of the Net itself. |
What's blacked out, exactly?
Over and redone
Location, location, location
| | Next month, on either side of Linuxworld in New York, I'm going to visit the campaign headquarters of the Bush, Clark and Dean campaigns. The mission has a technical angle, mostly. I'm on a hunt for new Linux-related hacks, developed in campaign laboratories, and their potential relevance to enterprise computing, which is my beat at Linux Journal. |
| | Two of the campaigns know I'm coming. The Bush campaign doesn't. I'm looking for contacts there. If any of you have some, pass them along. |
| | That Al Gore, a conventional politician, today endorsed Howard Dean, who is running a very unconventional campaign, tells me something about those, like Gore, who had mastered the dull conventions of campaign politics. |
| | Somehow it had all gotten away from them. Presidential campaigns had drifted out of alignment with most Americans. The ritual no longer seemed like something the country did for itself every four years, but what a professional cadre did, and sold back to the country as "politics." |
| | But it wasn¹'t, really. At least it wasn't democratic politics at anything like capacity. Now, in 2004, we are perhaps starting to see this. There is no decisive change, yet. But it is a big discovery when things frozen in place are suddenly found to be changeable. |
| | I want to go on and quote the whole thing. It's an outstanding analysis. Gotta go make breakfast. More shortly. |
| | [Later...] Well, not that shortly. Stuff came up. Anyway... |
| | This morning the lead story in the local paper was about how Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean "changes the game." So typical. Here's Jay again, talking about the way 2000 went down: |
| | "Well, of course!" said the professionals in journalism. "This is how the game is played. Citizens of the United States, let us to explain winning to you." But this too was a game—inside baseball—that had gotten away from the players. It was easy for journalists to think of themselves as outsiders, (observers) but then chatter away as insiders (participants), and never face the fullness of this contradiction. |
| | Okay, so let's go to The Matrix, where Morpheus is just beginning to clue Neo about what The Matrix really is, and the choice Neo will soon make to break himself free of it: |
| | MORPHEUS: From the Matrix. |
| | Neo locks at his eyes but only sees a reflection of himself. |
| | MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is, Neo? |
| | Neo swallows and nods his head. |
| | MORPHEUS: It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it? |
| | The LEATHER CREAKS as he leans back. |
| | MORPHEUS: The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. |
| | MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, were born into bondage... kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. |
| | The Matrix is a perfect myth and metaphor for the late years of the soon-to-be-late Industrial Age. Simply put it represents submission to The Machine. |
| | There's the mass retail machine, which we experience when we download food in bags at drive-up windows or buy big products in bigger boxes at big-box stores in vast new shopping centers where we report weekly in our big-ass SUVs. |
| | There's the mass education machine, which we experience as children passing through a compulsory school system that treats each of us as an empty database into which a state-mandated curriculum is dumped, treats as degraded products those databases that return sub-perfect query results, and sorts the whole database population into bell curves for its own convenience — all with the full approval and compliance of parents, who have, after many generations, become accustomed to a system that grades its children like meat on a conveyor belt. |
| | There's the mass media machine, which we experience when we jack into The Tube, or download our daily politics from the radio pipes we call NPR and Rush Limbaugh. |
| | The politics machine, for the last fifty years, has been part of the mass media machine. To that machine, democratic processes were part of the Sports System. Primaries and elections werenothing more than one way to keep score. There were others. Polls. Fund raising totals. |
| | The market conversation about politics was largeley an intermediated one. It had about as much resemblance to the old New England Town Hall as St. Peters to a stable in Bethlehem. |
| | Gradually, we're going through the Neo experience. We're all taking our red pills, whether we like it or not. That's because The Net is part of reality. Our conversations are grounded, and intermediated, outside the old Matricial system, outside the Olde Machine. Jay again: |
| | Suppose, then, that this narrative had gotten away from them, in the way that all things over-controlled can do. It would explain a lot about the rise of Howard Dean. It would explain the trouble the system sometimes has in understanding him. And it would explain some of the journalism about Dean. |
| | He credits Samantha Shapiro's Sunday Times story with getting some stuff right (read it now, 'cuz it'll scroll behind the paywall soon): |
| | "Part of Dean's appeal is that he behaves in recognizably human ways." That's true. |
| | About the death of the hub and spoke system: "Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow -- as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. -- to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other." |
| | Or: "When people from the unofficial campaign call and ask permission to undertake an activity on behalf of Dean, they are told they don't need permission." |
| | But Shapiro's bravest moment was her closing shot. Zephyr Teachout, director of Internet Organizing for Dean, is driving around the country in an RV, visiting people in the network she had only known online. Shapiro writes: |
| | ''What's happening is an unusual and unprecedented correspondence between the campaign and us,'' [Teachout] says. It takes me a moment before I realize that when she says ''the campaign,'' she doesn't mean the people running the headquarters in Burlington. She means the people she's going to visit in her Airstream. |
| | Then Jay gets to the extra-Marticial core of The Matter: |
| | It's almost spooky. The campaign is somewhere... out there. It is not at headquarters any more, although it talks to headquarters by blog. This is a de-stabilizing premise, and for a journalist who decides she buys it, a kind of reporting nightmare. |
| | If the Dean campaign isn't "at" headquarters, but distributed around, then maybe it isn't "at" where the candidate is speaking tonight, either. Or at that appearance on Hardball. Now politics has to be located all over again, and in a sense this is what Shapiro's report is about: how do you locate the driving force in the Dean campaign when people around the county who are somehow "in" that campaign are driving 200 miles to make it happen with each other, without plan or permission from Burlington, although Burlington knows about it, sometimes? |
| | He talks about how Shapiro's "search for a locator settled on three geeks," and how that's where her story missed its chance to make a key point, which is that there is no central point any more, no locus of control, no eyball atop the pyramid of The Campaign. Instead, something else is going on... |
| | There is a big idea here, and I give her credit for coming at it obliquely. Yes, the Dean campaign is overcoming some of the remoteness in the system and connecting lots of people to politics. But this only gets you half the way there, Shapiro says. The other part of Dean's success involves, not our fragmenting public life, but something missing in people's personal and private lives, which is causing them to look to Dean, who in turn sends out the right cues. She gets this. Dean, she writes, "seemed to emit some sort of secret call that made people, many of them previously apolitical, drop everything and devote themselves to his campaign." |
| | It had gotten away from them, the operators of the system. So Dean said let some of it go. Fifty years is long enough for a single style (command and control) to prevail. Part of his "secret call" has been to Americans, any age, who want to reverse the control revolutions that had brought presidential campaigns to a dead state by 2000. |
| | I think what struck some of us as so odd about the Gore endorsement, and the way it played, was that it looked so old school. So much like The Machine re-asserting control — and therefore of Dean selling out to The Machine. But I don't think it was. |
| | Last night I forced myself to watch several hours of CSPAN: of the debate among the democratic candidates, of campaign staff taking time out in the "spin room" to talk to the show host about how stupid the "spin room" was, and so on. At one point in the spin room segment the host asked Joe Trippi about the Gore endorsement. Trippi said Gore had in fact been in frequent conversation with Dean over the last year or so. It was plain to me that once again we have a markets-are-conversations phenomenon at work here. Gore and Dean had been talking. Gore and Lieberman clearly had not been talking. Did the Gore-Dean relationship involve any kind of sell-out? I don't see why. Gore may be a bore and a loser, but is he also incapable of learning anything? Is not some of his experience and wisdom useful to Dean? I would think so. Was Gore terribly rude to Lieberman by not warning him about the Dean endorsement? Sure. But should it matter? Should any of this shit matter? |
| | I submit that the only shits that matter are the real democratic processes going on here, still more than a month away from a single vote being cast in a single primary election. What are those processes, and how are they changing? The mass media machine can't tell us, because they are too much a part of the game which is the problem being solved by citizens who were never part of it. Citizens can solve that problem, because now they have the space to do it. |
| | Thomas Jefferson's understanding of freedom included what Hannah Arendt calls "public freedom"-- the citizen's right to share in the direction of society and the discussion of common affairs. This is why, late in life, he placed so much emphasis on dividing all the counties and parishes of the states into smaller units, which he called wards. About this famous flourish in Jefferson's thought, Arendt says: |
| | The basic assumption of the ward system, whether Jefferson knew it or not, was that no one could be called happy without his share in public happiness, that no one could be called free without his experience in public freedom, and that no one could be called either happy of free without participating, and having a share, in public power. |
| | While Jefferson understood that elected representatives were necessary in a large republic, he also saw the Constitution as incomplete, for it provided no forum, or, as Arendt put it, no "public space" in which citizens could learn the art of democratic politics themselves, instead of watching advertisements about it. |
| | We have that public space now. It's called The Net. The Dean Campaign and its constituency are symbiotes in this new environment. It's an environment that naturally supports democracy. It also supports the old Matrix. Unfortunately for the Matrix, the alternatives it supports are far more intresting, useful and powerful over the long term. |
| | In tha long term, the Greater Dean Constituency won't be the only symbiotes in the Net's democratic habitat. Other candidates, including many republicans, will learn how to live and thrive by the new rules, which we're only beginning to discover, even as we write them. |
| | Just think about all we're learning here. Boggles my mind. |
The Storm passes
| | What a bummer to hear that Norm Sloan has died. "Stormin' Norman" was the great coach at North Carolina State who led David Thompson and the Wolfpack to an undefeated season in 1973, when they were ineligible to play for the national title. In the next season, the Pack lost its only game to the then-undefeated UCLA, then beat them in the national tournament semifinal, effectively ending the Bruins' long dynasty). Some of the best basketball games of all time are ones Sloan coached. At the top of my own list is the 103-100 defeat of Maryland in the ACC tournament championship game in 1974. State went on to beat Marquette for the national title that year. |
| | My favorite quote of Sloan's came when Duke was beginning to dominate the ACC in the late '80s. At the time Duke was undefeated. Asked how he could beat Duke, he said "Easy. Throw 'em a zone and let the air out of the ball." And that's exactly what they did, too. This was back in the days when college ball had no shot clock. Sloan's teams were great at playing as fast or as slow as the strategy required — a sign of first-class coaching. |
| | I was sad to see Norm leave State in 1980, even though he was replaced by great Jimmy Valvano, who led state to its second and last NCAA title in '83. |
Turn out, tune on, drop in.
| | I'm  thrilled to see Ruby in there. I've known Ruby longer than any other blogger I can name — since she was three years old and we all lived together at Oxbow, a paradisal rural enclave surrounding a pond in the woods north of Chapel Hill. Ruby is one of the most smart and principled people I know, and a real force in the community. |
| | Wish I were there, 'cuz then I could see other old friends, like WUNC General Manager Joan Siefert Rose, whom I last wrote about here. |
| | Can't wait to hear the show. |
Lucky star
| | We're lucky to have him, too. |
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