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Monday, October 17, 2005
Special Ops-Ed 
| | If an open-source counterinsurgency is the only strategic option left, it is a depressing one. The militias will probably create a situation of controlled chaos that will allow the administration to claim victory and exit the country. They will, however, exact a horrible toll on Iraq and may persist for decades. This is a far cry from spreading democracy in the Middle East. Advocates of refashioning the American military for top-down nation-building, the current flavor of the month, should recognize it as a fatal test of the concept. |
| | Fourth Generation Warfare is the diagnosis, and it's a good one. But it will never be the answer because it sees only about 10% of reality. We need to wage peace from the outside in, spreading connectivity, not wage war from the inside out, hoping for democracy. We will never win in Iraq. Globalization will. What we wage now in Iraq isn't war. It's a holding action for history, which isn't so much on our side as constantly on our ass. Globalization is the ultimate horizontal scenario, the ultimate open-source net. Resistance is futile, but it will remain all some people have. They will die in a form of political-military evolution: the decline and disappearance of the unconnectable. |
| | Where do we differ? Tom views our future through the lens of the state. I don't. I view the world as a complex network of dynamic flows that only begrudgingly heed the dictates of the state (and often treat those dictates as damage to be routed around if they are not in alignment) -- in short, Friedman's flat world. This viewpoint translates into our approach to solutions. |
| | I would just say, go easy on Flat World. Freidman never argues the irrelevancy of states. As Martin Wolf points out, as does every economist on globalization, the most globalized economies feature the biggest govs, highest tax rates, and most regulation. OSW flourishes, as opposed to OS software itself, in nonglobalized environments only, where govs are weak. In good states it's just crime and lone wackos and LEA a plenty. Inside my Core, OSW remains a nuisance to be managed, not a defining threat. So to win ultimately, we expand that reality while shrinking the enemy's operating domain. |
| | Stay at that last link for more of the continuing polylogue, involving John, Tom and others. |
Guess I'd better take out that subscription
| | DAVID SIFRY'S epiphany occurred when he read The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book published in 2000 that quickly became a bible in certain Silicon Valley subcultures. |
People from the Power
| | Says here in the NY Times that power companies are up for getting into the broadband business. Doesn't say what the data rates are, though. |
Living by learning
Something You know, but They don't
Beats nominating a fetus
| | Bush doesn¹t care about abortion, and neither do the bibliocons. They understand that even if the Supreme Court was to strike down Roe, the states would legalize it anyway, and they¹d lose their moral authority. It¹s one thing to say that five men in black robes are imposing their personal views on you, and quite another to be faced with the certain knowledge that the people hold values that define you as outside the mainstream. So it¹s best if Roe stays intact and the conservative movement has the issue to complain about. |
| | The real problem that bibliocons have with the court showed up earlier this year in the great shouting match over the corpse of Terri Schiavo. All along the bibliocons and paleocons had been telling us they were fed-up with activist judges getting involved in state and local issues where they didn¹t belong, but suddenly they were all over the courts for refusing to be activist with respect to the family and the State of Florida. So it became clear that the right wants the mirror image of what the left wants, an activist bench that is willing to impose its personal values and beliefs on the rest of us. |
| | Looking for judges who have that sort of orientation is a hard search, because the conservative team that the right's been grooming since Roe (Luttig, McConnell, Olsen, et. al.) is all about judicial restraint, and none of them can be relied upon to jump into the breech on Schiavo-type cases and do the right thing by the right. So Bush had to ignore the conservative farm team and draft a close personal friend with the proper religious credentials and the requisite lack of judicial hang-ups. |
| | So that¹s why we have Miers, to make the far right wing of the Right-to-Life conservative movement less ineffectual the next time we have a case before the courts involving a corpse on life-support. |
| | Put yourself in Bush¹s shoes: his approval ratings started going down when he flew to Washington to sign the Schiavo bill, and they¹ve never recovered. The press pounced on him over Katrina because he made himself vulnerable, and they¹re not letting up. |
| | And this isn¹t a cynical move orchestrated by Rove, it¹s George W. Bush being sincere. And sincerely stupid. |
Exorcizing the machine's ghost
| | Nicholas Carr offers the best blowback against Web 2.0 boosterism that I've seen yet. I think he overreacts in some ways (e.g. damning all of Wikipedia for errors in a few selected entries); but he's still right to provide a sobriety test. His conclusion: |
| | Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be. |
| | Bear in mind that he means amoral in a literal way: non-moral. |
Lost baggage
| | Steve makes a point of not gracing readers with links on his post, cryptically explaining, |
| | Mike Arrington tries to suggest I (we) OFGNs are wrong about links. Nice try, kid. We're not wrong. Links are oh so BrinRank. Attention is the new coin of the Empire. |
| | It's not what you do that counts, it's what you don't do. |
| | He provides background for that in his show notes and posts here and here. The money grafs: |
| | I spent a good deal of time educating Mike on the inherent value of NOT linking, asking the following key question: |
| | € Which would you prefer, that I link to you or mention your name and not link to you? |
| | Mike says "link, every time." I say "wrong." Mike's way, he gets flow, page views, and, eventually, linkspam. My way, Mike Arrington gets typed into Google et al, vanity feeds spring to life, and people subscribe. His way: page views. My way: sub love. |
| | It's not who you know that counts, but who, what, and for how long. |
| | The choice isn't OR, it's AND. By denying readers links Steve makes his point through passive aggression, not persuasion. (Here's Mike Arrington, by the way. Don't sue me for linkspam, dude.) |
| | And if Steve wants to dismiss BrinRank, why point readers to the RSS search engines, rather than Google? Try typing BlogOn II in Google and see what you get. Now try Technorati. (Steve's partner in developing attention.xml, for what it's worth). |
| | And hey, Steve, if you want people to know what the hell you mean by "attention", how about pointing to searches like this one? Or to AttentionTrust.org? Might actually be helpful. And, more importanlty, non-manipulative. |
| | Data points: Steve Rubel said in March that "Scoble said that by the end of 2005 we'll all know what attention.xml is and why it's important for the services we choose to support it." |
| | Well, it's late October and nobody knows as much about attention (of the technical sort Steve's espousing) as they do about links. |
| | Attention may be a Fine Thing once people know what it is and how it works. Meanwhile links have leverage. At what they do, nothing works better. |
| | Calling me passive aggresive is a page view slime in an attention world. Let me be clear, Doc. I appreciate links, I just appreciate more attention-focused gestures more. In a page view model, links drive flow which drives adsense revenue. In an attention model, citations drive subscriptions which drives reader/participant relationships. This is so far from passive it's not funny. I am specifically and overtly not linking to drive people to RSS and its fundamental time efficiency. Is linking passive aggresive by driving people away from RSS andf back to the page viedw model? No. Neither is what I am doing. |
| | I bold-faced the key distinction, which I think is brilliant. Steve understands attention better than anybody, and I want more of us (including me) to know what he's talking about. I'm getting a lot more of it now, though not as much as I'd like. |
| | Steve adds (among much else — go read it), |
| | I have no interest in driving people to Google for a search on attention.xml when I'm putting all my energies into AttentionTrust. Most of the hits on that search come back to me, which I assume people have already read. I'm trying to save people time, not add to their overload. That's why attention is so important, and why it doesn't need the kind of manipulative pointing that Doc surprisingly seems to suggest. Now my using the world manipulative there is a cheap shot. Sorry. So is non-manipulative. |
| | So now, a question. Are you suggesting, Steve, that we all stop linking? Or just, as Dave says here, that links are now devalued? |
Now it's personal
Lesbian velcro
| | That's what our friend Lisa called it when I failed to properly strap a sandal by dumbly attempting to secure one of the fuzzy sections of a velcro strap to another fuzzy section, and then complained that there was "something wrong" with it. |
If you're not having fun in IT, you're not in the Philipines
| | Never mind that  Mike Abundo agrees with some items below. Just dig how he works at "identifying and analyzing nascent IT trends of potential benefit to the Filipino people" with two of those very people apparently ready to suckle his bare chest. |
| | Not a few nuggets in other posts there as well. Such as this item, detailing how blogging was prophesied by a 19th Century Russian Prince. Specifically, |
| | The fact that among other utopian inventions Odoevsky described something very close to the Internet and blogging was brought to public attention by -- surprise, surprise -- a blogger. Ivan Dezhurny, a Russian music producer, is generally fond of futuristic literature. Reading Odoevsky¹s novel "Year 4338", written in 1837, Dezhurny republished selected bits of the book on his personal blog to the delight of his readers. |
| | Odoevsky suggested in future there would be a kind of connection between houses that would allow people to communicate quickly and easily, the way they do now via the Internet. |
| | "Houses are connected by means of magnetic telegraphs that allow people who live far from each other to communicate," Odoevsky wrote. |
Whether weather
| | It's been a warm few weeks here in Santa Barbara. Now it looks like we'll have our first real rain since May. |
| | I put off taking stuffed furniture, cloth umbrellas and other soakables into shelter, as long as the sky stayed clear. Then, a few minutes ago (at 12:20am) I heard something we almost never hear in these parts: thunder. Sure enough: there were flashes of lightning off to the South and Southeast. |
| | I saw by the  radar map that coastal Los Angeles and Orange County are getting rain. It's still clear here. Beatiful, in fact. A few flat puffy clouds are fringed in silver while full moon shines out of a wide and warm night sky. |
| | Still, when I watched the map in motion, I see L.A.'s rain headed our way. So I took no chances and moved all the funiture into sheltered spaces. |
| | Which pretty much guarantees that it won't be raining here. |
| | Not that it would be a Bad Thing. It might mean an end to the long Fire Season. |
| | Thus endeth this morning's report on Life in Paradise. |
Getting vs. Doing
| |  That post wasn't really about Microsoft (though it makes sense for Robert to react to what I said about Microsoft in the post). It was about the highly silo'd choices most of us have for broadband. Also about the huge opportunities for services that can be provided to customers who want to produce and not just to consume. Phone and cable companies have proven, over and over again, that they don't get what the Net is about. Nor are they going to do anything much to take advantage of opportunities (for services to customers and money for providers) opened by unencumbered symmetrical broadband (rather than the encumbered asymmetrical service they've been providing for the duration, and which continue to express their blindered origins in the phone and cable businesses). |
| | I don't see any company with the ability to deliver on the promise of symmetrical broadband, other than Google. Only Google has the size, the Net-based origins, the lack of baggage and the vision to deliver the goods. Not that I'm saying they will deliver those goods. Just that I think they're in the best position to do it. |
| | And if Yahoo, Microsoft, et. al. see that as a challenge, all the better. I hope they do. |
| | * For more about "nature", review the script to The Crying Game. Scan for the word "nature" and note what Jody says to Fergus about it. Beyond being the key to the movie, it's also the key to understanding why companies do what they do. In the movie, personal nature transcends politics and even gender. In the marketplace, corporate nature transcends... well, damn near every opportunity, frankly. |
| | Locally, TDS, to their credit does offer 4MB symmetrical dsl service (4mbps up and down). |
Gluetrain withstanding
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