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Influence & Networked Markets Life & Everything Else Social & Political

Solitary Walker

<![CDATA[More on the tenacious value of the individual in the face of the force of conformity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential philosophers of his or any age, spent the last years of his life in virtual exile because of his writings. He died in 1778 and the French Revolution put those ideas into action a little more than a decade later. His determination to stick to his beliefs defines the value of the individual….
His Reveries of a Solitary Walker, written just two years before his death, was a reflection on his growing sense of satisfaction that, despite almost universal opprobrium, he was right.

All things considered, I think it is best to throw away my magic ring [a fantasy of invisibility he was exploring] before it makes me do something foolish. If men insist on seeing me as other than I am and are provoked into injustice by the mere sight of me, in order to spare them this sight it is better to flee their presence than remain invisible in their midst. It is up to them to conceal their actions from me, disguising their stratagems, avoiding the light of day, burrowing like moles deep into the earth. As for me, let them see me if they can, so much the better; but this is beyond them, instead of me they will never see anyone by the Jean-Jacques they have created and fashioned for themselves so that they can hate me to their heart’s content. I should be wrong then to be upset by the image they have of me; I ought to take no real interest in it, since it is not me that they are seeing.

So, I was reading Rousseau last night and wondering, “What if he had given in to the desire to be accepted, to the comforts of consensus. What a different world it would be. That’s the power of the individual: To change everything.]]>

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The problem is that for many people consensus means conformity

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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets Life & Everything Else Social & Political

There's something wrong with consensus

<![CDATA[I've been wrestling with the current passion for consensus. There's a destructive faith in the magic of the wisdom of crowds that is regurgitated by people talking about emergence, folksonomy and just about every form of social network that threatens to bring social progress to a grinding halt. Why? Because committees seldom if ever drive positive change. See the Russian Revolution for the most tragic example of committee-driven change, but you can see it in any group that falls back on consensus for every decision rather than trusting individual inspiration.
The problem is that any time you write that you don't believe in the absolute value of the community's efforts, you become an elitist. I don't question the value of communal effort and consensus, I just don't think it is sufficient to make society a better place. People matter more that crowds of people, according to the Enlightenment view of human value, but that supreme faith in the individual is fading fast—at every degree of the political-philosophical spectrum. This is a tragic fact and it makes me fear for my kids' future.
It takes individuals acting utterly alone, clinging to their vision, too. That said, what started as the following notes in my notebook is taking shape in my head as a kind of manifesto yet to be released:

Success is believed to be primarily collective, yet it is essentially individual. It appears collective because accomplishments are judged by others, but even the smallest changes come from an individual.

Hard rationalism is being replaced by soft collectivism in which consensus is valued over truth.

Those were my notes. Fact is, in political efforts, the emergence community got its ass kicked by the martial approach to organizing of the right using the same technologies, in which millions of people sublimate their specific political identity. The technologies of collaboration are useful, but they institutionalize modes of thought that suggest if contributions aren’t heavily vetted they aren’t worthwhile. Vetting is good, but suggesting that the individual must accept the input of others and integrate it in order to gain acceptance is dangerous.
Great changes and important stands against negative changes in society come from the individual, standing alone or working in small groups who resist broader social mores until, eventually, resistance fails and the ideas that individual or group tested, perfected and promoted are accepted, finally, as a “truth.”
Today, I was reading Mike Godwin’s Reason interview with Neal Stephenson, who said:

Stephenson: This probably won’t do anything to endear me or Wink to thE typical reason reader, but I was made aware of him by a Jesuit priest of leftish tendencies who had been reading his stuff.

It’s almost always a disaster when a novelist decides to become political. So let me just make a few observations here on a human level—which is within my comfort zone as a novelist—and leave it at that.

It’s clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage. This has been true since the beginning of human history. Exactly how and why power disorders occur is poorly understood.

We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you’d see someone like John Snow, who would point out, “Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera.” Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn’t understand germ theory, but they were getting closer.

We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don’t really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions.

Wink’s interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes.

Carrying that forward to the present day, Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn’t call it shaftology; that’s just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft, be they blacks in apartheid South Africa, South American peasants, or residents of inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of domination systems. It’s not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders. And even people who can’t stomach the religious content of his work might take a few cues from this epidemiological, as opposed to theoretical/ideological, approach.

Reason: The Baroque Cycle suggests that there are sometimes great explosions of creativity, followed by that creative energy’s recombining and eventual crystallization into new forms—social, technological, political. Are we seeing a similar degree of explosive progress in the modern U.S.?

Stephenson: The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil.

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse.” If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets Media Comment & Crimes Social & Political

Elusive synchrony is okay

<![CDATA[Dave Rogers writes:

While we’re not yet at the place where the innate wisdom of users blends seamlessly with the work of trained professionals, it may be closer than we think.

The problem with folksonomies, as the self-organized taxonomics of semantic networks are called, is that they emphasize collective agreement about meaning while most change comes from stubborn individuals who cling to, push forward and verify new meanings. There is a sense in the discussion about folksonomy that, once such things are settled, we’ll be pulling into the train station at Nirvana.
What I want to be sure of is that folksonomies stay flexible. David Weinberger writes about three conclusions for a discussion of tagging:

1. Rather than knowledge ending where the miscellaneous begins, now it’s beginning with the miscellaneous. (In your face, Aristotle!)

2. In the continuing battle between the forces of neatness and messiness, tagging advances the cause of messiness. (I think that’s a good thing, but you’re talking to a guy who last night was given the employees discount at a food stand at the airport because the cashier just assumed I worked there.)

3. We are owning not just our information but the organization of information. This is part of the project of re-meaning the world – make meaning ours – in which we’ve been engaged for decades.

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I like messy, because messy implies perpetual change. I don’t think all this will be settled, nor that we will ever make meaning ours, because changing meaning is the birthright of successive generations. We’ll only make it ours for a time, then we have to trust the kids to make their own.]]>

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Seeing beyond the tail to the dog

<![CDATA[Tim Bray writes:

The Long Tail is one the few things about the blogosphere that seems new. Here’s an obvious question: is there any structure lurking in that Long Tail, or is it just an undifferentiated skinny pointy blob? The answer starts here.

I think that the Long Tail is actually a tangled mess of microcommunities and subcultures and tribes and hobbies and fanatics. Julie Leung writes about the community of mommie-bloggers that the New York Times wrote up as a big deal, but it’s really a big deal as an example of the structures out there in the tail.

Following up on this posting in Browse, I think the tail is a topology, not a curve. I’ve been writing about this for a long time, but am not much of a sloganeer, nor have I ever wanted to be, but there is a long answer to the question of whether the long tail of the power law curve is even disorganized and need of organizing. That’s a business question, not a matter of the nature of the long tail. It’s a topology with rolling hills and valleys of influence, where erosion and time take tolls on a site’s ranking. It’s 3D, not 2D. It’s a badlands we can get lost in, especially if we rely on a badly conceived map, yet we’re at the same stage in understanding that territory as in the time of the Catalan Atlas.
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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets

Distributed sexuality

<![CDATA[Thundercat’s Seduction Lair: High School Sexual Networking:
Interesting: There is no center in high school sexual networks?

“We went into this study believing we would find a core model, with a small group of people who are sexually active,” Moody said. “We were surprised to find a very different kind of network.”

Based on research I’ve been doing (soon, soon, it will be revealed) there is no “center” in densely networked communities. Instead there are many active nodes in a network, but each is active selectively not consistently. With teen sex, you see that the network is weakly linked but very active.
It also depends on how you frame the network you’re looking at. If you didn’t create constraints, networks would seem to go on forever. Context is the active ingredient in the human agency that defines the shape and flow of network activity. You can see from the map below that one node can be presented as a center, but that there are many centers connected by dense traffic. More on the map soon.
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Google Print heralds the Sampling Society

<![CDATA[My comments on Google Print, the ambitious project to digitize university and public libraries are at Red Herring. Hello to the Sampling Society, we see you even though you have been standing there for years now.]]>

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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets Social & Political

Journalism is as journalism does

<![CDATA[Jeff Jarvis says anyone can be a journalist and I agree that anyone can, or could even before the blogosphere came along. After all, where do we think journos come from, special wombs filled with ink?
The professionalization of journalism is a problem because it has erected an arbitrary credentials-based pedestal on which a few people have been placed or attempted to climb up to themselves. With civic journalism sites, people can publish in an organized venue for information and debate about public policy or they can report the news from their own sites. The practice of objectivity and the rules of attribution, featured on last night’s The West Wing (“They aren’t a journalist,” Toby Zeigler warns before his colleague speaks to a blogger “off the record”), is another thing entirely. What bloggers and journalists have in common is the ability to write. Playing according to the special rules of the game developed between journalists and their sources is another matter that, for better and mostly worse, defines a “journalist.”
If bloggers report the news without falling prey to the elaborate dance of attribution—just saying who told them what rather than hiding sources who more often than not should be on the record behind “sources said” attribution—it would probably be a vast improvement over today’s environment, in which journalists are part of the politics they cover without acknowledging it.]]>

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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets Social & Political

Weinberger on C-SPAN

<![CDATA[I commend to your attention David Weinberger‘s talk at the Library of Congress on the future of information and what it means for the institution and citizens. C-SPAN has the tape.]]>

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Business & Technology Influence & Networked Markets

Everyone can learn a lesson or two

<![CDATA[Scott Rosenberg on Bloggercon III makes excellent points about the conversational co-evolution of personal and professional writing and reporting:

What bloggers can teach the pros:
*How to blur the line between the personal and the professional — creatively
*How to improvise in real time
*How to have a conversation with the “people formerly known as readers”
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

What bloggers can learn from traditional journalists:
*the value of legwork
*the nature of accountability
*The positive aspects of editing
*How to be humble — you don’t know everything!

The conference avoided the “Is blogging journalism?” trope and explored how the idea of writing and what is worth paying attention to has changed from the time when something had to be between the covers of a magazine to be legitimate.]]>