Thanks to Jeff, Eben Moglen’s keynote talk about free software, politics, social justice and more from Plone Conference 2006 got slashdotted this morning.
If you haven’t watched or listened to it yet, do yourself a favor. Jeff even wrote a far better summary of it than I ever could have.
Update: Also on Metafilter today.
Ethan Zuckerman (who probably doesn’t remember me following along two years behind him at Williams) has a nice review of Cass Sunstein’s new book “Infotopia.” I’m adding it to my reading list.
Sunstein is still concerned with the formation of ideological cocoons. In his new book, Infotopia, he’s become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Specifically, he’s excited about the ways new online tools make it possible for groups of people to assemble information and accumulate knowledge. He’s become a devotee of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who saw markets, first and foremost, as a way to aggregate information held by a large group of people. There’s ample evidence that Hayek was right in an examination of the failure of planned economies – smart men sitting in a room do a far worse job of setting the price of copper ore or bread than the collected actions of thousands of consumers, iterated over time.
Deliberation vs. distributed information aggregation. Fascinating. Sunstein’s a strong supporter of the latter. I’ll close by stealing Ethan’s closing paragraphs.
Whether or not I agree with all of Sunstein’s conclusions, his quest for systems that aggregate knowledge across networks is an exciting way to look at the contemporary Internet. A large number of the most interesting projects taking place on the Internet use strategies to aggregate information from multiple users to create new knowledge - this is the magic behind Google’s PageRank algorithm, Digg’s headlines and Amazon’s collaborative filtering recommendations. Analyzing these systems in terms of their effectiveness in getting people to reveal hidden knowledge is, in my opinion, an excellent framework for evaluation. (I’m very interested, for instance, in thinking through how the folksonomy and taxonomy systems David Weinberger is exploring in his forthcoming “Everything Is Miscellaneous†use different mechanisms to assemble information from different actors to organize information.)
It’s also useful to confront Sunstein’s fear of information cocoons again, five years later. Sunstein’s examples of cocooning are interpersonal ones in this book, governments and firms that manage themselves in ways to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths, as opposed to individuals burying themselves in sympathetic media. But media cocooning is a problem for individuals as well, consumers of online and offline media. I suspect it’s possible to use some of the Hayekian thinking about collecting diverse information to create media aggregators capable of breaking cocoons and exposing people to views and perspectives they might otherwise have missed.
Eben Moglen’s keynote address at Plone Conference 2006, “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” was hands-down the most inspiring speech I’ve ever heard in my life.
In just over an hour, he traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern industrial economic development, and placed our work into the larger context of the ongoing journey towards freedom and equality for all people. There was hardly a dry eye in the standing-room-only house when he was done.
Thanks to my good friend Grace of Versant Media, Eben’s talk is now available for your online viewing pleasure at YouTube.
Now is probably a great time to thank Eben for all he’s done over the past 15 years to advance free software, and to thank Jonah Bossewitch, Paul Everitt and Ian Sullivan — and of course Eben — for bringing us the magnificent gift of this talk. I’m so pleased to be able to share it with the world.
Share it with someone you love who wonders what you do and why it matters.
(A high-resolution version of Eben’s talk will be available for downloading from Archive.org under a Creative Commons license in the next week.)
Me, I’m feeling pretty darn good this morning. I slept really well last night. Maybe it was the new pillow. Or maybe it was something else.
Then, I awoke to a glorious sunrise here in Seattle, with great election news all across the map.
All in all, a “morning in America” kind of feeling.
How about you?
Atrios is like, funny and stuff.
“I feel so warm and fuzzy, seeing the Four Republicans of the Apocalypse show up for the signing of the “Torture Bill”.Let’s see there’s Famine, War, Pestilence and Cheney.”
(AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
Why would the CEO of an explicitly progressive political tech consulting firm out himself as a “supporter” of McCain? And then take a “leave of absence” from said firm?
Odd. Disturbing. I don’t know what to make of this. There must be more going on here than meets the eye.
As is so often the case these days, the commenters are smarter than the columnists. Which is too bad when the columnists are very powerful Big Green executives.
David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne) (p)reviews a documentary coming this fall called Jesus Camp:
It focuses on a woman preacher (Becky Fischer) who indoctrinates children in a summer camp in North Dakota. Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim — the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an “army†to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie.
Byrne draws the apt analogy to the madrassas of radical Islam:
… at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them†— but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.â€
In The End of Checklist Liberalism, Mark Schmitt points out that the traditional “interest group” politics of enviros and others aren’t working for Joe Lieberman, and he thinks it’s the harbinger of a move towards more holistic political decision making amongst the Democratic base.
Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them – like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill — because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,†as Broder puts it – since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice – what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?
But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society – not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups – is what a center-left political party ought to be about. And at the end of this fight, I don’t expect that we’ll have a more leftist Democratic Party, but one that can at least begin to get beyond checklist liberalism.
I’m not usually that into OPSR (Other People’s Senate Races) but, wow, check out the New York Times’ endorsement of Ned Lamont over incumbent Joe Lieberman.
If Mr. Lieberman had once stood up and taken the lead in saying that there were some places a president had no right to take his country even during a time of war, neither he nor this page would be where we are today. But by suggesting that there is no principled space for that kind of opposition, he has forfeited his role as a conscience of his party, and has forfeited our support.
Mr. Lamont, a wealthy businessman from Greenwich, seems smart and moderate, and he showed spine in challenging the senator while other Democrats groused privately. He does not have his opponent’s grasp of policy yet. But this primary is not about Mr. Lieberman’s legislative record. Instead it has become a referendum on his warped version of bipartisanship, in which the never-ending war on terror becomes an excuse for silence and inaction.
Very, very nicely done bit of viral agitprop:
The dancing Condi’s are absolutely priceless. I don’t even want to get into the weird racial subtext that one could probably find. But you’re free to.
95 Theses of Geek Activism. Good stuff.
(Hat tip to Alex at Worldchanging.)
Mark Schmitt offers a realistic asssesment of the significance of bloggers in Ned Lamont’s thriving primary challenge to Joe-menutm Lieberman in Connecticut.
Can we please put to rest the idea that Ned Lamont’s challenge to Senator Lieberman is a product of, or a wholly-owned subsidiary of, that thing called “the netroots.†(Without, in so doing, disparaging or minimizing the netroots themselves.)
Instead of crediting “Markos and his loyal minions,” Schimitt cites
Decades of statewide progressive organizing in the state. Lamont’s campaign manager is no blogger, but Tom Swan, who left his job as head of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group (CCAG) to run the campaign. According to one of the Connecticut blogs I mentioned above, much of the CCAG staff has also quit or taken a leave to help Lamont. CCAG got its start before even Al Gore had heard of the Internet, in the same year that Lieberman won his first primary – 1970 - and from the same impulses that created the reformist/anti-war Caucus of Connecticut Democrats in which Lieberman was active.CCAG has had its ups and downs over the decades, but it is one of a very few multi-issue progressive groups of that era to have survived. A related group, the Legislative Electoral Action Program (LEAP) was very successful at getting progressives elected to the state legislature, many of whom are still there. CCAG has had a very successful last couple of years, most notably in winning passage of the state’s public financing law for campaigns, the first such “clean money†law to be passed through a legislature rather than by voter initiative. It takes a lot of skill and political savvy to get a legislature to back a proposal with low political salience that most politicians view as a threat. (That is, they would like to bury it and expect they can get away with it.) The Lamont campaign is coming off the energy and lessons learned of that victory.
You could imagine a challenge like Lamont’s emerging without the “netroots,†although they certainly drive a lot of the enthusiasm. You couldn’t imagine it without politically savvy, experienced organizers like Swan, with a base in a long-term, multi-issue progressive coalition that has allies and experience and understands the state. And anyone thinking about how to build structures and parties that can win elections against Republicans needs to understand this as well.
Schmitt also points out that Lieberman has run one of the worst campaigns of the year, again nothing to do with bloggers, before concluding:
So let’s credit the netroots for what they do well – generate enthusiasm, force the big questions onto the agenda, generate a new definition of what it means to be a Democrat. But by themselves they can’t create a viable candidacy or bring down a popular three-term incumbent. Only organizing and the incumbent’s own mistakes can do that.
I haven’t really been following the flap about Kos. But Billmon’s lengthy wrap-up seemed smart. The closing ‘grafs are particulary worthwhile:
The Lieberman Dems don’t hate and fear Kos and the Daily Kos “community” because they are too far to the left. They hate them because they represent an emerging power center within the Democratic Party that they don’t control — what’s more, one that is now much closer to the public mainstream on the central issue of our time (the Iraq War) than they are. The overriding concern for the neolibs, I think, is not that Kos and the netroot activists will lead the party off to the far-left fringes, but rather that they are willing, even eager, to form alliances with conservative nationalists like Jim Webb (the Va. Senate candidate) who’ve been forced out of the GOP because of their opposition to the neocons and their insane schemes…. Add in the cheerful brutality with which Kos and Jerome have skewered the consultants and the DLC Dems, the primary defeat now looming over Joe Lieberman’s head, and the rice bowls that could be broken if the old system of campaign graft is abandoned, and it’s easy to understand why the long knives are out. Whether the grown ups (Peretz, Lieberman, Hillary) actually set the Swiftboat in motion, or just watched approvingly (“Who shall rid us of this meddlesome blogger?”) as their hatchet boys did what comes natural, is almost irrelevant. The important thing to understand is that we have reached the point where the Dinos and their media allies are willing to use Rovian tactics against anyone who challenges their entrenched position — even someone like Kos, who is hardly the second coming of Henry Wallace or George McGovern. Whether that’s good or bad for the Kossaks I don’t know — I suppose it depends on how much credence you give to Gandhi’s old saw: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” In the real world — and in imperial America, too — the truth is that sometimes they ignore you, then ridicule you, then fight you and crush you like an overripe eggplant. We’ll see if that’s true this time. Either way, though, it looks like the battle between the netroots and dino Dems is going to get very down and dirty indeed.
Fascinating.
…that Don Rumsfeld is doing a heckuva job. Heh.
I noticed this quote in today’s New York Times from a “Marxist economist” who has critiqued China’s growing social inequality.
Liu Guoguang, a Marxist economist and a former vice director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, stimulated an outpouring of opinions about inequality last summer when he gave a private talk that was transcribed and posted on the Internet…. In a subsequent interview with Business Watch, a state-run magazine, Mr. Liu said, “If you establish a market economy in a place like China, where the rule of law is imperfect, if you do not emphasize the socialist spirit of fairness and social responsibility, then the market economy you establish is going to be an elitist market economy.“
Those craaazy Marxists. When will they grow up and show some common sense?
Dave Pollard offers a great summary of Canadian pollster Michael Adams’ new book “American Backlash.” Serious political junkies will recall Adams’ previous book, “Fire and Ice,” which documented the diverging values of Canadians and Americans and provides the core analytical framework that Adams builds upon. Too long to do justice to here. Go read. Important. Not what you think.
I’m angry, but unfortunately not shocked anymore.
Grad student gets paper accepted in Science (!) that concludes the Bush Administration’s salvage logging policies are ecologically unsound. Grad student then loses BLM funding as the BLM tries to get Science to suppress the paper.
Grrr.
UPDATE (Feb. 10th): Looks like this story might have a happy ending after all. The BLM asked OSU to restore the project’s funding after lawmakers the cutoff could leave “the impression of scientific censorship.” Ya think?
Or, more accurately, pseudo-fascist bully. Along with all the other wankers who equate criticism of George Bush’s policies with support for terrorism.
For background on the term, see Dave Niewert’s excellent essay of last February, The Rise of Pseudo-Fascism.
Interesting writeup of how MoveOn is using Flickr as a distributed photo sharing application.
And of course, in typical MoveOn style, they’ve invented what sounds like a useful add-on — tools for email-based submissions of photos and for allowing a distributed network of users to review and approve photos — but are not sharing those tools with others.