The Illusive Edge

In 2004, the talk of the town was Republican supremacy, Karl Rove’s database, concerned Soccer Moms and pumped Nascar Dads. Columns, articles and books were being written about the rising tide of conservatism, the end of his–story, and the inevitable, permanent Republican majority. Republicans were on top of their game, and Democrats nowhere to be found. An acclaimed documentary featuring my boy Hutch even came out to put a wrap around it. Indeed, everyone thought, so went the Nation.

Now fast forward to November 4^th, 2008. O-to-the-Bama. Hope, change, blackberries and hip’n’roll we can believe in. Jay-Z breaks the news: mon président est noir! But even more unexpectedly, he’s a Democrat! What happened there??? The decline of the Soccer Mom? A meteorite? The emergence of new voting demographics? The unforeseen urban workaholics, Internet-junkie empty nesters, and new immigrants taking root? A Republican global meltdown? I see two reasons: discipline and discipline.

Politics, Harold Lasswell famously posited, is “who gets what, when, and how” (to which I would actually add, why). Who wins in politics, however, tends to be a much simpler equation: $$$ + rigor + zeitgeist + $$$ = victory. An unpopular war and an economy in peril provided the frame. The fine-tuned Obama for America machine took care of the rest. Running like a Swiss watch.

As American sociologist Frank White famously argued, “Mo Money, Mo Problems”. Politics nevertheless escapes this notorious rule. Obama raised over $770 million and spent over a third (~$250 million) on TV ads. Mo Money, Mo Chances. But while money matters (tonight, tomorrow, and anytime), it isn’t enough to win.

In less than four years, Democrats out-organized Republicans, leveraging the Internet for all that it could offer, from money to money to money to community organizing. But the key to Obama’s triumph primarily lies in his cold, ruthlessly coherent and flawlessly executed campaign strategy. A campaign in which data trumped “assumptions”; which meant departing from the traditional campaign wisdom of devotion to druid-like figures with “political acumen”, “gut” or “experience”. Regressions, on average, tend to outperform hunch.

A campaign in which decision-making was simplified, clarified and therefore more predictable. A campaign in which timing was more important than perfection. A campaign not obsessed with controlling what happened outside of it. A campaign not about the candidate as product, but about covering a movement. In other words, a campaign as cause that stayed on message from start to finish.

And so the Internet definitely played its part. But here is the trick: technology doesn’t belong to anyone. Neither does rigor nor a millennial craving to win. Thinking of current Democratic advantage in online organizing and fundraising as irreversible would lead to the same mistake people made four years ago about the formidable Republican mobilizing machine. The edge is real, but it surely ain’t eternal. This is a tribute to technology as a volatile, fluid, increasingly more accessible, and ultimately “just”, phenomenon. In the long-term technology knows no exclusive proprietor, and empowerment through technology no perennial beneficiary. And that, is simply exceptional.

Transgressive Groundswelling

The Groundswell is defined as “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other instead of from companies.” It’s about a vast and rather brutal realignment of necessities and allegiances, away from traditional, top-down, producer-customer relationship models.

Li and Bernoff do a great job describing the various implications that the Groundswell induces for companies. Unfortunately, however, the book is almost exclusively about how to deal or cope with the emergence of social technologies; in the authors’ words: how to “listen to”, “talk to”, “energize” and “embrace” the Groundswell. It misses the point, in my opinion, that the greatest challenge is less to design ways and strategies to “handle” such phenomenon, than to fundamentally rethink and redesign business models.

The book offers great insights into the various tools and methods to domesticate the Groundswell, to make it less scary, more palatable. It can help you figure out how to mitigate risks or even come out on top in terms of taking commercial advantage of the situation. But it only sheds moderate – if any— light on the larger issue at play: namely that the Groundswell is not simply a threat, but a fantastic opportunity for progress and growth.

“You’ll be able to build on your successes, both with customers and within your own company. And then, as the groundswell rises and becomes ubiquitous, you will be ready.” This quote captures pretty well, I think, the shortcomings of the book. It is ultimately a book about “preparation” (for something perceived as inevitable). Yet the key to the Groundswell, or to any other similar revolutions, is forward-looking adaptation and transgression, not mere reaction.

A final insight into the Groundswell is the fundamental challenge – if not the threat – that it poses to institutions. The Groundswell reflects a completely different attitude towards institutions and, arguably, even organizes their bypassing, circumventing, and weakening. The Conversation is no longer filtered through, organized by, and path dependent on, institutions. I would have liked the authors to delve a little deeper into that, for this is ultimately relevant both to governments and businesses. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.” The Groundswell thus poses a fundamental question, that of the future of order (and society) without institutions.

The Symphony of the Plausible Promise

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is truly an outstanding essay that draws powerful and far-reaching lessons about the attainment of progress, our understanding of human nature, and the practice of leadership.

I’ve touched in a prior post on the somewhat flawed (in my opinion) notion of the internet as this exhilarating, Über-democratic playground where possibility knows no end and where opportunity, bread, and booze are happily and equally shared by everyone. I’m tempted to take on open source in a similar fashion, but this time around I feel much more like Kevin Lomax doing so. Oh well. I’m tempted to take on the widely held, or so it seems, misconception that open source is about armies of benevolent nerds spread around the world and heroically taking on millions of projects in a perfectly smooth, fully participatory and impeccably integrated flow.

Myth breaker #1: open source projects have leaders, they’re just not called CEOs and they don’t flash around business cards. Yet they do provide a leadership service by sparking the first ounce of creativity, the first lines of code, the framework to start from, the initial playground. Great open source leaders don’t chair board meetings. Their sport is providing vision. Their business is to make plausible promises. They coordinate and nudge for a living.

Myth breaker #2: open source projects do not really look like loud and messy college reunions. In fact, they’re more like academic conferences, where people only show up to the panels they’re interested in and respectable participants make sure to skip the grandiose keynote address. Not everyone talks to each other. In fact, no one actually has to. The real work occurs at the subtask level. Open source jobs are easily and functionally separable. One person gives some directions, hosts the party, and the rest focus on providing something specific. Think grad students potluck dinners.

Myth breaker #3: open source actually requires incentives and does not reflect the much awaited, millennial transgression of human nature. Open source participants are not really waving little red books and certainly have no interest in storming the Winter Palace. In contrast with more traditional free markets, the currency of open source has more to do with “egoboo”, reputation and a sense of belonging. But these incentives are real. That’s partly why figuring out the economics of open source matters. Hence Larry Lessig and “creative commons”. While the “principle of command” is indeed absent, it is not entirely irrelevant a concept when analyzing open source politics (see Kent Beck’s technique of “extreme programming”). Kropotkin talked about a “principle of common understanding”. What I see is regulated connivance.

Myth breaker #4: all projects are not open sourceable. While I hear the argument about how every single problem (no matter its size, breadth or degree of triviality) virtually will always have a constituency or audience, I’m not convinced all projects would actually benefit from open sourcing. Having recognized the centrality of the “vision-provider” to the process, one can seriously question the supposed value-free and agnostic nature of open source design. What the true external validity of open source as a framework is, and to what extent is it extendable to large-scale public policy issues, remain mostly unanswered questions.

Now it’s also only fair to rendre à César ce qui lui appartient:

Wonder #1: open source makes us think about “perfection” from a radically different perspective. We belong to a world where achievement is primarily conceived as a linear, if not teleological, concept. Perfection as a long, delineated, and solitary march. We now learn to approach it as a somewhat contingent, perhaps more modest and more contained, notion: “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away”. Open source therefore sounds much more like Latin-American literature than a sonnet by Francis Bacon.

Wonder #2: open source goes far beyond the linear model and traditional Weltanschauung of “creation-provision”. We full well know that human nature has a bias for structure and operational visibility, all of which closed source models supposedly ensure. The sad truth is, we as humans would indeed happily trade quality and ingenuity for certainty. We are troubled by the void in accountability structures and the lack in prevision capabilities. Open source troubles us because its predominant form of contract is mostly intangible, digital and reputational. Yet we are missing an amazing insight along the way: delivery is not the point, (dramatic) creative improvement is.

Wonder #3: open source constitutes a truly fascinating example of how the brute force of statistical power, critical contributive mass, and diffused interest can topple centralized expertise. “The best hacks start out as personal solutions to the author’s everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns out to be typical for a large class of users”. While we acknowledge the undeniable existence of incentive structures, even informal ones, something else is clearly happening too. The Cathedral and the Bazaar’s parable goes beyond the self-interest of Adam Smith’s not so benevolent butchers, brewers and bakers, to articulate arguably an even more complex system of interested collaborative interactions. We’re talking egoless programming, disdain for territoriality, poetry in motion. These ants truly are special. Or perhaps it is open source design that makes them so…

Wonder #4: we can be heroes, just for one day. Or not. Open source is both inspiring and sobering. One the one hand, it captures quite powerfully the fact that anyone, really, can make a tremendous contribution to “progress”. On the other hand, it entertains the more humbling thought that true change (whether social, political or technological) does not necessarily require, nor automatically grant, the cape of heroic leadership. The very practice of open source deconstructs our culture’s understanding of progress as necessarily driven by romantic heroism. As a dear professor of mine used to say, “revolution is not about building barricades; it is the real, practical activity of building a better life, starting with the cards one is dealt.” Perhaps this essay could help us better spot “true genius” when it’s around us (sometimes even in ourselves) and we barely notice it.

I would argue that the success of Web 2.0 lies in its ability to audaciously and almost seamlessly turn users into stakeholders and willful, value-adding participants through inclusive and collaborative designs. The virtue of open source, it seems to me, is to harness the sheer, brute force of the talented and dedicated thousands, perhaps millions. To let the puddle of water find a drain, and to organize for the ants to find the food. My buddy Charlie Gomez, a great friend and a brilliant mind, is pushing the conversation even farther by examining different network architectures and how people best go about solving complex problems in parallel.

His research draws upon previous work by Lazer and Friedman and turns out to be pretty fascinating. For simple problems, he finds, the more connections in the network the better the final solution. However, for more complex problems, the fewer connections in the network the better the final solution. Sounds familiar? Charles/Charlie/Charlitos’ intuition is that “people need to struggle through more and more complex problem spaces in order to find a better solution”. Fewer connections simply forces people to search for better solutions. The caveat here is that fewer connections might find a better solution, but take longer to equilibrate to a final solution. Now my question to him would be: what is the Internet’s impact on network segmentation and connection-building capacity, as pertaining to open source projects? How does one think about the relationship between a wide, virtually endless platform and the potential need to limit or contain the number of connections, in the context of collaborative processes optimization?

That takes us right back to open source. So let’s get it right, people. I think progress would be better served, and we’d best utilize the truly awesome power of open source, were we to actually see it for what it is. Open source is really about the cold, strategic, and immensely empowering process through which various energies, talents, imaginations, and “better angels” are orchestrated to achieve the greater good. But this symphony ultimately requires leadership, organization, incentives, superior communication and interpersonal skills, sound vision, and an appreciation for scale and feasibility. Its promise actually is not as romantic as we’d like it to be, but it is real and it is plausible. And quite frankly, it’s all that matters.

Revolutions as Experiments

The newspaper industry’s inability to reinvent itself in the Internet age is about cognitive dissonance in the context of organizational and social change. In this week’s reading, Clay Shirky provides a very good framework for how papers responded – or indeed failed to respond – to the digital challenge; opposing the “realists” to the “fabulists” and even more interestingly, shedding light on the respective place (and role) these two groups tended to be given in newspaper organizations. His piece helps us better understand what happened, and what is still happening, in the midst of such radical transformations.

There will always be, in times of distress and uncertainty, a tendency to resort to known territory, look for familiar faces, and turn to habitual processes. Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-born novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, human rights activist, and one of my professors in college, was among the first to theorize and write about cultural symbolism in children literature, analyzing the hidden political and social messages behind Babar, the Lone Ranger and “other innocent heroes”. In The Empire’s Old Clothes, Dorfman provides great insights into the ways human nature copes, deals with, adapts, and fails to adapt, to change and uncertainty:

“In a crisis situation there is a decisive tendency, as my people discovered against their will, to embrace and promote the most irrational and authoritarian solutions, searching for salvation through the deification of that which is supposed to be the eternal human condition and which in point of fact is a constellation of traditional values which have been handed down and drilled into us over the years. These are the values of a social class: Its members impose their views on their subordinates. The fear of the unknown, of losing your identity, of having to undergo changes in your familiar landscape, encourages the repression of everyone else as well as the repression of your own doubts”

This argument is mostly about dictatorship and the misuse or abuse of authority, but it is more generally about our common inability to embrace and achieve “adaptive work”; the process through which individuals as well as societies manage to clarify a conflict in values, or bridge “the gap between the values that we stand for and the current conditions under which we operate”. Adaptive work requires serious re-evaluation, and sometimes even invalidation, of our previous selves and the ways we’ve been living. Its challenge predominantly lies in not seeking an easy answer, like that usually offered by a turn to authority.

Extrapolating a little bit, I also thought this quote captured pretty well the organizational failure of newspapers to reinvent themselves and evolve. Not so much their failure in finding a technical solution to the digital challenge (the jury still seems to be out on whether there actually is one), than their incapacity, as Shirky argues, to position themselves both internally as organizations and externally as an industry to embrace the transformation. Newspapers indeed have remained on a frenzy for a while, listening to the fabulists singing to them the sweet yet illusory lullabies of continuity and perpetual tradition.

Yet, in Fouad Ajami’s words, “men cannot indefinitely live on frenzy or be kept in a trance”. Neither can business models. And so the revolution seems underway. Rather, many little acts of revolution seem underway. We talk corporate, public, and social models. We witness investigative crowdsourcing, we re-conceptualize strategies to support the art, and we device collaborative, pro-am methodologies. It’s exciting. It’s messy. It’s empowering. It might work. It might not. But it’s happening. All at once.

We also quickly see that, to work well and deliver high quality products in a sustainable manner, citizen journalism will have to seriously ponder the fundamental differences between a cause and a task (and their implications for models sustainability). We also note that in the Guardian’s case, the crowdsourced bit was the “screening”, not the investigative work. And we wonder whether the experiment would have actually worked, had the job not been as sexy, controversial, and voyeuristic? (My sense on this is that you’ll always find people to go through politicians’ expenses, much fewer to monitor traffic problems in Medford.) Finally, we notice that current public models tend to rely on volatile, sometimes temporary or gig-like, sources of funding. Needless to say, the crusade will require more sustained, disinterested and perhaps even institutionalized support. It will also necessitate to train amateurs, recalibrate professionals, and make everyone else perform adaptive work.

The Internet is contributing to this by, among others, bringing down the barriers to, and the opportunity cost of, participation. It provides an avenue to perform, validate, and share, a collective sense of duty. Information as a public good! The paradoxical nature (and beauty) of the digital age lies in that the gradual shift from “interesting if minor” to “essential and transformative” is fundamentally fragile, certainly undetermined and most likely overdetermined. But its possibility is real. And it is powerful, and frightening, and hopeful. And it’s looking at us.

The point here, in the end, remains that much of this new thinking and reinvention is not coming from editorial boardrooms. Perhaps because the “wrong” people sit in them. Perhaps because newspapers are not structured to deliver, let alone initiate, such evolutions. Perhaps because, ultimately, “society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need, in fact, is journalism”.
Act II, Scene 1.

Powerfully Fair but Fundamentally Unequal

Having read Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything, I am left with two thoughts. One about relevance, and one about justice. Both try to engage the concept of blogging as necessary and authentic “progress”. Both try to shed light on the powerful reach, and yet inherent limitations, of the blogging experience.

The notion that one can say anything, from anywhere, at any time, at virtually no cost, and under pretty weak terms of accountability, is clearly empowering – if not exhilarating. In many ways, the phenomenon of blogging captures the true (and righteous) extent of technology’s contribution to the advancement of human freedom. It has lowered, perhaps even defeated, the barriers to unlimited self-expression and unconstrained information. It has done well to the world.

But opportunity without responsibility has also proved a recipe for sterile noise, travesties of progress, or simply a waste of bandwidth. The Washingtonian’s new editor Garrett Graff put it best the other day in one of my classes: “the last ten years of blogging and citizen journalism provide the best empirical evidence of why some people just do not get to publish a book”. Say Everything argues that there can’t be too much communication or too vast an archive of ­humanity’s thoughts and doings. Despite such celebratory tone, one cannot but acknowledge that a fair amount of today’s blogs remain poor in content, self-absorbed, redundant, literary weak, and obscure at best.

Now we all love ourselves some socially productive mediocrity, and I’m certainly not advocating for the establishment of the online Relevance Brigades. In fact, I do believe there is such a thing as productive cacophony, messy evolutions, or that there is sometimes a point in not necessarily having a point, or in having a different point, one that doesn’t please, appease, entertain, validate, comfort or protect us. Think ART. Think kids before they get educated out of creativity.

And so blogging as art, as the accumulation of creative 1s and 0s. Blogging as the messy, disorganized, often dysfunctional, sometimes irrelevant, but always “authentic” labour of the digital millions, spread across the world. Some kind of tech-powered democratic epiphany. A voice for everyone, and everyone a keyboard away from full participation to the Great Global Conversation. But expression implies an audience, and that’s precisely when la vérité sort du puits. The unadvertised peril of the Long Tail is indeed that such conversations oftentimes end up being with oneself.

Ironically enough, the arrival of more voices in our digital “out there” has not dispersed attention but rather concentrated it further. In Clay Shirky’s words: “freedom of choice makes stars inevitable”. Power law distribution is serious stuff that should make us all reconsider for a minute our typical understanding of progress solely as the perpetual extension of comparable opportunity. There could in fact be more than meets the mouse.

In the Republic of Inbound Links, your worth is not only determined by how many you reach but even more so by whom you reach. While both the concept and practice of blogging solidly rest on beds of fairness, the truth is that as a socio-technological phenomenon it only brought greater inequality. Inequality in readership, inequality in attention, and inequality in relative importance. And so blogging is progress in that it created new communities, spread unconstrained information and empowered the technologically inept to participate. But at the end of the day, it fundamentally remains a fair, yet unequal experience.

To those who ask, “How many blogs does the world need?”, Rosenberg sharply replies: “How many telephone calls does the world need?” The truth is, it still seems to depend on whom the calls are coming from.

The Search — chap. 4, 5 and 6

I just finished reading chapters 4, 5 and 6 of The Search. A couple of thoughts come to mind.

First, that Google indirectly reflects our societies’ secular drive towards a less plutocratic determination of information. Organizing knowledge historically has been the exclusive task –if not the privilege—of the few: whether they be successively the strong, the noble, the powerful, or the “enlightened”. The source of their legitimacy (rightful or not), and the rationale behind the claim to their authority, evolved over the years from blood and pedigree, to political influence and economic might, to more recently technical expertise and scientific proficiency.

The story of organizing knowledge, and more particularly that of sanctioning information as relevant information, mimics humanity’s rocky yet fundamental journey towards self-government. Some argue Google initiated the democratization of the access to, and organization of, information. Others contend that it in fact merely channeled, structured or provided the technologically-apt avenue to, an otherwise inevitable movement. From the answer to such question one could derive the true meaning, and place, of “innovation” as a social, scientific and historical concept. Innovation as inevitable, or innovation as inevitably changing the course of history?

PageRank uses links –and backlinks in particular—as proxy for importance. As such, it institutionalized the notion of rank according to popular consent or diffuse interest. There is no question that our era feels more comfortable about the participatory and democratic essence of folksonomy than the unilateral and somewhat aristocratic nature of taxonomy. Google indirectly empowers each and everyone of us to “be counted” in the determination of what constitutes relevant information. It is yet to seriously confront, however, the simple notion that aggregated intentions do not necessarily labour relevance, or value.

A final thought on humility. Our cult of success as an individualized, ϋber-glamorous, and pecuniarized concept diverts us from facing the tough reality; that of the inherently volatile nature of success. That for every single astonishing success, there are countless failures. That for each Gates or Zuckerberg, there are millions of anonymous, unsuccessful innovators. That for every Page or Brin, there is a Gross out there. It also makes us oblivious to the somewhat arbitrary unfolding of success. That Flycast indeed could have been 5 years ahead of its time. Finally, humility opens up the even more intriguing question that there could very well be no Google. In other words, that there is nothing inevitable or intrinsically imperative, about any such creation. The very materialization of Google should remain, in the end, both an extremely inspiring and humbling statement about the virtue of innovation, the power of free enterprise, and the reach of the imagination.

nouveau monde

welcome to my blog-

q: how can we be free and yet be governed?
a: by governing ourselves…

take a look at this article from the ny times on Gov 2.0. it does a pretty good job shedding light on both the virtues and the vices of the internet as a potential tool for increased democratic participation and ultimately, self-government.