Sunday, September 30, 2012
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Book idea: mythologie of collaborative creation
The Internet? We Built That
By STEVEN JOHNSON
Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political debate this season — starting with one of the most cited texts of the preconvention campaign, Obama’s so-called “you didn’t build that” speech. “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own,” Obama argued, in the lines that followed his supposed gaffe. “Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” In other words: business uses the Internet, but government made it happen.
About a week after Obama’s speech, The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz took on those lines from Obama’s speech, claiming it was an “urban legend” that the government built the Internet. Credit for the early networking innovations, Crovitz argued, belonged to private-sector companies like Xerox and Apple. It was no accident, he observed, that the Net languished in relative obscurity for two decades until private corporations and venture capitalists turned their focus to it.
So what had once seemed to be a relatively stable narrative grounding has in recent months erupted with all sorts of political tremors. For most of the past two decades, the story of the Internet’s origins followed a fairly standardized plot: the Internet was originally developed by computer scientists whose research was heavily financed by the federal government, most notably through Darpa, the research arm of the Defense Department. Some narratives emphasized the decentralized network architecture designed by Paul Baran to survive a nuclear strike; others gave credit to the British programmer Tim Berners-Lee, whose World Wide Web gave the Internet a more accessible hypertextual layer. And of course there were all those Al Gore jokes.
The renewed political stakes in the details of this origin story are obvious. If you believe Big Government built the most important communications platform of our time, then that success is a powerful riposte to all the standard claims about bureaucratic inefficiencies and incompetence. Government might be able to out-innovate the private sector, given the right focus and commitment (and freedom from being beholden to stockholders). But if you believe that the Internet’s success is largely attributable to the private sector, all the usual libertarian homilies remain untarnished.
So was the Internet created by Big Government or Big Capital? The answer is: Neither. This is what’s most notable about the debate over the Net’s origins: it misses the most interesting part of the story. We live in a world that assumes that the most important and original products in society — bridges, cars, iPads, hospitals, 787s, houses — are created either by states or by corporations. And yet, against all odds, the Internet came from somewhere else entirely.
Like many of the bedrock technologies that have come to define the digital age, the Internet was created by — and continues to be shaped by — decentralized groups of scientists and programmers and hobbyists (and more than a few entrepreneurs) freely sharing the fruits of their intellectual labor with the entire world. Yes, government financing supported much of the early research, and private corporations enhanced and commercialized the platforms. But the institutions responsible for the technology itself were neither governments nor private start-ups. They were much closer to the loose, collaborative organizations of academic research. They were networks of peers.
Peer networks break from the conventions of states and corporations in several crucial respects. They lack the traditional economic incentives of the private sector: almost all of the key technology standards are not owned by any one individual or organization, and a vast majority of contributors to open-source projects do not receive direct compensation for their work. (The Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler has called this phenomenon “commons-based peer production.”) And yet because peer networks are decentralized, they don’t suffer from the sclerosis of government bureaucracies. Peer networks are great innovators, not because they’re driven by the promise of commercial reward but rather because their open architecture allows others to build more easily on top of existing ideas, just as Berners-Lee built the Web on top of the Internet, and a host of subsequent contributors improved on Berners-Lee’s vision of the Web.
Now imagine, for the sake of argument, that some Dr. Evil invented a kind of targeted magnetic-pulse device that could home in on peer-produced software; one push of the button, and every single line of code that had been created through open-source collaborative networks would instantly vanish. What would happen if that button were pushed?
For starters, the Internet and the Web would instantly evaporate. Every Android smartphone, every iPad, iPhone and Mac would go dark. A massive section of our energy infrastructure would cease to function. The global stock markets would go offline for weeks, if not longer. Planes would drop out of the sky. It would be an event on the scale of a world war or a pandemic.
In other words, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world. Peer networks created and maintain the Linux operating system on which Android smartphones are based; the UNIX kernel that Mac OS X and iOS devices use; and the Apache software that powers most Web servers in the world (not to mention the millions of entries that now populate Wikipedia). What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.
It’s not enough to say that peer networks are an interesting alternative to states and markets. The state and the market are now fundamentally dependent on peer networks in ways that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago.
Why is this distinction worth making? Why should we avoid the easy explanations of a government-built Internet versus one animated by private-sector entrepreneurs?
One reason is that there is a growing number of individuals and organizations who believe the digital success of peer networks can be translated into the “real” world. Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age. New organizations are using peer-network approaches to attack low-tech problems. Consider the way Kickstarter has used networks of smaller funders to help solve the problem of supporting creative projects. Only three years old, Kickstarter is now on track to distribute more money this year than the National Endowment for the Arts.
But there is another, more subtle reason to stress the peer-network version of the Internet’s origins. We have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs who changed the world with their vision and their force of will. But as a society we lack master narratives of creative collaboration.
When we talk about change being driven by mass collaboration, it’s often in the form of protest movements: civil rights or marriage equality. That’s a tradition worth celebrating, but it’s only part of the story. The Internet (and all the other achievements of peer networks) is not a story about changing people’s attitudes or widening the range of human tolerance. It’s a story, instead, about a different kind of organization, neither state nor market, that actually builds things, creating new tools that in turn enhance the way states and markets work.
In the lines that followed his “you didn’t build that” comment, Obama managed to champion a collaborative ethos in much more eloquent terms: “The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country: you know what, there are some things we do better together.”
Obama is right, of course; life is full of things we do better together. But what the Internet and its descendants teach us is that there are now new models for doing things together, success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate.
That should be the story we tell our kids when they ask who invented the Internet. Yes, we should tell them about the long-view government spending that paid the initial salaries, and the entrepreneurs who figured out a way to make the new medium commercially viable. But we shouldn’t bury the lead. The Internet was built, first and foremost, by another network, this one made up not of servers but of human minds: open, decentralized, peer.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Democracy and Truth
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/09/the-winners-of-the-3qd-philosophy-prize-2012.html
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2010/11/democracy-is-not-truth-machine.html
"Rational truths are those established by chains of human reasoning that can in principle be replicated by others. Like Euclid's geometry. Science is an archetypal form of rational truth seeking since its authority depends on such replication: that one will always get the same result in the same experiment because the result doesn't depend on who the scientists are, but on the independently existing world. That means for example that if all the climate scientists in the world were wiped out by a freak meteor at a conference, climate science would quickly reappear and say basically the same things again (as more or less happened when the Catholic Church tried to suppress heliocentricism)."
http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2010/11/democracy-is-not-truth-machine.html
"Rational truths are those established by chains of human reasoning that can in principle be replicated by others. Like Euclid's geometry. Science is an archetypal form of rational truth seeking since its authority depends on such replication: that one will always get the same result in the same experiment because the result doesn't depend on who the scientists are, but on the independently existing world. That means for example that if all the climate scientists in the world were wiped out by a freak meteor at a conference, climate science would quickly reappear and say basically the same things again (as more or less happened when the Catholic Church tried to suppress heliocentricism)."
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Ritual is like Gardening
"I go to church because of my grandchildren. I enjoy taking them to the liturgy. But I'm fortunate because the liturgy I take them to the Greek Orthodox service that revolves around doing of liturgical practice rather than talking about belief systems. What you believe isn't the point. Showing up is. We light candles, take communion, make the sign of the cross, and kiss icons. The comfort I derive from these inane rituals is much the same as the comfort I get from gardening."
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Anything that leads to murder should raise doubts about its legitimacy when put in service of so-called spiritual truth. That killing was done "for God" and yet didn't lead to a complete re-think about the theological "approach" to a relationship with God is simply insane. Yet this madness persists today. Every time a sermon is preached where someone says "the Bible says God says" the lie continues to be spread. The answer to all such claims is a loud "Says who?"
Listening to the BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time, hosted by the always wonderful Melvyn Bragg about Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563) one story hit home -- hard! One of the show's contributors told the story of Perotine Massey, a Guernsey woman burned for heresy by the Roman Catholics. She gave birth while in the flames. The baby was tossed back into the fire after it burst from her burning stomach and landed -- alive -- at the feet of a soldier guarding the pire.
This awful event was described in the quaint "Old English" title given to a contemporary engraving depicting the burning as: "A lamentable spectacle of three women, with a child infant brasting out of the Mothers Wombe, being first taken out of the fire, and cast in agayne, and so all burned together in the Isle of Guernsey, 1556 July 18."
Such an account might confirm the superiority of Protestant Christianity to the brutality of Roman Catholicism -- except that Protestants did the same sort of things to Catholics, not to mention to Native Americans.
There is a "reason" for such viciousness: theology practiced as if it is an exact science. Call this the Roman Church/Protestant idea of spirituality as "correct" belief. That's a liability. The equivalent would be to say that you're only married if you can pass an exam on the correct details of your spouse's life history, beliefs, likes and dislikes, blood-type and food preferences.
A theological approach to religious faith attempts to reduce something intuitive to an exact "science." Tick the "wrong" box and you fail the exam.
From liberal to fundamentalist to charismatic, the Protestant denominations are still as united in their commitment to salvation-through-correct-ideas as are the Roman Catholics. The root of the Protestant commitment to salvation through correct belief lies in the retributive and juridical "rationalistic" history of the Roman Catholic Church from which all Protestant denominations evolved. Western Christianity has relied heavily on signing up to "correct" doctrines in order to be saved. Catholics and Protestants may disagree on what is correct but they agree that correct doctrine is needed for salvation.
Believing "wrong" was for much of church history called heresy and punishable by excommunication or death. Religious "certainties" were so fragile they had to be protected by violence by all sides. That should have eliminated this theological correctness retributive and juridical rationalistic approach long ago. It didn't because religion was never about God but about a way to dominate people and keep rulers in power. It still is.
The problem is that the book around which these "correct" doctrines are spun is not a book at all. In that sense it "says" so many things that it says nothing. So the book is a great mine to dig anything out of needed to support one's personal tyranny over others but it is nothing more than that.
For any book to "say" something it has to fulfill 2 tests: First it has to be a work of non-fiction whose truth claims can be corroborated from outside of itself. Second, it has to be by one author or at least by authors who know each other and collaborate to bring their message to readers.
What it can't be and at the same time be said to have a single coherent message worth killing people over, is a collection of myths, essays, letters, stories, recorded oral history, misinformation and fables that were gradually collected and added to over thousands of years without the authors being aware that their bits and pieces of writing would someday be seen as "chapters" in one "book." And since little to nothing in the book can be corroborated from outside testable sources, its truth claims (real or imagined) are worthless if taken as "fact"-based let alone in a juridical sense and then used to judge others.
When I run into the idolatry of Bible worshiping I'm reminded of something I observe with the folks raised in the age of texting and cell phones. I see them expect "answers" from the little black box they hold. They seem to trust it rather than the reality around them. They seem to be losing a tactile sense of how the world works because their connection to it is mediated through their phones, tablets and computers. For instance I know a young woman who tends to check the weather by looking at her phone instead of up at the actual sky. And that reminds me of the people I know who argue about what the Bible "says," for instance "about" gay people, rather than trusting what they know to be true about the gay people they actually know.
At least the weather report on the phone someone is checking (rather than just looking up at the real sky) was put together by well intended sane meteorologists who were actually trying to tell their audience what was happening. But those who look to the Bible for instruction in a way that overrides the reality they actually experience are like people trying to find out what is happening with the weather who watch a cooking show to get a weather report!
Since what is being said on the cooking show has nothing to do with the weather the person looking for information has to come up with an elaborate "explanation" of just how it is that a show about -- say -- making fried chicken actually is about thunderstorms and what to wear to a family picnic.
When absurdity is being rationalized and explained things get a bit crazy, say like this:
"We're having fried chicken at the picnic, they are talking about fried chicken on the show and so they must know all about our picnic and so when they say to use corn flower to bread the chicken because it doesn't burn as badly at regular wheat flower that must mean that there will be no sun today but clouds so we need to bring umbrellas so we won't burn and that just proves that real believers will only be saved because corn flower saves chicken from burning so from now on real believers will never eat white bread again or go out without rain gear. White bread is sinful and a sign of true faith is wearing a raincoat at all times! Amen?"
Here's a theologian at work "explaining" his equivalent of mistaking a cooking show for a weather report, and no less nuts: "Solomon also teaches us that not only was the destruction of the ungodly foreknown, but the ungodly themselves have been created for the specific purpose of perishing (Prov. 16:4)." (Calvin's New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, pp.207-208)
Nothing much has changed since Calvin's day. Franciscan University (Steubenville, Ohio) classifies gay people with murderers and rapists. This is a course description on their website: "SWK 314, DEVIANT BEHAVIOR focuses on the sociological theories of deviant behavior... The behaviors that are primarily examined are murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, and drug use (3 credit hours)"
Nothing much has changed since Calvin's day. Franciscan University (Steubenville, Ohio) classifies gay people with murderers and rapists. This is a course description on their website: "SWK 314, DEVIANT BEHAVIOR focuses on the sociological theories of deviant behavior... The behaviors that are primarily examined are murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness, and drug use (3 credit hours)"
The fact that theologians waste their lives is too bad but the problem is they've taken the rest of us with them into a labyrinth of absurdity where one can imagine a "god" creating the "ungodly themselves... [for] the specific purpose of perishing." I mean can you imagine seriously looking to -- say -- the life work of John Calvin for "answers" as to how to be saved when he said the system was rigged? And can you imagine going to a university where "murder, rape, robbery, prostitution, homosexuality, mental illness" are lumped together? Would taking this course be useful for learning how to relate to your gay daughter? And can you imagine how thinking of a gay friend as having been created for the specific purpose of perishing will help you love her as a human being?
The self-evident ridiculousness of "Bible-based" theology -- a ridiculousness evident to all but those who buy into it as the needed passport to salvation and/or to those who earn a living through it -- is due to the fact that most theology is as farfetched as trying to come up with a way to understand fried chicken recipes as actually being about the "meteorology" of salvation. This isn't because theologians are bad people. It is because they are trying to "interpret" a book that isn't a book. They are looking for a coherent single message in a book that the authors never knew they were writing. They are trying to explain the inexplicable and find coded "messages" where there are none. In that sense theology is the domain of the ultimate conspiracy theorists.
So perhaps it's no coincidence that atheism emerged in the context of the Western Christian expression of both Roman Catholic and Protestant "intellectual" and "rational" religions that carried on doctrinal disputes over their "facts" to such a degree that those theological issues became the root cause of endless wars, persecutions and killings. Beside the idea of correct doctrine leading to actual war Western Christianity paid another price in that it built a house of cards wherein if you remove one card the entire edifice collapses. Since religion was reduced to belief in the right ideas religion became more about the "recipes" in the "cookbook" than about cooking itself.
The problem is that this approach to faith (and cooking) flies in the face of all the rest of human experience which is a matter of trial and error, mixed motivations, sincerity seesawing with bad motives and healthy doubts about everything we encounter. Life is lived on an experiential plain that has less to do with coming up with the right formulations than with passing on wisdom gained by our experience. In other words "correct" ideas don't take into account changed minds.
In reality church for most folks is about community, family and continuity rather than about believing the ideas spouted from the pulpit. For most people the truth is that sitting through sermons is the passport to the coffee hour when the real business of church is conducted in conversations with family and old friends.
Most things we do have a human community reasons for doing them rather than an ideological or theological "reason." I go to church because of my grandchildren. I enjoy taking them to the liturgy. But I'm fortunate because the liturgy I take them to the Greek Orthodox service that revolves around doing of liturgical practice rather than talking about belief systems. What you believe isn't the point. Showing up is. We light candles, take communion, make the sign of the cross, and kiss icons. The comfort I derive from these inane rituals is much the same as the comfort I get from gardening.
The plants I like best in my garden are those plants that have survived many winters like the old rosebush climbing up against the porch. They can be counted on. They are not new and improved and I don't enjoy them by reading about them or talking about them but just by coexisting with them. The doing of rituals - like old plants in old gardens -- also binds us into familiar pathways where others have gone before.
Like caring for an old tree the pleasure is in the stewardship of continuity. And the "point" isn't knowing about roses, it's the pinprick form the thorns, the smell of the flower, the wife who you have taken the flowers to from the same rose tree each year, the grandchild next to you helping you water the rose while you're telling her that you did the same thing with her father "when he was little."
Faith is about finding contexts where we feel comfortable and where we don't have to constantly question ourselves on our motives or how we feel about the "facts" or if we "believe" this or that. Instead we just are. This just being in the moment, this "stillness of the heart" is a completely different experience than sitting through sermons and taking notes or turning to biblical passages and weighing up in one's mind whether you "believe" (whatever that means) in what's being said.
Certainty based on "facts" is a delusion since no information is complete and there's nothing we "know" that later we might not change our minds about. But experience is something that grows and can be added to organically. Learning by hands-on experience is not an either-or proposition. It is a matter of looking up at the sky to see what is happening in reality instead of down at an electronic device. And connecting with the experience of grace is better than looking at a book and reading about it.
A "fact based" religious life -- in other words the idea that theology is a road to knowing the "right way" to love God -- is like a fact-based marriage where each person has to be "right" about everything. It's devoid of hope on those days when you don't agree. And spirituality like a marriage only works when the prime directive of love overrides who is right or wrong.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Secularism is Not Atheism
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/09/secularists_are_not_atheists/
"Holyoake, for his part, endorsed an “atheism of reflection,” which “listens reverentially for the voice of God, which weighs carefully the teachings of a thoughtful Theism; but refuses to recognize the officious, incoherent babblement of intolerant or presumptuous men.”
"Holyoake, for his part, endorsed an “atheism of reflection,” which “listens reverentially for the voice of God, which weighs carefully the teachings of a thoughtful Theism; but refuses to recognize the officious, incoherent babblement of intolerant or presumptuous men.”
Friday, September 7, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips
History repeats itself: "..the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." Abraham Lincoln
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Reading Obama
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Obama-American-Political-Tradition/dp/0691147469
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/multimedia/video/william-james-and-josiah-royce-jamess-pragmatism-and-american-social-thought-1907-2
http://www.radioopensource.org/reading-obamas-mind-pragmatism-and-its-perils/
http://www.hds.harvard.edu/multimedia/video/william-james-and-josiah-royce-jamess-pragmatism-and-american-social-thought-1907-2
http://www.radioopensource.org/reading-obamas-mind-pragmatism-and-its-perils/
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