philosophy

Martin Heidegger’s 1954 piece, The Question Concerning Technology transformed the way I look at technology (it’s really dense, and the translation is heavy-handed). I read it in 1995, a decade before I got implicated in the web, and 40 years after it was published. When I first started writing on the web in 2004, I had a draft post, consisting of one sentence, called “The Question Concerning Digital Technology,” which was to be an attempt at an update of the Heidegger piece for a networked world. That draft has long since disappeared, but I’ve been thinking about it again of late.

A rough summary of Heidegger’s argument is:

• the purpose of technology is to order nature for human use
• humans are part of nature
• in ordering nature through technology, humans become part of that which is ordered
• in becoming part of the ordered universe, humans lose humanity
• this is a bad thing
• we might be able to save ourselves, by appealing to the greek root techne, which means, in part: “art”

It’s a compelling description of technology in general, and the web in particular: that the prime driving force is ordering “nature” (in a broad sense), with the result being, more or less, efficiency. If you look at what we’ve all been doing over the last few years on the web, much of the most exciting things had to do with ordering - specifically information, for more efficient access:

• google as a high-level orderer of information on the web
• RSS as an orderer of information sources I want to stay aware of
• del.icio.us as an orderer of information I want to keep track of & share with others
• flickr as an orderer of photos
• wikipedia as an orderer of encyclopaedic information

The list can go on and on, and of course “technology” does many different things, beyond “just” ordering, but in general the force propelling technology often seems to be mastery of the world around us for our use, one way or another. Which, as Heidegger points out, has worrisome implications for all of us.

I’ve always come at technology from something like this angle: I’m not particularly interested in technology per se, I am interested in the ways we might use it to make our lives richer and more meaningful. And in general, I think that creating things is the activity that gives humans the greatest sense of meaning and richness in their lives. Certainly that’s the case for me, and from my beginnings on the web, it was the confluence of free software (that is, the building and dissemination of free tools), collaboration, and unlimited distribution that excited me. “Everyone” could create things now, and share those things with the world. The projects I am most proud of (LibriVox, Atwater Digital Literacy) are platforms for people to create things that, I hope, bring richness into their own lives. I’ve always considered LibriVox as most important for what it does for our volunteers: it gives them a way to deepen their connection to a text they love, to read it and record it, and give it away; to make connections with literature that they might not have made otherwise. That we’re also making a free library of audio literature for the world is in some ways a fringe benefit. [Interestingly, and as a side note, coding itself is, to coders, a deeply creative and satisfying enterprise].

Of late, I’ve been feeling cold about the web. So much of what is going on is the ordering of nature, which, if you believe Heidegger, is the inevitable drive of technology. And “dangerous” for our humanity. I know many people involved in working on tranches of this ordering, and I have a few projects along this line as well (datalibre, earideas, collectik). Just off the top of my head: Evan’s Wikitravel tries to better order travel info; Vinismo order’s wine information; Dopplr tries to better manage your travel, and intersections with others who are moving around too; pal mat is working on google maps, ordering geography; the praized guys are building a better system to organize places and preferences. More will come. All of it is “good,” in the sense that it makes it easier to do the things we want to do, but I often hear Heidegger’s warning echoing through my mind: in ordering nature, we are becoming that which is ordered, and so we risk losing our humanity.

Here are some of the things that are coming, I think, from the inevitable drive of technology to order nature, and our human desire to have efficient sorting systems:

• We’ll continue to cataloging everything (from books to people to places) online, and find better ways to sort all that information, using objective authority (eg authoritative incoming links, aka google juice), personal network authority (links/preferences from your chosen network) as relevance indicators.
• We will map this network on the web, and increasingly apply it to physical space (starting with google maps, and becoming more customized and personalized)
• Mobile technology will mean both that our access to cataloged information becomes ubiquitous, and our efforts to catalog things will be unconstrained
• RFID, or something like it, will mean that this sorting of physical objects will move from its current general state (eg. tracking & finding something like “any copy of a certain book”), to specific (eg. tracking & finding something like “a particular copy of a certain book”), and will touch people too
• We’ll get all the media we want, when we want it
• We’ll get most of the data we want, when we want it
• Our mobile devices will increasingly interact with our physical surroundings (point at an object, get info on it; buy it; sell it), and will become our bank, and keys, our thermostat, and more, as well as everything else it already is (telephone, email, library, map etc).
• All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
• More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
• Data about people will become structured, and mostly available [For a well-networked human in my circle, this has already happened: I can track their interests, on a daily basis (del.icio.us, google reader shared items, digg etc.), their movements (dopplr), their public thoughts (blogs, twitter), books they like (librarything, gutenberg bookshelf), things they buy, etc etc.]

Lots of money will be made (if all goes well, some of it by friends of mine) finding new and different ways to do all this, and more and more. In essence, we’ll continue to use the web (and increasingly, mobile devices) to better order nature. And we’ll become better ordered at the same time.

Looking at this very brief list of what’s going to happen, I can’t help but think: “so what?” Is any of this going to make people’s lives richer or more meaningful?

My suspicion is “no.” I say this as a digital native, if a relatively recent, adoptive native (starting in 2004). For myself, I have found that the price of the benefits of the web has been heavy: while the web has allowed me to do all sorts of things, to build things and relationships, and projects, I find the quality of my time on the web so often unsatisfying. In a comparison of value to me between a random “leisure” hour on the web and a random hour doing something else in the real world, the real world trumps the web almost every time. Yet the web still usually wins the battle for my time (this says as much about me as it does about the web, of course).

I had a dinner a while back with Mike Lenczner, of Ile Sans Fil, and Jon Udell and some others, and this was the question MIke was asking, more or less: “so what?” Is free wifi access for all really such a great thing for people? Free encyclopedia? Free audio books? That’s not to say there is no value in those things, but we in the tech world imbue this stuff with a magical capacity to improve people’s lives, and I don’t think it’s clear that it has. Much less RSS feeds and online bookmarking. Free Software we see as a moral victory; OLPC as a revolutionary project that will save Africa; global voices online, as a dialogue builder that will transform our understanding of each other. All these things are good, great even, and there are countless other examples of wonderful online projects. But part of me agrees with Michael: it’s not clear that on balance they are truly improving people’s lives in any real sense.

But the point of all this is not really to criticize the web, nor to gnash teeth about the things people, including me, are building with it. Rather it’s a call to look at technology from a different angle, a call to designers and technologists and webbies and to consider a different approach, inspired by Heidegger’s solution of technology as art.

The web provides us enormous and efficient access, but a problem seems to me that it strips away the intimacy of our connection. Consider reading a book, versus reading on line; conversing in IM versus having a coffee; viewing a photo versus touching an object. This is not to criticize any of these experiences, or to say we are stuck with the modes and interfaces and tools we have now. I’m not saying that the web means less intimacy, exactly.

But what if we, those of us trying to make the world better with what we do on the web, rethink our projects in these terms. Leave the ordering for a moment, and consider intimacy instead.

What can we, as a community interested in making lives richer and more meaningful, do with technology to help humans experience more intimacy with the things that are important to them?

I don’t really have any answers, but it seems to me that it’s a challenge worth considering.

The web, and technology, will continue to order the world, there is no doubt about that. Your participation in this process is fine - and probably lucrative. But there is more, and more exciting things to think about.

A truly radical and creative use of technology, will find ways to help humans become more intimate with the things that matter to them. Those things might be art, books or songs; and people; probably food, and family. I don’t really know what else, and I don’t really know what I expect this to mean, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

Well worth checking out.

One Nation Under Google: Citizenship in the Technological Republic

A public talk by Professor Darin Barney
Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship, McGill University.

Friday, March 14, 2008
Arts W-215, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, McGill University
18h30, free

Does more technology equal more freedom? While the nuts and bolts of technological progress - computers, cellphones, internet access wired and wireless - become accessible to more and more people, the promise of increased civic engagement enabled by these gadgets seems to have eluded our wired society. There’s a lot more to technology, and to democracy, than wires and buttons, and it has a much deeper affect on our lives than simply being tools we can use well or badly.

In Dr. Barney’s words, “technology is, at once, irretrievably political and consistently depoliticizing. It is at the centre of this
contradiction that the prospects for citizenship in the midst of technology lie.” Presenting a range of examples from YouTube to the
hidden networks of food production and government bureaucracy, Barney contests the common notion that technology necessarily leads to enhanced freedom and improved civic engagement. One Nation Under Google examines the challenge of citizenship in a technological society, and asks whether the demands of technology are taking over the practice of democracy.

Presented in collaboration with CKUT 90.3FM

[ps, godshdarn it, ckut has a frustrating web site]

QUESTION: How can you hold the “Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship” and not have a blog?

Kids in a school start building Legotown. Eventually, powerful Legotown figures emerge, and inequalities surface. Some kids are excluded from Legotown, some control the enterprise, some struggle against each other; trading markets develop for various pieces. Teachers get nervous. Eventually, Legotown gets destroyed by external forces, and teachers ponder what they’ve wrought, and start a number of “experiments” to see how the kids react to changing rules.

Why We Banned Legos: Exploring power, ownership, and equity in an early childhood classroom, by Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin. A wonderful and thought-provoking essay/report.

[I should note that I am glad I was not in this class as a kid, with these somehow-creepy-social-engineering teachers]

All of it applies somehow to the “open” world of the web, in some ways I have not quite figured out yet. Here are some choice paras:

The nature of power:

During the boom days of Legotown, we’d suggested to the key Lego players that there was an unequal distribution of power giving rise to conflict and tension. Our suggestions were met with deep resistance. Children denied any explicit or unfair power, making comments like “Some-body’s got to be in charge or there would be chaos,” and “The little kids ask me because I’m good at Legos.” They viewed their power as passive leadership, benignly granted, arising from mastery and long experience with Legos, as well as from their social status in the group.

What does power look like?:

We began by inviting the children to draw pictures of power, knowing that when children represent an idea in a range of “languages” or art media, their understandings deepen and expand. “Think about power,” said Kendra. “What do you think ‘power’ means? What does power look like? Take a few minutes to make a drawing that shows what power is.”

As children finished their drawings, we gathered for a meeting to look at the drawings together. The drawings represented a range of understandings of power: a tornado, love spilling over as hearts, forceful and fierce individuals, exclusion, cartoon superheroes, political power.

On being powerless (in one of the post-Legotown trading games):

When the teaching staff met to reflect on the Lego trading game, we were struck by the ways the children had come face-to-face with the frustration, anger, and hopelessness that come with being on the outside of power and privilege. During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, “I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up.” In the game, the children could experience what they’d not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt.

On system unfairness vs. individual unfairness:

To make sense of the sting of this disenfranchisement, most of the children cast Liam and Kyla as “mean,” trying to “make people feel bad.” They were unable or unwilling to see that the rules of the game — which mirrored the rules of our capitalist meritocracy — were a setup for winning and losing. Playing by the rules led to a few folks winning big and most folks falling further and further behind. The game created a classic case of cognitive disequilibrium: Either the system is skewed and unfair, or the winners played unfairly. To resolve this by deciding that the system is unfair would call everything into question; young children are committed to rules and rule-making as a way to organize a community, and it is wildly unsettling to acknowledge that rules can have built-in inequities. So most of the children resolved their disequilibrium by clinging to the belief that the winners were ruthless — despite clear evidence of Liam and Kyla’s compassionate generosity.

On ownership (which, by the way, illustrates the radical and difficult departure that projects like LibriVox force us to confront, and why public domain - renouncing ownership - is so much more radical than creative commons - which just defines new rules of ownership):

In their reflections, the children articulated several shared theories about how ownership is conferred.

* If I buy it, I own it:

Sophia: “She owns the lavender balls because she makes them, but if I buy it, then it’s mine.”

* If I receive it as a gift, I own it:

Marlowe: “My mom bought this book for me because she thought it would be a good reading book for me. I know I own it because my mom bought it and she’s my mom and she gave it to me.”

* If I make it myself, I own it:

Sophie: “I sewed this pillow myself with things that my teacher gave me, like stuffing and fabric. I sewed it and it turned into my pillow because it’s something I made instead of something I got at the store.”

* If it has my name on it, I own it:

Alex: “My teacher made this pillow for me and it has my name on it.”

Kendra: “If I put my name on it, would I own it?”

Alex: “Well, Miss S. made it for me… but if your name was on it, then you would own it.”

Sophie: “Kendra, don’t put your name on it, OK?”

* If I own it, I make the rules about it:

Alejandro: “I own this computer, because my grandpa gave it to me. I lend it to my friends so that they can play with it. But I make the rules about it.”

Teachers impose the Bolshevik Revolution, to build New Legotown:

We invited the children to work in small, collaborative teams to build Pike Place Market with Legos. We set up this work to emphasize negotiated decision-making, collaboration, and collectivity. We wanted the children to practice the big ideas we’d been exploring. We wanted Lego Pike Place Market to be an experience of group effort and shared ownership: If Legotown was an embodiment of individualism, Lego Pike Place Market would be an experiment in collectivity and consensus.

Kids start sounding like zombie-versions of Newt Gingrich’s worst nightmare:

From our conversations, several themes emerged.

* Collectivity is a good thing:

“You get to build and you have a lot of fun and people get to build onto your structure with you, and it doesn’t have to be the same way as when you left it…. A house is good because it is a community house.”

* Personal expression matters:

“It’s important that the little Lego plastic person has some identity. Lego houses might be all the same except for the people. A kid should have their own Lego character to live in the house so it makes the house different.”

* Shared power is a valued goal:

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building. And it’s important to have the same priorities.”

“Before, it was the older kids who had the power because they used Legos most. Little kids have more rights now than they used to and older kids have half the rights.”

* Moderation and equal access to resources are things to strive for:

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes…. We should all just have the same number of pieces, like 15 or 28 pieces.”

Teachers get excited by the raw clay of Hobbesian childhood they have molded, through idealism and power structure management, into paragons of Rawlsian enlightenment:

As teachers, we were excited by these comments. The children gave voice to the value that collectivity is a solid, energizing way to organize a community — and that it requires power-sharing, equal access to resources, and trust in the other participants.

Paradise, built and achieved:

From this framework, the children made a number of specific proposals for rules about Legos, engaged in some collegial debate about those proposals, and worked through their differing suggestions until they reached consensus about three core agreements:

*All structures are public structures. Everyone can use all the Lego structures. But only the builder or people who have her or his permission are allowed to change a structure.
*Lego people can be saved only by a “team” of kids, not by individuals.
*All structures will be standard sizes.

With these three agreements — which distilled months of social justice exploration into a few simple tenets of community use of resources — we returned the Legos to their place of honor in the classroom.

A fascinating story, and one I need to think about more. It’s very relevant to life in places like LibriVox, I think, and I’m not sure why I am reacting with at least some negative cynicism. Maybe because one power-structures not examined is the relationship between kids and teachers? Maybe because the kids didn’t choose to participate in this experiment? Anyway, why do I not celebrate this experience, which mirrors in some ways the collectivist-do-goodness that underlies a project like LibriVox? To ponder more.

Hmm, maybe I am just having a bad day? Any thoughts on this from yon readers?

[this comes via mike migurski]

I listen to lots of audio, my preference being radio documentaries while cooking. Yesterday I listened to the best thing I have heard in ages, a piece by WNYC’s RadioLab called Space:

In the 60’s, space exploration was an American obsession. But the growing reality of space has turned the romance to cynicism. We chart the path from then to now. We begin with Ann Druyan, widow of Carl Sagan, with a story about the Voyager expedition, true love, and golden record that travels through space. For a dose of reality, astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson explains the Coepernican Principle and just how insignificant we are

Listen here (on earideas). It’s fabulous.

Kevin Kelly writes about what values start becoming more important when copies are free:

The internet is a copy machine….

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order….

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied….

Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy….

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free…

[more…]

The eight categories are: Findability, Patronage, Embodiment, Accessibility, Authenticity, Interpretation, Personalization, Immediacy.

[via: Open Access News]

if you are a teacher, you should watch this.

if you are not a teacher, you should watch it too.

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is probably the most famous university prof in the world, or at least he will be soon. Millions have read seen his articles videos in academic journals on Youtube, most famously, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, and more recently Information R/evolution.

The latest looks at students and their strange relationship with our academic institutions and models, which were designed before the telephone, not to mention the iPhone.

A Vision of Students Today:

[Link… to class blog; link to French translation]

How new is it, I wonder, that teachers can’t understand the world their students inhabit? It’s always been true to a certain extent, but the disconnect previously was mostly cultural … here it seems to me more environmental, and so fundamental. The mechanisms for communicating are changing, has changed (communicating the big ideas, facts, thoughts, as well as the minutia of of daily lives), and with pervasive computing and constant connection to the web, the way we think is changing too. For better or worse doesn’t really matter, it just will change.

Questions/comments (these have all been kicking around for a while, but still):
1. fact-learning: what is the value of memory when all the facts we might need to remember are available at our fingertips?

2. collateral damage: given the long success of fact-learning, what happens if that fades away as a prime method of educating? what else do we lose (eg, powers of focused concentration, the brain-training that memorizing things does)

3. plagiarism: copying is so easy now. instead of demanding that people not copy, maybe we should raise/change the standards of what we expect work to look like, assume it will be copied and pasted, and require that it be relevant in more important ways (see #1 above) … I see the parallel with with wikipedia/britannica question. if the info itself is free and available on wikipedia, then if britannica wants to be relevant, maybe it’s just going to have to think harder about what it can do better than wikipedia. ditto with schooling. maybe we need to move *beyond* “plagiarism is bad” to something more meaningful.

4. lecture halls: what are big classrooms for? i rarely went to many of my big lectures when I was in university - all that info was in the textbook, so why attend a dry lecture with a bad prof? it didn’t make sense to me then, and it seems crazier now. in the case of small classes I have a different opinion.

5. discipline: here I mean mental discipline. I notice this myself, with online distractions everywhere, I often find it hard to concentrate and apply the long-term discipline needed to Get Things Done. Part of how I have adapted is by trying to harness that lack of discipline, a prime example being LibriVox … which I once joked should have as a motto, “powered by procrastination.” This is the area that “worries” me most, because it’s the thing in my own life that concerns me. maybe we need to start thinking more about how to use unfocused, ambient mental energy for important things?

6. radical changes: while I think the changes in technology mean we need some radical rethinking of education, radical changes are always dangerous, you never know what other side-effects might overtake the initial effects. we need to be careful. if only someone would invent a way to have instantaneous feedback from multiple sources in an open intellectual system, it would make things easier!

7. The most important things an “education” can provide are:
a) critical thinking: ability to think critically about problems, this means ability to see a problem, to understand it’s context and history, and to be able to analyze various options and decide on the one that seems most likely to “work”. this is as true in science as in humanities and arts.

b) clarity: are we becoming less clear in our thinking and writing? losing the discipline of writing clearly, for instance, is bad news. the open web results a enormous amounts of unclear/undisciplined writing … so, are we really losing that skill, or is it just that there is far more writing and thinking being captured than ever before, and hence we see more of the unclear stuff - where before only the clear stuff got into writing? does clarity really matter? (yes). what’s to be done? or does that ask the wrong question?

Just some notes to ponder.

And also, more out of curiosity, I wonder how humans will adapt to these big changes that are only scratching the surface?

I’m not sure why, but I’ve been thinking lately about conservatives and progressives, and the problems of our current climate of political debate, heightened exponentially by cable news pundits in the USA. I have a trip to Saskatoon coming up, and I was thinking of contacting a few Sask bloggers, and Small Dead Animals comes pretty high in the search. It’s well-known right-leaning mostly-political blog from a woman in Saskatchewan, and a couple of the posts I read were … well they really turned me off. They seemed so pointlessly hostile to the “left.” And I landed on a couple of other Sask blogs, and had the same reaction (later I found some more comfortably lefty-like Sask blogs).

And yet much of the stuff on the lefty blogs is the same sort of thing (here too, probably): juvenile name-calling etc. But it steams us when we disagree; when we agree, it’s usually pretty funny stuff.

And further, I betcha if I met Kate of SDA, we’d probably get along fine, even if I don’t like her politics, and she doesn’t like mine, she’d probably not an idiot* (see below), and we’d probably have a fine discussion about healthcare or terrorism without wanting to punch each other.

We have some friends, Bruce and Michelle. Bruce is about as far at the other end of the spectrum of my political beliefs as you can get - and every time I read his political blog posts, I get all red-eared. Yet when we meet, and even when we talk about politics, I realize how close we are about our various frustrations with the state of the universe. We just have different explanations, often, for why things are messed up (I blame evil corporations; he blames corrupt governments; I blame the Conservatives, he blames the Liberals … we’re both right and we’re both wrong).

And I’ll bet you that most of us, lefties and righties - the non-idiots, at least - want more or less the same thing: a healthy country/planet, where we can leave things better for our kids, and where everyone gets a fair shot at having a decent life, where the rivers run clean and everyone’s got a job that lets them get the stuff they need; where the chances of getting killed by SARS or cancer or car crashes or corrupt police or terrorists or nuclear explosions are minimized.

On just about any issue (health care, security, environment etc), most non-idiot lefties and righties want the same sorts of outcomes.

And the real problem is not so much that we all want different things for the planet, but rather that we have some fundamental disagreements about how to get there, and what sort of impacts the different decisions about our course of action will have. Which are, sort of, testable differences: that is, some of them work and some of them don’t, and over time reasonable people should be able to look at policies, and outcomes, and decide based on the outcomes (rather than the philosophies behind them) whether they’re good or not.

Oh, one other thing I find strange about the political left-right split is that a belief about one subject is often directly correlated to a belief about another totally unrelated subject, eg. War on Terrorism, and Climate Change … and the other strange thing about those two threats in particular is that both sides use the same logic to argue one, and discount the other: climate change is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves; terrorism is a significant risk, therefore we must do extraordinary things to protect ourselves. Yet no one on the right *wants* climate disaster, they just don’t believe we can or ought to do what’s being proposed; and no one on the left *wants* the “terrorists to win,” they just don’t believe what we are doing is the right strategy to deal with the threat.

Anyway, I think there are a couple of big problems: righties and lefties don’t talk much together about what they do want for the world, and the reasons they think actions A are better than actions B to get there. And further, the discussion between left and right is mediated - more in the US than here, but here too - by people who *are* idiots, and are paid to be idiots, because that makes people mad, and that sells advertising.

*All this brought to you by a quote from Marjane Satrapi (via Matt):

‘The only real divide in this world is between the idiots and non-idiots.’

Amen.

I started writing about this ages ago, but have not finished yet… but in a discussion with Michael, the idea came up again, and I wrote a long comment there, which I’ll reproduce here (slightly redacted):

***
my theory of morality is this: moral ideas are cultural constructs that sink or swim based on their ability to “improve” lives & societies, where improve means: makes it easier for a bigger number of people to be well-provided-for, to solve problems they want to solve, and generally to be more happy.

here is a thought experiment: what if increasing individual liberty, abolishing slavery, providing public education (etc) resulted in: mass pandemics, death, misery, and a collapse in the economy. would we see liberty & public education etc as morally good? i’d argue no.

if you read the bible (and, I presume most religious texts), you realize that much of it concerns very practical rules of life (how to build things, how to eat things etc), in addition to more abstract spiritual things … those “rules” are helpful for keeping a society functioning smoothly, and well, and helps us continue to solve problems we want to solve.

so while making “moral” choices is important, to me the compelling argument (in politics) is that “moral” choices are actually ones that tend to improve lives, and be effective. (i think this is part of why the religious right is so strong in the USA: our “free” (and empty) society has resulted in people being unhappy … and a set of moral rules (work hard, be honest, help others, be true to your wife etc) helps you get better at doing the things that, over the past 3000 years, have proven to help make people happier, on balance).

Much of this theory comes out of watching LibriVox evolve, where free-form anarchy is employed only to the extent that it helps us make audiobooks, and not for abstract reasons. so when we decide on issues, we measure against making audiobooks, and not against abstract notions of freedom etc. This, i believe, is how societies and morality develop over time…rules of behaviour that are “helpful” become codified as morally preferable traits: honesty, courage, kindness etc.

regarding democracy & political engagement, my personal feeling is that i can accomplish much more outside of the political system right now. the political system is very rigid (like academia). it’s “better” than fascism, but it could/should become even more responsive to people’s needs, i think, by adopting more small-a-anarchist approaches to problems. i believe eventually i might become re-engaged in the system, i hope in ways that help the democratic system start playing with some of these ideas, to see what could be helpful, and what not. that is, i do not believe anarchist projects are good because they are anarchist, but only if they can be proven to help people do things they want to do (manage a health system, education system, environment etc).

civicaccess.ca is a perfect example of this: idea is: big groups of people with access to data over the net may be better at solving some problems than the government is, and the government should be responsive to exploring where these areas might be, and supporting movements/technologies/ideas that help bring decision-making tools into the hands of citizens, rather than keeping them in the rigid and compromised government systems as they exist now.

as for representative over direct democracy, again, i have no particular preference, except to the extent that one or the other can better address problems I see with the world; which includes protecting small groups from the abuse of big groups.

Interpretation of the data is to be discussed, but the data itself is … astounding:

from Maurizio.

(cross-posted at TextoSolvo)

One of the problems in the Western world right now, in my estimation, is that we see “freedom” as an artificially good thing in an abstract & idealized sense. humans, whatever else we are, are animals, and we have developed biological and cultural systems to deal with the universe. and nothing is “free” in the universe. you must obey the laws of physics: when you get punched in the nose it hurts, and when you eat rocks, they taste bad and make you sick, and break your teeth. that they are painful helps you try to avoid getting punched in the nose, and discourages you from eating rocks instead of apples, both of which are helpful if you wish to survive in the world. that is what the universe is “like,” yet in the western world we have abstracted out “freedom” as some kind of thing which is good in itself. I too think freedom is good, but not “in itself.” i think it is good because increased freedom for a larger number of people results in a better ability to solve important problems (firstly, how do we feed and clothe ourselves, and protect our families, and then other more complex, but less important issues).

so librivox is a kind of demonstration that says: here are the rules. everything *else* is free, but the rules are not negotiable. and they are not negotiabale BECAUSE librivox has an objective that defines everything we do: “to make all public domain books available in audio for free.” the rules have been/are set in order to help us achieve that objective. everything is weighed against the objective, not against some abastract “freedom.”

that is very powerful. i believe one of the driving evolutionary forces that has made humans successful is our desire to build and pleasure at building things.

but building things takes discipline and dedication. it is always easier to sit on your ass and do nothing. and you are - in our very rich, and very easy world, “free” to sit on your ass and do nothing, but I don’t believe you will ever be happy if you take that approach. In order to be a happy human, I believe, you must build things.

and *that*, to me, is what freedom means: the freedom to build the things you want to build. not freedom to do whatever you want, wherever you want, because “freedom” per se is sacred, but the freedom to pursue objectives you believe in.

we have lost our sense of discipline, and I think that makes people very unhappy. I don’t mean that in any draconican sense, I just mean that in western world, we are told (by psychologists, parents, media, etc) that we can do whatever we want, that we are the centre of the universe, that our freedom is the most important thing and we have a *right* to it, that just believing in ourselves is enough to succeed. all of which is, frankly, bullshit.

and that kind of thinking makes, I think, for unhappy people, and a disfunctional society, because we are NOT the centre of the universe able to influence it with our belief in how important we are; we are just a little part of it, subject to its laws. among which is, not much ever gets done without work.

A few people have gotten involved with LibriVox, been impressed by the anarchist underpinnings, and argued that we needed to allow full freedom (ie to rant, to be disruptive etc). but librivox as a system works in part because of the laws of our little universe, some of which we understand, some of which are mysterious. I’ve been careful to try to defend and protect those mysterious things - even if I do not totally understand them (hence my defense of the “disclaimer” - I don’t want to mess with something that’s worked unless it is very clear that messing will make LV work better).

I read recently somewhere that real freedom only comes from the pleasure of succeeding within constraints. Which seems to me to be about right.

I had a discussion with Steve about the term web2.0, and whether or not it is useful. Steve wants it kyboshed.

For me, the term was very useful, because it marked the time when new tools (eg wordpress) made it possible for me to publish to the web, without knowing anything about html. So:

web1.0=passive
web2.0=active

Justin calls for death of 2.0 as well, and I started writing a comment to object, but realized: it makes me a dinosaur. The usefulness of 2.0 to me is to refer to a web that is already gone. web 2.0 replaced 1.0 … and is now… just the web. and there’s no point in saying 2.0 anymore, unless you are interested in talking about how the web used to be, way back when. Waaaay back in early 2004.

So I am on board. Web2.0 is officially stricken from my vocabularity. The web is dead. Long live the web.

I’ve been thinking lately about evolution and politics. All this comes out of a revelation I had in the early days of LibriVox, that as an open project, the whole thing - the system - evolved like an organism, getting more complex in response to environmental challenges. More readers, more books, more languages, more projects required a slow evolution of a management from “Hugh collects the files and then uploads” to something very different. We currently have 338 active projects, representing probably 5,000 or more individual audio files - all of which must be collected, checked, named, assigned metadata, and eventually uploaded, and cataloged. That’s a lot of work. Point is that the management system, is very complex, and it evolved in a way that I expect looks a lot (on a small/sped-up scale) like how political systems evolve.

On the conservative/progressive split, there’s an old saw in US politics that the left thinks the right is evil, and the right thinks the left is stupid. Neither is true, of course, or not entirely true, and I think there’s an unwillingness, and sometimes just an inability to understand where the other side comes from. Maybe evolution is useful model to explain things.

Conservatives, generally, appeal to how things have been and claim that we shouldn’t change what’s worked in the past. There’s a sense to that, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Progressives, on the other hand, appeal to how things ought to be and claim we should change things to make it work better or differently. There’s a sense to that, that changing environments call for changed response.

By this nomenclature the Bush White House was filled with Progressives, in the sense that they decided to junk the past 50 years of diplomatic standards and wisdom - rule of law, international agreement, importance of history and understanding of the enemy, experience of occupying forces etc - in exchange for a bold new vision of transforming democracy. They thought the purity of the ideal would be enough to carry the day. While the liberals [what was left of them] argued for, essentially, a realist foreign policy approach, more cautionary, and more tied to past experience. The Bush Progressives were shown to be naive at best. And many other things at worst.

I am a temperamental conservative, and an intellectual progressive. Even within LibriVox (a progressive project, I guess), now that we have a system that works pretty well, I am always loathe to change many things substantially, since I worry about the unforeseen impacts changes might have. Because the system evolved through an unknowable cocktail of influences and reactions, I don’t like tinkering with certain of the intangibles, especially the ones whose influence is uncalculable. For instance, there has been a movement to change the disclaimer that comes at the start of our recordings (This is a LibriVox recording, all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain, to find out more or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org); I have resisted in part because I have an intuition that this disclaimer has had some kind of impact on the creation of the community that makes LibriVox succeed. Reciting it, in some sense, joins us all into a common cause, and that makes for a tighter-kint group - actually, some call us a cult!).

Slipping back to the evolutionary model: as the environment changes radically (say, political, economic, or ecological) there is tension between the conservatives and progressives. Conservatives look back and say: it worked before, it’ll keep working. While the progressives look forward and say, we must change! Without having much idea if it will work.

So I’d argue that a healthy society will allow for strong interplay between the two tendencies, the stabilizing force of conservatism, and the evolving force of progressivism. Balanced against the uncertainty of progressive solutions and the rigid inability of conservatives to change with changing circumstances.

Which is one of the reasons I think we need to find new ways to make democracy work. We need to open the process more, to put more of the decision-making process (and the data behind it) into the hands of the people. Our democratic system is very rigid, and does not change easily. One way to change that is to get the data out, to let people find solutions that might be better than the ones the paid beurocrats dream up.

Because I have a feeling - with peak oil, climate change, population growth, the rising power of china and india, political instability in the Middle East, and the newish digital universe - that we are in for a rocky road in the coming decades, and we’ll need to marshall new tools for addressing those problems. Open democracy, open data, is one way to spread the decision-making ability to a bigger, more complex, and more nimble system.

I was at the Montreal web entreprenneurs breakfast, and was talking with Robin, Alex Eberts, Sylvain, and a couple of others about language, the web, Montreal, and politics. It’s funny, though I am an Anglo born and bred, a Westmounter if you can believe it, it’s been a long time since I’ve been a typical Anglo when it comes to Quebec/Canada politics (not sure if typical Anglos exist anymore, at least not this side of the city). Maybe part of that grew out of my stint at university in Kingston. I enjoyed my time there, more or less, but I never quite felt at home in the Anglo Canada of Ontario. My allegiance was always more with the world of Montreal (the French, the English, the everything else) than it was for some idea of Canada. Of course when push comes to shove I’ve voted federalist in referendums, but given the choice of talking to a random Canadian stranger in Tokyo, I’ll feel more at home talking with a Franco-Quebecker than a Torontonian most times (not that I have anything against Torontonians). I’ve long had a certain intellectual sympathy for the separatist movement, partly because I have great respect for Rene Levesque and much of the social democratic vision the PQ had in the early days. (They have abandoned that vision, mostly, and I am not very interested in them as a result - though the rest of the clowns don’t do anything to inspire me either). Certainly as Canada moves more to the right, I am less and less interested in tying myself to the country of Canada as an idea, especially as the elements of the idea I do believe in are fast disappearing.

In the world of web that I live in now, though, the idea of national boundaries are mostly irrelevant. LibriVox, for instance, is populated by people from all over the world, a huge number of Americans, a tiny number of Canadians, and almost no Quebecers (that I can think of). In my commercial web life, I have a British partner in Sydney, and an American partner in Tokyo, and a billingual Franco-Quebecker partner here at home. On another brand new proto-project, LibriLinks, the one guy who has contributed so far is, I think, in England, but I’m not even sure. It doesn’t matter where he’s from.

The only relevant borders for me - at least online - are borders of interest. This is old news, but it’s interesting in the context of Quebec, and especially with the the explosion of new Web projects these days and the increased interaction at events. The ones I’ve been to tilt slightly to English, but the mix is pretty liberal. The money, love it or leave it, is in the US market, so the tendency will be for English. We’re peanuts in Canada, and 1/10 of a peanut in Quebec. As a for instance, 1.2% of the traffic for LibriVox (about 12k visitors a day) is from Canada; vs 32% from the US (the balance being mostly unresloved/unknown @ 26% and network (?) 32%).

English is (so to speak) the lingua franca of the net. No news there either, but the web world that I inhabit in Montreal is pretty bilingual on both sides of the table, and it has to be. Working together on various projects tends to erase the political misconceptions we might have had about each other. There’s not much choice about working together: Anglos have an in because English is our native tongue, and so we’re immediately comfortable in the space where much web action is happening; and it turns out that many of the people doing cool things are Francos.

Not sure what I am getting at, but it was inspired by this discussion chez Martine, and the idea that when you work together on a web project (really any project) with people, just about everything except for the work gets erased from your evaluation, and in the end political barriers break down. In the case of LibriVox something interesting happened. I came to trust and like people not for who they were, what they were (I had no idea of either thing), but for the concrete things they did in that open project. My friendships with those people was built entirely on their actions, and nothing else…And that, it seems to me is the best possible basis for a friendship - accross thousands of kilometers, across language, political, and national divides. There is an interesting web project in there - getting people from different sides of some heated politics to work together on a project with a common cause.

Technorati Tags: book, dawkins

I haven’t written a ramble in a while. Here’s one:

I had an impromptu drink with Boris the other night - unfortunately the other brain I seem to be feeding off of a lot lately wasn’t there.

We rambled about art, data, open source, society, flexibility, stability, evolution to touch on a few things.

My experience with the open project LibriVox has been very interesting, and has influenced my thinking about a lot of what we talked about: it started small, and grew and grew; in about four places it encountered major environmental challenges - mainly having to do with putting together the structures to let the project accomodate more volunteers, and more projects. At 10 people and a couple of projects it was OK with me running the thing, and some help on the website design; then it went up to 50 volunteers and 10 projects, and I needed help, and a new mode of managing people and projects; the help appeared. It cranked up to 250 volunteers, and 40 projects; more help & organization was needed; it appeared. We’re now up to 1000+ volunteers and something like 150 active projects. Needing more structure and more support. It came.

Because the project was open everytime a major problem presented itself, someone seemed to be there who had just the skills needed (designing the site for clarity, setting up a forum, cataloging, documenting, setting up a wiki, a promo poster, catalog software). Like an organism encountering environmental challenges, LibriVox was flexible and open enough to easily evolve into something able to handle the new demands. One hopes it will continue to do so.

Is there anything in the little microcosm of LibriVox worth thinking about in a bigger context?

Boris gave this interesting visualization about society. (Boris can you draw it so I can link to a pic?) Imagine a bell curve, moving from left to right along a time axis. Stick a couple of wheels under the middle of the curve: the wheels are industry - driving things forward; the big hump is regular society who go along with things; and the front angle part of the bell-curve/snowplow are the out-there artists at the far tip, and then creative types who interact with industry making up the rest of the angle. There’s some interaction between the two. The artists are at the forefront, are misunderstood, and suffer the greatest amount of attrition because they are battling directly against the universe - in a way they both lead the way for the rest of society, and introduce us to, and protect us from, the new. You can go on about this metaphor, but probably there’s an optimal steepness of the curve - steeper meaning more arty & creative types.

I’ve seen two arty shows recently: Marie Chouinard’s dance show Body Remix/Goldberg Variations; and Anslem Kiefer’s Heaven & Earth. Neither was “beautiful” in any standard sense, but in both cases my mind was flying the whole time I was experiencing them. I don’t know what I was thinking about, but these two big shows — both very intellectual, and very abstract — had my mind whirrling around at top speed. There was something about the depth of the data transfer to me — chaotic and not really articulable by me — that influenced me in profound ways both times. And I think this is what Boris was talking about, about art, especiallly challenging art, communicating information about the universe that we are not really able to comprehend in any systematic way: we can take a bash at it, we can define & systematize, but the chaotic and big nature of out-there art is precisely powerful because we can’t describe it properly. By it’s nature it’s beyond a complete intellectual definition; so much data referring to so much, interacting with our own particular data processing systems. But somehow there is great value in that process, because it forces me to *try* (we are, after all, so earnest we humans) to process the data, and in doing so I reform my brain paths, and evolve my brain to try to cope with a changing universe.

And this, maybe, is why the free software/open source and open data movement is actually of huge importance. An open source approach to problems, along with an open data approach to the world will allow “us” to a) have access to the data we need to solve problems and b) allow all of us to contribute to the solving of these problems in open source projects.

I have a feeling that the world will become more chaotic soon. Two things in particular make me worried: climate change, and oil supplies. Those two issues are catastrophic in ways that most people aren’t willing to admit: human civilization has developed over a small band of time, the last 10,000 years, with relatively warm & relatively stable climate (scroll down to chart: “Temperature of Lower Atmosphere Last 400,000 years“). If things get unstable, we’ll be in trouble. As for oil everything in our modern world is based on cheap available oil, particularly our food-supply system. Without cheap fuel for farm equipment, and food transport, we’re in big trouble.

So if you consider that:
a) major environmental challenges (ie. global upheaval) are on the way
b) successful organisms are those that best adapt to environmental challenges
c) providing the maximum amount of data to maximum number of people will allow maximum adaptibility
d) and supporting open source solutions to problems is the most flexible & adaptable approach

Then any society that does not support open access to civic data; and open source solutions to problems … is likely to have major troubles soon. This is the next level of democracy … data democracy, and is I think crucial for our survival. Maybe that’s too much; but a country (say Canada) that embraces data democracy, will inevitably become more flexible, more nimble and more innovative in its solutions.

Do you think our politicians are at all ready to think about this? There’s a new, not yet public project, called civicaccess.ca, that will try to convince governments to start. Good work Mike.

From Seed: Reinvention of the Self:

To understand how neurogenesis “the process of creating new brain cells” works, Gould’s lab studies the effect of two separate variables: stress and enriched environments. Chronic stress, predictably enough, decreases neurogenesis. As Christian Mirescu, one of Gould’s post-docs, put it, “When a brain is worried, it’s just thinking about survival. It isn’t interested in investing in new cells for the future.”

On the other hand, enriched animal environments “enclosures that simulate the complexity of a natural habitat” lead to dramatic increases in both neurogenesis and the density of neuronal dendrites, the branches that connect one neuron to another. Complex surroundings create a complex brain.

This applies to my post about open data too, I think. A brain becomes more sophisticated in a situation when faced with “enriched environments” … chronic stress stops things. Note there’s a big difference between chronic stress - which puts you in constant survival mode; and discrete stress, which forces you to find a solution to a specific problem. I would argue that having a complex brain, stimulated by “enriched environments,” allows you to overcome discrete stress (call that environmental challenges) in more creative and effective ways.

As this applies to society: we will be best able to meet complex challenges if we expose society to “enriched environments.” Enriched environments mean, I think, access to maximum amounts of data; and public domain, open data movements mean just that. A vibrant public domain (free software, art, civic data, scientific information, agriculture) will mean a more vibrant and innovative society, better able to meet major challenges (say: climate change, peak oil, avian flu). The connections between art & software & science & civic acess are not yet clear to the world at large. But some are working hard to forge these links, across a spectrum of areas, seeking to increase data exchange, and give the tools of data production to new people. Others don’t quite get it yet. Still others seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot, by fighting the obvious. That’s OK. You can’t expect everyone to get it. But you can keep pushing.

(tip to: Tech Monk & mtl3p)

So a few Montreal geeky types convened at the Office (aka Laika) for a sort-of impromptu discussion to try to figure out what the hell is going on in the world, and specifically what this “Open Movent” might be, and what connections we can draw (if any) between it’s various strands: that is, are there any connection between:

• Software: Free Software/Open Source (eg. FSF)
• Data: Access to Government/Civic Data (eg. Howtheyvote)
• Art/Media (eg. Creative Commons, LibriVox)
• Infrastructure (eg. ilesansfil.org)
• Hardware (eg. $100 laptop)
• Information (eg. wikipedia)
• Scientific Research (eg. open journals)
• Education (eg. UC Berkley podcasts, MIT OpenCourseWare)
• Patents on Life - and those opposing it (eg. GRAIN)
• What else should I add here?

The group was mainly geeks, and unfortunately Devlin couldn’t make it. That’s too bad because Devlin isn’t a geek, and works in agricultural IP issues, mostly in the South (ie developing countries) and his take on things might have helped us find the root we couldn’t grasp: biotech/IP issues are important in those countries because they have a direct impact on farmers’ choices about how they feed their families, how they live - if they can feed their families - and so are, in some sense, more critical than what we were talking about.

But I feel that there is an important link between all these things, a link that is very difficult to articulate because all these “sectors” talk in very different words, and are motivated by very different things. The hard-core geeks and the creative commons artistic freedom fighters are not necessarily talking about the same things, and probably wouldn’t agree on much.

Julien assigned me the task of summarizing the 1.5 hr discussion, but I don’t think I’ll do that. It would be a disservice, and I’m much more interested in what those attending have to say themselves (get writing!) than trying to interpret what they had to say, and butchering their thoughts in the process. Still, what I’ll try to do is summarize my perspective of things, after trying to absorb the discussions. I’ll probably leave out things like “I think” and “in my opinion” and “as steve said” etc…Take what comes below as an open reflection that could encourage comment & discussion, and not exactly my categorical statement of Reality in the Universe (although it might sound like that).

To start with, there are links, they are important, and figuring out what those links are is important. But all these “new movements” are in fact not new at all: the various principles the intellectual movements are built on (say: freedom, equality, access to data/information) are all old successful ideas. Ideas that are compelling because they appeal to successful and enduring notions in many cultures. For instance: sharing is good (kindergarten class #1), everyone should have access to knowledge (public libraries, public schools), a society should try to give everyone the same opportunities - ie you shouldn’t be explicitly barred from doing something because of race, creed, colour; but we might not do too much to help you.

These ideas are not at all universal, but just happen to be prevailing ideas of our particularly successful (ie good at economic & military dominance) western liberal democracies. We happen to be at the top of the heap right now. Meaning we’ve been successful, but not necessarily meaning that the Universe has designated us Kings of the Planet.

Note also: Not everyone is motivated by such abstract ideas. This is something that Mike speaks of with great passion from his experience at ISF: many people are involved because they like coding, they like wires & antennae, they like fiddling with projects, tinkering, building. That they’re doing something for the “good of humanity” (freedom etc) might be important to some, but it’s certainly not the universal motivator. Some couldn’t care less.

So here’s what I think: Humans are programmed to find ways to overcome environmental challenges, and to get pleasure from overcoming them (which encourages them to overcome them). If you look at the history of human civilization, you could look at it as a series of problems: access to water, access to food, access to heat/energy, access to clothing, access to shelter, access to mates. “Civilization” is an evolving process which morphs based on a lack of any combination of those, and cultures develop as codified ways to meet those needs, in more and more complex ways, generally for more people. Wars start when one culture’s need for one thing rams up against another culture’s need for another; successful cultures are the ones that win wars, and gain access to what they need; or cultures that succeed in negotiating in some non-war way. Unsuccessful cultures don’t win the wars, and get denied access to varying degrees. Similarly within a culture you’ve got warring factions all fighting for bits of the stuff that satisfies those needs. And the drive for wealth, the drive for power etc. is a sensible thing to have within the system of a culture because it means that the culture, as a system, will be driven to maintain access to the things which fulfil those base needs. As the world & it’s cultures get more complex, this need is abstracted out to other things. So you get art, computer games, religion etc. But in a way that’s just a fetishized expression of the same thing. (That guy’s pyramid, whatever his name is). Even when you have all the water, food, mates etc you could possibly want, your drive to solve those problems is still there; your drive to solve problems full-stop is still there. Otherwise you would fade away. That drive to solve problems manifests itself in art, in the joy of coding, in building bookshelves…anytime you “do” something, accomplish something, build something, and you feel good about it, you’ve filling that need; and the pleasure you get out of it is a genetic signal that you’re a functioning human. There are of course exceptions, but bear with me.

So: Humans are happiest when they build things (whether that’s a poem, a bridge, a printer driver code, or a field of corn, a new way to generate energy, a library, a community of freedom-fighting geeks). Let’s say we are genetically (culturally?) programmed to get satisfaction from completing tasks, making something. Some tasks are more fulfilling than others, but in general even completing excruciatingly boring tasks results in a pleasing feeling. You can describe this in many different ways, but we generally feel pride and happiness about accomplishments.

We use various tools to accomplish these tasks, to build things & do things. Hammers and ibooks, and apple scripts, paintbrushes, shovels, encyclopedias, calculators. And people who are driven to build things (say, the tinkerers, the programmers, the car buffs and the CEOs, the politicians & the activists) are pretty pissed when they are told that they cannot make the tools they use better. So when, for instance, a software company gives you a tool to do a job, and you say to yourself, this is OK but what I really want is THIS; but the software company says: you cannot change the tool to do THIS, you can only do THAT. Well that pisses off someone who has a job to do, an inefficient tool, the means to make that bad tool into a good tool; but gets artificially prevented from improving that tool by IP protections. That, I think, is the root of the Free Software movement. That a non-free software system that doesn’t allow tool users to use tools the way they want, and to improve those tools offends their general desire to build things and do things. If you have a bad tool and the means to make it a good tool, it’s really shitty not to be able to make it a good tool.

Now you can abstract THAT out to everything else related. Art, data, scientific research, education, seeds etc. are all tools used to solve problems. Those problems could be very base & important (how do I feed my family), or very trivial (how do I make a better songlist in iTunes), but we are driven to DO these things and build these things and solve problems; and that we are driven this way means that we as a species are good at overcoming environmental challenges. ie It has been essential for our survival that this be the case.

So I *think* this open movement is about something very fundamental to the survival of the human species, that is: we want the ability to get and use tools to solve whatever problems we deem worth solving.

The free movement is about defending this fundemental need of humans to use tools as they wish, for purposes they wish, and with whatever modifications they wish. And the different strands grow out of different people’s interest in different tools (encyclopedias or bits of code, or music samples). So we are against:

• DRM that says you can use this piece of art only like this
• proprietary software that says you can only use this software the way we want you to use it, and you cannot make it better to do what you need
• closed government data systems that say, we will manage & interpret the data for you, the way we decide to do it
• IP protected seeds, that say you may plant these seeds only as we tell you, and if you pay us
• closed scientific journals that say: you can get access to this scientific knowledge only if you pay us this much money
• information/education systems that say: you can only have this knowledge under these conditions
• communiction infrastructure that says: you may exchange data and information like this, and with these charges associated

And we are for: Allowing humans to use their tools as they see fit, and to modify their tools if they want to modify them so that they are better at solving problems. By “opening” this stuff up, we give humans access to more data and more ability to solve problems (trivial, critical) in creative ways. The Open movement has huge implications for the future survival of cultures, and perhaps the species.

NOTE about participants (ie people who happened to be there): brett (videoblogger & film maker), mike (isf founder & general free movement spitter), robin (anarchist software developer), steve (builder of opensource tools for scientific collaboration), julien (ace podcaster), and me (in my LibriVox hat, I guess). Ella, an artist & blogger and non-boy popped over to our table a couple of times, but I think we were stupidly much less welcoming than we should have been - more out of intentness of our conversation than anything conscious - and I would like to personally apologize for that.

Posted on the LivriVox forum, but I thought it was worth repeating here on dose.

One of the things I (personally) like about many podcasts is how … crappy! … they are. I don’t mean the facetiously, I mean that very honestly. I like that people cough and you hear the trucks roll by, and things are messy and badly-produced etc. It is like real life, unlike the polished stuff you get on TV and Radio & movies, which is fantasy.

And this is something I love about LibriVox. It is a bit of a revolutionary act to say: I wish to listen to a book recorded by a bunch of people, only some of whom are good readers! I want to listen to the words, and to the voices of these average joes & janes reading, the same as I remember my mother reading to me as a kid, and the librarian who used to read to us in school. It’s a rejection of the need for polish, for perfection, for style; choosing instead the substance of the text, and the reality of a real real flawed person like me doing their best to read something they love.

And I think this notion is not so easy to understand - why would I want to listen to something imperfect? Well, for me, because that perfectiion is a sham, and it’s unnecessary and it distracts from the text in a way.

I have a friend here who is a improvisational jazz violinist, Malcolm Goldstein.

the first time I head him play I thought “what the HELLL is this? It’s noise!” But what he’s asking you to do is listen to OTHER things, not the melody & harmony and all the easy things we associate with music, but something else, the underpinnings of the sound, the textures of the noises, the surprise, different cadence. And this is tied in with what the world is really like: it is not so ordered, so clean…it’s very messy and chaotic, but we are trained not to like this aspect of the world, not to like the flaws and imperfection. One reason we are taught to want perfection is that if we don,t like flaws we are easier targets for corporate marketers who sell perfection. Yet there is such beauty in that mess, if you pay attention to it in a different way, there is so much to be learned from chaos and flaws and mistakes. But you have to unlearn how to listen for it.

In the same way, I think (and this is just my personal take) LibriVox is a place that celebrates the flaws, the beauty in chaos, the messiness of life, but interpreted through the great works of literature of the world. we take raw materials and build with our voices something different, but I think something revolutionary, and we say: because it sounds like THAT over there, does not mean it has to sound like that here. We give you something different, and you can give something different too.

Some other general political thoughts - and a reference to open source & computer networks at the end. There has been a general tendency recently in the developing world to elect what could be called “anti-US” governments: Hamas in Palestine, and, say the sweeping leftism in South America: Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Bachelet in Chile, Lulu in Brazil, Vázquez in Uruguay, and maybe Kirchner in Argentina. There are likely more, elsewhere.

All of these are considered “worrying” by the policy-makers in USA; yet most of these elections were considered fair. The question worth asking is, why do countries in the South keep electing governments that the US is opposed to (publicly and privately)?

And I suggest that the answer is this: the policies that the US exports, and the governments they support, have not done a very good job of providing for their populations. So the global status quo (as defined by US and its allies) is not a very stable system - or at least it won’t be unless the Northern policies are adapted to accomodate the shifts in the south.

Something similar happened during and after the 1929-39 Depression in North America. The late 1800s to late teens of the 20th C saw a radical shift in industrialization; huge production, technological advances, etc twinned with terrible conditions for workers. To avoid revolution, and total chaos in our governing and social systems, we built a social safety net, worker safety conditions, worker rights etc. Which in fact either brought on, or at least paralleled the most prosperous era in the history of humanity. Is that a coincidence?

Capitalism, unfettered, leans towards massive exploitation - of workers and consumers - monopolies, and destruction. Unattended capitalism will tend to be very lucrative for a few, and very destructive for the rest.

Socialism, unfettered, leans towards inefficiency and unnecessary government intervention.

Somewhere between the two is a balance that’s probably the optimum for the global system (though the variables are changing: oil prices, and climate change being the two biggies, I think, which are likely to throw everything out of whack in the near future). We’ve seen a massive shift to the right in the US; and much of the rest of the world is shifting in the other direction. And I suggest that if the US starts creeping towards the centre the balances on the other side will too; but the US - being the powerful beast - needs to examine why the rest of the world is reacting the way it is, and where they need to change their policies, not just their communication strategies.

All this makes me think about (much less complex) open source systems - like LibriVox, or more obviously wikipedia - that are self-stabilizing through open input; and also extremely efficient at producing “useful work” from idle hours. I’m not sure what the connection is exactly, but I keep thinking about politics from an open source perspective: how to bring the efficiencies and stability inherent in open source systems to our political structures?

Anyone know the answer?

Repost from librivox.org:

Below is a paraphrased sample of an email we occasionally get from librarians and teachers, as well as my response to the email. I have paraphrased the email.

***

To LibriVox,

LibriVox is a great web site. I hope to help my students to use the audiobooks. However I am concerened by the link to Wikipedia you have on your site. We teach our students that Wikipedia is not the best source of information, since anyone can edit it, and we suggest they critically evaluate the site (just as we suggest they evaluate any web site). Wikipedia markets itself as an encyclopedia and many people think it is “tried and true” as a source of information. This is especially a problem in yourger people who have not developed the skills to properly evaluate. I suggest that you should consider taking the link to wikipedia off of your. There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead. Thank you.

XYZ,
Librarian
XYZ Secondary School

Date: Wed, 18 Jan 2006 14:47:46 -0500 (EST)
From: librivox Subject: Re: Wikipedia link

Hello XYZ,

Thanks for the note, and your feedback much is appreciated. I hope you enjoy the LibriVox audiobooks, and perhaps your school would like to do a recording project for librivox?

re: Wikipedia, I am about to launch into a (long) defence of wikipedia, so be warned! No offense meant. But I would be very happy if you take the time to read my thoughts on wikipedia itself, and its relationship to LibriVox. I would be curious, if you have the time, to hear your response to mine. Again, please don’t be offended, but I am passionate about this issue.

BEGIN DEFENSE OF WIKIPEDIA
I must say that I could not disagree more with your evaluation of wikipedia, and I think you are making a grave error in warning your students away from this wonderful educational resource. Here are some reasons why:

-the wikipedia does not claim to be “tried and true,” in fact just the opposite: it recognizes that it will have errors, and asks that users edit them, whenever they see them. So it is certainly not tried and true, and this is a very important thing to learn about *any* single source of information - especially on the internet. *Nothing* is tried and true, and wikipedia encourages users (student or otherwise) to be careful and critical about the information they find there. It is recognized as an excellent first source, that should be checked. Perhaps that would be a good thing to teach your students: use wikipedia first, check elsewhere, and then make corrections if there are any mistakes in wikipedia!

-the wikipedia is very often the best first source for any topic on the internet. For instance, I wrote much of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feathered_dinosaur

I challenge you to find another source of information on the internet that has as much detailed accurate information on the topic as this article. And I double-tripple challenge you to find another FREE source. It is not my experience that, “There are many other sites on the internet maintained by credible sources that could be included instead.” Which ones? Are they free? If you can find me another resource that has the breadth of detailed information that wikipedia has, for free, I would be very excited indeed! And I wrote large chunks of the article above for precisely this reason: I could not find a single source on the internet that had all the information. It seemed to me that since I had hunted down and found the information from various sources, and since I had used wikipedia previously, that I should give back. It was easy. I just wrote what I had learned, and presto! Now there’s a nice accurate article about feathered dinosaurs, that anyone can read for free, where before there was none. (I note there’s a repeated section in there, which I should edit, unless someone beats me to it).

Note also that lack of of information in a single place is a particular problem for the topics of Authors and Literature, our bread and butter at LibriVox. It is just not true (in my experience) that there is another single source of information on the internet about Authors and Literature with as much accurate information (can you show me one that is free?). And I offer another challenge: can you find a single error in ANY literature articles on wikipedia? If you can I will send you a DVD with all LibriVox books for free … and then I will go correct the error! But I bet you will not find an error.

-wikiepdia also encourages your students to share their knowledge in an open way, to participate in bringing more knowledge to the world. The principle of wikipedia is much like a library, where the idea is that everyone should have access to books. Wikipedians believe that everyone should have free access to knowledge, and they participate in bringing knowledge to the world every time they make an edit, or add a new page. So as a librarian, some of the questions you should ask yourself (among others), are: do you think that knowledge should be free or owned? Should people be encouraged to share knowledge? If you think it should be free, what is the best way to help knowledge be free? What do you think are the effects of discouraging your students from using a source of information, created by volunteers all over the world, who share their time and expertise with the lofty aim of providing a free encyclopedia to the world? If I were one of your students, I would think you were telling me: volunteering to share my knowledge is bad; promoting free access to knowledge is bad; and that I should not contribute to increasing knowledge in the world.

-sometimes articles in wikipedia have incorrect or misleading information - sometimes even hurtful information. This cannot be denied, nor is it denied by anyone. But the amazing thing is how quickly most errors are caught, and edited. The average time between, for instance, “vandalization” (making nonsense, or derogatory edits) and restoration to accuracy is in the SECONDS. Some errors stay longer-usually because no one is reading them. But there is an army of volunteers who care passionately about the objectives of wikipedia — free information for all — and they are incredibly vigilant. Still, they don’t catch everything. But neither does the New York Times.

-errors: Britannica v Wikipedia: although this is, to me, beside the point, an analysis done by Nature magazine found that on scientific topics, Wikipedia has slightly more errors than Britannica, but not significantly more. This despite the wikipedia articles being on average TWICE as long as their Britannica counterparts.

Finally, to wikipedia and LibriVox: wikipedia was one of the prime inspirations for LibriVox. The idea that a group of volunteers could take on a project so useful, so wonderful, so ambitious, and so good for the world - and do it so successfully made me think: maybe people could do the same with audiobooks? Like wikipedia’s editing policy, we accept anyone as a reader, and we make no judgments about the quality of their recordings. And like wikipedia, we say to our listeners: if you do not like how a recording is done, please, make another one, and we will be happy to include it in our catalog.

Finally, and, again, just a silly aside: every time we complete a LibriVox book, we go to wikipedia to add a link to our recording, so that people will know that not only can they go to their library, take out the book for free, but they can also listen for free with LibriVox recordings. We get many hits a day from people who have come from wikipedia. Do you think Britannica, or any other resource would let us link so easily? I bet not.

I hope you did not fall asleep reading that long-winded essay, but I was saddened to get such an email from a Librarian. I have always thought of librarians as defenders of everyone’s right to free information … which is exactly what wikipedia is trying, with all its flaws, to deliver.

In short, we won’t be taking down those link to wikipedia!

Best regards,

Hugh McGuire, Founder
http://LibriVox.org