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RConversation: Silicon Valley's benevolent dictatorship

I posted this to my Facebook "notes" already, but it's such a great piece it needs to go on Diigo and the blog, too.

A must-read, especially for "the rest of us," analysis and commentary from Rebecca MacKinnon on what it was like at the July 08 FutureBrainstorm Tech conference at Half Moon Bay in California...

Among the things MacKinnon discusses, there's the question of what might happen to internet freedoms in some (engineered or actual) post i-9/11 "event".

And of course there's the matter of "benevolent dictators," which her title already alludes to. The "benevolent dictators are the guys currently running the major internet apps / venues. Reading MacKinnon's article, I was reminded of early "cradle to grave" type paternalistic capitalists -- for example, the people who ran Beverly, Mass.'s United Shoe Machinery Corporation, the first-ever company named in anti-trust suits way back in the very early years of the 20th (!!) century. Notably, not all mid- to late-19th and early-20th century capitalists fit the bill of the caricatured "Robber Baron" -- some were "benevolent." (Or paternalistic.) But when push came to shove, it didn't last.

Neither will this model?

Tags: rebecca_mackinnon, web_2.0, capitalism, business, democracy, socialcritique on 2008-08-01 and saved by 9 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromrconversation.blogs.com

It was pretty clear that the CEO's, tech entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists whose lives and businesses revolve around Silicon Valley really do view the world in two parts: The Valley and Everybody Else - with the latter in concentric layers of tech-unsavvyness, remoteness, non-English-speaking-ness and primitiveness.
As author Rebecca Fannin pointed out on the Huffington Post, even China was barely mentioned: "Why was China ignored in the panel discussions? First, it's far away. Second, and more importantly, Silicon Valley is in a state of denial."
I was struck by the assumption permeating many discussions at Half Moon Bay: that communications technology (mainly, the internet and mobile devices) combined with capitalism will inevitably make everybody in the world more free. Just by virtue of being deployed as broadly as possible. Thus, as these people continue to make millions, they are also saving the world. Which makes them all feel terribly good about themselves.
Lessig predicted that the U.S. government will eventually find an excuse (perhaps after some kind of "i-9/11" attack) to clamp down on Internet freedoms in the United States - with the implication that law-abiding U.S. Internet and telecoms companies will have little choice but to go along with it (nor can we be very optimistic that Congress will let us sue these companies for helping the executive branch infringe on our constitutional rights).
Joi warned that not all kinds of capitalism lead to greater freedom or spread wealth and opportunities to everybody. "The capitalists aren't really that helpful, generally," he said. It depends on the business model deployed which really depends on the social intentions of the people running the business, and how much they care about long-term social and political repercussions. "We're forgetting that we had to fight to create an open Internet." Venture capitalists, he said, "assume that the Internet just works... that's very irresponsible," and they're not thinking about how specific business decisions impact overall levels of freedom, openness, and inclusion.
His point is that we have come to depend way too heavily on a small number of Internet and telecoms companies to conduct the most private and intimate details of our professional and personal lives. As long as those companies have values aligned with our own and are run by people we think have integrity, we don't see a huge problem. But what if the values cease to be aligned or political circumstances change?
The guys running Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many other companies represented at the Fortune Brainstorm are the benevolent dictators of the global information and communications system. But can we assume they will always be benevolent? What happens when they roll out services in not-so-benevolent authoritarian regimes? We need to push our service providers to be honest, transparent and not screw us over, which is why I've been involved for the past two years in developing a corporate code of conduct for free speech and privacy (which is likely to go public sometime this Fall). But that's not enough. Power over our communications and identities is much too concentrated in the hands of people who are more accountable to v.c.'s and shareholders wanting profits than to users who want their rights and interests protected. We need to have more choices - which should include plenty of non-proprietary, grassroots, open alternatives.

Rate Your City Councillor : Rating Toronto and Vancouver City Councillors & Alderman

More like this, please:

I so WANT this for Victoria: an online feedback tool to rate your city's councilors. So far available only for Toronto and Vancouver, but, one hopes, soon to expand to other Canadian cities.

PS: of course you can rate your mayor, too.
via Spacing.ca (http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/06/27/rate-your-councillor/)

Tags: local_government, polls, councillors, web_2.0, democracy on 2008-06-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.rateyourcouncillor.com

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The Big Sort - Bill Bishop w/ Robert G. Cushing - Book Review by Scott Stossel - New York Times

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

Tags: big_sort, demographics, democracy, trends, bill_bishop on 2008-05-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

Superficially, the phenomenon Bishop is examining is not new, and the litany of division he recites is familiar. The two major political parties have become more extreme and can’t find common ground anymore. National civic groups and mainline church denominations have withered away, replaced by smaller, more narrowly focused independent groups. Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.
This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where “The Big Sort,” which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original.
“By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable.”
American migration is now inspired at least as much by “lifestyle” choices as by economics. “We have built a country,” Bishop writes, “where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
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- Substitute "city" for "country," and you're close to describing Victoria, where ideological inbreeding is in some groups so advanced that its members can't understand "'those people' who live just a few miles away" [i.e., in Vancouver]. Instead, it's all about how "we don't want to be 'just' another Vancouver." That's sorting at work, right here. It's great that Bishop et al. call that into question; here (in Victoria), it's taken as a good thing: that we're "different" from them, etc., but if you look at the whole picture, is it a good thing? Not when it thwarts the city's economy.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-19
Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disoriented — and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves. This sorting was compounded in the 1980s and ’90s as the clustering of educated people in certain cities produced regional wage disparities — which in turn attracted more-highly educated people to the richer cities, which in turn accentuated the economic disparities between cities, creating a cycle of division that shows little sign of relenting.
Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does. Psychological studies suggest that the mere fact of division, even when there is no substantive content to it, can be corrosive: in a series of experiments in the 1950s and ’60s, groups of similar people arbitrarily divided into subgroups quickly exploded into conflicts of “Lord of the Flies”-like intensity. Other studies have shown that when relatively like-minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view of the individuals in the group but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they’re already inclined. This gives clustering a powerful self-reinforcing quality, and helps explain how American counties have hardened into such immovable political clumps. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal or a federal appeals court judge,” Bishop writes. “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
The founding fathers didn’t need social psychology experiments to understand that homogeneity could be dangerous. In their wisdom, they created a system of government that called for constant conversation and compromise among competing interests — what Alexander Hamilton called the “jarring of parties.”

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Plan to modernize copyright law could make everyday habits illegal

Oh, fuck Canada, fuck the CBC, eh?:
"Mr. Geist also noted that in schools or libraries, the U.S. laws would prevent students from making copies of material they use for research purposes.

But he and some industry stakeholders have acknowledged that Canada should adopt some elements of the U.S. legislation that offer flexibility for the "fair use" of intellectual property. They say that under the existing laws in Canada, a person could be sued for producing a parody of a politician based on real images, sound or video, or even for recording a television program.

The restrictions recently prompted the popular on demand Internet video site, YouTube.com, to remove a parody of the former president of the CBC appearing at parliamentary hearings because of a complaint from the speaker of the House of Commons."

Boo-hoo, a speaker of the House of Commons commonly complained about a parody, and it had to be taken off YouTube? This takes the biscuit.

Canada, land of tutelage and lords, even if they are common as dirt.

Tags: canada, copyfight, democracy, internet_neutrality on 2008-01-08 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nationalpost.com

Jay Thomson, the assistant vice president of broadband policy for Telus, said the existing laws in Canada are also preventing his company from launching a new digital television recording service that would allow subscribers to tape their favourite shows for later viewing on a network server without having to use a VCR or Personal Video Recorder device.
"I'm certain that the vast majority of Canadians don't know that when they tape a program for later viewing using a PVR or even VCR that that is a copyright infringement in Canada, and they're potentially subject to a lawsuit for undertaking that activity," Thomson said. "It's not against copyright law in the U.S., it's not in Australia, it's not in Japan or the U.K., and it's been going on for decades here and shouldn't be a copyright infringement (here) either."
Mr. Thomson said Telus cannot launch this service until the government updates Canada's copyright laws.
"Instead of taping Boston Legal on their PVR that they paid $400 for and are trying to figure out how to use, they would be able to have a much more economical approach," he said. "The business case hasn't been worked out yet because the legal issues still have to be resolved but for example, maybe they'd pay a small monthly fee to rent space on the provider's server."
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- Oh Jesus H. Christ -- pay a fee to do this? g-d that.
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-08
But Mr. Thomson does not agree with adopting U.S. copyright laws which could force Internet Service Providers to take down websites or online material of their clients based on allegations of a copyright violation before it is heard in court.
"We don't think that that system should apply in Canada, because it gives too much power to rights holders," he said. "It turns them into judges and juries."
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- - at least he's cognizant of that!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-01-08

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Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950 - New York Times

The title says it all. I'm an American citizen, and Hoover's ilk just makes me sick. What an unbelievable pig he was, and how shockingly he treated American citizenship... Today we have Bush Jr and his cronies following in Hoover's wake: "Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today." Pfui, J. Edgar Hoover, and pfui to all your ilk.

Tags: america, civil_rights, democracy, fascist_tendencies, fbi, j_edgar_hoover, liberty on 2007-12-24 and saved by 4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.
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- - 7 centuries of civilization, swept away by Hoover's paranoia & bigotry. Great. (not)
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-24
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”
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- - g-d fascist, he's the one who doesn't deserve citizenship, doesn't know what it means
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-24
But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.
Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.
So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.
The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.
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- - ha! A kangaroo court, in other words! Brilliant (not)
  posted by lampertina on 2007-12-24

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