ideometric

From Yglesias:

Strong IP is usually branded as “good” for “creators” but the main impact of the digital revolution has been to advantage non-commercial producers relative to commercial producers, and the main impact of strong IP law is to shift the balance of power back to the commercial world. We’re accustomed to thinking of capitalism in opposition to socialism, state-direction production, but in the information realm the main opposition is between capitalism and activity that is simply non-commercial in nature.

A couple months ago I lent $25 to a woman in Peru who wanted to buy more beans to sell at her local farmers’ market.

It’s not charity; she bought the beans for her business and has been slowly paying me back from the profit she makes on that investment – I’ve gotten $12.50 back so far. Lenders like me make no profit, but the organizations managing the loans charge interest to cover operating costs.

Kiva is the microlending site that makes this possible. Microlending is when you make small loans to people, often in developing countries where small amounts go a long way towards providing opportunities to escape poverty. These people are generally trying to start, maintain, or expand a business but lack the funds or availability of credit.

Kiva connects you to in-country organizations that screen applicants and disburse the money. This is different from charity because it provides the means to self-sufficiency and development. I think it also respects the dignity of people that are trying to make it in adverse conditions.

I think Kiva is still relatively young, but this kind of grass-roots, networked style of economic development has a lot of promise. It’s the sort of thing that Obama’s team picked up on with their fundraising tactics, drawing in millions of small donors to raise more than any previous campaign.

An interesting little article in NYT about the experience of Indian Americans turning back to India for work.

I found this idea intriguing.

If there is a creative class, in Richard Florida’s phrase, there is also emerging what might be called a fusion class: people positioned to mediate among the multiple societies that claim them.

Cultural education is key in a globalized world. Learning how to negotiate cultures – a skill children of immigrants build by tough necessity – is a definitely a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. However, I think its value outside the market is ultimately much greater. The culture wars, ethnic conflicts, tensions caused by immigration, conflicting religious beliefs, etc. all require us to find a way to relate to each other civilly (lest the clash of civilizations thesis prove accurate), which I think means learning how to replicate the kind of “in-betweenness” that immigrants and especially children of immigrants are forced to negotiate.

Photo: Taking a break from reading @ Yri Cafe in Hongdae

Started reading Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. It’s pretty comprehensive making the case for the importance of policy change and institutional shift in favor of openness and freedom for information technologies (away from incumbent industries’ and government support for proprietary models that stress ownership and access control). His key argument is that there is potential in the network communications paradigm for advancing justice, democracy, and freedom. How much of this potential will be realized depends on key decisions made now – regarding network neutrality, copyright and patent policy, the DMCA, DRM, etc. etc.

It’s dense though, I’ll write more when I have time to digest it. But so far so good – it makes a lot of points that I was trying to get at in my thesis, but only marginally succeeded in supporting.

Here’s a talk given by the author @ MIT It’s really fast paced but worth a listen.

I’m reading a short commentary by Alain Touraine in New Perspective Quarterly Fall 1998, trying to explore more of his work before getting back to work on my thesis…This excerpt is interesting to me.

The transformation of industrial culture has been underway for some time. The glimmerings of cultural change were first seen in the student and countercultural revolts of the 1960s, when marginal actors expressed their disenchantment with industrial culture. In the wake of those revolts, misgivings set in about the logic of the entire system–the Club of Rome proclaimed the era of limits and ecological concerns touched the mainstream.

The second stage of this transformation set in as prime actors of the industrial culture, such as the labor unions, began to disappear from center stage as the main opposition force. As had happened in earlier times, when the conflict between citizen and prince became institutionalized in constitutions and parliaments, the social rights of workers were institutionalized in the social-welfare state and mainstream political parties. Their struggle became hollow, bureaucratic and ritualized.

In the West during the 1970s, a sense of emptiness and malaise set in. Without the familiar actors, it was difficult to find meaning in that which had lost its unity. A period of complete doubt and cynicism arose. We didn’t know where we wereheaded. There was no orientation. The seeds of post-modernism had been sown.

With an empty image of the future, reaction at first set in. There was a search for roots, a nostalgia for the past. Representing varying degrees of reaction, Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority and Jean-Marie Le Pen came forward. And, in a much more serious way, the very universalism of Reason from the industrial period was rejected in favor of pure difference: I am homosexual, I am Chicano, I am woman, I am black. Then, finally, came the narcissism of the “yuppie” who so lacked even a reminiscence of personality that his individuality was defined entirely according to the conventions of status consumption.

At this same moment in the West, during the 1970s and 1980s, technological revolution was taking place—from computers to bio-engineering to satellite broadcasting. In purely material terms this marked the beginning of reconstruction. Today we are just passing to the other side of the emptiness. We are beyond the crisis of our incapacity to act and are entering the first stages of cultural reconstruction. The first actors which appear clearly in the early stage of reconstruction are the most powerful—the communication elites of the mass media who are the producers of language, symbols and images. In the Information Age, those with the means to define society’s image of itself have the central power.

I like Touraine because he’s all about individual agency; he sees oppositional power, and the ability to reshape society located at the individual level, and he places the role of culture at the center. I’m still wrapping my head around his vision of individualism and subjectivity, but it seems to be founded on the notion of learning to accept each individual’s cultural autonomy – the ability to speak for yourself and to engage each other’s differences on equal footing, democratically. He’s not a postmodernist; it’s not relativism that he’s advocating – it’s how to get beyond the trap of relativism that degrades culture and how to live together in an interconnected, multicultural world.

This view of cultural reconstruction argues, against post-modernism, that society does have a center and that center is conscious man, the subject and actor, capable of constructing cultural models.

To me this illustrates why blogs (etc) and democratized digital media in general are so important, they are tools by which the “reconstruction” of culture (and through culture, social relations [is that the right order?]) can be directed and contested more openly and democratically than ever:

At this critical stage of cultural reconstruction, the main conflicts revolve around the invention of language and images that redefine man’s relationship to nature.

This post is messy and unfocused. May or may not revise it later. I’m starving and can’t think, might write more later. Thnking out-loud is good though.

For a while now, a Korean blogger under the name Minerva has drawn a lot of attention for his writing on the economic collapse going against the official line of the Korean government. Some speculated that he was an insider posting anonymously.

Now someone alleged to be Minerva has been arrested, and he turns out to be a 30-something with little more than a 2 year degree.  It’s part of a seemingly wider effort to curtail freedom of speech and press, as the major broadcasters are coming under threat of greater control and some officials advocate legislation to do away with anonymity on the Korean parts of the internet.

Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

The man, known throughout South Korea by the pen name of Minerva – after the Roman goddess of wisdom – upset the government with his doomsayer’s forecasts for the economy and his satirical attacks on President Lee Myung Bak’s policies.

But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future.

Park Dae Sung’s arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent – a crime punishable by up to five years in prison – came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.

[...]

The government camp hopes that Park’s case will lend weight to the Lee government’s attempt to regulate the country’s vigorous and unruly online communities. But the main opposition Democratic Party has accused the government of gagging the Internet, a popular venue for anti-government criticism.

The story is less about the content of Minerva’s posts than the government response, which is a great embarrassment and disappointment. Korea is so advanced in many fields of IT development, yet displays such backwardness in action and policy.

IHT story here.

Good article by Hua Hsu in the Atlantic on the changing dynamic of race and culture in America. Especially good treatment of what “whiteness” means in America’s changing demographic makeup.

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

The article is good in that it doesn’t lose sight of entrenched inequalities, and sees the variety of “white” responses to demographic shift (and power shift, as “white” people come to terms with it), from self-denial and identity crisis to defensive withdrawal into identity groups. But it’s ultimately optimistic, as am I, about the potential for a new era of respect for individuals as individuals, and the democratization of American culture.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

I figure I should start thinking about grad school. I came across MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, which is right up my alley.

 A New Research Agenda

Comparative media studies is not the study of interactive technologies. It focuses on social and cultural interactions with technology. As media become increasingly integrated into all aspects of modern experience, it is impossible to fully understand our central institutions and practices without understanding media. The most urgent questions confronting us are social and cultural, not purely technological.

Which is right on. I’ve become less interested in the newest gadgets in and of themselves, and more interested in their social and cultural affordances. I’m interested in the kind of society new media (portable, social, networked, and highly capable) is shaping, and even more interested in potential reformulations of existing social relations to become more like the networks that underlie new media.

I just finished Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. The most valuable take-away was his constant refrain that deregulation and increased global competition has simultaneously empowered consumers and investors by aggregating and enhancing their collective power, while shafting workers and average people.

Increased competition has lead to a race to the bottom to maintain competitive advantages predicated on cutting labor costs, and indeed any cost that might reduce shareholder profits. This negatively impacts wages, job security, working conditions, retirement plans, union participation, health care, the environment, and society as a whole.

Profits for corporations and their shareholders have gone way up, but they have not been shared with society or with workers. Instead, the rich have gotten far richer, and the rest have done merely okay, benefiting from lower cost goods but losing stability and income growth. This is in contrast to the post-WWII social contract (see Fordism) that emerged between unions and large oligopolies sharing profits with labor, ballooning America’s middle class, providing social mobility, and fueling American economic growth and the mass-consumption/mass-production economy. For a variety of reasons, that arrangement broke down and we can’t turn back the clock, nor should we try. But that doesn’t mean the current system is good or that it can’t be changed for the better.

Reich’s aim is to encourage political engagement. The problem is not greed or corporations in and of themselves; these are distractions. The underlying problem is that the current way of doing things perversely incentivizes myopic self-interest, speculation, short term investment and profit maximization, rather than sustainability and public good. That we let our consumer-selves get the better of our citizen-selves, and that this shows in our tacit acceptance of the status quo where profit is the sole concern and social well-being is completely missing from the equation.

The problem is finding a balance between the good and the bad. Increased choice, lower costs, more competition, greater economic dynamism, efficiency and innovation are all good things. But they need to be accompanied by policies that mitigate the negative impacts on labor, inequality, quality of life, environmental degradation, the exploitation of labor abroad, the blind eye turned towards oppresive regimes we trade with and invest in, etc.

His conclusion was a bit sparse, but I think the point was that the solution is necessarily political and democratic, requiring the force of legislation, and that we can’t let the monied interests and corporate lobbies continue to define the rules of the game, on either side of the political spectrum…

I just checked on my sole contribution to Wikipedia, the entry for Netwar, and interestingly it’s largely unchanged except for a few cosmetic edits. I can see how people would get addicted to this, there’s a kind of nerdy sense of accomplishment and purpose in compiling and ordering human knowledge…

I like this quote, and the implications. From Alain Touraine:

“society is not what it is but what it makes itself be”

The Associated Press has decided that fair use no longer applies to them, and is attempting to charge $12.50 (and up) to quote as little as 5 words from an article.

This is an example of the tension embedded in new media, between cultural autonomy, democratization, and the enhancement of capability on the one hand, versus the creation of potentially more invasive methods of control, censorship, cooptation, and extraction of profit on the other. It’s a political issue (at the very least). We need smart policies regulating technology and communications, and smart laws protecting our rights.

This post from Making Light sketches the alternative…

“Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.”

In the same vein, Bruce Schneier echoes this concern in light of wider designs for embedded limitations, such as kill-switches in OnStar that can remotely shut-off your car, or overrides in your cell-phones and other gear that might forcibly set them to silent in a movie theater, or turn them off in an airplane, (etc.).

“This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good “manners” on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music to a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.”

In a world of simulacra, copies without originals, when is a work “finished”? Is it a perpetual work-in-progress?

I think I like that idea.

Hamelink, C. (1986). Is there life after the information revolution? In M. Traber (Ed.), The Myth of the Information Revolution: Social and Ethical Implications of Communication Technology, pp. 7-20. London: Sage.

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I thought this was an interesting text, so here’s a short review for my own benefit in synthesizing its ideas and engaging my own for my thesis.

Hamelink critiques the narratives of human progress that arise from advances in technology (the industrial revolution, the information revolution). He refers to them as myths that ultimately serve to obscure the fact that little changes in the overall power structure of society. His point is that the utopian visions of an information society are uncritical, couched in terms that assume that technological advancement in and of itself is an unquestionable good for humanity.

To question this myth, he uses some obvious examples that many system or macro level analysts cite. 1.) Information tech is the perfect tool to “perpetuate a capitalist mode of production,” as evidenced in numerous ways by the growth of large TNCs. 2.) Information tech makes it easier for states, institutions, and bureaucracies to micromanage and extend regulation, invade privacy, etc. 3.) Information tech supports cultural homogenization, an “oligopolized leisure market,” and a whithering of autonomous culture.

Thus, Hamelink argues, the myth of the information society “is meant to cater to the interests of those who initiate and manage the ‘information revolution:’ the most powerful sectors of society, its central administrative elites, the military establishment and global industrial corporations,” holding little promise for the marginal, only that they will be “computer-controlled losers.”

While these are valid points, it seems to me that this macro perspective ignores whats happening “on the ground” – that networks made viable by dense, more affordable, and more pervasive communications technologies, are creating new sources of power that can challenge the powerful groups laid out in Hamelink’s critique above. More on this as I develop my thesis… back to Hamelink for now.

In opposition to the established information revolution myth, Hamelink proposes a counter-myth, and things get interesting. He talks about hierarchies and competition as integral (negative) aspects of the social system. Globalization and other factors have expanded competition, and in some sense hierarchies have been globalized as well. He speaks about this in terms of the domination of efficiency, rationality, and analytical thought; secularization, the devaluing of the search for meaning, and ultimately futility. Basically, I guess, touching in some respects on the problems with late-capitalism and/or postmodernity.

The counter-myth is one that stresses cooperation and “the joy and excitement of non-competitive” collaborative effort, and is aimed at restructuring the hierarchies that dominate society. The institutions and industries that are empowered by new ICTs have weaknesses that can be exploited — there is a disconnect between what they promise and what they deliver, they are locked in competition with each other for power and profit, and they are vulnerable by virtue of their size and reliance on networks of various types.

That immediately makes me think of present-day open-source oranization in all its various iterations. What’s more, Hamelink goes on to say that this counter-myth, or “heretical ethics” engages with these “dinosaurs” of the old social order through a “‘judo strategy’: exploiting, in a calculatd manner, the strength and weight of the opponent” such that the old hierarchies will fall under their own overextended weight. Asymmetric warfare, networks, open source… these ideas seem to be supported in the writing I’ve seen on netwar, 4GW (Arquilla & Ronfeldt) and John Robb’s global guerilla theory.

Hamelink’s articulation of an information society counter-myth seems like something of a reach. It’s kind of vague and all over the place, philosophical, speculative, fuzzy, etc. It lacks concrete details to ground it in reality. I think this is partly due to the date the paper was written. Nevertheless, I think the ideas touched on in this counter-myth are interesting and generally supported by events that have happened since the paper was written.

This text does a good job, for me, of encapsulating the two visions of information society’s potentials. Next on my agenda is to assemble some solid case studies to show and examine the real-world seeds of this counter-myth…

I’ve put up an initial reading list for my thesis. It needs to be whittled down to a more focused short list. I’m sure it’s missing a lot of really important stuff too. Also put a list of everything I can remember reading that’s atleast tangentially related. Who knows, might come in handy.

Here’s the rough draft proposal for my senior thesis. It’s vague and all, and needs some better vocabulary (global culture? what’s that?) but atleast it’s a place to start getting ideas for what I should be reading.

The flow of culture through international trade, migration, and new communications technologies is an important part of globalization. To a large extent, these flows are characterized by unequal power relations, privileging the cultural expansion of the dominant core countries, and the US in particular. This is reflected in critiques of ‘Americanization,’ ‘Western modernity,’ and global cultural homogenization. The globalization ofculture often results in a forced hybridization or negotiation of the global and the local, where global flows threaten to displace less powerful local cultures, challenging or expanding traditional identities, ways of life, and forms of expression.

However, new media and the information and communication technologies that underlie the emerging information society, such as the internet, computers, and cell phones, are often described as empowering and democratic. These technologies decentralize capability and control in the sense that individuals have greater capability to manipulate and create culture, as well as greater control over how and what they consume. At the same time, computer networks are opening alternative distribution channels that make marginal/niche cultures more viable.

Do these new technologies reshape transnational cultural relationships in ways that challenge existing inequalities by creating a more democratic, fragmented global culture? Or do they support the expansion of a homogenizing, hegemonic global culture? I will begin by surveying these two opposing views, followed by analysis illuminated by localized ethnographic detail, situated within a macro examination of transnational power structures.

An interesting story in Wired about life behind China’s “Golden Shield” aka the Great Firewall. Here’s a clipping.

For all its ambition, the gears of the giant surveillance machine keep getting fouled with sand. On one side of the Great Firewall, a small industry is sprouting up, dedicated to evading blocks and monitors. Libertarian software engineers, enterprising students, banned religious groups, and regular for-profit companies compete with one another to launch new downloadable tools that outfox the censors. They exploit proxy servers, deploy encryption technology, and ferret out holes in the wall. I have spent many afternoons in the Internet cafés of Beijing’s Haidian University district, learning from the students who live in this world. For a dollar an hour, they will help anyone hack the system: set up secure SSH and VPN connections, use a circumvention tool called UltraSurf developed by the banned Falun Gong group, access unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks. Their techniques confirm John Gilmore’s adage: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Makes me wonder how high a priority enforcing the firewall is, if kids can hang out in a cafe offering these services. Maybe authorities are just resigned to the futility of enforcement except in cases that they perceive as threatening?  What type of people subvert the firewall, and for what purposes? To access, or to publish? Is this a trivial thing for the average person meeting their information needs, or does it constitute a radical act? What are these “unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks”? I need to read up on UltraSurf too.

Sources: Wired Article /BoingBoing

An interesting article from a CIA publication about the use of the internet in North Korea. I wonder how the internet  is used by the (presumably few and priveliged) who have access. The article brings up points about how computers are easier, in some ways, to control than other technologies that have been repurposed with revolutionary intent inside totalitarian regimes. North Korea is an extreme case, and China’s leaky firewall is probably a more easily generalized case study on censorship, activism, and the net (my guess, anyway).

 ” While allowing researchers to use the Internet to keep current with global trends in science and technology, P’yongyang has been able to retain control over unwelcome political information. The government can promote scientific exploration while keeping researchers in country and under surveillance. Computers conducting Internet searches are more readily monitored than the photocopying machines that served to spread forbidden political tracts in the former Soviet Union. With Internet searches easily tracked and the penalties for political dissent grave, it is difficult to imagine scientists straying from technology sites. The same applies to the domestic Intranet, where technicians exchanging e-mail messages on political issues would run a serious risk of late-night knocks on the door by members of the security forces.”

Source: Mercado, Stephen. Hermit Surfers of Pyongyang. CIA Studies in Intelligence, VOL. 48, NO. 1, 2004 Unclassified Edition. Online version.

I created a Wikipedia entry for Arquilla & Ronfeldt’s theory of netwar as a project for one of my classes. It’s been up for a good amount of time now, and looking at the history of edits on a document you created is interesting. Not much has changed since I put it up, unfortunately. Several people have tried to add examples to the article, only to have them deleted by others for being “POV essay material.” Haha.

It’s not perfect, but I will say it’s better than what was there before (that is, nothing).

DataCenter sounds like a great idea, and apparently they’ve been around for quite a while. Here’re parts of their mission statement:

We help to level the information playing field by making proprietary databases and sophisticated analysis tools accessible for community investigations.

We address the disconnect between community knowledge and “authoritative research” by helping communities learn and apply social science tools so they share “expert status” with policymakers and academic institutions.

I found out about them from a recent report they did with the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance.