As news of a faith based corrections facility opening in Florida elbows out news of the first American Mad Cow, I find myself at work in a cheery Christmas fog. This year for sure, I thought all sentiment would be scoured from the holidays. No particular reason for it. Just fatigue, maybe. We got a house finally this year, Allegra is talking to Sara again, Cheney and Bob and Jeanne all came out from CA for a visit, and the squirrel feeder on the frozen deck is keeping a small legion of beady eyed rodents happy through the December before the election. So there is a plenty to be grateful for. But I seem to be running out of the bottomless optimism that has sustained me through the last decade, when there were few and far between objects of my gratitude.
I am even intrigued by the idea of Jesus again after so many years. I mean, if you put aside the rabble rousers who inspire fear and hatred in his name, he didn't have such a bad message. As somebody said, early christianity was the only game in town if you didn't own property and didn't come from a good family. It was the only organized religion that reached out to the runaway slaves, felons, exiles, homeless, etc of the time. Wealthy and healthy Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, etc families might have made some charitable gestures toward the outcasts of humanity, but they didn't stand on street corners trying to get them to join their church.
Yesterday when Sara donated something to the bell ringer outside the grocery store, he said "This will help rehabilitate drug addicts and prostitutes". Her thought was to jokingly say "That's good because somebody has to help those scum" but she thought better, and smiled, and wished him and you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I say that advisedly, because if you want to wish me something closer to your faith and custom, I will receive it in good spirits, without resentment for its parochial tone, trusting in your good intentions and humanity. Namaste, too.
24.12.03
18.12.03
Modern heroes.
Cheryl Stearns is going to jump out of an open gondola 130,000 feet up in 2005. It will break the world record set in 1960 (!)...and prepare for emergency rescues of astronauts who could jump from space back to the planet surface without a vehicle....
The future of laptop government
Dean's "campaign on a laptop" as interpreted in this recent Washington Post article presages some major changes in ALL organizations, according to the writer. It might have enormous consequences for regional governments, too.
In a nutshell, Everett Erhlich claims that the Dean campaign does not even resemble the other presidential candidates' campaigns. It is run in a small, flattened information engine that completely eliminates the bloated campaign bureaucracies of the past, still used by his competitors.
Erhlich refers to the work of an economist named Ronald Coase, who wrote in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determined the size of the organization. This explained the size of a company like IBM, for example. It had to develop a mountainous management structure to organize and support the vast amounts of information processed through the operational structure.
(I am not entirely sold on this truism. Ford Motor Company, for instance, had enormous plants that did not grow from the demand for information, but for the demand for hard stuff...cars and the machines that could make them. The ratio between production size and production information volume, in this case, is radically different from the ratio maintained by IBM. For the sake of arguement, however, lets assume Coase is right.)
Dean's campaign, run on the internet and in the databases and email files of a net-savvy team, supposedly represents a new creature on the political landscape, a self-defined movement that can court the Democratic nomination but will exist with or without it. But the most important thing here, is the small, mobile nature of the information hub: essentially a laptop computer with, say, 40 gigs hard drive and some off the shelf management software.
Gone are the index card files, filing cabinets, and their entailed offices and warehouse spaces rented or even owned by the local party. Gone are the legions of clerical volunteers, the boiler room phone factories churning out personal phone contacts ward to ward, precinct to precinct. Gone are the fund raisers which must finance this huge middle layer of contacts, messages, agreements, contracts, analysis, positions, etc in labyrinthine paper stores. Gone are the people, real estate, phones, cars, expense accounts, dinners and lunches and gifts.
In their place, a laptop, an inch thick and weighing 4 lbs, available at a moments notice, capable of sharing, publishing, broadcasting or pointcasting information 24 hours a day. All documents, records, reports, positions immediately at hand. Ready to trigger smart mobs or dumb mobs into instant action. Capable of stealth or open provocations, responses, counter punches.
4 lbs of political nuclear fission. Available to anyone with a credit card.
It could well be the end of huge monolithic parties. I mean, it has been a long time since a New Hampshire Democrat really had much in common with a Manhatten Democrat or a Minnesota DFL'r....except for their shared opposition to the Right.
With the rise of laptop politics, the boundaries of political hegemonies will be like the boundaries of flocks of birds, shifting, porous, changing even as they are measured, but still indicating some kind of mass in flight, in contrast to the other life forms around them.
In a nutshell, Everett Erhlich claims that the Dean campaign does not even resemble the other presidential candidates' campaigns. It is run in a small, flattened information engine that completely eliminates the bloated campaign bureaucracies of the past, still used by his competitors.
Erhlich refers to the work of an economist named Ronald Coase, who wrote in 1937 that the cost of gathering information determined the size of the organization. This explained the size of a company like IBM, for example. It had to develop a mountainous management structure to organize and support the vast amounts of information processed through the operational structure.
(I am not entirely sold on this truism. Ford Motor Company, for instance, had enormous plants that did not grow from the demand for information, but for the demand for hard stuff...cars and the machines that could make them. The ratio between production size and production information volume, in this case, is radically different from the ratio maintained by IBM. For the sake of arguement, however, lets assume Coase is right.)
Dean's campaign, run on the internet and in the databases and email files of a net-savvy team, supposedly represents a new creature on the political landscape, a self-defined movement that can court the Democratic nomination but will exist with or without it. But the most important thing here, is the small, mobile nature of the information hub: essentially a laptop computer with, say, 40 gigs hard drive and some off the shelf management software.
Gone are the index card files, filing cabinets, and their entailed offices and warehouse spaces rented or even owned by the local party. Gone are the legions of clerical volunteers, the boiler room phone factories churning out personal phone contacts ward to ward, precinct to precinct. Gone are the fund raisers which must finance this huge middle layer of contacts, messages, agreements, contracts, analysis, positions, etc in labyrinthine paper stores. Gone are the people, real estate, phones, cars, expense accounts, dinners and lunches and gifts.
In their place, a laptop, an inch thick and weighing 4 lbs, available at a moments notice, capable of sharing, publishing, broadcasting or pointcasting information 24 hours a day. All documents, records, reports, positions immediately at hand. Ready to trigger smart mobs or dumb mobs into instant action. Capable of stealth or open provocations, responses, counter punches.
4 lbs of political nuclear fission. Available to anyone with a credit card.
It could well be the end of huge monolithic parties. I mean, it has been a long time since a New Hampshire Democrat really had much in common with a Manhatten Democrat or a Minnesota DFL'r....except for their shared opposition to the Right.
With the rise of laptop politics, the boundaries of political hegemonies will be like the boundaries of flocks of birds, shifting, porous, changing even as they are measured, but still indicating some kind of mass in flight, in contrast to the other life forms around them.
17.12.03
Looking down the barrel of the holiday
Everyone is under amazing pressure these days. Everyone. Even the chronic losers cannot take refuge in their escapist ways these days. The winners see the brass ring shaved down to a sliver, and hundreds more hands reaching, while the redemption value of brass is dwindling to nothing. The losers find their ruts of self-pity being foreclosed by the smiling images of drug addled patients loosed upon the land. No more depression, they tell us, no more anxiety. If you feel anything, feel great, feel American, feel first and think later.
I have a few presents squirrled away. I try to enjoy the view from the new house. I try to avoid thinking about the job that is being done on my 15 year old son in public school, and the jobs that are being lost in my workplace. I try to avoid thinking about the fantasy of cheer that is held out to us through a thousand glimpses into other people's dreams. Where are any of these dreams realized?
Whose dreams come true anymore? And why do we take it for granted that dreams coming true are better than realities lived on their own terms?
The holidays divorce the images of happiness from the routine of daily living. They create a kind of joy ghetto where you need a special pass to visit, and you can't take anything you find there back home with you.
Less pressure. It is as though we are all on a submarine that is sinking deeper and deeper into the inky cold water...as though it is just a matter of time before the hull caves in.
I have gone to many schools of pressure adaptation. The school that tells you to hold your breath, the school that tells you to thrash and grab, the school that tells you to stare straight ahead and wait until the pain abates of its own, the school that teaches the arts of displacement; how to push your pressure off into the skins of those weaker and more gullible than you.
What I have, finally, is just love. And the knowledge that love is not enough. It can't really slay dragons, or drain the floods or calm the angry storm skies. If anything, love keeps you more vulnerable. Everyone you love is a hostage held by the future. You must pay a ransom. And that ransom is your dreams.
In order to really love in this world, you cannot live in or for dreams. You must live in the dustballs and freshness-expired ordinariness of this world. Love or dreams, what a choice.
I have chosen though. I left small, unmarked dreams in a paper bag at the bus station. My love came out of the back of the waiting room, disheveled and blurry, but real. I would do it again.
That isn't what sells sugar water or huge vehicles. But it gets me through to tomorrow, and soon the holidays will be over, and we can wear our ordinariness without apology again.
I have a few presents squirrled away. I try to enjoy the view from the new house. I try to avoid thinking about the job that is being done on my 15 year old son in public school, and the jobs that are being lost in my workplace. I try to avoid thinking about the fantasy of cheer that is held out to us through a thousand glimpses into other people's dreams. Where are any of these dreams realized?
Whose dreams come true anymore? And why do we take it for granted that dreams coming true are better than realities lived on their own terms?
The holidays divorce the images of happiness from the routine of daily living. They create a kind of joy ghetto where you need a special pass to visit, and you can't take anything you find there back home with you.
Less pressure. It is as though we are all on a submarine that is sinking deeper and deeper into the inky cold water...as though it is just a matter of time before the hull caves in.
I have gone to many schools of pressure adaptation. The school that tells you to hold your breath, the school that tells you to thrash and grab, the school that tells you to stare straight ahead and wait until the pain abates of its own, the school that teaches the arts of displacement; how to push your pressure off into the skins of those weaker and more gullible than you.
What I have, finally, is just love. And the knowledge that love is not enough. It can't really slay dragons, or drain the floods or calm the angry storm skies. If anything, love keeps you more vulnerable. Everyone you love is a hostage held by the future. You must pay a ransom. And that ransom is your dreams.
In order to really love in this world, you cannot live in or for dreams. You must live in the dustballs and freshness-expired ordinariness of this world. Love or dreams, what a choice.
I have chosen though. I left small, unmarked dreams in a paper bag at the bus station. My love came out of the back of the waiting room, disheveled and blurry, but real. I would do it again.
That isn't what sells sugar water or huge vehicles. But it gets me through to tomorrow, and soon the holidays will be over, and we can wear our ordinariness without apology again.
12.12.03
The tragedy of the commons in new clothes
Call me Cassandra.
I am not optimistic today about the role of technology in politics.
My pal Howard says the commons is the source of wealth and innovation, and the new commons is the internet. The commons, in this case, being a reference to the halcyon days of New England, when the sheep roamed the town square, and livestock fed off the common ground without fences.
When the internet bloomed it was considered a vast, shared turf. Generosity was the attitude of choice. There was more than enough for everyone. It seemed.
That changed with the dotcom fiasco, in which "insiders" foreclosed on castles in the air for millions of investors.
Then came feral spam, and the escalation of viruses bred in the suburban bedrooms and dorms around the world. The clarion call of technical empowerment was a trumpeted with increasing bad breath.
On one level, the "commons" is becoming narrower, in terms of shared access to a common resource.
The real resource of the internet is the ability to connect in order to exchange. The illusory resource is the ability to see and be shown.
As the commons narrows down to the active, empowered few, however, the passive majority become a new commons: a new common resource of money, opinion, loyalty, interest, etc: the resources that politics is built from. The grass of the commons becomes the sheep that fed on it, and the sheep become the new commons. (Excuse the image, but Mighty Morphin Metaphors sold it as is, and has a no exchange policy.)
As the technical commons shrinks and becomes established turf among a minority defined by strength, the political commons becomes available through the new technology. We will see it shift away from the progressive agenda of 200 years of American history. And it will happen in radical, non-linear usurpations. Smart mobs. What moral tone? What values?
There is a fire sale in the history department. Kids are rummaging through the shopworn ideas, looking for new combinations that can energize them. It can't be long before they find the writings of the right wing thinkers from the early 20th century. Before they became radioactive comic villans.
They were the philosophers of minorities defined by strength. They called it fascism. It's seed are strewn in the turf.
If you want to read the history of our immediate future, read about the demise of Weimar, the rise of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mussolini in Italy. Forget Stalin and Hitler, look to the farm teams where the ambivalent but authentic dilemmas of millions of "nobodies" got transformed into the annealed weapons-grade societies of the Axis.
History won't repeat itself. It spoke once, and if we weren't listening, that's too bad. But it starts the new movement, and the motifs are so familiar, so achingly familiar.
I am not optimistic today about the role of technology in politics.
My pal Howard says the commons is the source of wealth and innovation, and the new commons is the internet. The commons, in this case, being a reference to the halcyon days of New England, when the sheep roamed the town square, and livestock fed off the common ground without fences.
When the internet bloomed it was considered a vast, shared turf. Generosity was the attitude of choice. There was more than enough for everyone. It seemed.
That changed with the dotcom fiasco, in which "insiders" foreclosed on castles in the air for millions of investors.
Then came feral spam, and the escalation of viruses bred in the suburban bedrooms and dorms around the world. The clarion call of technical empowerment was a trumpeted with increasing bad breath.
On one level, the "commons" is becoming narrower, in terms of shared access to a common resource.
The real resource of the internet is the ability to connect in order to exchange. The illusory resource is the ability to see and be shown.
As the commons narrows down to the active, empowered few, however, the passive majority become a new commons: a new common resource of money, opinion, loyalty, interest, etc: the resources that politics is built from. The grass of the commons becomes the sheep that fed on it, and the sheep become the new commons. (Excuse the image, but Mighty Morphin Metaphors sold it as is, and has a no exchange policy.)
As the technical commons shrinks and becomes established turf among a minority defined by strength, the political commons becomes available through the new technology. We will see it shift away from the progressive agenda of 200 years of American history. And it will happen in radical, non-linear usurpations. Smart mobs. What moral tone? What values?
There is a fire sale in the history department. Kids are rummaging through the shopworn ideas, looking for new combinations that can energize them. It can't be long before they find the writings of the right wing thinkers from the early 20th century. Before they became radioactive comic villans.
They were the philosophers of minorities defined by strength. They called it fascism. It's seed are strewn in the turf.
If you want to read the history of our immediate future, read about the demise of Weimar, the rise of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mussolini in Italy. Forget Stalin and Hitler, look to the farm teams where the ambivalent but authentic dilemmas of millions of "nobodies" got transformed into the annealed weapons-grade societies of the Axis.
History won't repeat itself. It spoke once, and if we weren't listening, that's too bad. But it starts the new movement, and the motifs are so familiar, so achingly familiar.
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