The 2-step tonic for political depression

I've not made any bones about it: This campaign has left me beaten down and depressed. Am I the only one?

So, here's my tonic. It comes in two parts: Part 1: Get out the vote. Part 2: Get out and vote.

If we get out the vote, we win. We could even win big.

And while democracy does not consist merely of pulling a lever in a voting booth, pulling that lever is so important that people have died to give us that right. That's what I remember every time I vote, and this will not be the first time I get choked up in a voting booth.

I'm depressed so I spend more time thinking about how bad it's going to be if Bush wins. But occasionally I am granted a moment of thinking how good four - eight! - years of Kerry can be. I believe we will see a type of strong leadership - principled, realistic and unmarred by meanness - that this country has not seen in a generation.

I gotta go call some strangers...

You can, too. Kerry supporters can sign up here to call from their houses. Bush supporters can go google it on their own; I'm not that much of a liberal.

When your wifi card doesn't work...

When your wifi card doesn't work under XP, after spending three hours futzing with drivers, I suggest you try this:

Control Panel > Administrative tools > Services. Look for Wireless Zero Configuration. Click on it. If it's stopped, start it. If there's no start or stop button, double click on it and change "Startup type" to "Automatic."

Or you could get a Mac which, because it is a closed environment, tends to be easier to live with.

Doom the Movie (not Doom the Presidential Prediction)

1. The Doom movie is in pre-production in Prague. Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the Grave, Romeo Must Die) is directing and Karl Urban ("What business does an elf, man, and a dwarf have in the Ridder-Mark? Speak quickly", LOTR 2) will play the lead. The script is not the same as the script of Doom 3, which is the same as the script of Doom 1. which is the same as Die Hards 1-7, Rambo's 1-12, and every psychopathically sympathy-free mow-'em-down tale ever told ... and I say that as a fan.

The writer, 26-year-old Dave Callaham, has no other screenwriting credits. He gives away a bit of the "plot":

In the movie he [the space marine] is reunited with his sister, a scientist on the based named Samantha (to be played by Die Another Day villainess Rosamund Pike). They were separated after an accident that killed their parents and Callaham says, "They are a little estranged" However, strange things are afoot on the base as alien monsters begin to appear and both brother and sister have to put aside their differences in order to survive. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will also appear as Sarge, the head space marine...

In the interview, Callaham says that Id agreed to let him put in some real "character development." That's code for "I really want to make a Doom movie that will not only betray your vision, but will totally suck."

The interview got slashdotted. And here's a 145MB video about the history of Doom. I have not downloaded it.

2. The December issue of Computer Gaming World runs a "Duke Nukem Timeline" that points out: "Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were proposed, authorized, announced, designed, launched, and successfully landed on Mars in less time." Yeah, but did NASA have to worry about pixel shading? I don't think so. Ok, well, actually the NASA imaging software probably did, but, Duke Nukem is going to totally kick NASA's ass!

Our moon

Liz points us to a beautiful sequence of photos of the lunar eclipse, taken by Amy Desiree Goldstein.

Rebecca on WikiNews

Rebecca MacKinnon, who knows a little bit about journalism, has a terrific post on the proposed WikiNews.

Overall, I think it's an interesting experiment that is likely to turn into something other than is planned. What worries me most is their insistence on maintaining a neutral point of view, a policy that I believe mirrors the weakness of journalism that blogs redress. (Joi has additional concerns, as does the award-winning Dan Gillmor.)

The award-winning Dan Gillmor

Dan has won the 2004 World Technology Award for Media & Journalism. So deserved. Not only is We the Media the seminal statement of how the Net is transforming journalism, Dan has been walking the walk before most of us could crawl.

Congratulations, Dan.

Two urgent questions

1. When the network newscasters announce who won Florida, what little self-effacing phrase will they use to introduce it? "We're ready to announce a winner in Florida, and believe me, this time we've checked our numbers and counted them twice..."? "We are calling Florida for Bush/Kerry, although with Florida the only thing you can expect is the unexpected..."? What's it going to be?

2. If one were to serve a house drink on Election Night, what should it be?

a. Suggest existing appropriate drinks for Bush supporters and for Kerry supporters.

b. Create your own drink and describe what's in it. E.g., for pessimistic Kerry supporters, you might suggest the Bush Oblivion ("take three a day for the next four years") . Or, Kerry supporters might drink Iraq Invasions: Mix together wild turkey and WMDs; if no WMDs can be found, substitute zero-proof beer. Bush supporters might prefer the Shock and Awe.

Steve Johnson's new book

Steve talks about his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You. (Love the title). A snippet:

It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

Steve is one of my very favorite writers. He leads you through some complex topic and just as you're pleased with yourself for having understood so much, he turns you around and shows you some truth you hadn't noticed about where you've just been. Despite the powerful Writers Envy his work induces in me, I'm very much looking forward to his new book, which he thinks he'll be done revising in a few months.

Gonzo endorsement and dancing in the voting booths

If you haven't read Hunter S. Thompson's surprisingly enthusiastic endorsement of Kerry, drop a tab and go on over to Rolling Stone...

Fittingly, I got to this through John Perry Barlow's inspired rational madness: How to Overthrow the Government.

100,000 Iraqi dead

The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 civilians have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.

More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say.

This is a newspaper's summary of a study in the prestigious UK medical journal, The Lancet.

From the article itself:

The major causes of death before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and other chronic disorders whereas after the invasion violence was the primary cause of death. Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters, and were mainly attributed to coalition forces. Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher (95% CI 8·1-419) than in the period before the war.

...Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

Is this proof that we should not have started this war? Of course not. But it should keep us from ever thinking that war is an easy answer to a hard question.

(You can read the whole article here. It requires a free registration.)

Fuck it. You know, I try to be reasonable. But it's hard to maintain the cool stoniness of reason when you're surrounded by a 100,000 corpses — women and children and men — even if your country is directly responsible "only" for most of them.

We have an administration that uses this war to win an election, yet it forbids us from seeing photographs of our honored dead. Then it crows that the Democrats will lose because we're "reality-based." A hundred thousand corpses around us is a lot of reality to ignore. Reality is going to catch up with us, and it iis going to hurt 100,000 times more when it does.

What have we become?

PopTech Infotoons

Peter Durand of AlphaChimp has posted the posters he did in real time illustrating each of the PopTech talks. (My blogs from PopTech start here.)

Prayers of Mass Destruction

Terry Heaton blogs an interview with Anniesj who got a friendly visit from the Secret Service after she blogged — irked by Bush's talk of prayer — that she was praying that God would inspire Bush and his pals to commit mass suicide. Anniesj seems to think she's actually done something worth being investigated for. Terry concludes:

...if you're a blogger, for crying out loud be careful about what you post, even in the comments section of somebody else's blog. The first amendment is not absolute, and it's pretty easy to find you.

I conclude that when the Secret Service can tell you what you are and are not allowed to pray for — especially when you're writing satire — this country has had it.

I personally pray the Rapture comes before Nov. 2 and that it takes Bush and his cronies to Hell to do some nation-building.

The Net is an echo chamber? Nah.

In an article in Salon in February, I disputed the idea that the Net consists of echo chambers:

...Even if I spend most of my online time in my echo chamber of choice, the minority of my time may bring me into contact with a more diverse range of opinions than I would have encountered without the Net. That seems to me to be the relevant statistic, however elusive it might be.

Micah Sifry at the new Personal Democracy Forum cites a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that says: "Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions."

Since the study supports my position, I have can only conclude that the study is deeply flawed.

PhotoShop Weasels

Mithras at Kos proves that the Bush campaign's latest ad doctors a small crowd into a large one.

Getting through till Tuesday...and beyond

ProgressiveMajoritySpeaks has posted a mp3 mix of Martin Luther King, Robert LafFolette and Paul Wellstone. Loop it and listen for the next 4 years...

RageBoy's brain scanner

Chris Locke weaves a nasty little web of ideas - personal, psychological, industrial, historical - over at this site that puts Maslow's self-actualization in a disturbing light.

My new tagline for Chris: RageBoy: Giving being fucking nuts a good name since 1985.

Bush giving the finger, on tape

Hmm, Candidate Bush overheard calling a NY Times reporter a "major league asshole." VP Cheney telling Senator Leahy to go "fuck himself." And now Governor George Bush giving the finger to the camera. All just part of the return to civility and Christian decency that this great man represents. (Ask yourself: What would Jimmy Carter do?)

Yes it's petty. I present it as nothing more than that.

This video comes courtesy of VideVote.org. Here's a description of the project, courtesy of Jon Lebkowsky:

Working with Texans for Truth and Mercury Campaigns, we're putting together a web site to gather videos and images of any disturbances and irregularities that might occur at polling places on election day...We aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented. This all began when the NY Times ran an article over the weekend saying the Republicans plan to challenge some voters at polling places - "winning through intimidation." We're hoping a bunch of citizens with cameras will discourage efforts to intimidate voters, but if not, we'll have video and photo records which we'll place online as close to realtime as possible.

Citizen-journalists to the rescue!

Google browser browses the world

Jason Kottke in September guessed that Google is building its own browser. Slashdot got all slashdotty on that idea's ass. The supporting evidence: Google has registered gbrowser.com, they may be hiring people from Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, and there are reasons to think it makes sense for Google to do so...at least in terms of Google's ambitiousness.

I'm not good at this type of prognostication. (So, what type of prognostication am I good at? I accurately predicted that John Travolta would be a huge star back when he was a Sweathog. That concludes my list.) But, yesterday's purchase of Keyhole — yet another Windows-only service, as Dan Gillmor points out — got me to thinking. If Google is building a browser, what might it be like?

It would not be a Web browser. It'd be a world browser. It would find pages on the Web, of course, but it'd also find the ones on my desktop (Google desktop). It would know about my email (Gmail). It would know that my own photos are categorically different from all the other jpgs on the planet (Picasa). It would let me browse the physical earth (Keyhole) and show on a map the documents that talk about any particular place (Keyhole + Google Local).

And it wouldn't be just a browser. It would let me work with the information I've found: Manage my photos (Picasa), manage my desktop files, translate documents (Google Languages), shop...

If that's what Google's aiming at, they need a file manager (no big deal) and would probably want to have a e-wallet and maybe a digital ID offering (Whoogle? — currently owned by AK PRadeep in Berkeley).

The result would replace current browsers but wouldn't look much like them. You'd do so much of your daily work in it it that it would feel more like a desktop...

...which is where it gets really interesting.

Click here for a disclosure statement.

Victory for the Northeastern region! But defeat on the narrative front.

Apparently, athletes hired by the New England region were successful in their efforts to defeat similar athletes hired by the greater St. Louis area. I commend them all.

But, this leaves us with an incomplete narrative. The Boston team failed for 86 years because it was insufficiently grateful to a particular porcine athlete who went on to great success. This resulted in a curse. Now the curse has been lifted. But how? Did Manny Ramirez accomplish seven impossible tasks set for him by the wily Odin? Did David Ortiz slay a Minotaur? Did Johnny Damon pull a thorn from an enchanted Yankee's paw? Without knowing how the curse was lifted, the story just doesn't work, people!

GeorgeWBush.com rejects non-American visitors

Bush's official campaign site seems to be rejecting visitors from outside North America.

Yeah, way to build a coalition, George.

[Thanks to Paolo for the link. Paolo comments: "This must be the most stupid move in the short Internet history."]

Three from Trippi

I got to hang out with Joe Trippi yesterday. Here are three miscellaneous snippets:

Waiting for Hawaii. Hawaii, which went for Gore by 20 points, is now in play. Trippi's latest count of electoral votes puts the two candidates even...which means that the deciding votes may come from an archipelago where the polls don't close until 2pm on Wednesday, East Coast time.*

Both sides think they're going to lose. Apparently (= borderline rumor ahead), the mood on both campaign planes is dismal. Both sides think they're going to lose.

Tracking polls soften the blow. Tracking polls average results over three days. I.e., On Friday you see the average of W-T-F, and on Saturday you see the average of T-F-S. That means that if a small gap opens on Friday, you're likely to see a substantially larger one one on Saturday. This is bad news for Kerry if you watch Zogby but good news if you watch the Washington Post. (Zogby is good news for Nader, who has gained about 40% in the past 12 days, up to 1.1. On the other hand, if you're Libertarian, Constitution Party, Green, Other or Undecided, Zogby says you're screwed.)

——
*Joho guarantees that all its math is wrong.

Update: Zogby now has Kerry cutting Bush's lead to 1 point. By the logic of tracking polls, we should expect a further gain by Kerry tomorrow. (Fingers crossed, knocking wood, sacrificing small woodland mammals in particularly gruesome ways.)

Things not to ask yourself before walking down two flights of stairs to an open atrium

"I wonder how Jackie Chan would get down..."

How not to watch a Red Sox game

Every time a ball fails to clear the fence, assume that the players are already giving 110% and calculate exactly how many more percentage points were needed to make it a home run.

Supply the answer in the form, "If baseball player had only given ___%, that would have been a homer." Repeat until your wife and son go upstairs to watch in your bedroom.

Effective propaganda?

I think this ad is some fine propaganda. Does it work for you? Do you think it'd work on undecided voters?

Trippi class

Joe Trippi invited me in as a guest speaker at the seminar he leads at the JFK School of Government at Harvard. Man, that was fun, although I apparently depressed several students judging by the number of them who were googling for some variation of noose "how to tie". You know you're being depressing when, in response to a question about the world in twenty years, you use the phrase "surface dwellers."

I began with 15 minute informal talk about the miserable shape our democracy is in. But, I said, during the Dean months, I felt something different. I think we call it "hope." It came not from Dean or his policies. It came from the connection to other Deaniacs and the sense that it was in our power to make a difference together. The sense that democracy is ours and that it sounds like people talking with one another - that's what I loved about the Dean campaign.

I get some of that from the blogosphere. It's one place where the spark still lives.

Then I shut up and we had an interesting discussion about how realistic the Internet hope for democracy is. Trippi is less pessimistic than I am.

At the end, I asked for a show of hands: Who thinks Kerry will win, and who thinks Bush will? It was 50-50.

Proof of draft!

You've been dubious that Bush plans on bringing back the draft? Take a look at the front page of the Bush web site today. It features this photo:

Bush site prepares us for the sub-teen draft

Irony-dectomy

David Zucker, the producer of Airplane, Naked Gun, and Ruthless People, has made a movie — supported by the Republican Club for Growth (remember the "sushi-eating, Volvo-driving" anti-Dean ad?) — that lampoons Kerry for being a flipflopper.

Without the slightest sense of irony, Zucker promotes himself as a former Democrat who now is a Republican.

(Link from LGF.)

Carmeron Marlow at da Berkman

Cameron Marlow of Overstated.com and Blogdex is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. It's on Political Hacks, i.e., hacking politics. (His slide is here.)

He gives lots of examples of people using the Net to take advantage of information that's already been there. e.g., www.FundRace.org. Don't miss his analysis of the debates here and here. (That second link goes to an auto-summary of the debates. I once did the same thing for the book of Genesis.)

We played around a bit with a tool Cameron wrote that maps the frequency of phrases in the two candidates' stump speeches, mapped across time. Some surprises. Try searching for saddam, osama, health care, vietnam, lawyers, and teresa.

Die, telcos, die!

RCN provides our house with telephone service, cable modem, and cable television. I just switched another telephone line over to them because MCI charges too much for sucking.

But here's what I learned: RCN charges $7.00/month for Caller ID. Seven bucks for a service that is essentially free to them. Jeez. It makes me love my Vonage phone all the more.

(On the positive side, RCN silently upgraded its cable modem customers to 7 megabit service. Right now, DSLReports says I'm getting 5mbit down and an increasingly asymmetric 572kb up.)

Error 405: This link works fine but nobody cares

I received yet another personal message from Marc Racicot today. He certainly seems to like me! This one says:

There's an old saying that goes, "All politics is local." As a former Governor, I couldn't agree more.

To reach the undecided voters, we need to make our message local as well. That's why we have created special web pages for every state - to tell every voter why President Bush is the best choice based on the local issues important to them.

We encourage you to share our Massachusetts page with friends, family and neighbors who live near you and may still be undecided.

www.GeorgeWBush.com/Massachusetts

It's with a certain satisfaction I report that the links leads you to this:

Petty of me, I know. But I'm afraid the only pleasures left are petty.

Eminem's screed

As a 53-year-old suburban dad, I am, let's say, outside of Eminem's demographic. But his vehemently anti-Bush Mosh (lyrics here) truly shizzled my nizzle. (I'm assuming it's good to have one's nizzles shizzled.)

Maybe you can tell me: Are his claims of self-importance ("Come along, follow me as I lead through the darkness...", "I give sight to the blind") as egotistical as they sound, merely evidence of the young lad's lack of a self-esteem problem, or just part of the genre I need to accept?

Steve Johnson: Red Sox Fan

Steve Johnson, resident of NYC, recently switched his fandom from the Yankees to the Red Sox. I can't quote from his most recent post without giving it away - it's one sentence long - but go have a laugh.

Reason to Love Canada #341

Canada's equivalent of American Idol is a show that profiles individuals of great achievement in Canadian history. You then get to vote for your favorite. Currently in the lead position is Tommy Douglas, "the father of Medicare," followed by Terry Fox who ran across Canada after losing his right leg to cancer.

Meanwhile, in America we're trying to decide whether we'd rather watch The Swan or Who Wants to Blow Donald's Trumpet?

O, Can-a-DA...

[Thanks, Tim Bouma, for the link.]

Marc's bad idea, and a personal matter

I think Marc Canter's idea is, overall, a bad one because, even though his scheme provides transparency (yay!), as I understand it, bloggers who said bad things about a client would not get their contracts renewed (boo!); "Say nice things or we'll stop paying you" makes you less trustworthy. I'm in favor of bloggers making money from their blogs, but not if I now have to worry that their voice may have been bought. (See Stowe and Jason for more.)

And I want to set the record (= the index) straight on a personal matter. Marc quotes me from a fun lunch we had a couple of weeks ago in SF. He told me about his plan. I told him why I thought it would result in coercing bloggers into saying good things about his clients. I not only that I of course want bloggers to be able to make money blogging, but I suggested variations on his plan that I thought would put money in blogger's pockets without making us into shills. (Primarily, I suggested paying bloggers to blog about a product on the product's site, with full transparency, for a limited time with a non-renewable contract. Is it a good idea? I dunno, but bloggers would make money and I think wouldn't feel coerced into being positive.)

This is a tad awkward. Marc has generously apologized for running the quote and removed the reference to me. Thanks, Marc. I have therefore removed two brief paragraphs from this blog entry. one that whined about what I thought was Marc's mischaracterization of my opinion and another that was slightly light. I have deeply mixed feelings about editing blogs after the fact (excepting for typos, misspelling names, etc.), but I'd rather err on the side of civility.

Microsoft in violation?

In order to register a Microsoft product, you must get a .NET Passport. There are no alternative methods. I don't want to support Passport because I'm uncomfortable with Microsoft being in the ID business — and if I'm wrong, then I'll fall back simply on "I don't want one because I don't want one" — so now I don't get the benefits of registration (whatever those might be).

Isn't this coercive behavior? Can't someone please sue them? Thank you.

Michael O'Connor Clarke's new blog

Michael has started a Corante blog called "Flackster." Michael's one of the wittier writers around, so I look forward to this chronicle of life in, among and against the PR-osphere.

Red Sox question

I don't know anything about baseball — for example, are there rules about when you can use a pinch runner, or is it just random? — so pardon me if this is a naive question, but: Is this the first time that winning a World Series would make a team normal?

Jay Rosen's list

Jay compiles a fantastic list of "What's going on here that we don't understand, do we, Mr. and Mrs. Jones?" He asks for help understanding what thread runs among the topics.

I left a comment, basically repeating a post from a few days ago:

Great list, and I agree with Shrinkette: Sounds like you're gestating the blog entry we're all waiting to read.

I think you can see one of the pivot points in Stewart's refusing to be CrossFire's "monkey": The journalists want to entertain and the entertain wants to tell the truth.

The entertainer is the pivot here because I think part of the new -- but transient -- narrative is that "The media are the last to know"...and in particular, the last to know that they've lost their pompous, false claim on our trust. "The media are the last to know" is a comic trope since, obviously, they're in the knowing business. Hence, the narrative has become comedic. Their every protestation of seriousness -- from Dan Rather's apology to Sam Donaldson's toupee -- now only makes them look more ridiculous.

Go read the list and leave Jay a comment that makes sense of it all...

Personal Democracy blog

The new Personal Democracy site and blog lis off to a strong start. E.g., Cory takes the first solo with an article called "Will Congress Outlaw Your iPod?" The list of contributors looks great, starting with Micah Sifry, one of the organizers of the site.

[Note: It's a little awkward for me to tout this site since I'm one of the contributors, but, well, take a look at it and judge for yourself. Of course.]

[PT] Eloma Simpson Barnes

The political session ended with a performance by Eloma Simpson Barnes. She gave a Martin Luther King speech that had apparently been given to a northern audience while the Voting Rights Bill was still in contention. It sounds like a dumb idea: Her voice emulate's King's. Her intonation is pitch perfect. It's just weird.

...Except, it totally worked on me. I'm old enough to remember King - when I was a young teenager, I was in one of the marches on Washington - and Barnes' performance brought it all back to me. We were so lucky to have King. Our history might have been much bloodier without him. And we lost so much when he was murdered.

That voice. It made me cry.

[PT] Connected politics

John Sculley moderates. The speakers are Andrew Rasiej, Joe Trippi and Adrian Wooldridge. They each get ten minutes.

Andrew: "Politics is broken. Our democracy is broken." There are 513,000 elected officials in this country. The relationship has been top down. What we learned from the Dean campaign is the power of the person to person connection. "There are 513,000 egocentric politicians in the US. Not one of them is netcentric." If they were netcentric, they'd say: "My constituents know more than I do." [Shades of Dan Gillmor.]

We can use the Internet to support the status quo, which is how it's been up through now. Or we can use it to d something new.

Adrian Wooldridge: "Connected power is not necessarily leftwing politics." Internet tools will shift the country further to the right. Goldwater inspired the biggest political revolution in recent history. It was a populist rebellion. And the center of gravity of the US is very much to the right. We jail 5x more people than Britain. We are far more anti-abortion than Europe. 45% of us believe in the devil while only 13% of Britain does. And it's going to get more right-ish.

Trippi: Presidential candidates are different from us. If we were asked to carry a box for four years and not drop it or else the world will end, we'd say no thanks. But every four years, ten guys come forward and say, "Gimme that box."

The only hope for our democracy is the new community and trust-building that's happening on the Internet; we need to form power at the bottom to change a system that's not working. And it's not an ideological fight. It's about it becoming a more powerful democracy." The Net allows us to come together and "have faith in strangers." [Yeah!]

Sculley: Brooks says that Republicans like their presidents to be people of soul, above the fray. Democrats feel otherwise. Are issues not really as important as we usually think?

Trippi: The real problem is the broadcast media. The 6-second soundbytes.

Adrian: People dislike CrossFire because people are craving more subtlety and nuance.

Q: What good does connected campaigning do if you don't have good candidates?

Andrew: Netcentric means that the candidate arises from the group itself.

Trippi: The system is set up to keep interesting people from succeeding. Everything works against insurgents.

Adrian: Anti-Americanism will rise even if Kerry is elected because there it has structural causes.

Trippi: If Kerry loses, there will be a huge demand to change the Democratic party, either from within quickly or from without.

Trippi: It was the voter-to-voter connection that made Dean different. Kerry and Bush are both running topdown campaigns.

Q: Adrian, you say that the Republicans have the big ideas and the big think tanks. Will that change?

Adrian: The Republicans did that consciously. The Democrats need to do that, too. they need to agree on a simple set of goals, but it's not clear that the Left has that. The Left needs the sort of blodbath created by Goldwater so they can sit down and decide exactly what they want.

Trippi: If Kerry wins, my fear is that there will be a sigh of relief.

Adrian: The best thing would be if both lost.

Andrew: In a netcentric ecology, it's less necessary to label yourself as left or right.

Q: Why didn't Kerry take advantage of the Dean machine?

Andrew: Because they're idiots. But mainly because they're afraid. I wish someone had said during the debates that the thing we have to fear is fear.

Trippi: We're in the infant stages of this. We need to be talking about the common good. We need leadership to talk about this. And only the trust being built online will let this happen.

Trippi: The big shock of 2004 may be the importance of cell phones. Pollsters can't poll 'em.

Q: What rules could we change?

Andrew: Funding limits. Encourage local activism. [I missed some ... and all of these reports of answers are compressed]

Trippi: The system is set up to prevent insurgents. There's lot to change. It could happen in a single election cycle: If a third party candidate started splitting the vote with the Democratic candidate, momentum could move to the third party rapidly. "That's what happened with the Whigs."

Q: Will more transparency make it harder for politicians to take tough positions?

Trippi: The problem is due to people wanting to be in office permanently.

Q: What about the power of the special interests?

Andrew: Schumer has $20M in the bank which means he's subservient to special interests.

Q: What are the features of communities where source flourishes.

Andrew: Learn from open source. You'll find all the elements there.

Hip-Hop Mondale

Gabriel Chafetz, the son of a guy I love, has created a 28-minute film. I haven't yet seen it, but Gabriel says: "It's sort of a hip hop "get out the vote" documentary/musical starring Walter Mondale." How could it be bad?

There's a streaming version here. It's being broadcast in Minnesota on PBS.

Broadcast Times:
TPT 17 Saturday, October 23 at 8PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 24 at 11PM
TPT 2 Sunday, October 31 at 5:30PM

[PT] David Bornstein

David Bornstein went to Bangladesh to learn about the Grameem Bank that makes loans primarily to women. He discovered that the program is working: Women are building businesses. Social entrepreneurship is important, he concludes enthusiastically.

He talks about a project to bring electricity to poor people in Brazil: single wires going to houses, grounded in the soil, low voltages. The project is also bringing solar panels to rural areas, renting them for what people generally pay for candles, kerosene, etc.

He talks about "child line" in India, now in 55 cities. It's a number you can call if you see a child in distress. It started with one woman who spent 3 years trying to get the equivalent of an 800 number for it. It's deeply affected India's child protection policies.

Ideas don't break through resistance, David says. Ideas are passive. Ideas need champions. They need marketing. They need to be shepherded through the system. And the government ought to fund social entrepreneurs.

[PT] Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman from the Berkman Center (yay!) talks about the global digital divide. He puts up the GeekCorps business plan:

To benefit from the Internet, you need geeks
There are few geeks in Africa
Geeks beget geeks ("Geekery is one of the last apprenticeship industries")
Geek + plane ticket = Geek in Africa

We need to spend on both plantains and PCs, he says — the immediate issues of feeding people and building a connected economy.

"Electricity turns out to be a massive part of the digital divide." Likewise, so is conectivity — there are 12 phone lines per 1000 people in Ghana, compared to 700 per 1000 in the Us. Plus, 78% of web content is English, but only 12% of the world speaks English as a 1st or 2nd language. This all ends up making a "relevancy divide": What is a rural farmer in Ghana going to get out of the Internet?

GeekCorps took a different tack. Rather than looking at the rural, unconnected poor, they worked with those who were readier to adopt technology. He points to the "Busy Internet" internet cafe in Ghana — 200 seats filled 24/7. An hour of use costs the price of one beer. And he tells about a local guy who builds wireless systems.

From this experience, Ethan learned that there's a ton of money to be made by bring the next billion internet users online, and it won't be the current major multinationals because we're idiots about the developing world. E.g., ilkone is an Islamic cellphone built by people who really do understand what Moslems might want in a cellphone.

We're idiots but it's not our fault, he says. Ethan has been mapping the areas the NY Times reports on. Not much about Africa, central Asia, or S. America except where the economies are booming. If you adjust them by population, Iceland (250,000) is tremendously over-covered and the Congo (52M) is under-covered. The best predictor for where the media looks is where the money is.

It's an old problem, he says, pointing to The Structure of Foreign News" (1965). So, why don't the media tell us about Africa? Ethan's looked at what we're searching for (looking at Overture's version of AdSense). E.g., searches for Brazil are generally for tourism and pictures of naked women. (He calls this study "internet sociology.") "We are a feedback loop for mainstream media." We're telling the mainstream media that we're not very interested in the developing world.

Why should we care? Because, as Tom Barnett says, the failed and failing states are the ones that are most dangerous to us, and we're not paying attention to them.

How to fix it? Hack the media. Peer production. We're all producers and consumers. The problem is that people write what they want to write, and we've shown we aren't interested in the developing world. So we need consciously to build "bridge blogs." Paradigm: Salaam Pax. We need to do this not only because Africans need to be on the Net but because we need Africans on the Net.

[Great.]

Social gravity

I fell into a social black hole last night.

The crowd was exiting from what was probably the best single day of PopTech in the five years I've been coming. A bunch of people I know and like were going to a cocktail party about a mile away. I decided not to go because ever since my freshman year in college, I've noticed that parties with loud music, people I don't know, and crudites push me into a recursive mumbling awkwardness that is only cured by leaving. (It's actually been diagnosed as a mild form of aphasia.)

So, I found myself on the too-pretty streets of Camden with no one to eat dinner with or even to whine to. I poked my head into a few restaurants looking for people I recognized. No luck. I had a quick (but too-expensive) dinner in an Italian restaurant, sitting at the bar (no tables were available), reading a magazine. Then I bought a copy of The Weekly World News ("President Finishing National Guard Service" — that's what all those long vacations have been about), went back to my motel room, and moped.

I am a social putz, no matter what The Washington Post says.

On the other hand, while spinning the dial last night, I saw a great Sarah McLachlan music video (is that what we call them these days?): "This video cost $100,000." It shows how that $100,000 was actually spent doing good around the world.

[PT] Grant McCracken & Barry Schwartz

Grant McCracken argues against the idea that consumers are given "empty choices." The title of his talk is "More is More."

1. Many choices that look empty, he says, are in fact structural: they represent actual differences in taste and preference. I.e., "Material culture makes culture material." Example: "Feminism" has led to so many ways of talking about femaleness that the term no longer has meaning. The profusion of choices in the market reflects the profusion of social and cultural distinctions. The market reflects how furiously inventive we've become.

2. Some of these empty choices are exploratory, he says. The market keeps giving things a try.

3. Some choice is not empty but "formative."

He goes through the Kaufmann Continuum to show that innovation starts out risk, then gets adopted by the mainstream and gets sorta boring. At least, that's what I'm getting from this. He concludes: Empty choice" is a source of innovation. Empty choicess are adaptive.

[I was never sure what he was arguing against.]

Barry Schwartz's topic is "More is Less." (He wrote the Tyranny of Freedom.)

No, we can't have it all, he says. The choices we face aren't empty. That's why they "torture" us. In his local supermarket he found 285 brands of cookies, 75 iced teas, 175 salad dressings, 40 toothpastes. We are given choices for just about everything, from retirement plans to college curricula. "And I don't think this is good."

Americans have more freedom of choice than ever before, we're richer than anyone ever, yet Americans are sadder than anyone ever before. (Clinical depression is 2x what it was a generation ago.) He says studies show that if you offer fewer choices, people buy more and are happier with their choices.

Too many choices make us unhappy because we regret lost opportunities. our expectations get escalated, and then we blame ourselves.

What really make people happy are close relations with other people. Close relations restrain, not liberate: To be close means to not be free to make choices for yourself. Your choice is limited by the fact that you care about others.

Going from no choice to some choice dramatically increases our well-being. But there's a point where having more choice decreases our well-being, he says. Being anything you want to be is only possible in world with limits. [Yeah, I hate it when school principles say "You can be anything you want to be."]

[He makes a great point, and he's a terrific presenter. But it bothers me that he equates choices about which of 275 cookies to buy with choices about careers and religion. Also, I think he overemphasizes choice and obscures the inescapability of the historic-cultural-linguistic situation into which we are born.]

Q&A

Bob Metcalfe: So, does wealth make us unhappy?

Schwartz: That follows from my argument. It's another reason to support income redistribution.

Bob: So my drive to have everything is socially responsible, since I'm keeping choices from other people.

[The discussion gets to what I think is the heart: If fewer choices make us unhappy, why don't we shop in smaller stores? And if we're not smart enough to recognize that too much choice makes us unhappy, who is going to decide on the constraints of choice for us?]

[PT] Spencer Wells

Spencer Wells wants to know how humans populated the earth. His research shows that the deepest, earliest split is in the African lineage. Hence, our common ancestor was African. And it looks like the split occurred only 60,000 years (2,000 generations) ago.

So, how did we populate the earth in that time, he asks. The route went from Africa to Australia, he believes. He goes to India to try to find the missing genetic marker — one found in Australian aborigines. He found it: M130, from 50,000 years ago. About 5% of Indians have it.

Why did we leave Africa 50,000 years ago, he asks. The Ice Age may have dried out Africa, forcing us to migrate. Also, we had the "great leap forward" in human culture.

He says there's a company that will look at your dna and tell you where you hang from the family tree. He says one in 200 men are descendents of Genghis Kahn. [I, on the other hand, trace my ancestry back to Ernest the Vexed.]

[PT] Ben Saunders

Ben Saunders talks about his solo trip to the north Pole. "I'm not a scientist, I'm not an -ologist. I just drag heavy things around." 72-days alone. The fourth person to have done this. When he go there, he says that there was nothing there, not even a pole. He said he'd known that, of course, but he still kind of expected there to be something, anything, there. When he was made it to the pole, he called three people ... and had to leave messages.

Why does he do this? He's exploring the limits of technology and human potential. Now he's headed toward Antarctica to retract Scott's (doomed) steps.

I can't imagine doing this. I can't even imagine wanting to do this.

[PT] Alexis Rockman

Alexis Rockman (more here (thanks Shannon) ) an artist who studies how culture sees nature. "There are very few boundaries between dead, alive, food, pet, and so on." He provides commentary on images of his paintings.

[PT] Brian Fagan

Brian Fagan gives a talk that spans several hundred thousands of years, spending some special time on what we can learn about dealing with the climate from 2,000 years of Egyptian history. "Ladies and gentlemen, it is a crime how little we know about how other people see the world and put the world together."

[PT] Richard Alley

As someone on the chat says, Richard Alley is "brilliant and twitchy." More kindly, he's an animated speaker. He shows photos of his ice-drilling expedition to Greenland. Is there global warming? Yes. He runs through the evidence. The biggest cause is fossil guels: The typical US driver buys 100 pounds of gasoline per week. We're burning fossil fuels a million times faster than nature created them. Global warming is a natural trend but we're making it much worse.

Most of the effects of global warming are negative for humans, he says. Some high-latitude economies will do better. But, it could dry up the grain-belt, kill off a whole bunch of species, raise sea-level and spread tropical diseases. [Ok, overall, I'm against global warming.]

It's hard to make it better but easy to make it worse.

He hypothesizes that the climate moves by staggering up and down. He shows a chart that shows that in the Ice Age, the temperature staggered but the CO2 level changed rather smoothly. Possible conclusion: Now that CO2 is rising again, we should perhaps expect big swings in temperature.

He shows satellite photos of the ice sheets in Antarctica. They're melting. These are just small ones. But it's possible the large ones will melt. Goodbye Florida.

We can do things about thi