The Parasitic Meme

(edited to correct some Don Fagin lyrics)
In Medias Res: Brilliant, Scary, Visionary, and Strange

Russell has some thoughts about a speech by Clay Shirkey in which Shirkey discusses his observations about social surpluses. He makes a certain case there by recounting a conversation with a person who couldn’t understand where the people who edit wikipedia articles find the time to do so. And in a speech which likens television sitcoms of the mid to late 20th century to gin pushcarts of the late 19th to early 20th century, he points out that those people have found that kind of time by not watching as much television as they used to.

I confess to being weary of tech visionaries. I don’t agree with Clay Shirkey about the transcendence of what he’s seen. Either that or I simply can’t get excited about tech progress any longer. Or I see his anecdotes as data points in much larger trends which have “changed the world” in superficial ways, but not in fundamental ones.

Consider, for example, the rhetoric that used to swirl around the invention of various devices we now take for granted. Perhaps the telephone is a good example. At first, people were shocked and appalled at a device, essentially the very first automation network, which could utter sounds made before then only by a human throat. Leave aside the notion that a human was still required to make the sound, he was still making a machine imitate it an appreciable distance away.

So, looking “from 30,000 feet” at the growth of the phone network, first, there was resistance, sometimes lots of resistance, then embrace by the wealthiest or most technologically inclined of the population, followed by a general acceptance of the tool by commercial interests, followed by general acceptance by all the population, followed by a worldwide build-out of the network.

But during those first years, the rhetoric was of a revolution in the way humans interacted. Some even declared that it would end wars, because people could then talk to one another more easily and misunderstandings could be resolved with the new gizmo far easier than with the old.

Since then the human race has fought the bloodiest wars in the history of civilization, and endured the most brutal tyrannies, alongside some of the highest and most noble expressions of lovingkindness and humanitarianism. Good and bad, but no fundamental change in human behavior, because there were now telephones.

The same sorts of things can and have been said about any subsequent innovation. Television was supposed to be a premier educational tool, bringing teachers to far-flung places. Hopefully the primary use of television today illuminates the absurdity of that assumption.

FM Radio was supposed to supplant AM Radio as a better technology than before. But RCA undertook to destroy its inventor personally, rather than buy shares in its technology.

The attitude towards the computer was that it would eventually become “a just machine that makes big decisions / Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision” with the promise that “we’ll be clean when their work is done / We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young, mmmm…”

What a beautiful world that will be, indeed. Donald Fagin’s “IGY” (for the International Geophysical Year declared by world scientists) captured the rhetoric of the revolutionary, common when we Americans were reaping the low-hanging fruit of the second large network to be built after the telephone, namely, the electric power grid. It was the attitude that got my American society to agree to send a man to the Moon and return him home again.

During the Roosevelt era in the mid-Twentieth Century, during the U.S. ascendence into a world power, the rhetoric was surely the same for that power network as for the telephone; bringing it to the people of the U.S., and then to the world, would solve many of their problems and help them all to live higher. The TVA was born of revolutionary rhetoric, as was the regulated telephone monopoly. Technology for the common man with the common touch.

Did it change society much? During all that time the U.S. fought about Civil Rights, and not peacefully. Hate abounded as it always had.

The third network, the computer itself, was not an internetwork of voice, or of power, but it stemmed from the benefits of both of those. When ENIAC was brought online, when differential amplifiers and image dissectors were refined from ideas about physics, we learned that we could capture algorithms in networks of current limiting vacuum tubes, display them on screens, and our visionaries declared the revolution of the computer. “Star Trek” was first made during this time, actually right before it ended, but of course the first uses of the computer were in war, hot and cold. The visionaries of the time glossed over that part when promoting the use of computing automation to the masses.

(Today, much of Star Trek’s social projections seem quite silly to me, even as the technological predictions decorate my home and come true beyond Roddenberry’s wildest dreams.)

And they do it today, during the ascendance of the fourth network of human cooperation, instanced today as “the Internet.” With computers cheap, the potential for media interactivity is very high. Certainly, as Clay Shirken pointed out, children today expect their screens to come with interactivity. I’ve felt the same impatience with television entertainment myself, but I can also remember that interactive TV was a promise of early cable franchise conglomerates. It was mocked on the Nickelodeon network in the mid-80’s in an episode of “You Can’t Do That On Television.”

It is ironic that Fagin released “IGY” in 1982, when the shine had come off the electric grid, after one energy crisis and during the tail end of a second, and when pollution, global climate change (then called global cooling, actually!), and peak oil were starting to be on everyone’s mind. By then the Internet was a connection network for large computers owned by the military and the universities affiliated in one way or another with DARPA.

Ten years from that point I would be of age, and be participating in a small way in the build out of that fourth internetwork, following the voice, power, and transistor networks which had already been designed and built. At that time I was fully enraptured by the revolution the Internet and computers could provide.

Since then, I’ve seen the same things happen “over the Web” that happened with the first telephone network, and the upheavals of the power grid and the rollouts of various, faster, and smaller computers. Resistance to the new technology is most often followed by attempts by established powers to own the new technology and shape it to their benefit. Witness the fights between Western Union and Alexander Graham Bell. Farnsworth and RCA. Steve Jobs and Microsoft. Any number of music publishers and the anarchists who use the Internet to duplicate their intellectual property against all laws. Efforts by movie companies to control through the DMCA. The “Net Neutrality” debates.

That ought to be enough of a body of examples to showcase what I think is true: Visionaries can’t see the future. Bell’s prognostications about the phone network, Kurzweil’s and Gates’ about computers, Roosevelt’s about the power grid, all were partly true and partly appallingly false. The telephone network was built, the power grid, television broadcast networks, but we are not “eternally free” nor “eternally young”.

Instead, basic human nature continues to rule. Now, Shirken talks about a tiny fraction of all the people participating in media interactivity, blogs and online votes and Web 2.0 stuff. As a revolution, because people were choosing to “wake up” from the 20th century’s equivalent to the gin cart, namely, broadcast television entertainment.

He isn’t alone in this kind of thinking, obviously, both since it is plain to see the ease with which young people obtain cheap computers and use them to communicate with one another, and to see how baffling these new approaches to communication are to those of us who are used to older technologies.

Hopefully, though, I’ve been able to demostrate why I don’t see those things as “revolutionary” or even very important for changing society or the world. Instead of sudden, the changes he highlights appear to me to flow apace, as society behaves the same about every new innovation as it did about all the old ones. As a very early adopter of what people now call text messaging and of the power of the so-called “social networks” (I used Unix “talk” and still use Usenet, for two examples), coupled with my study of modern history (for which I am not lettered, merely educated), I claim armchair expertise in the field as a social observer.

Hence, the observation he offered is pedestrian, and not terribly inspiring to me. I claim this even as I buy new iPhones and flat screens and computers for my own use, because they are dead useful tools. But they will not help us transcend ourselves.

Finally, I offer my own anecdote, as harmony (or dissonance) to some of Clay’s enthusiasm. I am aware of Kurzweil’s idea of “the Singularity”, which is a moment he predicts for the future when humanity will merge with intelligent computers, or other types of artificial intelligences. At that point, we leave our physical bodies behind and use the “superior” AI bodies, or just become “pure energy”, as Roddenberry once put it.

The trope is common, actually. Clarke wrote about it in Childhood’s End, Vinge in Marooned in Realtime, Bear in Blood Music. Most science fiction writers touch on the subject. Most apply Platonic attitudes toward purity and intelligence.

I described some of these ideas to a friend, who has two children and manages rental homes for a living. She was appalled and did not prefer it.

It was the same visceral rejection offered by those older opponents of that first inter-human network, the telephone, which I thought was marvelously interesting, whether or not Kurzweil was right. History shows that he probably isn’t.

The behavior of the mainstream CNN/FOX/ABC/CBS/(MS)NBC media in declaring Jeremiah Wright’s words “important” or “relevant” to Obama’s candidacy seems incorrect to me. The assertions themselves invoke association fallacy which a college sophomore should recognize as completely unreasonable demagoguery, though in my own cynicism, I wonder if such students can actually name the two or three kinds of logical fallacy present in the case they propagated.

If CNN et al hadn’t run the story, I would simply have not been aware of it, except in the abstract sense that Black preachers often wax political from the pulpit, which is something my own religion tries not to do.

They weren’t at all behaving like ideal journalists by relentlessly and continuously playing only snippets of those Trinity sermons, out of their context, all while pretending to only cover the controversy. In my opinion, they fomented it, and held controversy open.

Obama was correct, and utterly Christian, in condemning a sin of expressing hateful frustration while keeping a metaphorical arm around the so-called sinner.

But honestly: What else are we supposed to expect from a Boomer-era Black preacher, after a lifetime of civil struggle against a firehose-strength stream of resistance to any social change that would bring parity to his and his parishoner’s families. Just parity!

On certain grounds, I refuse to fault Wright for getting excitable about American social injustices, except insofar as the fact that that kind of rhetoric is no longer needed to sway “White” kids, anymore. And the fact that he played right into the hands of media congloms whose leaders care only about the number of eyes looking at the screen when the ads play.

Can we really fault Wright for framing those ideas in classic Preacher-fire’n'brimstone, when given in a religious context? Good grief! The entirety of American religion, including the so-called secularisms, promise precisely the same things, even if they name different causes for them.

For example, does it really differ in kind from the sorts of left- and right-wing claims I’ve heard made about why 9/11 happened (remember Falwell’s words?), or why a hurricane precipitated the drowning of New Orleans. Or, for that matter, much of what Ward Churchill had to say a few years ago about why radical Islamicists have targeted the U.S.?

(Now, note here, please, that I don’t actually agree with Churchill, or Falwell, or anyone else who supposes that “sin” is the direct immediate cause of calamity. Look in your Bible: the rain falls on the just and the unjust, etc.)

Or for that matter, certain softer promises made in Mormon scripture, about the conditions required to “prosper in the land the Lord giveth you.” Or the prediction, without a timetable, in Mormonism’s “Proclamation on the Family” that the “calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets” are the destiny of societies which don’t heave-to and conform to traditional family norms and roles?

So it’s with that background that I’d claim that as an ostensible Obama supporter (having voted to pledge delegates to him in a precinct caucus), I didn’t actually need that speech he gave to recognize the cynical treatment his friends were getting at the hands of a willfully excitable press. I’m far more upset with CNN than I am with Reverend Wright, whose energy on the subject is no less than I might apply, after decades of watching family and friends suffer in a regime where only lip service has been given to Constitutional ideal.

I hope to meet him someday, perhaps to shake his hand and attempt a sliver of empathy towards him and the life he led.

The Democratic Party nominating process drags on, as of this writing, with one more really big state and several smaller states and territories left to assign delegates to a candidate for President.

Right now, Barack Obama leads in the race, with a hundred or so more delegates pledged to him than Hillary Clinton, along with a nominal popular vote lead. A hundred or so, that is, unless the delegates from Florida and Michigan are included.

Right now, Hillary Clinton’s campaigners are lobbying hard for those delegations to be seated, either as-is, or with a re-vote. Preferably as-is. And right now, the Party officials in those states insist that not only should there be a seating or a re-vote, but that the Democratic National Committee is the entity responsible for paying for the process.

Questions arise. Were the party rules formulated using a democratic process? For example, did people vote for the people who developed the rules? If they were, doesn’t that mean the rules are fair, or at least fairly deliberated?

Perhaps more than any other deliberating body except the Congress of the United States, the Party rules for the Democratic Party, or, at the very least, the roster of members of the Democratic National Committee, appear to be formulated at their conventions by elected delegates. This is interesting, because this means they are people who were elected by constituencies to represent those constituencies in a deliberative body.

Almost completely by definition, then, the DNC was constituted by an open democratic process, and the rules are fair.

Counterpoints ensue. Even if fairly deliberated, doesn’t the moral principle of “one person, one vote” override a fairly deliberated rule? Shouldn’t the sovereignty of an arguably morally superior deliberative body, such as a duly and more directly elected state legislature, have primacy over the duly constituted DNC?

In other words, shouldn’t the DNC accede to Florida and Michigan law, regardless of the Party rules, because the legislatures and governors there are “closer to the people”?

Well, that one is easy: No, they shouldn’t. The “Party bosses” and legislatures overlap somewhat. And the Democrats are not a governmental body per se, since they don’t regulate outside their own membership.

Well then, what about the declared principles of the Party, among which are to include as many people from as many sources, factions, and constituencies as will stand with them? Doesn’t that principle override rules that nobody thought would matter in the least when they made them?

Doesn’t that mean that the States can flout an unjust Party rule? Such a principled action, surely a part of the decision making of the lawmakers in Michigan and Florida, is a form of civil disobedience, perhaps in the vein of Thoreau and others like him. Isn’t it? Create the fact on the ground and then dare the “Party bosses” to “disenfranchise?”

Thing is, that sort of civil disobedience could mean that those leaders would have to be willing to accept the penalty of not having their delegates seated, scorching the ground with a couple hundred unseated delegates.

In counter-counterpoint, what about all those who knew the results wouldn’t be counted, and stayed home, as a much milder form of civil disobedience, albeit just to a folkway? Does applying the so-called higher principle not mean that those who voted “uncommitted” or stayed away would then be just as disenfranchised?

This brings us to the idea of the “do-over,” since that would a) permit those two large states to make a salient point about early primaries in small states, and b) permit the nominally winning candidate the opportunity to actually campaign for delegates in those states. And since the contest would be held after the cutoff dates in the party rules, there would be no need for a floor fight come this fall. The last thing the Dems need this year is a floor fight.

If we accept that the MI-FL quasi-satyagraha, taken to its logical conclusion, has the potential to really do damage to the Democratic party, then that do-over becomes all the more appealing.

But elections cost money. The DNC doesn’t feel like it broke any of its own rules, so therefore the states ought to come up with something, and pay for it. The states don’t feel like the rules were fair in the first place, therefore the DNC should foot the bill.

Put simply, the states and the state parties should foot the bill. It’s complicated a little bit by the fact that the Republicans in Florida had a hand in the mess, by simply being in the majority with a smaller penalty for disobedience to Party rules on their side, but it is also probably irrelevant. They could have done like the state of Washington, and simply disregarded the results of the beauty contest primary.

The point is, the DNC is not really in the wrong. Howard Dean’s fiduciary duties to all Democrats require him to stick to the rules they foisted on him. FL and MI party officials sit on the DNC, where the decisions were made. The balance of fairness was struck there, in favor of four other states and a cutoff date, in an open and democratic process which started ‘way back in 2004.

Further, the Florida and Michigan knew the score, before they changed the dates. In at least one Aristotelian sense, they simply caused the problem. It seems simply proper to lay the cost of fixing a problem at the feet of those who caused it.

Some sort of other compromise is in the works, of course, with all the factions pushing it. Who knows? Maybe every faction will be sufficiently mollified.

If so, it would be a fine example of open, deliberative, democratic process.

Back in October, as a geek-self-congratulation and as sort of a birthday present to me, I bought an iPhone. My MDA from T-Mobile still worked fine, but as with all things Apple, I saw it and waaaaaaanted it from the first day. I thought the price was too high.

Then they lowered the price.

Oh, it was still $400 plus tax. It still came (and still comes) with a 2-year ball and chain, complete with an AT&T logo. The total price of this phone is more like $2000, with that contract factored in. That’s a big price tag for a one-pound electronic utility belt. But that first $400 was sitting in a jar in my office where I keep the unchallenged money my family lets me have for these sorts of things, so I drank the kool-aid.

It tasted pretty good. The iPhone is different. The combination of the PDA features and the phone, as with my old MDA, make it a very handy Single Thing In My Pocket. The soft keyboard, once I got used to it, is a dream come true, far better than the tiny chiclet keys on competing qwerty phones. I could go on but I think everyone has seen all the pretty and acknowledges it.

It is superior to the MDA in a few specific ways, but weight is not one of them. Nor is cost. The aggregate cost of my MDA was more like $500, since it was bound to a one year T-Mobile contract and was otherwise “free after rebates.”

iPhone lacks some other significant features, in my opinion: There is:

• No Book Reader
• No synchronization of iPhone notes with Apple Mail notes
• No To-do list (iCal has it!)
• No stereo Bluetooth profiles
• No IM application. Let’s not begin to pretend that 200 text messages per month on a proprietary network satisfies that requirement

Some of these things are no-brainers, which leaves me confused. It’s the sort of thing Microsoft is known to pull, not Apple.

Foremost, though, is that the whole EDGE network used by the iPhone just plain stinks. Let’s not pretend otherwise here. 15 seconds of setup every time I try to use it, repeated if there is a delay in use more than a couple of minutes. It won’t work at all in certain locations and inside certain buildings, even though the phone reports full-bars-coverage in those buildings and the voice service works without a hitch.

There’s lots to do. I hope (hope!) that the introduction of an official SDK won’t mean stupidities like Verizon’s byzantine and expensive “Get It Now!” software programs. Otherwise, I’ll just jailbreak the thing and have done with Apple’s attempts to pull a Verizon on several million iPhone users.

Even so, it’s the best all-in-one hip computer I’ve ever owned, and what it does (except for the EDGE thing) it does very well. So I’m still geeking out about it. Just a few more features and I’ll ask for nothing more than to unlock it altogether, when my AT&T contract is done.