stargeek
THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'THE BOSTON
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 A member of the Derrick Jensen mailing list pointed out a brilliantly-written letter to the editor of a small Virginia community newspaper, describing new laws to increase penalties for 'eco-terrorism', a vaguely defined term which appears to include acts of sabotage to corporate 'property', even if they do no harm to any individual. The law was apparently designed to discourage acts against the property of logging, mining, and factory farm corporations, developers and SUV retailers. Here's the letter in its entirety.
Last week, you used the term "ecoterrorist"
with
regard to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). A note on semantics: The
Department of Defense defines terrorism as "The unlawful use or
threatened use of force or violence against individuals or property to
coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to
achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives."
Somehow, burning a bulldozer fails to meet these criteria. Unlawful and ideological, yes. But they intended to coerce corporate entities (United Land, Virginia Land, Kessler Group, Regency Centers, and Dierman Realty Group), not governments or societies. Do you feel "terrorized" by the loss of the Land Company's trackhoe? Even developer Wendell Wood seems non-plussed. "You can go buy another." What is scary is how terms like "ecoterrorist," "cyber-terrorist," "narco-terrorist" and "special-interest terrorist" are slipping into our vernacular. Know this: "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" legislation was proposed in Texas and New York, to officially label many forms of advocacy as "terrorism." Plus, President Bush's proposed Patriot Act II hopes to broaden the definition of terrorism and make it easier to sentence such "terrorists" to death. Now, who's scaring who? Indeed, the ELF is the FBI's top priority regarding domestic terrorism. But I, for one, would hope they'd instead focus more on whoever mailed U.S. military-manufactured anthrax and ricin to Congress. Truth is, most people agree with ELF's intentions. A recent national survey found that two out of three people think the environment is more important than property rights, corporate profits, or even creating jobs. The ELF usually targets only the most egregious of industrial polluters and ecology-destroying profiteers. Take Nestle's Ice Mountain bottled water, which built a plant in Michigan's Mecosta County (despite a 2-1 resident vote to deny them zoning) and then proceeded to violate state and federal water rights by siphoning from public rivers and streams. ELF activists, after exhausting legal avenues of dissent, tried to blow up the plant. Is the sprawling Hollymead Center as bad? No. But Richmond's SUVs were arguably an environmental and social menace. Objectively speaking, SUVs kill more Americans than al-Qaeda does. The last word: There was a time when we had a very different term for those who sabotage avaricious corporations. As John Adams said of the Sons of Liberty who dunked East India Company tea into Boston harbor: "There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity in this last effort of the patriots that I greatly admire." Brian Wimer Charlottesville P.S. This week, Bush's Education Secretary called the National Education Association teachers union a "Terrorist Organization" for criticizing the shortcomings of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. Who's next? Editorialists? |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
(Warning: some financial math ahead.) A Ponzi scheme, named after its early 20th century inventor Carlo Ponzi, is a form of pyramid scheme. Basically it involves selling a nearly worthless security to a small group of investors, with the promise of great returns if they promote the security to more investors, and so on, ideally, forever. Like any pyramid scheme or chain letter, of course, it eventually collapses when it runs out of suckers. The first ones in get rich, and the last ones in (much greater in number) get shafted. As we all know, the stock market is focused on the short term, and fluctuates wildly in response to a single quarter's earnings, external economic events, even rumour. If you look at it holistically and long-term, however, it has all the markings of a century-long Ponzi scheme, the most lucrative, and potentially most devastating, in history. Let's take a look at the US S&P 500 as a surrogate for the entire stock market, the entire market for equity securities of listed public corporations. The index goes back to 1917, but was revamped in the 1940s and recalibrated so that the index for the average of 1941-43 was 10. It slowly rose to 100 over the next 50 years, and then to 1000 over the next 12 years. This broad index earned, in 2003, about $55 per average share of the component securities, using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles). So at its current level of about 1100, it has a P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio of about 20. That means investors are willing to pay $1100 now for a share that will theoretically 'pay back' $55 next year, and hopefully successively more in future years, to justify the 'present value' of $1100. To think of ir another way, it's like a bank charging you $55 this year, $65, say, next year, and so on for at least 50 years, as 'interest' on a loan of $1100. The 5% interest in the first year isn't very attractive for such a risky 'loan', but since future 'interest' will be dependent on (hopefully rising) earnings, there is the prospect of a very lucrative return eventually. So the S&P 500, like all equities, is said to 'discount expected future cash flows'. A general rule of thumb says that the P/E ratio approximates the annual expected growth in earnings, so that means the investor in the market is expecting earnings to grow by close to 20% each year, essentially forever. How is that possible? Well, it isn't. Earnings grow because (a) prices increase, (b) costs decrease, and/or (c) volume increases. In a 'free' market economy, prices are determined (theoretically, now) by competition -- new competitors will enter the market, and/or existing competitors will adjust their prices, to the point that their return on invested capital is just high enough to justify the investment risk. That level, in a low-inflation economy where the alternative 'risk-free' investment in GICs and bonds is only 2%, is roughly a modest 7%, with the extra 5% compensating the investor for the risk implicit in equities. And, in the long run, volume can't increase -- there's only so much market for anything, and once it's saturated, earnings should therefore level off at a flat rate. Let's suppose we've more or less reached that state now. Let's also set aside the fact that the $55 earned last year by the average share is likely considerably inflated -- there are undoubtedly some more undetected Enron-type exaggerations out there in some of these 500 companies, and GAAP allows capitalization of stock options and other near-fraudulent practices that significantly overstate 'true' earnings. Is the $55 a fair return on investment in these companies? To answer that question we need to calculate what the investment is. According to the S&P, this $55 represents a 17% return on investment. In other words, the net assets or 'book' value of the average share is $55/17% or about $325. We already indicated that a reasonable return, given the risk, was 7%, which on $325 would be about $22 per share. Why are stocks earnings $55 per share when in a 'free' market they should only be earning $22? To answer this we need to look at the three components that make up ROI (or more correctly, return on equity -- ROE). These three components are: Margin (profit/sales), Turnover (sales/assets), and Leverage (assets/equity). Leverage can be inflated by excessive borrowing, which companies can get away with in times of low interest, but which boomerang when interest rates spike. Leverage can also be inflated by stock buy-backs, where the company essentially uses excess cash flow to buy back its own stock and hence increase the value per share of the remaining stock -- but this is a form of cannibalization, and leads to the same imbalance between debt and equity. Neither is sustainable. Turnover can be increased by lowering inventories, factoring and off-balance-sheet financing, but ultimately tops out -- you need to have a certain amount of money tied up one way or another in assets to be able to run an effective business. So you're left with Margin, which ultimately is the only explanation for the enormous ROE of $55/share, when in a free competitive market someone should be willing to accept $22/share. The truth is that the market, and big corporations, are far from efficient. Many industries are heavily subsidized by governments to the tune of billions of dollars in kickbacks -- er, I mean, support payments -- per year. Big corporations also work as oligopolies to prevent smaller companies from entering their markets and charging more reasonable prices for their products. We, the consumers, are in fact paying $55 for goods and services that could be sold for $22 and would still provide the corporations with a very reasonable return. If and when government subsidies end, oligopolies are broken up, and the market for goods and services truly becomes free and open, the S&P 500 should then generate $22/share each year, a 7% ROE, still an attractive return in a low-inflation economy. So we have a number of factors at work, conspiring to drive up stock prices in the unsustainable illusion that double-digit growth can and will continue forever, or at least until we're dead and it isn't our problem anymore. We have big corporations earning exorbitant returns, two and one half times a reasonable level given the risk, paid for by the taxpayer and consumer (the same people who then take what's left of their meagre paychecks and invest it, with insane trust in the brokers' unsustainable recommendations, in the stock market). And we have a P/E ratio that is already assuming that these wildly inflated, taxpayer subsidized, price-gouging levels of profit will continue to rise even further, at close to 20% per year, forever. Voilà, Ponzi scheme, par excellence. Let's do the math. Take the $22 per share that big corporations should be earning per share in a properly regulated and open market. Acknowledge that the assumption that these earnings are going to grow in the future, when markets are saturated, consumers, corporations and governments are already buckling under grotesque and unprecedented debt loads and cannot afford to buy or pay more than they already are. Discount that annual stream of $22 of earnings for 50 years at a reasonable 7% discount rate. Know what you get for the fair value of the S&P 500 with these calculations? About 300. That is what, when you strip out the growth hype, the subsidies, the price-gouging, and the unsupportable P/E valuation, the S&P 500 should be trading at. Not 1100. Eventually the Ponzi scheme will collapse. There may yet be time to con yet more foolish investors into believing that it will rise from 1100 to 1500 to 2000 or 5000 or higher, and if investors can be duped into believing that's what shares are worth, that's what they'll trade at. This scheme has been running for a century, and made many people millionnaires. But eventually we, or our children or grandchildren, will realize that the S&P 500 should be at 300, and since stocks always trade at what people think they're worth, that's where the S&P 500 will end up. The millions left holding the bag will lose most of their life savings, their pensions, everything. (Oh, and if you change the assumptions about inflation and interest rates, the above valuation doesn't change. Future values and discount rates both go up proportionally, so the inflation-adjusted present value stays the same.) Even the brokers can see the writing on the wall. They will now try to convince you that by wise investing you can 'outperform the market' by buying low and selling high, even if the market is ultimately doomed to do no better than go sideways. This is another great variant on a Ponzi scheme. It's the stuff that has hooked the new breed of gambling addicts called 'day traders'. For every investor whose holdings 'outperform the market' there will be, of course, at least one loser. But the magic of Ponzi is that it's always the other guy, the next guy, the not smart enough guy, who will get burned. You'd be better to play slot machines or buy lottery tickets -- at least the potential payout isn't overstated by 250%. In addition to the perpetual-growth Ponzi scheme, and the 'outperform the market' con, brokers also make scads of money from IPOs -- initial public offerings. As James Surowiecki has elegantly pointed out, the IPO is a scam by which an aptly-named 'syndicate' of investment firms ('underwriters') buy a mass of shares from the company 'going public', at about half the price per share they know they can flog them to gullible investors, many of whom rely on these very brokers for investment advice. They then dump their shares on these investors, knowing that the price will promptly drop back close to the IPO price. The underwriting brokers get rich, and the unsuspecting customers get burned. That's the reason Surowiecki and others, most recently Lawrence Fisher in yesterday's excellent analysis over at our mother ship Salon.com, have urged Google, potentially the most lucrative IPO of all time, to screw the brokers and either sell all the shares directly to the public by auction, or, even better, not to go public at all, and save the delirious investors the grief they will suffer when they find out Google has no direct line to God, and hence isn't worth a million dollars a share. Eventually we, or our descendents, will learn (or have no choice but) to 'just say no' to dysfunctional stock markets and all the evils they breed. Until then, we'll continue to be addicted to short-term thinking, the illusion of perpetual growth, paying too much for everything we buy, subsidizing public companies with our taxpayer dollars, downsizing and outsourcing and offshoring as 'productivity enhancement', and putting up with the atrocious greed, corruption and devastation of insatiable global corporations that pull the strings of politicians like puppeteers, all in the name of 'maximizing shareholder value'. It's addictive gambling with a staggering cost, it's insane, and it's fraud. |
 I have just updated
the full Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by
clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my
e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject
of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and
inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Schnauzer Logic
#3435
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post
below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.Connecting the Dots 3437 Vanitas Personae 3446 Cassandra Predicts 3456 Two Fawn's American Indian Movement Pages 3467 Mindboggling Adventure Tales 3488 Bartholomew's Notes on Religion 3494 Saunter & Repose 3517 Avon Calling 3522 Bill Penrose's Radio Weblog 3530 The Cassandra Frost Collection 3531 Lumberg Boinked Her 3552 Screwing the Pooch 3557 Poli Sigh 3566 The Outer Edge 3573 Matriarch 3577 Oh My Stars 3580 The Poche 3591 Bob Rich's Weblog 3592 Douglas Moran's Radio Weblog 3597 XXX Rated Realist 3602 Rich Whiteley's Radio Weblog 3605 Manhattan Waiter 3612 The Grace Pages 3622 Lucy 3627 Vietnam Moving Wall in Worland WY 3628 Ashent TwentyThree's Radio Weblog 3632 What's in Scott's Head 3635 Monkey Labs 3637 Carnival Knowledge 3641 Infidelia 3744 1.21 Giggawats 3746 Docta Puella 3751 Enough 3752 Steve Simard's Radio Weblog 3753 Heart Attack Diaries 3757 |
 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:
Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about. |
 I love the work of photographer Dav id Lorenz Winston, so when I saw what looked to be an original oil painting by him entitled "Solitude", at an unbelievably low price, I couldn't believe my eyes. I was right not to -- it wasn't an oil, but a giclée print of a photograph on a textured gloss or surface-treated canvas, so it looked, at least to my untrained eye, like an original oil. It glimmers in the light and reflects light off the sides of the pigment as you move, just like hand-painted oil or acrylic. Giclée (invented by rocker Graham Nash) is like inkjet on steroids -- 12-colour hi-res inkjet copies produced one-off from a digital master. By contrast, most prints use lithography -- an upscale dot-matrix technology but with only four colours used and relatively poor resolution. The combination of giclée and gloss/surface treated canvas is a great example of innovation, and I commend the studio, Northland Art Company, for using it. The photo above (excuse the warp -- my lousy photography) is taken from the giclée-on-canvas print; a plain print by Winston from his website is below. You can get an idea by comparing them of the richness and three-dimensionality that this ultra-high-resolution colour and stippling effect adds.   Winston's
work looks almost surreal, as if it were photoshopped, but the
giclée-on-canvas (close up sample at right) seems to restore
its
'authenticity', by psychologically transforming it from a photo (a
mechanical reproduction), to a painting (a man-made reproduction). When a photographer doctors his shot, unless it's very clever and artistic we're inclined to call it fraud. But when an artist uses paint or watercolour to portray something in a distorted, exaggerated or surreal way, whether it's real or imagined, we call it art. The distributor at Northland said the process can double the walk-by sales of a print. And the process can make a poor art collector look like an affluent collector of originals. Now I'm wondering if it would be possible to take some of my 'flat' prints and either surface-treat them, and/or re-print them onto textured canvas, so they look like the original watercolours, oils or acrylics instead of just prints. Any artists tell me if that's possible? And what are the ethical issues of re-printing (for personal use only) or surface-treating a signed print -- does this open up the same issues for the art world that digital copying and file-sharing have produced for musicians and film-makers? |
This
is the first of five
articles in a series that will be published intermittently this month.
This article summarizes what I believe were the most important ideas
of
2003 in the world of blogs and blogging. The other articles in
the
series will propose the most
important ideas of the year in:
 BLOGS & BLOGGING -- THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS OF 2003  During the year, the blogosphere doubled in size, and began to mature into a true alternative medium for information and connection. My nominations for the most important ideas of the year* in blogs & blogging are:
* Yes, I know some of these ideas are themselves not new this year. There is nothing new under the sun. But I would argue that the application and implications of these ideas were first manifest some time in 2003 |
 I've written recently about the future state of business, a world incorporating powerful, versatile social networking tools. And I've played with most of the first-generation social software and read volumes about how it will, or won't, work in business and ultimately affect our daily lives. The concept is wonderful, and the technology is fun, but the tools developed so far suffer from three fatal flaws:
In an earlier post I stressed the importance of allowing each individual to maintain and organize their own content and their own networks their own way. At that time I said: "When you force people to adapt their mental models to a standard model (inevitably a complex one to accommodate a variety of specifications), a standard model that is dictated by the technology and its designers, you will get no usage, or at best reluctant, inefficient usage." If I were start all over again, to design the second generation of social software, it would be transparent to the user, wouldn't require any submissions, wouldn't keep any content in any central location, and would be so simple to use that even people without computers would use it.  That
may sound like a tall order, but it really isn't. It would be like
building a house. Let's start with content, the foundation of the
house. Rather than getting people to submit stuff, we need to help
people to organize the personal information they already have, and
then
harvest it automatically. When I talk to people in the front lines of
just about every business, from proprietorships to large companies,
they confess their filing cabinets, the document folders on their hard
drives, rolodexes and other personal collections of information are
chaotic and impossible to find things in. They also say no one ever
taught them how to organize these personal repositories so that
content
could be found easily. Everyone just assumed that the skill to do this
comes naturally. So first order of business is personal content management. No
rules, no standards. Just some simple
tools that allow people to organize all the information and documents
they have into some order so it can be readily found again when
needed.
Let a whole bunch of PCM tools loose on the market, and let them
evolve
as people learn what they need and what they don't and what
organization makes sense to them as
individuals. Weblogs would be a good source of ideas for the
design of PCM tools, since essentially that's what blogs are.The next floor of the house is the metadata. Software developers would work with the users of individuals' content other than the individual him/herself to ascertain how they might want to use the individual's newly-ordered content, and develop tools to harvest the relevant metadata to do that. This second layer of tools essentially reorganizes the individual's content, transparently, in ways that make it more useful to the individual's networks -- actual and potential friends, associates, customers, suppliers etc. These tools would spider the content and essentially 'fill in the forms' that those in each of the individual's networks might need to access the individual's information in the format they want it in. The PCM tools would allow people to specify which content could be seen and accessed by others with the appropriate 'permissions', and the metadata tools would repect these permissions. These metadata tools would be invisible to the individual user, and would work automatically in the background as the individual added, deleted, and changed the content using the PCM tools. Still with me? Now comes the pièce de résistance. The third level of the house is the networking and connectivity tools, the ones that, analogous to the telephone switch, actually enable the identification of relationships, the making of connections, the transfer of information, and ultimately even collaboration and other more dynamic interactive applications of connectivity -- transactions. These applications harvest and mine the metadata, and have no content of their own. They operate on a just-in-time basis. These tools might include an Expertise Finder, a Connector, a Super Address Book, a Network Builder, a Publisher, and a Subscriber. So for example, if I'm researching solar power for my new house, or looking for people to work with me on a Meeting of Minds business assignment, I could use the Expertise Finder tool to identify who I could and should talk to, what information each of those experts has in their personal content that is permissioned for me to look at, multiple contact information for each of those experts, and the cost, if any, of contacting the expert and/or accessing their personal content. A Connector tool would then enable one-click connection to the selected expert(s) regardless of medium selected -- telephony, instant or asynchronous messaging, Simple Virtual Presence, etc. The Connector tool, just like a telephone switch, would connect people within an organization, or between organizations, or between an individual and someone in an organization -- it wouldn't matter. So if I work for a bank and I need to find an expert in financial derivatives, it would work exactly as my personal solar power search did. I could then choose between 'found experts' within the bank and those outside. If I want to contact my father in Winnipeg, or the group I play poker with on Friday nights, I would use the Super Address Book instead of the Expertise Finder before using the Connector tool, but the process would be analogous and as simple and intuitive as looking in a rolodex or phone book. And if I wanted to build a new network of people interested in discussing New Collaborative Enterprises, or whether Kerry should pick Kucinich as a running mate, I might use the Network Builder tool, which would function exactly like the Expertise Finder except it would identify people with particular interests rather than particular expertise. Finally, I could use the Publisher tool to 'push' selected content out instead of waiting for people to come and get it, and a Subscriber tool, based on RSS, that puts out a 'standing order' to pull in and aggregate others' content that meets my specified criteria. Just-in-time. Dead simple. Built on information I maintain, control and organize my way. Personal versus business information, internal or external, doesn't matter. A utility. An appliance. You could even build additional commercial and transaction tools on top of this. Buy a 'smart' fridge/freezer that takes inventory of what you have, 'permission' it to feed your PCM tool, and your grocery supplier can automatically compute, fill and deliver your order with no intervention by you at all. There are some important lessons to learn from the success and failure of previous technologies. A combination of simplicity-of-use, personalizability and adaptability has made tools like paper, books, pencils, paints, diaries, typewriters, newspapers, timepieces, telephones, radio & TV, personal calculators, CDs and DVDs ubiquitous and hugely popular. In contrast, the lack of these attributes in tools like the PC, musical instruments, the VCR, the fax machine, almost all software, PDAs and videoconferencing, has severely limited the market for these tools, and caused millions to curse their complexity. I don't blame first-generation social software designers for making the three mistakes that already have detractors raising their eyebrows. We need to do lots of experiments to see what will work and what won't. There's no harm designing and playing with skylights and new types of shingles even before the foundation is ready to be poured. And as Stowe said, social software "will become the cornerstone of a revolution in IT", not to mention a revolution in how we connect, network, and organize and share information -- activities that comprise much of the fabric of our lives. We just need to remember: Simple, Personal, Decentralized, Just-in-time. |
 Things are usually the way they are for a reason.
But there are few situations in the world that appear, from a
distance,
as unreasonable as the war between Israel and Palestine, a war that
has
been going on, in essence, without let-up for more than half a
century.
At one point the efforts to reach a peace settlement got so close to
success that the negotiators on each side received Nobel Peace prizes
for their efforts. But the dream didn't last, and for reasons we
couldn't fathom, the cycle of bloodshed, escalation and retaliation
cranked up again and is now at firestorm levels, threatening to push
the entire Mideast into even more cataclysmic violence.The reason we couldn't fathom this, is because we've never lived there, never walked a mile in their shoes. In The New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Goldberg provides us with an excellent proxy for such an experience, as he crisscrosses the area, from Israel's "ideologues of aggressive settlement" to Palestinian mothers teaching their children the honour of death in the holy war against the Jews, describing what he sees and what he hears from those in power, and from those who have nothing. It is a gut-wrenching, depressing journey. You'll need to buy the May 31 edition to read it, and I would recommend it highly. Alternatively, you can listen to Goldberg summarize his findings, along with a slide show of photos by Gilles Peress, here. One of those photos, of a Palestinian woman peering through a temporary gap in the new Israeli Separation Wall, is reproduced above. Goldberg makes no secret of his personal view of all this: The
leaders of the Jewish national-religious camp do not adhere to
observable reality, They exist in the glorious Jewish past and in the
messianic future but not in the reality of today, in which Jewish
soldiers give their lives to protect settlements; in which
Palestinians
live and die at checkpoints; in which Israel is becoming a pariah
among
the nations; and in which Israel may one day cease to exist as a
democratic Jewish state.
[Michael Tarazi, legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team says] "Settlements are the vanguard of binationalism" -- a single state that would soon have an Arab majority. "I don't care if they build more. The longer they stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an apartheid state."... "We have to look at the way the South Africans did it. The world is increasingly intolerant of the Zionist idea. We have to capture the imagination of the world. We have to make this an argument about apartheid." The view of the moderate majority on both sides is that the best of a sorry lot of options is to have Israel dismantle the settlements and withdraw from the pathetic Gaza Strip and the volatile West Bank, to the so-called Green Line, the UN-brokered treaty line after the last "official" war. But that majority view is very fragile, and violently opposed by a significant minority on both sides. The settlements in the occupied territories are the flash-point, where hugely outnumbered Jews, many of them vehemently anti-Arab, provocative, and uncompromising, are surrounded by largely militant Palestinians ready to lay down their lives to reclaim "their homeland", and protected by an Israeli army that has ceased being protectors and become an army of occupation, many of whom are all too willing to demonstrate violently which side they support, as Goldberg reports. There are no good guys and bad guys in this war, and every confrontation, of which there are thousands, at every checkpoint, every attack by Arab militants (many of them children), every razing of Palestinian homes to make way for more Iraqi settlements, every suicide bombing, radicalizes both sides and renders the position of the moderate majority untenable. The extremists on both sides, outnumbered though they may be, are firmly in control of the political agenda, and their every provocative act strengthens their position rather than ostracizing them. The "ideologues of aggressive settlement" on the Israeli side, and especially in the settlements, largely believe that all of the occupied territories are theirs by divine right, and that it is the will of God that all Arabs be expelled from their holy land in its entirety -- that, as their website says, "There is no Palestine". And the militants and zealots on the Palestinian side, among the poorest and most destitute people on the face of the Earth, and with one of the highest birth rates, state categorically that they would not stop fighting if Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank, but would merely be encouraged to continue the war until all Jews were extinguished from their holy land. The rabidly intolerant have the will and the ready means to scuttle every attempt at compromise, to embarrass moderates, to incite violence and then say "I told you so." There is nothing particularly unique in this, of course. Many of the tribal wars in Africa, the ethnic wars in the Balkan states, and the insane religious war in Northern Ireland, exhibit the same shameful, and shameless, pattern of violence and intransigence. The next, inevitable attack by Islamic fundamentalists on US soil will surely produce the same knee-jerk result in the US, and launch another war to treat the symptoms and exacerbate the disease. Ariel Sharon, less moderate than most but less extreme than the extremists, has taken an impossible 'middle' course sure to satisfy no one: Withdraw from Gaza, kind of (there are a host of conditions that render the withdrawal largely a joke to Palestinians), and bulldoze Palestinian homes to build a mammoth wall, not along the Green Line but deep inside the West Bank to "protect" the Jewish settlements, which are everywhere, not just in the border areas. The partisan, bipartisan support he has received in the US shows how little America's leaders understand the realities of the area's politics. As I've said before, the only answer, and it will take decades, perhaps centuries to achieve, is to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, to give Palestinians a reason to value peace, "something to lose", and help them build infrastructure and educational institutions, and a future to believe in. Poverty, ignorance and inequality, not religious and ethnic hatred, are the real enemies of peace. It doesn't matter whether the area is partitioned into two states, fairly or unfairly, or made into a single apartheid state. Things are the way they are for a reason, and in Israel-Palestine the reason is entrenched, and there is no short-term answer. No matter who represents the two sides, there will be decades of violence, war, and bloodshed to come, and it is inexcusable and ignorant of those of us who don't live there to take sides for cynical political gain. Let us instead -- as we should be doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other areas we have recklessly meddled in, in the absurd and arrogant belief that we understand the problems and have all the answers -- let us instead invest in infrastructure, in education, in building a better world even as the zealous minorities try to tear it apart. The founders of the religions we all claim to believe in would surely understand, and nod in assent. |
 One of my peers in the badly-named discipline of Knowledge Management is IBM's complexity guru, Dave Snowden. Last year Dave wrote a paper entitled Managi ng for Serendipity, which I really enjoyed. Dave appears to share my disdain for the context-free capture and 'codification' of people's business knowledge in massive 'knowledge bases' just in case someone else might be able to benefit from that knowledge sometime in the future (assuming they can find it). Dave's paper explains how senseless this expensive exercise is. I have outlined in my Personal Knowledge Management articles why I think Knowledge Management energies would be much more effectively spent (1) developing social networking applications and competencies, and (2) developing personal content management applications and competencies, focused on the specific, individual needs of the organization's front-line knowledge workers. In the above-mentioned article, Dave asks the question: If capturing 'best practices' and similar context-deficient knowledge in central repositories is, except in limited cases*, ill-advised, what if anything should organizations be collecting in centralized 'knowledge bases' and what centrally-coordinated programs should be used to encourage learning and knowledge transfer? He suggests three possibilities:
* Dave acknowledges the value of 'best practices' in internet payment systems and safety procedures in a nuclear power plant, for example. |
I have just updated the
full Dire
ctory of Active Salon Blogs.
You can download it in Excel format by clicking on the link at the top
of the right sidebar just below my e-mail link. It contains current
information on the owner and subject of each blog, plus current
sortable data on hits/month and inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Insights from Today's
Gospel (#3342)
Boomer Mom / Suburban Malaise (#3343) Tales of a Stone Pilgrim (#3346) Reading A1 (#3364) Fortinbras Radio Weblog (#3368) The Fix-It Chicks (#3378) What Would Dick Think (#3379) Reggie E. Scott's Radio Weblog (#3388) I Cover the Blackboard (#3398) The Irregulars Blog (#3403) Post-Coital with a Modern Primitive (#3409) The Adventures of Sophie's Dildo (#3411) If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please let me know. |
| Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily. If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of that. Keep your fingers crossed for me. |
 A few interesting articles on innovation, knowledge and the future of business - worth a read:
|
 Diagram ©2004 The Caring Enterprise
Coach
Today, the average North
American entrepreneurial business lasts just four years, the average
sole proprietorship even less. Yet entrepreneurship is not rocket
science; it's nothing more (or less) than making a living for yourself
with your business partners, instead of depending on some indifferent
corporation to provide you with a living wage. Running a business is
certainly no more difficult than raising a family, or landing a job
and
building a career with a big company. The essentials of
entrepreneurship could easily be taught in every school, and there'd
still be plenty of time left for the rest of the school curriculum.
But, perhaps because big corporations and the governments they control
want the 'labour force' to be meek, subservient, fearful and insecure,
most people have come to perceive entrepreneurship as a complex and
difficult art, fraught with danger, unprofitable, emotionally
scarring,
and demanding of enormous courage and energy. "It's certainly not for
everyone", I keep hearing.Entrepreneurship requires self-knowledge of what you're happy doing, what you're especially good at, how much you're willing to put into your enterprise and what you expect to get out of it. Without this self-knowledge, you're likely to be as miserable in your own business as working for some unappreciative boss, and that unhappiness will bear directly on its success. Beyond that, all you need are common sense, self-confidence, and a modicum of four key, learnable skills:
One of the 15 steps in the process of establishing and running an enterprise is avoiding the landmines. In MBA school they now call this Risk Management. This article identifies ten of the major landmines for entrepreneurs, using some real-life examples. I don't believe any of the enterprises described below is still in business (though some of the entrepreneurs have moved on, learned their lesson, and succeeded in other businesses):
Another technique entrepreneurs can employ to alert themselves to potential landmines is establishing an Advisory Board made up of people who have well-rounded business experience, knowledge of markets, and skills the entrepreneur and his partners lack. Such Advisory Boards are often reciprocal, offering mutual support and advice in lieu of fees. I am constantly surprised how few entrepreneurs use such 'support groups', relying instead on their own instincts, the counsel of inexperienced and costly 'professional advisors', and others (bankers, customers, franchisors, and various 'agencies') who have only a nominal, and purely financial, interest in the entrepreneur's success. Some 'support groups' and networks have been set up as money-making ventures, but these tend to be unwieldy and their members terribly needy -- ten people looking for advice and new customers for every one capable of offering useful information or counsel in return. It's best to create your own. The problem, of course, is that most entrepreneurs are paradoxically too busy fighting fires and avoiding landmines, to be able to invest time finding and networking with support groups and other valuable advisors who can help them avoid the next round of fires and landmines. But, despite the failings of the first generation Social Networking tools, such tools hold enormous promise. Although Shoshana Zuboff coined the term The Support Economy to refer to federations of businesses working together to support their shared customers, the first true Support Economy may well be entrepreneurs supporting each other. |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the second part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here
and the third part will follow next Tuesday. Four: Innovation & Society: How Technologies Limit Freedom, Human Nature Confounds Innovation, and Consumer Decision Tools Doom Marketing  Those
of you with HR backgrounds are probably wondering why I have not
spoken
about non-individual, community aspects of civilization and why and
how
these arose if the innovative individual is perfectly able to do it
all
him- or herself. These issues are relevant because of the role of
teams, organizations and other social constructs in the process of
innovation.Let's take another look at our proto-human, now equipped with the six basic types of manually powered machine (lever, wheel, screw, pulley, plane, and wedge -- the latter in the form of flint-head arrows), plus other early innovations like controlled fire, animal domestication and crop cultivation. Like other creatures he's adopted the family unit as a social convention, but now he's experimenting with a more sophisticated social construct, the tribe. Question is, why? Is it Darwinian -- Did humans that banded together have a higher likelihood of survival than loners? Or is it purely social -- Do humans, like other creatures, have a basic need for social contact with others that goes beyond family? Whichever it is -- a survival need or a social need, it required innovations to make it work, innovations like a code of laws and behaviours to prevent and resolve disputes between individuals, and shared language. At this point, in the view of some anthropologists, a tug-of-war began between our essential individual, autonomous nature and the perceived benefits of increasingly advanced, abstract and restrictive 'technologies' like division of labour, specialization, private and communal property, governments and other hierarchical social organizations, including the modern corporation. All these social 'technologies' limit individuals' freedom, and much of our civilization has been about trying to find a delicate balance between individual 'rights' and the apparent benefits afforded by technologies that compromise them. This tug-of-war continues to play out today, in our suspicion of government, the existence of 'militias', libertarian movements, evolution of privacy laws, and struggles over property ownership. The battle is far from over, with slavery, one particularly extreme social construct favouring hierarchical efficiency over individual liberty, still practiced in many countries, and women, children and animals treated as property with no rights or freedoms whatsoever in many others. This tension also plays out in the modern corporation, itself a feudal social construct which is neither egalitarian nor democratic. Corporate efficiencies have produced technologies that have massively improved material wealth and (most believe) quality of life in the few centuries since they were invented. But these advantages have come with a huge cost of personal freedom -- In many countries employees are virtual slaves of their employers, with no hope of realizing their full personal potential. In many companies promotion and remuneration have nothing to do with performance or competency. Here are some of the consequences for innovation of this individual/collective tension, in today's companies:
Perhaps this is a universal trait that we need to consider when designing innovation programs: Everyone loves to engage in social activities that are fun, challenging and unthreatening, but when the social activity impinges on individual 'territory' or property, or on scarce resources, social and collaborative behaviour ceases and confrontational, competitive behaviour takes over. But isn't competitive behaviour exactly what business thrives on? Doesn't the rush of adrenaline and testosterone in the quest for competitive advantage and 'winning' yield high productivity, sharpened customer focus, and more new ideas? I would argue that competition is at best a neutral factor in engendering innovation, and may in fact be detrimental. Most of the books on teamwork, such as The Wisdom of Teams, stress two essential preconditions to effective team behaviour:
Furthermore, many businesses are now reaching out to involve customers, alliance partners and even competitors in their problem-solving teams, because they help bring different points of view to the creative process, and because these external partners share both the defined problem and the sense of urgency with the internal team. In a world of accelerating change, no competitive advantage is sustainable -- innovations and new technologies can almost instantly reinvent industries, products, services, and offerings, and eliminate any competitive advantage the old ones may have had. Despite massive and sustained oligopolistic efforts to prevent it, customers are beginning to wrest absolute control of business direction and success from almost every industry's producers, management strategists and marketers, and now set the agenda and reward companies that respond to their needs and build new serving capability, not those that bash the competition, sue their customers, or create barriers to competitive offerings. The Bush regime's corporatist agenda has been only a temporary setback in this inexorable trend. A side-note about branding: Many marketing people, lamenting over the passage of market control from producer to consumer, cite the increasing importance of branding as an organizational strategy, and of brand loyalty as a success factor. For this reason, they argue, aggressive, proactive marketing is not dead. They fail to appreciate that consumers, faced with the severe scarcity of (a) time to assess product alternatives and (b) objective comparative analysis like Consumer Reports, tend to use 'brand' as an unsatisfactory surrogate decision-making tool. If you as a consumer want to buy a car, or select a television program to watch, the ideal decision-making process would be:
Tools like these exist today (Consumer Reports is an example of the former; the Recommendations Lists of Amazon.com are an example of the latter), but they are not yet very robust or reliable. In their absence, brands and brand loyalty are the surrogates: 'I always buy Chrysler products' or 'I usually watch CSI on Thursday nights' is your brain's way of substituting brand for the more ideal tools noted above. Once these tools exist (and the Information Age is ripe for them), product brands will simply become community-identification brands ('I drive Chrysler products because they reflect who I am and I want others to see that and associate with me, or not, because of that identification'). At this point, brand community-association becomes merely one more selection criterion of the analytical tool. With the advent of the near-perfect consumer information these tools provide, traditional marketing has no remaining role, and the knowledge-driven transition of power from producer to consumer is complete. Five: The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations: Business Gets Feminine and Consumers Seize Power from Producers It is now accepted wisdom that the organization of the future must be flatter, more empowering, less hierarchical and more networked, in order to be sufficiently agile and responsive to the ever-more-powerful customer's needs. Much has been written about organizational 'ecology' and the ability of communities of practice to self-organize to solve identified common problems more quickly and effectively than command-and-control driven organizational structures. There is a growing awareness that self-organizing communities operate best when their leadership uses what are usually considered 'female' modes of operation rather than the traditional 'male' ones:
These issues are important to the future of business innovation. We must decide whether an organization saddled with the structures and controls of an old 'management' style can hope to be sufficiently agile, responsive to customers, creative and focused on new product development, to survive when that survival depends on strategic improvisation and continuous innovation. There are two huge and contradictory trends occurring in organizational structure today: globalization and fragmentation. Globalization is occurring because small organizations cannot achieve the scale and resource capacity needed to be viable, and fragmentation, the spinning off and incubation of small, narrowly focused 'best of class' companies, is occurring because large organizations are too unwieldy, inefficient and inflexible to be innovative and respond to customers' rapidly evolving needs. So we have today the worst of both worlds: large, fat, unresponsive global companies and emaciated unscalable small ones. Furthermore, because of today's concentration of money and power in the hands of increasing global corporate giants, this system is in disequilibrium, with dysfunctional non value-added consequences such as these:
Those with an entrepreneurial bent would form, or join, one or more Producer or Innovator enterprises over their working life. Those with a productivity bent would gravitate towards the Global Utilities. Many others would be self-employed, providing niche advisory services to all three types of enterprise. You may think this is a very idealistic view of how 'organizations should be reorganized', but it is also a very logical one, and one that could easily be achieved today because of growing dissatisfaction with the dysfunctionality of today's organizational structures, and the ability, thanks to the Internet and other powerful new 'organizing' infrastructure technologies, to bring this 'reorganization of organizations' about. Only a poverty of imagination, opposition from elite vested interests, and the inequitable distribution of power and resources, all of them well within human capability to rectify, are preventing us from realizing this potentially liberating, perhaps even Earth-saving, reorganization. In fact, this customer-driven revolution is already happening, quickly, quietly, and non-violently, its first manifestation being what Shoshana Zuboff in her best-seller calls The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and The Next Episode of Capitalism. The advent of a New Economy, with Innovators focused intently and exclusively on solving real human needs and problems (and not on the hyper-marketed, artificial incrementalism and 'copycat' and 'sequel' new product development that today's risk-averse oligopolies have our most creative minds fruitlessly working on) offers the potential of astounding acceleration of innovation and resolution of seemingly intractable human problems: pollution, over-population, unemployment, inequality, human and animal suffering, disease prevention, war and cruelty, biodegradation, mental illness. Some would say it's not a moment too soon. What does all this mean for today's company looking to jump-start its innovation programs and processes, and today's individual looking to participate in making his or her own, or his or her employer's, enterprise more innovative? From the discussion above we can add six principles of innovation strategy to the eight principles developed earlier:
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