Mitch Kapor's Blog

In “The Wealth of Nations” Benkler makes some key assumptions about the nature and role of technology in shaping our lives and, in a separate category, assumptions about how the ends of freedom and justice are best served.  The assumptions are worthy of discussion and debate.
He says: technology impacts but does not determine outcomes.  Technologies are not neutral but have constraints and affordances which make some types of users harder and others easier.  I couldn’t agree more.

He believes freedom and justice is best achieved through a combination of market action and private, voluntary (thought not necessarily charitable) nonmarket action. The role of the State should, for the most part, be muted.

At the same time he says we must recognize that what may appear to be a simple choice over technology-architectures is much more than that (e.g. net neutrality). These policy choices are fundamentally social and political choices–choices about how to be free, equal, productive humans.

I agree with the immediately previous point.  After all, architecture is politics.  As to the point before that, while I am all for achieving as much freedom and justice as possible through non-state means,  I have the fundamental view that government is not going to wither away and die no matter what.  We have to comes to terms with it and tame it.

Just as there are opportunities to transform and mitigate the execces of capitalism through a hybrid economic model that begin to include peer production and non-proprietary creation of value, there are opportunities we must pursue to create more decentralized and participatory forms of democracy.

What I spoke with Yochai last Thursday, I think he was intrigued.

Yochai Benkler has written a very important new book, perhaps the best single volume explaining why phenomena like free and open source software and the Wikipedia work and why they are important and transformative instances of the networked information economy. The “Wealth of Networks” calls to mind Adam’s Smith’s seminal work “The Wealth of Nations”. Inviting the comparison risks a charge of arrogance, but I believe time will be kind in rendering a favorable verdict

There is a wiki which comprises a learning and research environment about the book. PDF’s of the whole book are here. A bulleted version of Chapter 1 for easy on-screen reading is here.

I have created a summary of the first chapter of Wealth of Nations by editing the collaborative summary of the book. I have favored brevity over nuance. Parenthesized examples are my own, not Benkler’s.

Audio of Yochai’s talk at UC Berkeley last Thursday is here.

The central thesis of “The Wealth of Networks” is that a new stage of the information economy is emerging in which decentralized, non-market production of information goods and services will play a major role.

Non-proprietary strategies have always been more common in the production of information goods than in the production of physical goods, e.g., in public education, in the arts and sciences and in political debate. Now it is possible for effective, large-scale, cooperative efforts to play a central role in creation of information and culture, e.g., free and open source software and the Wikipedia.

Part I of the book provides a framework to understand this peer production for what it really is: a new mode that is powerful, efficient, and sustainable.

Part II of this book examines how the networked information economy has an impact on individual freedom, a participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice,

By removing constraints of the earlier industrial information economy, (e.g., three over-the-air television networks or even five hundred cable channels) with affordances that permit in principle an unlimited number of information sources as on the internet, tradeoffs between these goals of liberal democracies can be lessened.

The networked information economy improves individuals’ capacities in three ways: to do more for and by themselves, in loose affiliation with others in a non-market setting (e.g. Digg) and to cooperate with others through formal or organized groups (e.g. Wikipedia) that operate outside the market sphere.

The networked information economy has also allowed individuals’ greater participation in the public sphere through access to alternatives to the news and commentary of mass media and new and more accessible forms for discussion and debate (Daily Kos).

Third, through both coordinated collective action and loose uncoordinated but coordinate action individuals can affect the content and focus of mass media news and commentary (Rathergate)

The non-proprietary models of production made possible by the networked information society also can be harnessed to promote justice and human development. There are at east two ways in which this happens.

The peer-production model is being used in areas outside of software such as agricultural research, open-source textbooks, and health-related products in ways which show promise to improve economic conditions and basic quality of life in the developing world.

A more critical and self-reflective culture can emerge as the network information economy allows culture to be more transparent and more malleable (remixing).

When I go to a movie or a public meeting, I silence my phone as a courtesy (as should we all).  Then I typically forget to unsilence it, and I miss incoming calls.

Why doesn’t the phone provide for a timed period of not ringing (which could have an intelligent default and be easy to override) after which it automatically reverts to ringing again?

Then I only have to take one action to silence the phone when I am thinknig of it and the rest is all automatic.

Now if my phone’s sofware was like Firefox in the sense of having a good plug-in architecture fox extensions, I could do this myself.

One of the original motivations for Chandler was develop a better way for my wife and I to coordinate our calendars. We have VERY complex calendars with many appointments and lots of travel. Many but not all of our work activities overlap and we and our assistants are always involved in complex scheduling.

It was thus a big milestone recently when we started to keep both my actual calendar and Freada’s in Chandler. We are sharing via OSAF’s Cosmo server and so far it is all working.

Here’s an intentionally blurry screenshot.

Kids, I wouldn’t try this at home just yet as it’s not ready for prime time, but it is a taste of what is to come shortly.

Somehow, a few posts back, I managed to omit the central item of three entries on politics.  This was really too bad, because it introduced the main idea.   I am now including it here and repeating a part which appeared previously.
I am more hopeful than I would otherwise be about the prospects for a healthy movement for fundamental political change because I believe using technology in innovative ways can make a difference – not by itself in some techno-deterministic way, but in service to a greater purpose.
When I was first thinking fifteen years ago about the challenge of protecting and fostering freedom and openness on computer networks, I originated the phrase “architecture is politics”.  The structure of a network itself, more than the regulations which govern its use, significantly determines what people can and cannot do.

The decentralized architecture of the Internet minimizes the role of central authorities and maximizes the ability of any participant to offer or receive any information or service and to develop new capabilities and services.  What keeps the Internet from descending into chaos and anarchy is not centralized authority, but that its activities, while decentralized, are highly coordinated through adherence to collectively developed open standards.

As long as the fundamental architecture of the internet remains open in the deepest sense, it offers the promise and challenges of of a system that is free to evolve through innovation.  When anyone attempts to or succeeds in controling key interfaces of the internet, whether by governmental restriction of access to certain web sites, telecommuinicaiton carriers threats to favor certain traffic over others, or email providers charging for mail in discrininatory ways, that promise is deeply threatened.

I used the term Jeffersonian in an approving way to describe the decentralized yet coordinated architecture of the internet in the cover story of the Wired managine (issue #3) in 1993.  In hindsight,  it was premature (if not naïve) to espouse that the Internet would by itself herald a revival of Jeffersonian democracy.  Yet, the basic insight that freedom, participation, creativity, and openness are better fostered by a decentralized but coordinated architecture, than by a centralized, hierarchical one, remains correct, and is there to be taken advantage of.
Politics is Architecture

When it comes to building a new movement, the converse proposition, “politics is architecture” holds true as well.  The architecture (structure and design) of political processes, not their content, is determinative of what can be accomplished.  Just as you can’t build a skyscraper out of bamboo, you can’t have a participatory democracy if power is centralized, processes are opaque, and accountability is limited.  Politics needs a new architecture, not just a new coat of paint.  We need to renovate the house (and Senate). The architecture team needs to reflect the future, not the present—who is sitting at the table, and the experiences and perspectives they represent matter enormously.

The internet, if kept open and accessible to all, is a tool we can use to reform our politics and create new democratic processes and institutions. By using the internet and building upon its open decentralized architecture, we can help give every person a voice and offer them a forum to participate in creating a healthy politics. The internet provides the tools to build bottom-up systems that are both globally interconnected and locally controlled. As the printing press was the technology that helped birth modern self-government, so the internet can be the tool to build a new democratically controlled participatory politics.

Periodicially, we are asked why anyone would want to synchronize browser-based bookmarks when you can use del.ico.us or other web-based solutions.
There are a number of things that you can’t do so well with web-based bookmarks that you can with browser-based bookmarks: drag ‘n drop, folder hierarchies, toolbar layout, item (re)ordering, opening in tabs, etc.

In fact, though browser-based and web-based bookmark systems solve the same problem, they do it very differently and they  support very different usage styles.

Our conjecture in designing Foxmarks was that lots of people gave up on browser-based bookmarks because it was so difficult to make them available wherever you needed them. Foxmarks attempts to address that obstacle.

We now know from conversations with our users that people (even regular del.icio.us users) start relying more on their browser bookmarks once they realize that their bookmarks will be wherever they need them.

In the end, people will use whatever feels most natural to them. For some, using anything other than del.icio.us is inconceivable. For others, good ol’ browser bookmarks just feel like home.
– adapted from Todd Agulnick’s comment here

We’re seeing a spate of major publicity about Al Gore in anticipation of release of his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” including the cover of Wired magazine (with a slant to “green tech” and apparently not yet online?) and a piece by editor David Reminck in the New Yorker. See the trailer for the film now.

The film, which is part science lecture by the best college professor you ever had and part evangelistic warning about the impact of global climate change centers around a compelling lecture and slide show Gore has given over a thousand times, which comes out of deep-rooted personal passion and conviction, and which has its origins when he was a junior Senator from Tennessee in the 1970’s. No one can say he’s a johnny-come-lately to the issue.

At the recent TED, the talk was the highlight of the conference, and the documentary drew raves at Sundance where it premiered. When he gave the talk a few months ago at our office in S.F., which houses the Open Source Applications Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Level Playing Field Institute, some employees had what amounts to a religious conviction about climate change, in essence moving it off the long list of things we know are problems but aren’t on the front burner to the short list of burning issues.

This mirrors the situation in general. While the majority of Americans now recognize global warming as a real problem, it is not taken with a great sense of urgency. Perhaps the documentary, an accompanying book, the web site, and the attendant hoo-hah can help catalyze a further shift in public opinion. God knows we need it.

The mainstream media is still playing the issue as a “he said, she said” debate instead of giving due weight to the scientific consensus, and op-ed columnists like John Tierney at the NYT are focusing on making fun of tree-huggers (ok, hard to resist sometimes) rather than being serious about the substantive issues.

The movie opens May 26 in LA., June 2 in S.F.

Dan Farber in ZDNET, Farber flickr set, ClickZ News blog, Renee Blodgett

“Email — Should the Sender Pay?”: Debate Between Esther Dyson and Danny O’Brien

In light of AOL’s adopting a “certified” email system, EFF is hosting a debate on the future of email. EFF Activist Coordinator Danny O’Brien and renowned tech expert Esther Dyson will discuss the potential consequences if people have to pay to send email. Would the Internet deteriorate as a platform for free speech? Would spam or phishing decline?

I will be moderating.

WHEN:
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

WHERE:
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street, San Francisco
(between Valencia and Guerrero)
Tel: (415) 863-1087

Directions to the Roxie

This fundraiser is open to the general public. The suggested donation is $20. Wear you EFF t-shirt and your suggested donation plummets to just $10! No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Please RSVP to events@eff.org

Geoff Goodfellow invented wireless email back in 1982.  I used a version of his system in the early 1990’s. Geoff got nothing.  NTP got $600 million for a set of patents which should never have been issued.  Link to NYT article by John Markoff.

GEOFF GOODFELLOW is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came up with an idea that resulted in a $612.5 million payday. But he will never see a penny of it. He remains little known even in Silicon Valley and, perhaps most surprising, he doesn’t really mind.

And herein lies one of the stranger tales about innovation and money in the world of technology.

A high-school dropout, Mr. Goodfellow had his light-bulb moment in 1982, when he came up with the idea of sending electronic mail messages wirelessly to a portable device — like a BlackBerry. Only back then, there was no BlackBerry; his vision centered on pagers. He eventually did get financial backing to start a wireless e-mail service in the early 1990’s, but it failed.

My two cents:

“The moral of the story is that for a long time now the patent system has been misused,” said Mitchell D. Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, the software publisher, and an adviser to Mr. Goodfellow in the early 1990’s. “If it had been properly used, NTP would never have been issued its patents, and they never would have had a basis to pursue a lawsuit against R.I.M.”