Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Wouldn't you say the phenomenon Jelly Bean describes has a lot more to
do with news media that doesn't report the connections?  

Plus, corporate PR professionals (including the ones who craft the
policy emissions of the Bush administration) are smart at wagging the
dog.  They know that they can deforest, strip mine, belch fine particle
pollution and sell multi-ton gas hogs even more effectively if these
connections remain unexamined by the public, and tailor their
communication accordingly.

NGOs often seem to be one-issue organizations because the people
involved love birds, or bears, or some other aspect of the biota to
distraction.  Most members of Audubon could make the connections
between air quality, wetlands destruction, weather changes, pesticides,
West Nile and birds any day of the week.
  

    

"Also, this &*&%$#^ wifi provider doesn't want
 to play nice with Safari."

Bruce, I often have to use the ancient, creaky Internet Explorer to
arrange the setup with a wifi provider. After the connection is set up, you
can revert to Safari (or, better yet, Firefox).

Speaking as one OSX dude to another.
  

    
BTW speaking of climate change, we're in for heavy weather this week:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002141092_storm05.html
  

    
Anecdotal argument for climate change:

As Bruce flits through the skies of Europe, I can offer the comforting
fact that only about 50% of the flights I've taken around Europe in
the last year or so have experienced severe turbulence.  And only about
25% of those over the continental US!

By severe I mean a 757 equivalent unable to maintain assigned altitude
in cruise, then requiring the pilot to use repeated abrupt throttle
changes and sharp rudder adjustment throughout approach just to bring
it back to level flight from time to time, hopefully coincident with
touchdown.  Nothing like being slammed sideways at 38,000 feet while
watching the drink trolley go airborne!

I've flown quite a bit over the last 15 years, all over the world, and
never experienced that particular form of unpleasantness until fairly
recently...but now I almost take it for granted.

Is the weather getting worse...or are airlines willing to fly in
conditions they would have considered too marginal a few years ago?
  

    
..forgetting possibility 3 that I am simply unlucky...
  

    
My flights seem eerily smooth lately, which makes
up for the severe dysfunctionality of the security apparats
on the ground.  My checked bag disappeared in Paris, was
nowhere to be seen in the customs port of Houston, and mysteriously
reappeared in Austin.  Of course, they insisted that
I check the bag ; I would never have done that voluntarily,
since the commonly subject them to weird antics.

I'm not quite sure what the heck I'll do with Viridian List.
Having an email list at all seems kind of archaic now.
Why not an RSS feed, blog, podcasting, etc etc?  

If you want to join it, nothing simpler; just
send me email.

I just had an odd media experience in an aircraft
over the Atlantic.  There was multichannel video
installed in the back of the seat.  After my computer
ran out of juice, I had to channel-surf to avert
utter boredom, so I ended
up watching a mainstream-TV American cop
show off the back of the neighbor's chair.

It immediately struck me that it must have
been a COUPLE OF YEARS since I actually sat
down and watched an entire television dramatic
episode.  I never much liked
or hated television, I was more or less willing
to watch it if the opportunity came up, but
compared to websurfing, this TV show had
the dusty, archaic feeling of vaudeville.

I mean, those are real scripts, talented actors...
it was the kind of vaguely progressive
TV drama fodder that's supposed to be
"punchy," "hard-hitting," "sizzling"...  It
was like watching ice melt, as a
media experience.

I wonder if television is doomed. 
  

    
Welcome back! There's already some questions in queue. Meanwhile as
Viridian webmaster, I should note that we're not posting each new
message on the front page at ViridianDesign.org using Blogger, and
there's an RSS feed for the Viridian notes at
http://www.viridiandesign.org/rss.xml. 
  

    
"First, the potential "Napsterization" of physical
objects: why buy, for example, the latest Star Wars
action figure when you could download a hacked CAD
file free from the Web and make one for the price of
materials? I know the costs won't bear out initially,
but I assume such "makers" will get cheaper over time,
and just the above scenario could kill the toy
industry (which is usually wobbly in the best of
times). What are the future social and economic
effects of this technology?"

*Well, as readers of my weblog know, I just got
back from Serbia.  The extent of product counterfeiting
there is really shocking.  You can't squeeze a tube of
toothpaste without wondering if the thing is faked and, if so,
exactly what substance is scrubbing the inside
of your mouth.

This isn't the old version of product counterfeiting,
either. This is some pretty sophisticated manufacturing
by people who obviously would have the skill to make,
say, real shoes; except they'd rather undercut Reebok
in order to line their own pockets without having
to pay for Reebok's global PR budget.

And you don't know who they are; and you'll never
know who they are; and if the product harms you,
you have no redress whatsoever.  It's 
sinister.

Needless to say the purported "government" that
more or less runs "Serbia and Montenegro" is not going to do
a thing about this.  When is the last time
you saw an internationally-known Serbian
brand?  They're just not gonna play the NATO
branding game; they're like Adbusters,
only they mean it.

http://adbusters.org/metas/corpo/blackspotsneaker/
  

    

>  And you don't know who they are; and you'll never
>  know who they are; and if the product harms you,
>  you have no redress whatsoever.  It's
>  sinister.

Yes.  It's easy to be cynical about branding, but knowing 
the identity of manufacturers is of value to consumers, no 
doubt about it...  I hadnt thought of knockoffs as corporate 
identity theft nor as a breach of faith with consumers who might need
redress before now. 

That scenario is sinister enough, but toss in some real life internet
phenomena like trojan horses.  In what ways can a physical object make its
purchaser a slave to someone who just enjoys messing with people -- or
punishing consumption they feel is excessive, or terrorizing the minions
of the great satan or global capitalism, for that matter?   Ugh. Where 
can this go... ownzered by your trojan cell phone, crashed by your 
infected car?  
 
  

    
<bruces>, are you saying the Serbs and Montenegroans have an explicit
anti-intellectual property component to their counterfeiting
activities?  It's not just for the money?

Or is it just "collateral damage?"
  

    
At least they're not giving the products away. Bill Gates would almost
certainly appreciate the capitalist mind-set of these hard-working
Serbian entrepreneurs who, though they may be making unauthorized use
of brand names, at least want MONEY for their wares... unlike American
Free Culture commies who want to give everything away.
  

    
This is a popular effort, this fakery.  People in the Balkans just
don't think in a state-centered way any more.  Everybody's
his own smuggler; everybody's got cousins offshore who send
money and gifts home.  They all experienced international
sanctions for years.  They're not gonna strengthen the hands
of intellectual property lords like the WTO or WIPO or RIAA.
It just means building new whips so that NATO and the Europeans
and the UN can scourge them.

So it's not like a state conspiracy to pilfer; it's more like
the Dutch and hashish.  You just don't look real hard,
and the traffic takes care of itself.

A lot of the retailers who are behind the flow of
fakes are refugees who lost everything.  They were
living out of car trunks.  Now they're living out
of kiosks, and they're kinda nicely settled in there;
some of those Balkan kiosks have TVs, neon,
and smokestacks.
  

    
You were among the first authors to put substantial works online as
"literary freeware." What do you think of Creative Commonas and Free
Culture - threat, or menace? Stimulus for innovation or communist
conspiracy?
  

    
Well, Free Culture is not a "communist conspiracy."  A communist
conspiracy
would want to nationalize intellectual property through the
dictatorship
of the proletariat (assuming that it recognized intellectual property
as something other than "theft".)

I would classify Creative Commons as an ingenious if somewhat
complicated scheme which may or may not prove to have legs
as an actual workaday institution.  All these copyleft schemes
have to involve somebody who cares enough to keep track
of who copylefted what under what circumstances.  Creative
Commons aren't public domain, they're not abandonware.
They're gonna require some kind of bureaucracy and some
kind of grievance squad.  That makes them vulnerable,
and with the passage of time, possibly top-heavy.

I wonder, for instance, if Creative Commons couldn't
be harassed to death by a deliberate blizzard of SCO-style
petty lawsuits.  I also wonder if their zealots might
just get bored and despair over the dullness of their
bookkeeping when they expected the Creative Revolution, baby.

As far as the "threat or menace" aspect goes,
the menace is not in some Saddam dictatorship
of creative Marxist-Lessigists.  The danger
is  in the general collapse of law and order
and its replacement by nothing in particular.

I'm getting worried that the WTO - WIPO regime,
the general respect for law and order in the realm of
intellectual property, may just collapse worldwide.  It may 
fail through imperial overstretch and get nibbled
to death by global guerrillas.  It may be
that as the means of production get offshored into
areas like China and India, where there traditionally
has not been little respect for IP, the West's standards
of behavior may simply be ignored. 

That fish is rotting from the head down. If the USA
is itself widely regarded as an outlaw state, why
should anybody pay even lip service to the IP interests
of its multinationals?  That system cannot be
enforced with cruise missiles; the global populace
in general has to agree that the scheme is legitimate
and just and the best way to produce prosperity.  
Otherwise they just pirate stuff and buy
fakes.

People don't physically have to pay money for IP;
they're merely required to do it.  So trying to
drag money out of IP means imposing a regulatory
framework on globalization.  That's not easy.  
It's like trying to dam up black water.

The WTO doesn't run the world.  Seen from
inside, they're very rickety, balky and feeble.  
There's just not a lot of enforcement power there.
Their appeal is mostly moral, believe it or not.

Global law and order of any kind is in deep trouble now.
We could find ourselves living in a "failed globe", where 
states fail all over the place, including the USA.  Then most
everybody would find themselves living in the way
that the planet's majority have always lived.
And that's not the "American Way," that's
the third-world way.

Instead of a thriving Group of 7 with its vast
tinkertoy of advanced-state infrastructure and
legalisms, we could find that the 21st century
globe looks a lot more like Brazil. Like  Turkey.  China.
India.  Big, ramshackle, semi-stable, randomly
violent, mostly poor, amazingly corrupt.  

Given that Creative Commons is a lawyer's invention and wondrously
and nitpickingly legalistic, I wonder what kind
of future Creative Commons would have in such a world.  I tend
to think that people would just shrug and forget
it was around.
  

    
Don't Americans seem to believe that we've already has a collapse of
law and order, to which the respond by electing candidates who promise
more social control? Isn't that what follows a perceived social chaos -
an authoritarian backlash?
  

    
As far as I can figure it, that's in reverse order.
I mean, in the Balkans, it was Tito, an authoritarian
of the first order, whose social order went to
pieces.  Then there was some nasty Balkan
phony-war terror-war bloodletting that looked
very rigorous and tough-guy, but was just a front
for the well-nigh complete ethical, political,
military, economic and social rot in Yugoslavia.
The place imploded.  It's statelets now.

Bosnia, Herzegovina, Kosova, I don't even
know what the proper name is for those
entities.  UN protectorates?  Global colonies?
NATO hot potatoes that are now somewhat cooler EU
potatoes?  We haven't even invented the
terminology.  We're still trying to pretend that
we can state-build them back to the way they
were.

The late Zoran Djindjic kinda figured that after Milosevic
was deposed, he'd act like the take-charge revolutionary
leader and shake some law and order back into
Serbian government.  But the biggest smuggling
gang in town just shot Djindjic in the back and
he died on the spot.  His successors are a lot
more circumspect.  They know that the state
can be whacked in the streets by the gangs
and that nobody that matters will turn a hair.

The situation is Serbia
is actually kind of stable.  It doesn't have
a grim, violent feeling.  The police are not
feared by the populace.  You don't see
blatant acts of race-hate.  It's just that
the place is profoundly crooked.  It's like a world
capital of black globalization.

I know this all sounds pretty grim, farfetched,
alien and freaky to most Americans, but that's 
more or less what happened to our own
dark twin, the "Soviet Union."  You remember
them, that other continental superpower full
of white guys and bristling with military
power?   They alienated all their allies,
bogged down fighting Moslems, went broke, and then
collapsed like a burst tire.

People still call that area "the former
Soviet Union", what, fifteen years after the
thing died?  That's like calling Texas "the
former Confederate State" in about 1880!

I think people instinctively call it "the former
Soviet Union" because there's so little
national character to the diffuse entities
that appeared after that collapse.  Putin
makes authoritarian noises and can bust
the heads of some of his moguls, but the
guy's got no economy.  There's no rule
of law to speak of.  The Russians pipe oil and gas.  That's
about it.  They're a rentier enterprise.

Serbia looks like a jolly vacation spot
compared to the Russian situation.
They're losing half a million people a year
in Russia.  Their demographics are catastrophic.
You'd think they'd pick their socks up and
patch a civilization together, but they're
dying off like the buffalo.  By the middle
of the century half the Russian ethnic
group will be gone.  Just, you know,
Gone With the Wind.

Nobody's killing them.  They're not being
invaded by tyrants.  Nobody's putting them
in camps.  But whatever the hell it is that
they've got: the Disorder, the Decline --
man, that stuff is fatal.  It's more serious
to the health of nations than
a major shooting war.  They're
in a tailspin.  

You think they'd get all better if they
elected and installed a bunch of
Republicans?  Or for that matter, Democrats?
  

    
The New American Century may be ready to go there. They see a world in
chaos and disarray, and figure they can fix it with American know-how
and spunk, like Teddy Roosevelt's boys in "The Wind and the Lion,"
which I can imagine they're screening in heavy rotation at the White
House. Despite their bungling, I think these guys really think they're
the only hope for the world.

I suspect you've read Jim Moore's "The Second Superpower Rears Its
Beautiful Head." He says

"As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its
power in the world, many people are longing for a 'second superpower'
that can keep the US in check.  Indeed, many people desire a superpower
that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term
well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic
process.  Where can the world find such a second superpower?  No nation
or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the
European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of
institutions in the field of international law, including the United
Nations.  But even the common might of the European nations is barely a
match for the current power of the United States.

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. 
Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the
'will of the people' in a global social movement.  The beautiful but
deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace
campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people
concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development,
environmentalism, health, and human rights.   This movement has a
surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify
their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at
a fundamental level we are all one.  These are people who are
attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of all 6.3 billion
people in the world—and not just the members of one or another
nation...."

Could something like this work? A loose network of global citizens
connected online and united in their alienation from their various
governments - governments that don't seem to be effective in doing what
governments are theoretically supposed to do, maintain some semblance
of order, justice, safety?
  

    
"Could something like this work? A loose network of global citizens
connected online and united in their alienation from their various
governments - governments that don't seem to be effective in doing
what
governments are theoretically supposed to do, maintain some semblance
of order, justice, safety?"

Well, I've been looking for that for a long time -- "post-national
governance."  "Twilight of Sovereignty" and all that, this is one of
the oldest riffs in the cyberpunk metier.  

Not a new question at all.  Back in the early 80s,
we used to have it figured that multinational corporations would
do it, you know, some of those Japanese Zaibatsu Lifetime Employment
Corporate Feudalist Apparats,  They should have had the world
well sorted by now.

Well, the megacorps were even more frail than national governments.
You want the classic version of a politically ambitious
multinat, it's Enron.  The guys are one phosphot-dot thick!
As for Japan Inc., it was so subject to regulatory capture
that the entire population ended up sitting on their hands.

What  does seem to have happened is not corporate dominance
but  the arrival on the scence of  a new class
of ultrarich moguls, your basic "They Rule" crowd.

http://www.theyrule.net/

But they don't actually rule, they just profit.
They don't bother to interface with the employees.
They don't bother with labor, they don't even bother
to own the physical means of production; I'm
not sure what these guys do, besides appoint
each other to directorial boards.  Well, I do know
what Enron did.  They ran a vast Ponzi scheme.
I know what Mikhail Khodokovsky of Yukos did.
Same thing, basically.  

We're not gonna find
any "semblance of order, justice, safety" around the
likes of Enron and Yukos -- heck, they can't
even offer the  semblance of a genuinely profit-making
capitalist enterprise.

Then there's that Second Superpower pitch, which,
frankly, reeks of bohemian arrogance to me.
What, like the Seattle 99 crowd are the only people
in the world who can use email?  

"A loose network of global citizens
connected online and united in their alienation from their various
governments"  -- you just described Al Qaeda.  Obviously
there's profound destructive potential there, but when
did Al Qaeda ever provide anybody with a "semblance of order,
justice and safety"?  Taliban Afghanistan?  Chechnya?
Fallujah? Kashmir?  Is this what the world's being offered
as liberated zones and models of Islamic moral integrity?
They can burn. but they can't build; they're a global
suicide cult.

Did you ever see that last-reel scene in "Lawrence of Arabia"
where the heroic Arabs finally seize Damascus and the
place burns down in their care?  Man, that's Al Qaeda all over.
When I see various  NGOs storming the WTO, I really wonder
what happens when you give these cats the car-keys.
Where's the agenda?  And if they got one, why can't it get votes?

I especially like it when the left starts talking about the
*right wing* Second Superpower, the "vast right-wing
conspiracy" that tried to lynch Clinton, the "Straussian
Republikudnik NeoCons" plotting in their Iran-Neocontra White House
basements...  Because that's what a Second Superpower looks
like to you when you don't agree with its politics.
It's a horrifying, irresponsible, illegitimate conspiracy.
Unless your friends are doing it.  Then it's a movement!

Paul Wolfowitz would also nod and agree with the pitch there,
"A loose network of global citizens
connected online and united in their alienation from their various
governments - governments that don't seem to be effective in doing
what
governments are theoretically supposed to do, maintain some semblance
of order, justice, safety?" --  except he's got that figured for
a critique of NATO and the UN.  He considers all that a glowing
justification
for American military unilateralism.  

I don't think we're gonna find the exit till the smoke fills the room,
but I'm busy looking.  There's gotta be one around here somewhere.
I don't mind voting, I pay taxes.  All we've gotta do is maintain
a civilization here; how hard can that be?
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sat 8 Jan 05 12:37>
  

    
Having worked a while with the krewe at WorldChanging.com, I think
we're onto something there. Alex Steffen and Jamais Cascio made it
clear up front that they wanted to be about solutions, not problems,
and I think the idea is that, if we toss out enough constructive memes
and point to projects and paradigms that make the world work better for
everybody, that exit you're looking for will begin to emerge. And it's
an exit that actually goes somewhere.

Others are are making bleaker pronouncements, like Jane Jacobs who, in
her new book _Dark Age Ahead_, "sees 'ominous signs of decay' in five
'pillars' of our culture: family, community, higher education, science
and 'self policing by the learned professions.'" (Quoting from the
Publisher's Weekly review.) Also Jared Diamond, whose _Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed_ looks at examples where
civilzations that have collapsed throughout history, often because they
didn't respond well to some environmental disaster.

Assuming that we have societal decay (as Jacobs says) and the
increasing potential for environmental disaster, and assuming real
leaders emerged who were willing to take proactive and constructive
steps toward mitigation, have you any thoughts about what those steps
would be? 
  

    
Well, man, I'm a science fiction writer.  So my personal idea
of "proactive and constructive steps" would be, I dunno,
ultra-intelligent posthuman vanilla ice cream for
everybody with a side order of solar-powered
sustainable roller skates.  Wahoo!

If you need some "constructive steps" that are a
little more practical and attainable, there isn't
much wrong with the UN Millennial Development
Goals.  This is what officially passes for an official
consensus future for the global community
at this point in time.

I'm not personally and blazingly ambitious
about this lip-pursing UN agenda, but if we somehow got 
these rather unromantic and plonking goals
accomplished,  there's no question that we'd all 
be a lot better off.


So here you go, then:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a
day.
Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

2. Achieve universal primary education
Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary
schooling

3. Promote gender equality and empower women
 Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education
preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

4. Reduce child mortality
 Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five

5. Improve maternal health
Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major
diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country
policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources.
Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to
safe drinking water.
Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum
dwellers, by 2020.

8. Develop a global partnership for development

 Develop further an open trading and financial system that is
rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory. Includes a commitment
to good governance, development and poverty reduction—nationally and
internationally.

 Address the least developed countries' special needs. This includes
tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief
for heavily indebted poor countries; cancellation of official bilateral
debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries
committed to poverty reduction.

Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing
States.
Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt problems through
national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the
long term
In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and
productive work for youth.

In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to
affordable essential drugs in developing countries.

In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of
new technologies == especially information and communications
technologies.
  

    

WorldChanging looks like the Whole Earth Catalogue as a network. 
Seems like a great idea to me....
  

    
Yeah, I agree. Considering the attention WorldChanging is getting, I'm
not really sure why Whole Earth didn't survive.

Th UN set of goals looks great, though the UN itself is constrained by
a US lack of commitment while the country's leaning so far to the
right. See
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2000/10-09-2000/vo16no21_mandate.htm
for an idea of the right-wing perception.

Speaking of science fiction and seeing that rusirius is with us, I'll
ask you the same question I asked him a few days ago:

"Remember the people we knew who were seeing cyberpunk as a political
movement rather than a literary subgenre? I wonder what they're doing
now? That energy was too weird to simply evaporate, no?"
  

    



Rohit Gupta writes:



"What trends have you extracted from watching the recent Bollywood
product? The industry here is now making films with audience's abroad
as target, almost always, since the local market has been
unpredictable and unresponsive. Also, if you need recommendations from
the classics, give me a holler."

-Rohit Gupta
  

    
Along the same lines as Jon, what do you see as the bridge to any
effective world governing body? The UN, as it is now, seems pretty much
ineffective. And we definitely aren't helping the program. Or do you
see a world government at all? In some senses it seems like we all
better learn Mandarin and hope the Chinese look favorably on our
children.