A Networked World

#NetHui Lessig on fire

I've been a huge fan of Larry lessig since I first found the net back in 1995. So when he was booked for NetHui I was a lot more determined to turn up on the Friday than I would otherwise have been.

While I expected most of what he had to say, albeit updated, the last 10 minutes were seriously unexpected.

I never expected to hear a guy with such a huge reputation who comes from the heart of the online world to stand up in Auckland and beg us to help rescue his nation from its evolving disaster driven by systemic corruption. Watch it.

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

More sustainability BS

I can't believe that we are still reading this stuff. We have secret to sustainable paint. Don't get me wrong, there is every reason to try new stuff and push the limits as far as they can go but where the hell was the journalist's mind here?

Resene believes it has identified the secret ingredient that will allow it to produce the world's first sustainable paint.

In August the paint-maker was the inaugural winner of What's Your Problem New Zealand?, a competition set up by the Crown research institute Industrial Research.

The prize was $1 million of research, and Resene has wasted no time in getting its project under way to develop a waterborne paint that is based on resins made up of 80 per cent sustainable ingredients.

Waterborne paints at present use acrylic as a resin, and existing environmentally friendly alternatives contain only 30 to 40 per cent sustainables.

The key is to find a substitute that will allow it to make a paint based on resins made of 80 per cent renewables.

The company will only say that the ingredient will be non-cropping (it won't compete with food crops for space) and is likely to come from existing industrial waste streams.

So lets go through that again shall we?

Resene believes it has identified the secret ingredient that will allow it to produce the world's first sustainable paint.

sustainable - Wiktionary
1. able to be sustained
2. able to be sustained for an indefinite period without damaging the environment, or without depleting a resource; renewable

OK? Simple; at the end of the day we have as much of the same quality of resources as we started with. So, how does it measure up?

The prize was $1 million of research, and Resene has wasted no time in getting its project under way to develop a waterborne paint that is based on resins made up of 80 per cent sustainable ingredients.

Weasel number one. to put it another way, this paint is 20% UNsustainable. Now, unless you can throw out of the formula the 20% that is not sustainable, then as soon as you run out of the unsustainable ingredients, you stop making the paint. Here, take enough food for a walk across the Nullabor plain and 80% of the water you will need. Have a nice trip. There is no such thing as percentage sustainability, your ability to produce anything is absolutely limited to the least available element. When that runs out, you are done.

Waterborne paints at present use acrylic as a resin, and existing environmentally friendly alternatives contain only 30 to 40 per cent sustainables.

See above, it doesn't matter whether your sustainable elements are 10% or 99%, its the non-renewables that will kill you. Now, not adding to the environmental load is in itself a good thing so 80% renewables is better than 30%, but sustainability it isn't.

The company will only say that the ingredient will be non-cropping (it won't compete with food crops for space) and is likely to come from existing industrial waste streams.

More weasels. If the sustainable elements comes from existing waste streams then they are absolutely dependent on the continuance of those waste streams in sufficient quantity to feed the sustainable paint mix. If those waste streams are legislated out of existence, or if they are generated by non-renewables, they too are going to stop and the sustainable paint is wholly dependent on the least renewable constituent of the other company's waste stream.

Furthermore, if the recovered ingredients are themselves composed of non-renewable atoms, Resene has shifted the problem exactly one step and, while they may have reduced some costs by being able to discount the waste content of their providing industries, they have exposed themselves to all the uncertainties that those industries have to deal with. I would bet they have increased their business risk by 50% or more.

I'm all for safer paint, I'm all for products that remove anything from the waste stream that can be reused as something else, but I'm 100% against misrepresenting this as sustainable, it's not even close.

Do we still have the leisure to be "creative"?

As usual, Johnnie points to some interesting ideas that kick me off. Change and diversity

Jack Ricchiuto has some thoughts on how change happens in networks.

...the possibility space for change opens up when we connect different people who can begin resonating together around shared stories, opportunities, and dreams. It’s a process of liberating people from the confines of clusters of sameness and ideological colonialism so they can move toward more diverse connections and pragmatic alignments.

The phrase clusters of sameness resonates for me and I think organisations often clog up with those. He continues:

the fusion of difference and resonance is a powerful approach because in that space, people move away from trying to change each other, which opens the space for the possibilities of creating innovative.. changes.. Resonant listening to one another’s differences allows us to join in both-and innovations that could never be possible in an either-or constrained world

I agree about the processes, but I think the crucial thing that gets left out of all this is that there is no way to steer the process towards a "desirable" (for whomever) outcome, nor can we determine the result in advance.

We live in a control-oriented mindset, change that we do not initiate frightens us and we try to reassert whatever control we thought we had, change that we do initiate gets out of control very quickly and we waste more resources trying to get back in control.

In every case we resist any change that we don't think we can determine in advance. But we live in a real world where change is permanent and uncontrolled. Hell I remember writing in an essay in high school something to the effect that "in order to maintain a constant relationship with a constantly changing world, we have to change, constantly".

I thought it was pretty cool then and I still agree with its foundation, the only thing I'd add is that the constant relationship is itself impossible, that changes too.

The whole idea of change management is a crock. Change, like shit, happens. Our biggest problem is that we are not inclined, nor do we learn, nor are we taught as part of our education, to understand, adapt, participate in or benefit from the changes that happen. Still less are we able to abandon changes that are short term wins but long term failures.

For me, this is about opening space so that we can explore experiences fully, without the pressure to problem-solve.

I'd love that to be true but I think we are running out of the lleisure we've had to be purely creative. The number and urgency of problems that we are going to have to solve, on a personal and daily basis, as well as a community and national one, is getting bigger, faster. Those of us, like me, who have had it damned easy all our lives and had the luxury of being able to invent, innovate and think about the world rather than get our hands dirty in it are going to spend the rest of those lives working much harder for much less money and often less return of all kinds.

With dwindling resources, the small problems that we simply threw some money at are going to become harder to deal with and the big problems such as climate change and PO are starting to cause medium sized problems such as landslips and crop failures that just wont go away. We've had 2 generations of cruising on the capital, from here on we will be paddling like hell to stay afloat.

If anything we need tools like open space and theatre sports as a form of rapid prototyping; spaces where we can bring hard problems, trial a bunch of possible solutions and take them away to work on them.

Jim Kunstler asks the question

While he can go over the top a bit, Kunstler is definitely on my team when it comes to the reality-based life. And once again, in Self-jiving Nation he asks the question that nobody else seems to have thought of:

I'd like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new thousand-unit pop-up "community?" For a next generation of super-cars built to look like medieval war wagons? That's the "hope" that our officials seem to pretend to offer.

Exactly, the talking heads all talk about this recovery, but its always a recovery "from" the crash and never, ever, about what our lives and communities and economies will look like once we have "recovered".

It's completely inconsistent with any reality-based trend-lines, by the way.

When the Australian Government commissions a report that says nearly a million homes are in direct danger of rising sea levels and that it should consider compulsory acquiisition and demolition of some homes as an option, the destination of the recovery looks a lot less sunny than most of the discuission would have us assume.  Make evacuation plans

Urgent action to cope with the impact of rising sea levels needs to start now, including improving evacuation routes for coastal communities during extreme storms and flooding.

As well, a sweeping federal parliamentary report calls for an overhaul of the building code to make homes more resilient and for the legal liability for future property losses to be sorted out.

Warning that ''the time to act is now'', the bipartisan report brought down last night states that thousands of kilometres of coastline have been identified as at risk from the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

The only note of compulsory cynicism I can muster for this one is that, coincidentally, the coastline is disproportionately owned by the wealthiest members of society who would probably be handsomely bailed out by such legislation.

A few years ago they were squawking about their properties being protected and told they would have to suck it up and take the hit because the community could not afford to protect coastal landscape to that degree. Looks like they may have found a good fairy after all.

The mother of invention

Johnnie continues to look at how innovation happens and gently nudges necessity in a couple of quotes.
Johnnie Moore's Weblog: Innovation, disruption, control etc

Bob Geldof made a similar point at a NESTA bash a few months back, where he said innovation happens naturally in response to strong need, linking Ireland's dire poverty to its subsequent reputation for innovation.

In The Future Eaters, however, Tim Flannery finds the delta of that proposition.

"When the first reports of the Tasmanian Aborigines reached Europe they created intense interest. Europeans thought that their simple tool kit and lifestyle meant that they were a very primitive people. For a very long time after, it was widely believed that these apparently truly primitive people had survived in their remote corner of the world because they had not had to compete with more advanced races.

"The French savants of the Baudin Expedition, who observed the Tasmanians in 1802, were amazed that even though the Tasmanians lived in an often bitterly cold climate, they lacked clothing. Extraordinarily, they also lacked the ability to make fire. Mannalargenna, one of the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines to live a traditional life, told of what would happen if a group's fire was extinguished. He said that people had no alternative but to eat raw meat while they walked in search of another tribe. Significantly, one of the universal laws among the Tasmanians was that fire must be given whenever requested, even if the asker was a traditional enemy who would be fought after the gift had been given.

"The French were also struck by the fact that the Tasmanians did not eat fish, even though they were abundant in Tasmania's coastal waters. Francois Peron records that when members of the Baudin Expedition offered some fish which they had caught, the Tasmanians expressed amazement and horror. This was not an isolated instance, for earlier, in 1777, members of Cook's third expedition recorded that Tasmanians reacted with horror or ran away when fish were offered to them.

"There are some other quite extraordinary features of Tasmanian culture. The Tasmanians, for example, had no hafted implements (such as axes), no implements made of bone, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no dingos and no microlithic stone tools. Indeed, their entire tool kit seems to have consisted of about two dozen kinds of objects."

"It is easy to see how the limited material culture of the Tasmanians could seduce the savants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into classifying the Tasmanians as the world's most primitive people. Not surprisingly, the anatomists of the day had an almost insatiable demand for corpses. Through dissection, they hoped to find additional evidence supporting the idea that the Tasmanians were primitive; maybe even a kind of living, missing link. Needless to say, these anatomical studies yielded no such evidence."

"Until very recently, many people found no reason to doubt the conclusions of nineteenth century science concerning the Tasmanians. But detailed archeological research, much undertaken only in the last few decades, has now shown conclusively that there was nothing primitive about the Tasmanians at all. They were, instead, a highly specialized offshoot of the Australian Aborigines, whose culture evolved under the extraordinary constraints that 10,000 years of solitude would place on any small band of humans.

"The most striking evidence concerning the evolution of the culture of the Tasmanians has come from the study of campsites occupied over the last 7,000 years. Deposits that date to 7,000 years ago or more are full of bone tools, including awls, reamers and needles. There seems to be little doubt that these implements were used for sewing, probably to make skin cloaks similar to those used by the Aborigines of southern Australia right up until the nineteenth century.

"The variety of bone tools found in Tasmanian middens dwindles with time, until eventually, about 3,500 years ago, the last of them disappear from the archaeological record. This suggests that stitched clothing was lost from the material culture of the Tasmanians at about this time.

"Interestingly, the older archaeological sites show that fish--although despised as a food in historic times--once formed an important part of the Tasmanians' diet. Evidence from some sites suggests that fish made up about 10 percent of their diet in the past. . . . Then suddenly, about 3,500 years ago, the remains of fish cease to appear in refuse dumps."

"The most plausible explanation [for the simplification of the material culture of the Tasmanians] seems to lie in the unique isolation and small population size of the Tasmanians. The theory goes something like this. A small group of people are less likely to come up with technological innovations than a larger group. If the group is completely isolated, then new ideas cannot reach it. Because of this, innovation in material culture is slowed. Because the population is small, activities and knowledge may be lost simple through the early death of skilled people before they can pass their skills to the next generation.

"Losses such as that of clothing and the ability to make fire may have resulted from rare, early deaths occurring over a long period of time. The 5,000 Tasmanians lived scattered in small groups. It may be that only one or two people in any one group had all the skills necessary to make bone needles and prepare skins. Over 12,000 years there is a high chance that the few such specialists in any one area would, at some stage, die before they could pass their skills on. Repeated chance events like this might have led to the loss of many skills that require specialized knowledge.

"If the population is small enough, there may be strong evolutionary pressure to dispense with high-risk activities. This is because risks that are acceptable for larger populations can threaten the very survival of smaller ones. The loss of fish from the Tasmanian diet may be an example of a high-risk activity that is strongly selected against and thus lost, in small populations."

"Eating fish can be a risky business, because occasionally a dinoflagellate bloom known as a 'red tide' can lead to mass poisonings. The simultaneous death of hundreds of people in a large human population is a great personal tragedy, but it poses no threat to the survival of that society because the statistical chance of losing all members of one age group or sex is tiny. Such a poisoning in a small population, however, can be a disaster for the entire group. This is because, through chance, it may kill a significant proportion of the women of child-bearing age, or all of the older and more knowledgeable individuals. In order to avoid such catastrophic events, extreme conservatism may be selected for in small societies. This is because in evolutionary terms it may be better to forego the benefit gained from eating such 'dangerous' food as fish, rather than risk an extremely rare but catastrophic poisoning event."

Innovation has a high risk of failure, failure is only acceptable when there is a comfortable distance between that failure and death by starvation. In other words, comfort and wealth are (up to a point) necessary to enable innovation. If I am confident in being able to eat tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, and to deal with most minor medical issues that might arise, I will be prepared to try new foods, new crops, new recipes and to accept their failures as a learning.

If I live on the edge of survival, I will be MUCH less likely to try new things.

That will be compounded in a culture where personal, individual survival is the highest good. In those cultures where personal sacrifice may be occasionally necessary to ensure the survival of the community (and in some cases like Inuit and Australian Aboriginals or Tikopians where recognition of the end of your value to the community leads to your own death) more experimentation may be possible.

As a slave-owning culture we have been isolated from those kinds of necessities and very possibly lost our ability to recover them in time, but the payoff has been the freedom to innovate.

That our innovations are now choking us speaks volumes for the care we have taken to weed out those innovations that promote selection for failure.

BTW, I'm not being rhetorical about the slave-owning, I keep 60 horses under the bonnet of my car, dishwashing and clothes-washing slaves in my kitchen and laundry, carpentry slaves in my basement, food preservation slaves as well. Not to mention all the food growing, processing and haulage slaves that bring me goodies from round the world.

And what do I do with all this wealth and comfort? Build better iPods so I can listen to music or demand to watch movies on my mobile.

THIS is a goldmine

Just read the whole thing Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I get so fed up with people trying desperately to demean and undemrine the greatest invention in human communication. All the bogus crap about how it undermines "real" relationships, make us all sad loners with no social skills yadda yadda.

And instead it may be creating the most literate, most communicative, most effective generation yet. No wonder it scares the bejesus out of those who have lived by controlling the message and its distribution.

Sod 'em all.

And Jon turns up with the rest of the motivation for us old farts.

A real estate story switches

Yesterday the NZ Herald was running a story about how house sellers had the upper hand because there were so few houses for sale. Today the story is a bit different. Spring fails to bring listing leap

Real estate agents are complaining about a shortage of listings, saying the warmer weather usually makes people think of shifting. But not this year.

Realestate.co.nz, jointly owned by the Real Estate Institute with a group of large agencies, complained about the lack of the anticipated spring pickup in a monthly update issued yesterday.

In July, 10,733 houses were put on the market but last month there were only 10,644 new listings.

This was below the expected level anticipated as a result of the spring seasonal upturn.

The reason so few people are selling is simple, they can't clear their mortgage at the current market price for their house.

Right now, thousands of kiwis are waking up every morning knowing that they are renting from the bank and that the day they sell their house they will be destitute, they will have no home and the bank will have taken all the selling price, then probably demanded more. They have finally reached the moment when they have accepted the consequences of their previous dumb decisions about how much debt they could carry.

Right now they need a miracle and its not coming.

And here's another data point.

The agents are blaming the lack of new listings partly on flat prices. National house prices have fallen 7 per cent since the market peaked in October 2007 when the asking price was $403,107, the agents said.

The prices are flat because there is no longer the kind of overheated demand for houses as "investment vehicles". Perhaps we are drifting towards a point where a house is a place to live and bring up your family. Once we take the wide boys out of the system, and especially as people lose the ability to go racing all over the landscape looking for the next bit of margin or the next job that has a better car in the "remuneration package", the need and desire to be a nomad is fading.

And here's the last bit of delusion.

Alistair Helm, chief executive of realestate.co.nz, predicted the listing drought could eventually push up prices.

Using what? Those smart enough to be able to get a loan from the bank to buy houses at even slightly inflated prices are smart enough to know that more debt is the problem not the solution. And those who might be stupid enough to take that risk wont get a loan from the bank any more to indulge their delusions.

Almost nobody has any pricing power any more, company tax takes around the world are dropping like rocks, the UK is down nearly 50% and the real kicker is the UK VAT take which is down about 37%.

Deflation is when the amount of money in the system is too little for the available products and services. Since money can be anything we agree on, from gold to conch shells to big round rocks on the seashore, we agreed that debt was money and for the last decade especially we created vast amounts of this apparent money and used it buy things.

Then we stopped agreeing that debt was money.

If all you can give me for my house is debt, I no longer accept it, and anyway your friendly local bank wont create any more for you. So the total amount of "viable" debt" - ie, has some chance of being repaid before the heat death of the universe, has collapsed. And since debt was the vast majority of the "money" we used, the perceived value of the assets denominated in debt has also collapsed.

When I can't afford to sell my house, its monetary value is zero. Simple really.

Cool health issues mapping mashup

I came across this thanks to Tim O'Reilly's tweet on it. EpiSPIDER Map Exhibit

It spiders a whole bunch of sources, including online jnews for health-related stories and tries to locate them on the map. You can filter by disease type, country, province or state, Human development index, population, GDP and report age.

Now it also picks up some false positives like an NZ report on global swine flu numbers and locates them in NZ, but it also lets me know within an hour of the report that NSW has reported its first swine flu death.

List under cool tools

The Development Karaoke

Its always hard to explain what I do to someone who doesn't know the business; my wife has taken to saying, "he does internet stuff" and leaving it at that, I don't blame her.

But I had a discussion yesterday with a guy who is ICT for development, we'll call him V (not his real initial) who was having trouble figuring out why a project he is working on isn't working. He's done this stuff before, but he's working with a new group and can't make any headway.

V (or, as I call him, Vee) is from the country in question, but has been away a long time and has become pretty Americanised (in a good way - energetic, can-do, that stuff) and the people he is working with are from a different place and tribal group and a waaay different experience. So he calls me for some ideas. The chat we had is below, its anonymised and I've tidied up the Skype structure a bit, reconnected sentences and paragraphs that got split up by the chat format etc, but all the words are there.

This is what I do