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.

The real Wikileaks secrets

Most of what we have seen from the Wikileaks cables is mere confirmation of what we suspected all along, mostly that our politicians and other leaders routinely lie to us about what they are doing and, especially, why they are doing it.

In some cases that leads to dead people as have illegal or unwinnable wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan and it is seriously rich to have people with buckets of blood on their hands lecturing Wikileaks about the possibility that people may be compromised.

There is a difference between those who cause harm inadvertently while trying to out a criminal and those who commit the crimes in the first place. Ask any cop who has accidentally killed someone who walked into the line of fire at the wrong moment, for example.

But the real secret that is causing so much panic is not the diplomatic chitchat and scandal, schadenfreude-inducing though that may be; what is causing all the sturm und drang is the meta message that is coming down the line and will get much liuder and much clearer as the commercial and banking data comes out.

That message is this, the game is rigged. Like this, for instance

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – A WikiLeaks cable indicates that BHP Billiton tried to sabotage a proposed investment by China's Chinalco in rival Rio Tinto, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The cables sent from Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's chief of staff to US officials describe how BHP "played its cards with consummate skill" in lobbying the government to delay a decision on a deal between Rio Tinto and Chinalco,” the ABC report said.

In February 2009, Chinalco agreed to invest $19,5-billion in Rio Tinto and its operations to obtain an 18% stake in the world's third-biggest mining company, which at the time was battling to shift debt.

But Rio broke off the deal in June, opting instead for a big rights issue and a since-scrapped iron-ore joint venture in Australia with BHP.

The Chinalco agreement had followed an earlier failed hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton for Rio Tinto.    

All of the players involved knew what was going on, not one of them lacks the resources to know what the others are actually doing behind the scenes, the only people who must not find out that the pollies and the captains of industry are rigging the game is us.

As long as we can be convinced that we have to play the capitalist (or communist or theocratic) game and that there are rules which, if followed, can lead to "success" we will keep doing our best and blaming ourselves for any failures.

But once we see clearly that the whole game is rigged by those who have been playing longest, we will first withdraw our participation and, when they try to enforce play, out will come the torches and pitchforks.

THAT is what is getting so many panties in a bunch in the capitals of the world.

The damage done by Wikileaks

I'm sure that it comes as absolutely no surprise to any diplomat nor their employing government, that their counterparts from other nations routinely lie to them about pretty much everything. Nor should it come as a shock that some of their counterparts think of them as idiots or worse.

A diplomat is someone who lies professionally for his country and any diplomat not fully aware of that is a liability and should be fired forthwith.

So it is unlikely that the Wikileaks data dump provides anything more than confirmation of normal suspicions and, being diplomats, these people will have no trouble whatever continuing both to deal with, and lie to, each other with unruffled feathers for many years to come, their personal flutterings soothed by regular application of canapes and booze.

On the other hand, what the leaks can very much damage is the credibility and safety of governments at the hands of their employers, viz, us.

While most of us have a default position that our masters, elected and otherwise, treat us and our aspirations and needs with dismissal when it is not outright contempt, it is another thing altogether to discover how regularly and egregiously they betray our interests in the pursuit of their rarefied and esoteric goals in the Great Game.

Wikileaks has the mission of fleshing out and adding fine detail to those betrayals and in doing so they undermine the pretenses and obfuscations and credibility, the authority of nation states in relation to their own people.

THAT is why the bastards are screaming in moral panic; that is why they are plotting the destruction of the torchlight shone straight into their corrupted hearts.

That is why we all have a duty to support Wikileaks, because it has the potential, at last, and in fact, to keep the bastards honest.

Update:  What is the betting that, if sweden is able to have Julian Assange extradited, the rape case will be dropped but he will be held because there is an application from the US for his extradition to their jurisdiction? I'm going with about 80%.

Plus, after spending so many uyears in a very happy association with sweden and its reputation for openness, I'm bloody horrified by their role in this.

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.

Some days I despair of the media

Read this and tell me if I'm nuts. House prices too high, warns expert

Auckland's house price surge has prompted a warning that over-valuations are creating a bubble that will burst and cause a painful property recession.

Barfoot and Thompson's November figures, out yesterday, showed a 23-month price high in the city of $550,217 although the number of sales was fairly low.

Institute of Economic Research principal economist Shamubeel Eaqub said the trend could have far-reaching and damaging effects.

"House prices are showing renewed over-valuation," he said. "This will intensify as interest rates rise. A correction in the housing market is necessary to reduce the economy's vulnerability to house price movements. The sooner there is a change, the less the likelihood of a larger and more painful recession further down the track."

Prices were now near the previous peak, suggesting valuations were also becoming very stretched.

"While prices are rising, sales volumes are slowing after adjusting for seasonal patterns," he said.

So, while prices have reached their all time high again, the number of houses being sold is falling. Lets take a limit case; 3 houses only are sold in the city during December. All three sell for exactly a million bucks. Will we see a headline saying that the average house price in Auckland has now reached a million? And will there be further warnings about an unsustainable bubble?

A bubble happens when two things align, too much money in circulation and a mania for a single type of object (tulips, houses, gold - anything in relatively, but not absolutely, limited supply).

We had a housing bubble and, as it deflates, there will be periods when the prices rise again for a variety of highly local reasons - including someone sells their Brisbane house at last and moves back to NZ where they buy a bit over the odds just to get the family settled etc.

But the fact is that banks are not lending if they can avoid it, people are feeling unsafe as their jobs look increasingly shaky and aren't going to take on new debt, in fact they are trying to unload their overpriced assets when they can.

I have a mate who was looking for an apartment in the city. The news reported a few weeks ago that real estate prices were rising again and 2 days later about 400 properties hit the market.

Tell you anything?

Apparently not our ever-boosting media who seem to see their job as "keeping our chins up" in tough times, mostly so we don't look down and, like Wile E. Coyote, realise that there is a gaping hole under our feet.

Bunnies.

NSS

Well I'll be danged, media suckered again. Sheriff says balloon boy a hoax

FORT COLLINS, Colorado - A Colorado sheriff said it was a hoax when parents reported that their 6-year-old son was in a flying saucer-like helium balloon hurtling away from their home.

Sheriff Jim Alderden said Richard and Mayumi Heene "put on a very good show for us, and we bought it."

"We believe that we have evidence at this point to indicate that it was a publicity stunt done with the hopes of marketing themselves or better marketing themselves for a reality television show at some point in the future," Alderden said.

When this hit the screens I wandered over to Google and looked up the the average weight of a six year old kid and the lifting capacity of Helium, did a few basic calculations with a spreadsheet and came up with a spherical balloon about 12 feet in diameter.

I didn't bother trying to figure out how big a balloon it would take to rise to 7,000 feet in that short time, nor the effect of its evident partial deflation, what we were seeing was just too small to do the job.

Besides which, any child would have to have been inside and breathing helium for the whole time which would have killed him.

But nobody suggested any of these things, the media, the military, the cops and uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all chased yapping after it as if it was real. We happily sit in front of the idiot box and watch session after session of MythBusters and the net result is that the level of thinking achieved by the media is still subterranean.

Privatisation rock meets hard place

Our right wing government (by NZ standards to be sure) espouses a philosophy that seeks to privatise profits and socialise losses and one area that has always caused gritted teeth in the National party is state media.

Along with cutting taxes (now firmly off the menu till some actual recovery occurs) getting the state out of the communications business has long been on their agenda, and the broadcasting charter has stood in the way of that. So legislation is afoot to finally water that charter into oblivion.
Tune-up for TVNZ - Business - NZ Herald News

National insists privatisation is completely off the agenda as it presses ahead with the Television New Zealand Amendment Bill removing the last ghosts of the public charter.

Ah, the denial, stage two of the Accusation/Denial/Proof troika.

It is the latest in a long list of Governments to try to change, fix, tweak or punish the state-owned TV company.

Financial returns announced this week - a $2.1 million profit, down from $19.4 million the previous year - come as the network faces more tough times and pressure to boost dividends in the middle of an advertising slump and media revolution.

The problem is that there's going to be nobody to buy it and no benefit in doing so. All the corporate media people are busy trying to save their own butts as advertising dollars move online and newspapers, magazines and electronic media try to run with two wheels in the ditch.

Right now there's a free information market, a really free market, with a trivial hurdle to entry (can you go into your local library and get a Blogger account?) and no possible way to capture any slice of the market. Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky have been charting the decline and fall of big media for a decade now and most of their predictions are coming true, leaving old media in a real bind.

Right wing politicians love the idea that their corporate buddies will do all the propaganda and they can do a nice impression of "its not US, its them", but when corporate media, especially TV and radio are reaching only the poorest members of society, while the rest are plotting the revolution online.

Of course they could solve the problem by increasing the number of poor people. Looks like that is being solved as we speak.

On the one hand

This is a brilliant example of the power of Internet tools, creativity and our willingness to act swiftly and decisively when we are committed to something. Vegemite

Who would have thought that tampering (which is how the crowd saw it) with a "low involvement' product such as a salty yeast extract spread could provoke such outrage. Clearly not Kraft, or not initially anyway. The volume of blogs, the venting of spleens and the sheer energy poured into the protest as it spilled out to every corner of the internet should confirm one thing: social media has the power to make or break a brand or product like no other medium.

By yesterday morning a Hitler parody video clip had been viewed 46,000 times, making it the No. 1 comedy clip on YouTube this week, according to analysis by the online risk and reputation consultants SR7, which also logged more than 60 Facebook groups that had been formed expressly for the purpose of getting Kraft to dump the name. One such group, "Australia says no to iSnack 2.0" had more than 2500 members by yesterday morning.

The SR7 director James Griffin goes as far as to label this a "watershed" in marketing. "Regardless of whether or not this is a marketing ploy by Kraft, this is an example of social media determining the outcome of a marketing campaign."

Within five days of announcing a new name, Kraft had done a corporate about-face the likes of which we have not seen in a while...

Kraft is now faced with a very pumped up and aggravated bunch of Aussies who have already brought it to heel and will be watching the company's next move. Any hints that the entire exercise was a conspiracy could sink the new product and damage the Vegemite brand itself.

On the other hand, we are surrounded by pollution, dangerous ignorance, corruption, financial criminality, abuse, exploitation, slavery, intergenerational theft and a panoply of human-created catastrophes and failures that need exactly this level of attention and our response is what?

Re-naming the friggin vegemite.

Some days I despair.

Rich media - poor media, advertising crosses the line

Way back in 1995 when I first encountered the net my immediate reaction was "goodbye traditional media" - given that I was working in radio at the time, it meant I had to make some adjustments to my "career path".

Still, its taken 15 years to cross the line, but it looks like we are there. Ad Spending: Internet Tops TV in UK

In the United Kingdom, however, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting that online advertising has overtaken television. According to Reuters, advertising spend on the Internet grew 4.6% to a total of 23.5% of the total market.

On the flip side, television advertising spend plummeted 17% and dropped to second place, accounting for 21.9% of the total. That means, for the first time ever, the web is the leading medium for advertising in the UK.

Haven't seen the comparison yet for NZ, but in the current economy, TV here is taking a real hiding - TVNZ profits plunge 90pc to $2.1m

IAB chief executive, Guy Phillipson says, “This is a significant milestone…This is the first major market where online has overtaken television to become the biggest single medium.” The IAB report, conducted twice a year, found that online ad spend now accounts for 1.75 billion pounds, which is roughly $2.7 billion. Reuters reports that the increase in online ad spend is a result of economic conditions that are forcing advertisers to move to the web

That last bit is perhap the most interesting part of all. The days of scattershot advertising where is someone is in the room they are deemed to have "received" the message, are over. Now we can track exactly who has clicked on the link attached to the ad and whether they became a client and the role of the marketing people has been made orders of magnitude harder.

But there's a meta here, Internet access and regular use is for those with discretionary income, the number of poor people with Internet access is still way behind; in NZ we have 100,000 families with school aged kids who don't have home access and that doesn't count the poor elderly, the poor disabled and the poor who don't have school-aged kids.

But they all have TV because once you have the device, the content is essentially free. But when advertisers realise that TV is mostly reaching those people who don't have any money, what exactly do we think they are going to do?

Exactly. Next question, have we reached the moment when the power laws governing media viability really kick in? Stay logged in, because staying tuned may not be available much longer.