I have to drive out of Washington, DC, this morning. I’m not driving a limousine. I’m not on my way to impose oppressive loan repayment terms on impoverished African nations. I’m not stopping at a Starbucks, although I might get a bagel at the local Whatsabagel. But some people in black bandanas apparently want to stop me. They don’t appear at all interested in telling me why they want to make it difficult for me to get out of town, for other people to get to work. It apparently alternately has something to do with this week’sWorld Bank meeting, Starbucks, the IMF, the upcoming war on Iraq, McDonald’s, oil companies, the Gap, Dick Cheney, capitalism, neoliberals (whatever that means), violence against women, George W. Bush, and bad art.
Now, let’s be straight — if I sat down and had a discussion with some of the more intelligent members of the so-called “anti-globalization movement,” I’m fairly certain I’d find myself in agreement, at least in principle, with more of their views than the average American. I’m not an anarcho-syndicalist, but I’m closer to their end of the spectrum than to, say, a Fox News commentator. And I know some of this gang. One of the leaders of Mobilization for Global Justice, the DC activist group that organized much of this weeks activities, used to hang out at my house (my ex-housemate and he are friends). I even spent New Year’s 1998 at a party at his apartment. He’s really bright and not a bad guy. But his “movement” is a pile of crap.
The ideology has its merits; the activist practices, though, are muddled, ineffective, and do more to generate misinformation and misguided anger than to educate and focus the issue. Few DC residents understand what they’re protesting. No one has explained to the public why they are marching on the World Bank, but threatening to ransack Gap stores as well. Too many targets of protest are rolled into one. The ideas are never communicated effectively; instead we see predominantly young and white (a point that should not be quickly dismissed) protestors with puppets, effigies, and vague posterboard messages. Their manipulation and use of the media is pathetic (Newscasters on the local Fox station are There are no charismatic leaders to provide a voice to the ideology and communicate it to the less politicized masses. There is none of the dignity or seriousness of the civil rights movement or even the anti-Vietnam protests of decades past. Instead, this batch of wannabes only succeed in looking like a bunch of privileged college students toying with activism.
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Ray Ozzie on the idea of pingback:
“I don’t have a ‘discuss’ link on this blog for a reason: I think that it’s a Good Thing that this blog medium is different than a traditional electronic discussion medium – relying on human mechanisms to ’spread the word’ about interesting referrals, rather than technical mechanisms.”
A purely anecdotal observation: it seems to me that the bloggers who are so enamored of weblogging’s ability to speak without the “hindrance” of actual response or discussion are those already in positions of prestige and arguably power, whether in journalism (Andrew Sullivan) or technology (Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer).
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A couple of weeks back I wrote:
“Because weblogs are decentralized…, without an effective means to discover the other components to the conversation…, the the original blogger writes in isolation and only includes other voices as he/she sees fit. Sound like any traditional media you know?” (read the whole post)
It looks like some other people have been thinking about how to solve the problem. [link via Scripting News]
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SmartMobs.com is the companion site for Howard Rheingold’s upcoming book, Smart Mobs.
What’s a Smart Mob? Imagine hundreds of Japanese teenage girls dispersed throughout Tokyo, all in near-instant contact with each other via wireless technology. When one of them spots their favorite teen idol (say, me, for example) browsing the latest anime at a newstand, she can message the others, allowing them to triangulate in on my position. Within minutes I’m surrounded by hundreds of my screaming teenage fans.
Okay, so that example got a little twisted, but you get the picture. That’s a smart mob — an emergent cooperative phenomena brought about by near-instant communication in the hands of dispersed, unrelated individuals. I’m eagerly awaiting Rheingold’s book.
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Wired has a good profile of Lessig that summarizes the Eldred v. Ashcroft case well.
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Today someone found their way to this blog by searching for “reasons why not to send email to a guy when it was meant for a girl.”
Man, there’s gotta be a story behind that.
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You know those Nigerian email scams floating around? Where you can “earn” millions of dollars by flying to Holland to retrieve the hidden money of the wife of the former Nigerian president? This guy is scamming the scammers. Oh, he sent them the requested photocopy of his passport. Of course, his passport says he’s Capt. James Tiberius Kirk.
This scam saga has been going on for over two weeks now, and is coming to a head…the scammer is supposed to meet their mark in Dam Square in Amsterdam. They are to dress all in yellow and hop on one foot to be recognized.
Priceless.
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“The whole purpose of the clause in the Constitution that says that Congress’s power is to “promote the Progress of Science” is to induce a spread of new learning. If the government is going to be handing out monopolies to authors and inventors, and expending significant state resources to enforce their monopolies, then a bit of learning, 7 or 14 years later, is not a terrible price to pay.”, Lawrence Lessig.
By training, I’m a writer. There was actually a point where I made a living writing. A lousy living, but I paid rent. So, trust me, I believe in copyright. But there’s just no reason that copyright — which in most media is acquired by a corporation and not even owned by the original creator — should last for over a century. And there’s lots of good reasons it shouldn’t.
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Clearly I’m in major gadget buying mode. Earlier this week the new DVD player arrived in the mail. Yesterday evening I came home from work to receive my new Dell Inspiron 8200.
I’m scared of it.
I mean, damn, this is a big, fancy, powerful machine. 1.8 Ghz?!? Good gravy. I’m not sure what to do with that. And it’s friggin’ big — it’s got a 15″ display at 1400 x 1050 resolution, for crying out loud. I’ve had smaller CRT monitors. There so much screen real estate I could rent some of it to a small third world nation.
It’s sitting here on my desk next to the last laptop I bought, a Gateway2000 Solo purchased refurbished back in 1996. (Of course, since 1997 or so, I’ve always had an IBM Thinkpad provided by work.) It makes the old Gateway look like one of those toy computers you buy for your four-year old niece. Tell the truth, some of those toy computers probably have more power than the ol’ Gateway (90 Mhz Pentium, 16 MB RAM). Hell, the video card in this new Dell has four times the RAM of the entire Gateway.
And then there’s Windows XP — all blue and bubbly and 3-D. And it wants to be my friend. Really badly.
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