I'm impressed, though, that you would write so many words to try to convince people they're being led down the milk path by a couple of money hungry elitists. That foray into distortive optimization was quite something, even if it didn't go anywhere. The "bathrobe" thing was jarring in its incompleteness, though. Either bring in the fritos and ding-dongs, or leave it out completely.

But seriously, my compliments. You said exactly what NRO would say, but far more creatively.

NRO?

I thought it was a bit too derivitive of Nicholas Carr although I did add the innovation of applying the analysis to politics rather than (nominally) apolitical information aggregation projects (e.g., Google or Wikipedia).

Sorry you got lost at a few points. It is brisk, dense, and presumptive of the reader's background. There are unfamiliar and almost jargony usages there (such as the intransitive "incite") that can make it hard to track.

Perhaps to clarify: the connection between distortive optimization in commerce to the open left in politics relies on recognize that in both commerce and politics we have manifest, trade-based (in the broad but still tangible sense), networks and "pipelines" of production. Major party platforms, for example, are the end product of a series of applications of labor to materials: there are meetings, email exchanges, polls, data mining, etc. Similarly, political activities like fundraising campaigns or letter-writing campaigns. Those things are businesses -- it's ordinary production -- it's a bunch of nodes with inputs and outputs and a theoretical MBA at each node managing the assets of that node to match inputs and outputs. You get your toothpaste through the same kind of process. And while talking about process in that way is very abstract, it also happens to be exactly the way that IT talks about what it does -- IT goes in and optimizes nodes in that abstract graph. So, when IT has a huge impact in the political graph, it is just vanity that leads people to think "ah, we are getting closer to political Truth" -- the only objective is the political business models are changing, in this case to gain a greater emphasis on the recent theory of long-tail marketing.

Don't worry, you'll get and embrace it eventually. It's a point of view that does what you are, I think, aspiring to do -- only much more efficiently.

-t

You didn't work Soros into this blather. Though maybe that was coded into your "political Truth".

Point stands. Your message is that this is all money hungry elites suckering bathrobe clad minions into pounding out ideologies crafted from above. Despite your protestations, nothing else you said adds to that conclusion, however clever it might be.

and even the hobbiest kids who write free software are often spotted cutting their teeth by making amateur implementations of the latest breakthroughs.

Where else would they cut their teeth? You can't just pick up a violin and produce good music that no one has ever played before. You have to start with something just to learn.

Edit: Oh, and the people at Open Left actually have a fairly involved post addressing your concerns about node efficienices and distortion of the network...

and even the hobbiest kids who write free software are often spotted cutting their teeth by making amateur implementations of the latest breakthroughs.

Where else would they cut their teeth? You can't just pick up a violin and produce good music that no one has ever played before. You have to start with something just to learn.

Where else would they cut their teeth? Hacking technologies in design spaces aimed at empowering individuals rather than gathering long-tail populations. They could be writing programs for their local networks, thinking of the audience as being those people who physically surround them rather than as being some remote, globally disbursed demographic. The emphasis could be much more on programs that people pass along saying "Hey, we use this over here, you might want to try it over there" and much less on programs that people announce saying "Hey, everybody c'mon over here to http://mydomain.com".

The big kids at one of the nearest advanced CS research centers around here is hacking up local networks for various innovative forms of environmental monitoring (e.g., what if we put CO and other chemical monitors on the cell phone's of a bunch of people?) [Intel research center in Berkeley]. Advance that line of thinking a few years and you have the potential for a very vibrant, very regionally relevant kind of IT -- maybe City Council gets that data, maybe local businesses do, etc. Kids, then, will be better off practicing by trying to improve *that* build-out, not trying to prove that they, too, are qualified to implement MySpace or Wikipedia.

-t

I hope that your political intentions are beyond
simply having a particular person in office and
much more in the direction of progressive change
in our economic, legal, and societal arrangements.

So, you enjoyed a success in getting your candidate
elected but the proof is in the pudding of what he
does, right?

I think the problems most progressives fret about
are things that require deep changes in the degrees
of freedom that elected politicians enjoy, as well
as deep changes in our economic arrangements.
Progressive goals will be frustrated as long as those
points aren't addressed and those points can't be
addressed simply by electing candidate A over candidate
B or by weakly biasing the selection of bills put before
congress, etc.

-t

The issue, in my mind, is whether the internet is a viable and effective tool for political change. The answer seems to be, obviously, "yes". BTW, Kirsten is a she.

Kirsten is a she.

She is also a "he" depending on linguistic context. One of the things I liked about some part of the Star Trek franchise was when they started having subordinates address superior female-sex officers as "sir". You know, as if pronouns were just syntactically gendered....

The issue, in my mind, is whether the internet is a viable and effective tool for political change.

All is change. It would be surprising if the internet were an exception.

-t

I know Matt, and I know Chris. I don't know Mike Lux except for the occasionally bit of e-mail. Matt went to Harvard, he's not some hoi polloi, but both Chris and Matt are poor and driven. Neither of them have been corrupted yet, neither of them has been inside enough, long enough, to have become bubblized. Both of them are sincere - they mean what they say. How things will work out remains to be seen, but at this point in thier lives they are, in my opinion, the real deal.

Cynicism can be useful, but cynicism and those who sell it are also deadly to the health of societies and to the people who want to make societies better. Too much cynicism leads to not trying to fix things, and thus is a self-fulfilling policy if writ large. Sometimes ya gotta believe, and in my opinion, you could do a hell of a lot worse than to believe in Matt and Chris.

PrairieStateBlue

I'm glad the topic is important to him as I did get sucked into his thoughts and they seemed to make sense so for him not to be taking it seriously would have been disheartening to me after the effort I put in to buying into them. I help run a local IT/Internet node. But then in his reply I see that as an amateur it is all right to be engaged in distorting nodism at the local level where there are real live bodies close enough at hand to temper the distortions.

But then in his reply I see that as an amateur it is all right to be engaged in distorting nodism at the local level where there are real live bodies close enough at hand to temper the distortions.

There's nothing wrong with technological progress -- we want as much as we can get, in some sense. But: to the extent the engineers behind that process are thinking holistically, they do a better job. Being physically near and face-to-face engaged with trading partners and adjacent markets is a good way to maintain that holistic view (e.g., would you put the small shop next door out of business just because you can or just because you don't feel like taking steps to avoid doing so? It really depends, doesn't it, on the structure of your local community.)

The Walmart and Amazon trap has a proximate cause: capital markets, especially venture capital.

Venture capital funds, by their structure (a small number of partners managing a large pot of high-risk money), can only make investments at a quite course grain -- so the expected payout has to be very high and fast. These investors are constantly chasing the largest apparent opportunities to create the most massive distortions because its the only way they can see to make money on the deals. It's like a game to see who can light the biggest fire in the woods. They are biased to hear only short-term upsides of proposed build-outs (e.g., look at the concentration of effort consumer-oriented biotech) because that's where the investment horizon ends.

The only smaller sources of investment capital are friends and family and small business loans. That's a huge gap in the scale of funds available and in the openness of the markets (VC capital being, in spite of the rumors, a very open and competitive market --- small business capital being lots of little, narrow, highly constrained markets). That "in between space" gets neglected, a lot.

-t