Conspiracy Theory

Where's the Birth Certificate?
Originally uploaded by paparatti

I grabbed the picture from Flickr and then clicked "blog it" because it's the easiest way to get the attribution right. The funny thing is that people coming to the blog will see just the photo with the title: "Where's the Birth Certificate?"

I've never seriously doubted that Barack Obama was born in the USA. I'm not sure why he seems so foreign to so many Americans, but it's precisely that sort of belief I've been ruminating about for the last week or so.

Election seasons here in the USA are long and with elections in November the political ads are everywhere. The way that some Americans conceive of the world, well they believe in conspiracy theories! There's quite a bit of distance between what I think and some of these theories, but I don't feel smug about that. When I try to put a narrative together about what's really going on, I fall into my own versions of conspiracy theories.

Ruminating along these lines I remembered a point that Phil Jones made in his writing about Netocracy that conspiracy theory might "play the role for NetoCracy that religion did under feudalism?"

I went searching for "netocracy" and saw a bunch of links of which quite a few turned out to be me pointing to Phil Jones. I blushed as there seemed something sycophanitc about them. Sycophancy is surely relevant to the whole idea of NetoCracy. The Wikipedia article on syncophancy helpfully provides 15 alternative phrases: toady, lickspittle, bootlicker, etc., none of the descriptions I'd like to think of myself in re Mr. Jones, whom I hold in high esteem.

It is odd that not many others than Jones say much about Netocracy. I suspect that one reason for that has to do with the question Phil asks about conspiracy theories playing an epistemological role. I think that's a question that comes to mind even if nobody hears Jones explicitly ask it. Conspiracy theories are discredited, something only "they" believe in, so that makes a high hurdle to talking in terms of netocracy. Anyhow, Jones posted a link to a paper on Netocracy he delivered at the Wittgenstein Symposium which is a short primer on the construct.

Jones writes:

Central to their [Bard and Söderqvist] thinking is that the ruling class will arise through their aptitude for managing, trading and filtering information streams, while the underclass have little control over the streams to which they are connected, and are effectively bamboozled into subservience.

I added the link to Amazon's page for Bard and Söderqvist book. Oh, in this election cycle I'm feeling bamboozled and think too many of my fellow Americans are too.

My family name is Powers, which is a common name in the USA. I was rather angry about the recent news that a shadowy privately held organization was given a contract by Pennsylvania to collect information on citizen groups and their information forwarded to corporations, corporation lobbyists and law enforcement officials. The person who made the contract is named James F. Powers the head of Pennsylvania Homeland Security. There's no relation so far as I know, but his family name probably did preclude my screaming for his head on a platter.

The cost of this contract makes it small potatoes really, but the contract raises all sorts of issues, so I'm happy there's be some sustained attention to it. Powers made himself very scarce after the controversy erupted but he testified before a panel of the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee looking into the matter yesterday.

The link to the story online doesn't include a picture of Powers, but the print edition did. He looks like he could be related to me ;-) One reason the whole affair made me so angry is that the exploitation of natural gas at depths of a mile or more is a very important issue facing Pennsylvanians now. ITRR the organization doing these reports is a shadowy group. The Governor released their product publicly. Working from those reporters were able to fill redacted parts of documents ITRR had released on their Web site. ITRR said that they redacted portions "to protect client privacy." Extrapolating from that Massey Energy and Koch Industries are probably clients of ITRR.

After testifying before the Senate panel Powers talked to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters and told them:

"As a private citizen, I'm actually against drilling, but my responsibility as a public official is to support the rights of people legitimately doing business. I have to protect them," he said. "As long as they're legally conducting business with permits to drill, my responsibility is to protect them."

There are 872 wells in reporting data given to the state so far. I don't imagine there are too many Pennsylvanians who think they can to anything to stop further drilling. But there are plenty who wish that the drilling goes on nowhere near them. So when Powers says he "against drilling" he probably means "not in my backyard" which I totally relate to. Anyhow the political decisions are much more to do with "how" and under what restrictions drilling proceeds than it is a pro and con issue. Matters of policy entail quite a lot of nuance and detail and that's why citizen meetings are so necessary.

For example as the drilling goes down a mile or so vertically to the ground surface the wells are then exploited by fracturing horizontal seams. So there's an issue depending on your point of view of "fair pooling" or "forced pooling" where if a sufficient number of your neighbors have sold their mineral rights and you retain them companies can still drill beneath your property. People in communities want to talk about things like this. And it's not surprising that companies would want to know who said what at such meetings, on the other hand it hardly seems the role of government to pay the tab for such surveillance and report production.

James F. Powers holds the rank of colonel. Powers's boss Robert French, director of Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency holds the rank of general. Both men in their civilian capacity were dressed in business suits when they testified. The point is that Powers has a great deal of experience, so his notion that his job is to protect drilling interests isn't a mistake.

Smedley Butler was a Major General in the US Marine Corps and one of the most revered officers ever. Butler went before a congressional committee (national) in 1934 and testified that a group of business leaders had contacted him to lead a military coup d'etat against then president Franklin Roosevelt. In 1935 he toured the country giving a speech War Is a Racket. A pamphlet of the same was also published and got wide circulation. Butler wrote:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Here are a couple of links from Phil Jones's wiki, the first NetoCracy and the second Conspiracy Theories The general outlines of conspiracy may not have changed that much since the 1930's but what has changed is the billions being created through commons based peer production. Military theorist John Robb wrote a piece recently entitled Cognitive Slaves. I chuckled when I read Robb say about himself: "an optimist (believe it or not)." The funny part is I do believe him. Whether or not Phil Jones would call himself an optimist, I don't know; I can't say I've seen him write that. Nonetheless, Phil is a very constructive fellow, I know that. And he sees some potential good in Netocracy.

Networks aren't all bad nor all good. To steer into the good and avoid the bad, it matters quite a lot the conspiracy theories one subscribes to. Despite his own personal views about gas drilling in Pennsylvania James Powers considered it his duty to report to lobbyist of energy companies; his duty is conceived as protecting their interests. Therefore the conspiracies he's concerned about are meetings like parents trying to get to the bottom of school administrators plans to open up drilling on school grounds. Two quite different conspiracy theories are operative in situations like that, but only one is named "conspiracy" by the state. Powers seems completely blind to the other one.

Things are going to hell in a hand basket here in the USA. I'm not alone in feeling a sense of doom about the up coming elections. But I don't think it altogether helpful to think in polarized left/right dichotomy when it comes to conspiracy theories simply because it seems to messy to try to cut them up that way. I sniff around at the Web site of The Smedley Butler Society and it's hard for me tell if it smells right or left. It seems to me that smelling a racket isn't something completely dependent on political persuasion. Left and right people are sensing conspiracies and there's more agreement about these theories that most of us seem to think.

Godwin's Law

Mike Godwin is an attorney and effective advocate for free speech online. He's also known for Godwin's Law which states:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

All day long I've been kicking myself for leaving a comment on a post at Phil Jones' essential blog Composing. I conclude that seeing my comment as idiotic he simply didn't post it: Thanks very much Phil.

It's not the first time I've said something stupid on the Internet, and probably won't be the last. But I find this gaffe particularly egregious because there were no comments and I lead not by comparison to Nazis but to Fascism and that's close enough. I'm so amazed that I didn't immediate recognise my fallacy of reductio ad Nazium.

Phil points to a video of former Prime Minister Tony Blair speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast. The National Prayer Breakfast is organized by The Fellowship Foundation.

Religion in American life is apparently a subject that makes me a little crazy, even falling into conspiracy theories. Of course conspiracies sometimes exist, but most reasonable people are surely correct to be skeptical about conspiracy theories which attribute complex cultural and political events to an underlying conspiracy theory.

Phil makes the point:

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what a politician believes in private. But the moment he or she starts letting their ungrounded faith guide their actions, it's time to get them out of office.

The point has merit, I'm all in favor of reason, and I think reason is what Phil is positing in opposition to "ungrounded faith." The essence of Phil's point is reason provides some defense against errors resulting from faith. The trouble is I'm not sure how really reasonable any of us really are. Acting by faith provides a sort of economy of effort we really don't do without; it's not just religious faith. Something very much like faith seems at the root of the current financial crisis. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is really smart in helping us see how easily we all can be fooled by randomness, and how distruptive black swan events are.

What Taleb is talking about seems related to the problem of faith generally. Phil is talking more specifically about religious faith. I am not a theist, that is one who believes God as the creator of the universe. But I probably can't claim that I'm an atheist, or at least many atheist wouldn't claim me. The trouble I have is both with the meanings of god and belief.

Recently The New Scientist published an article Born believers: How your brain creates God. the article points to studies which suggest that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works." In other words that people in general have a tendency towards supernatural thinking. That sure rings true to me! Also in that issue the editors posted an editorial which they linked to the previous article, The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief with the quite sensible argument that we ought "to be careful." And that caution is very much in line with Phil's post.

What sent me over the edge in my comment essentially suggesting that Tony Blair and his Tony Blair Foundation are hawking a version of Fascism? First it should be noted that this really is over the edge and in sharp contrast to Phil's reasoned arguments. The truthful answer is that I'm not sure. I am well aware that reductio ad Nazium is a fallacy, and that my use of that suggests a blind spot which would be good of me to examine so to perhaps help me avoid making a fool of myself in the future.

My last two posts on social networks made me feel kind of stupid too. I think social networks are important and also hard to understand. It's good to try to understand what they look like and how they work because they are important. But it's also important to recognize that networks are complicated so not to be too quick to assume I understand what's happening.

All over the world there are networks of associations which figure significantly in how power is exercised. We talk about "old boy networks" and "good old boy networks." The former referring especially to public school affiliation in Britain, and the "good old boys" a term more American and not so closely aligned with schools. Religious affiliations do seem to me a strong contributor to these American "good old boys" networks. The Fellowship, or The Family, has in it's history traditions of secretiveness, which lends itself to conspiratorial theories. Jeffery Sharlet's investigative report at Harpers, Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats provides some background. There is also within the traditions of the organization certain tendencies familiar to Fascist movements. And Chip Berlet's What is Fascism? provides some definition of what Fascism is.

In the USA The Fellowship is hardly alone as a Christian network that insinuates itself into halls of power in somewhat secretive ways. We American tend to be religious, as everyone knows. I'm not sure how all these various networks operate, but it's hard to miss the fact that networks do exist and exert some influence on governments.

Sharlet's piece mentions connections with the Fellowship and Uganda's president Museveni. I look at Ugandan news some, and as an outsider I can hardly claim to understand. Nevertheless occasionally news reports which feature connections between very right wing American representatives and various Evangelical Christian groups make me wonder what's really going on. I'm not sure I can ever really find out either.

It appalls me that Pat Robertson is still a respected figure in American politics. His association and support for former Guatemalan dictator Gen. Rios Montt discredited him in my eyes. A rather similar set of circumstances with Robertson's business dealings with Liberia's Charles Taylor made my blood boil.

There are lots of atrocities associated with religions of all sorts. I don't think anyone denies that. Indeed such atrocities are brought up as arguments against religious belief. But most of the people I truly love are religious. I think there's quite a bit to the New Scientist article that religious belief seems a sort of "default" position in our psyche. I think humanity's ties to religion are deep, even for irreligious folks like me. So when Blair and others, for example Karen Armstrong and her move for A Charter For Compassion, aver that religion should be a force for good in the world, I'm sympathetic. I'm sure that's possible, just as I'm sure religion is sometimes a force for bad.

Phil's post suggest that voters in democracy should demand reason of our politicians. I'm sure he's right, that is desirable. I'm not sure that personal religious beliefs really can be separated from our guides to actions so neatly. Phil goes on to note that part of the problem with religious faith guiding actions is that such faith inhibits learning. That religious belief can contain a strain of vanity leading to ill-conceived actions. Blair in his speech remarks:

It is that humbling of man's vanity, that stirring of conscience through God's prompting, that recognition of our limitations, that faith alone can bestow.

No question humility is in order; the only question is what prompts it?

In the news Blair has been awarded a million dollar prize "presented by the Dan David Foundation, based at Tel Aviv University." He'll give the money to his foundation. But if one accepts, as I do, that humility is good in the face of human vanity, the source of humility Phil suggests is probably going to be more effective in terms of keeping Blair vanity in check than faith ever will be!

The Tony Blair Foundation urges religious tolerance. I'm not sure sufficiently so. I'm trouble by the networking approach familiar to The Fellowship, Young Life, Intervarsity Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, and many other Christian organizations closely associated with hard right politics in the USA. Chris Hedges is an American journalist, author and student of Christian theology. He's a Christian who argues forcefully against religious Chauvinism and Fascism. Christianity and rightist politics don't have to go hand in hand.

I think I went over board when I saw that Tony Blair was addressing the National Prayer Breakfast. I'm sure Blair is aware of the rightwing cant of the Fellowship. I'm also sure he knows that Americans of various political stripes attend the meetings. So his remarks were knowingly political. And the politics of it is suspect to me. I also find the decision to accept the million dollar prize from Israel politically suspect for someone so engaged in peace advocacy in the Middle East. It's unreasonable for me to accuse Blair of Fascism, but not unreasonable to notice dangerous mixing of politics and his religious views--A point Phil manages quite succinctly.

Phil also worries about Obama years down the line. But Obama's recent handling of religion and politics seems hardly encouraging to me. That's a subject for another time. But to end this post I'll point to an online magazine called Religious Dispatches it's a thoughtful publication promoting understanding of religious forces in today's world. Understanding is something I could use much more of.

Photo Source: Mike Godwin by Alice Lipowicz CC 2.5 from Wikipedia.

Ghost Stories

The story from an August 1969 Yankee this morning was entitled Spirit Capital of the Universe which apparently 100 or so years ago was Chittenden, Vermont. The story is about William & Horatio Eddy. The Wikipedia article gives the gist about the facts in the article, but the "neutral tone" that Wikipedia misses some of the fun of the magazine article. Yankee is a good source for ghost stories and I remember as a boy seeking them out to read. Indeed the illustrations to the article I picked up today seem familiar to me now.

I have no idea what to make of ghosts and find it rather convenient not to be much bothered by them. Over the years my sisters' and brothers' children have come to visit here in the summers. Now most of them are adults. A few years back I heard that while they enjoyed these visits they also often found them terrifying. Then a while back I mentioned this to one of my sisters who in turned wondered why I should be surprised; afterall, "You're the one who told them all those ghost stories." I hadn't the faintest idea what she was talking about and let her know that. She just rolled her eyes. And another time I had the same discussion with my niece. No ghost stories huh? "What about the one... and another one, and another one?" Well, this time there was no denying those were my stories and I had told them after all.

New England surely has no monopoly on ghost stories, but it's no slouch as a region when it comes to them either. I've always been interested in the number of old buildings around that were Spiritualist Churches. And of course New England is quite famous for witches. I couldn't imagine that I'd been the source of so much terror to my darling nieces and nephews growing up. I feel quite sure I hadn't meant to terrify them. But that my now adult niece could recite so easily from memory the the stories I'd told busted my pretences completely. So when the story about Governor Palin and the witch hunting Pastor Muthee made the rounds it was hard for me to get into high dudgeon about it. We all compartmentalize what we think about and it would seem we put ghost stories way back in our mental closets. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing to get them out and sometimes we worry about the cold water that might get poured over them. But still we hardly ever really discard them; rather store them way back in our mental closets until we might use them once more.

I have no ideas how to connect ghost stories with a couple of links to share, so I won't even try. Emeka Okafor at Timbuktu Chronicles links to a great article about open source hardware in Wired. Phil Jones linked to SomeRightsReserved a site where designers post blueprints for making things. Both of these developments may be on the edge or periphery of things right now, but I strongly suspect they'll make it to the middle before too long.

Okafor makes the point that open source hardware could be a real boon to African manufacturing culture. That's a good point, but also as the reality of job loss begins to settle in here in the rich countries, many smart people are going to be scrambling to make some income. We're accustomed to talking about outsourcing here in the USA, but the discussion of social media and how it might impact our making a living is just beginning. I said a couple of links, but I'll make it three. Susan Mernit posted a great post Susan sez: Social media must haves for the recently laid off. I liked it because while I frequent all sorts of social media online, I'm really quite stupid and haphazard about it. Her straight forward post suggested to me ways I could be smarter about it. That may be wishful thinking on my part,still it's a great primer on the subject.

Naturally there are great differences and distances between people in developed economies and in developing economies. But there are fundamental challenges we all face and new tools and models of work are available to people all over.

Grace Ayaa--oh here's a fourth link--posted a great post from Kampala A little light in the shadows about her visit to learn more about the Kampala Junior Team. I was so moved by the post. First of all because Madam Ayaa does so much on behalf of her fellow Ugandans and I'm so happy to see her blogging to tell her stories. Oh and what a great story teller she is! And secondly the idea I've been mulling about the last few days is how to make some money to help support the Kampala Junior Team. Her post encourages me not to give up on that. I need encouragement and I think others do to. I'm beginning to see how these social Web tools can make a big difference here and abroad. Together we can create something good in small increments.

The Wired article about open source hardware suggests that this sort of distributed effort can actually speed development. But it's going to mean we'll have to rethink a few things.

Blog Day

Here's the deal with Blog Day:

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Am I prepared? Heck no! But I was forewarned because I read Erik Hersman's White African blog and remembered that today is Blog Day seeing his post 5 Great African Blogs for BlogDay 2008.

These are my five picks:

White African
My heart's in Accra
Composing
Busoga Shining Light Association
Kampala Junior Team

I love blogs. I spend an hour or two everyday reading blogs. It is true that some of the blogs I read are American political blogs with big audiences. I'm something of a political junkie, but wouldn't really call any of those blogs favorites. Almost everyday I read something a blog that touches me deeply, such that I can't help but to feel affection for the bloggers. It's hard to pick favorites when there's a personal stake in it. Of course Blog Day really isn't about favorites anyway, but about discovery and broadening our social stake among people everywhere.

Probably anyone reading this blog already knows Ethan Zuckerman's My heart's in Accra. If not link there now. Zuckerman perhaps more than any other blogger embodies the ethos of Blog Day, the value we can gain from expanding from our narrow comfort zones from where everyone is more or less like us to discover and listen to others.

I'm not very technically savvy and was late to discover the Internet. It was all very cool when I did, except geek talk just seemed impossible to understand. Among the many virtues of the Zuckerman's blog is he's a geek who knows how to say interesting things about technology in ways ordinary people can understand.

There are too many great posts to choose from. A recent one WE Magazine provides a great introduction, especially if you're able to watch a video interview on your connection. There's a transcript at the same link so people with slower connections can read the interview.

I think it somewhat an advantage that I got online later than most. I'm old enough that electronic games weren't part of my growing up. In fact, I can remember the fascination transistor radios had when they were new. ATM machines still have a bit of a "what will they think of next" feel to me. So the possibilities the Internet opened up were quite startling to me. Zuckerman wisely warns about cyber-Utopianism, I think I caught a dose of that. But just surfing around and seeing some of the craziness provides an antidote of sorts. Nevertheless, the Internet changes things, and the exciting thing is that we get to decide even in small ways what sorts of difference will make a difference.

About the same time that I discovered Zuckerman's blog, I found Phil Jones. Phil has several blogs and other Internet sites he maintains. He links to them under the heading Synaesmedia at his blog Composing. Phil's posts are mostly links, sometimes with a short comment. Occasionally he writes longer essays, but always has something important to contribute.

Phil demurred at my calling him a "public intellectual" pointing out that most of his time and effort is engaged in his day job as a coder engaged in supply chain management. Still I've learned more from Phil about how the differences a world of people connected with communications technologies make than anyone else. I also love that he's a Brit living in Brazil. So I get look at Brazil I otherwise wouldn't.

At the end of the WE Magazine the interviewer asked him if he could have three wishes what they'd be? One of Zuckerman's wishes was this:

I think maybe my second wish was that everyone had someone who was emotionally relevant to them who lived in a very different place.

I've been corresponding over the Internet with my friend Nathan Magumba almost ever since I got online. We've never met in person, but we're good friends by now. Nathan has long been strived to be of service to his community. He founded a community based organization called the Busoga Shining Light Association. For a while I tried to convince him of the value of blogging. That didn't take, but recently without any prodding on my part took the plunge and started blogging. Check out Busoga Shining Light Association. One of the reasons I'm excited is now that he's talking online, it makes it easier for me to talk about our common interests too.

It is quite possible for people we meet online to be emotionally relevant. I haven't known Kayiwa Fred so long as I've known Nathan. Kayiwa is in Kampala and Nathan in Iganga. They've never met, except for the Internet. I think Kayiwa was really surprised when he found out from Nathan how long we'd been friends. While attending college Kayiwa is actively involved with youth football (soccer). Like Nathan Kayiwa really wants to find ways to contribute to his community in uplifting ways. He's discovered social media, even while like me finds it hard to understand most of the time. Still check out Kayiwa's blog Kampala Junior Team. From the links on the sidebar you can find other online ways to make connections.

A friend of Kayiwa's in Wales has started The KJT International Supporters Club. Kampala is a different place, and Snowdonia is different too. I've never been to Uganda. Now since I have good friends there I hope to be able to travel there one day. Many years ago when I was 17 I did travel to Wales. Zuckerman's first wish in that WE Magaizne interview is that people would have a chance to experience a place radically different from what their own like he was able when at just 20 he went to study in Ghana. He says:

And it really changed how I view the world in a very positive way.

Perhaps Wales wasn't so radically different from Western Pennsylvania as Kampala might be. Still it seemed far away to me then. Perhaps what travel changes most is to open up our imaginations to how complex and beautiful living is. We live in natural communities and in communities of people. Being in a different place makes it impossible to take our communities for granted--makes it hard anyway to. Travel is a very important form of education. The Internet makes travel more possible than ever before; if we make our stories available and if we are willing to listen to the stories of others. Ethan Zuckerman is right to think that makes all the difference.

Layers

Bloggers make a lot more sense when they blog a lot. I don't make sense, but suspect it would be worthwhile for me to start blogging more often. I do post fairly frequently within a social network called Ned. For many reasons it's hard to take stuff from one context and place it in another. Blogs seem to have a fairly inclusive context and social networks more exclusive. So it's a matter of finding the right pattern of correspondence. I suppose I won't find what's the right sort of stuff to put here unless I start putting stuff here again.

The many blog posts I read, and the conversations generated by them contribute much to my day. Among the bloggers I love reading is Phil Jones and his several blogs. Ethan Zuckerman has generated a great conversation about homophily; i.e. birds of a feather flock together, on the Internet. It's quite a stretch to say that Phil thinks like I do. Phil Jones is a computer scientist, I am so not. Then again, a recent post of his Why Geeks are doomed in a Suit world raises some points in one context that I'd been thinking recently about in another context.

Phil begins his post pointing to a critique by Joel Spolsky of Java-oriented Computer science education. Spolsky thinks that some culling of students from CS studies is necessary, not only for the future of Computer Science, but also for the happiness of would be computer scientists. Some people will never be happy in the field. I knew that for myself never even having to venture into a demanding CS class.

If you know about computer programming, I urge you to read Phil Jones. I don't know anything about it, but this caught my attention:

The Geek's job is to make the abstraction levels fit together. Of course the only way to achieve this is with an understanding of both the higher and the lower levels : simultaneously. And the easy shifting from one to another.

Via 3Quarks Daily a fantastic blog where I get a steady fix for my xenophilia jones, there was a link to an artcle by Paul Ehrlich in Seed. Cultural Evolution has the snippet at 3Quarks along with the smart comments there, and Cultural Evolution: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? is the link to the whole article.

I have enormous respect for Paul Ehrlich as a scientist and public intellectual. But this article seems so wrong and sloppy in so many ways. That alone probably wouldn't have bothered me much except for Ehrlich thinking that the article describes good science towards answering his question: Does human culture evolve via natural selection, as our genes do? I emphatically don't think what he describes is good science. That puts me in a peculiar position, on one hand is Ehrlich, an esteemed scientist and on the other is me, some blogger in a basement. Who will you believe?

Oh boy, where to start. Well, Phil's observation about making abstraction levels fit together very succinctly gets to the nub of my disagreement with Ehrlich's study. Ehrlich is interested in the question of whether human culture evolves via natural selection. Ehrlich begins:

If we wish to understand and predict culture change generally, viewing culture as an evolving trait in analogy with genetic evolution is a very useful place to start.

This seems very reasonable to me. But as Ehrlich proceeds, it seems obvious that he's not very careful about the in analogy part. In analogy seems a very particular level of abstraction. It's one thing to say, "Her hair is as soft as a mink's coat." and quite another to begin collecting her hair to make a mink coat.

Ehrlich's article proceeds to tell the story of some of the ways that cultural evolution has gone off the rails into absurdity by following too closely on Darwin's heals. I suppose that's necessary to assure us that he had no intention of falling into the same pits. He asserts:

There are clear patterns in cultural evolution, which are just as prevalent as those in genetic evolution.

Then he proposes that what's necessary is a simple hypothesis which can be tested. Rather implicit in what comes next is that Ehrlich has forgotten entirely the in analogy part; that is, his hypothesis presumes that natural selection works as the engine driving cultural evolution. My head is beginning to spin because I'm not sure what culture means to Ehrlich, for example on what scale, i.e. French culture as distinct from US culture. I'm also not sure at all what exactly culture is analogous to in genetic evolution. Is it analogous to the phenotype of an organism, to a species, to an ecological system, or what? Apparently I'm dense, because there is no attempt on Ehrlich's part to make this part of the analogy clear. Is it obvious? If it is, then surely the analogy must be that culture is a kind of species. Without thinking too much about it, that analogy will break down for many purposes. In any case at this point in the article a warning is flashing in my head: Abstraction level confusion!

Here is the hypothesis that Ehrlich came up with along with Simon Levin:

We believed that the evolution of technological norms would generally be more rapid than that of ethical norms.

It concerns me that "technological norms" along with "ethical norms" seem hard to rigorously state. What exactly are they? Can you look up a list of those somewhere? But the main problem is there is no attempt to connect what "technological norms" and "ethical norms" might be in cultural evolution in analogy to genetic evolution. What are they like? Perhaps organs of an individual of a particular species?

Ehrlich then describes his false starts in looking for data that might be used to test their hypothesis. He writes:

Unfortunately, ethnographies are written more like novels than scientific studies, and it is impossible to be certain of all the crops grown and the counts of deities.

My first thought was that was just a gratuitous zinger directed towards anthropologists--They're not real scientist! Unfortunate that Ehrlich seems not to wonder why he encounters stories, and finds it justified merely to judge them unfortunate. Where there are stories it's a sure signal of relevance. The judge inquires: "Quilty or Not Quilty?" It's no good to reply: "Your honor, I have long hair."

Ehrlich was determined to ignore all complications, and locates some data about the canoes of Oceania. With that data Ehrlich has a colleague analysis it into functional traits and symbolic traits. I'm wondering what are canoes to culture in analogy to genetic evolution? What do symbolic decoration on canoes tell us about "ethical norms" and how would we know? I have several more questions, but it appears that Ehrlich is content just to have these two invented categories of canoe traits to test his hypothesis.

The conclusion after studying changes in canoes over time is the decorations change much more frequently than the functional traits; ergo

The original Ehrlich-Levin hypothesis was rejected.

Even at this point I would have been happy with the piece if Ehrlich had stopped to wonder even a little how two famous ecologists could have muddled things so thoroughly. But no, Ehrlich concludes:

We directly tested a theory of cultural evolution. Our work has helped to uncover a piece of the larger, more complex process of culture change and has shown that it is reasonable to think of that change as evolution.

How has this research shown that it is "reasonable to think of that change as evolution?"

At every stage of this inquiry it seems to me that Ehrlich has paid little attention to levels of abstraction. And then having produced a muddled mess shouts "Proof!" It seems nuts to me, really nuts.

It's too bad that Phil's bosses don't appreciate where he's coming from. He does a good service in pointing to a reason why. I'm lucky I'm not a geek;-) It is quite upsetting to read an article by an eminent scientist discussing inquires into the nature of things with another very eminent scientist, enlisting colleagues from a prestigious University in a terribly flawed study and that along the line nobody said this is BS.

I flunked out my first go round in college. Logic was one of those culling courses Spolsky refers to, and I got culled, twice. So I'm not so sure about my abilities in handling abstractions. What I am sure is I expected better from Paul Ehrlich!

Puttering

Spring is here. There are daffodils blooming all around the garden and they cheer me. Most of the daffodils come from spreading about bulbs from a patch that's about the same size in the picture, in fact you can see that very patch in the distance in this photo. The daffodils are all around, but I'm disappointed that I can never seem to take pictures that capture the yellow riot of color. There are an incredible number of daffodil varieties. I've planted several which extend the blooming season considerably. I've not a clue as to this variety's name, but they are early and clearly naturalize well. I bet all of them have spread from just a few bulbs planted fifty years ago or more.

I like gardening very much, but I'm an incompetent gardener. I don't really mean to be self deprecating when I say that. My garden is a source of exercise, curiosity and delight, so I value the garden and gardening highly. I say incompetent more in defiance of formula, and in favor of and attitude of "go ahead and take a stab at it."

My mother was fond of naming what she spent a great deal of time doing as "to putter." The AH dictionary--the tattered First Edition by desk--notes that to putter in the way my mother used it is chiefly British: "To occupy oneself in an aimless or desultory manner." I'm more apt to say "putz." That word isn't in my book copy of the dictionary, but means much the same as putter. Putz is Yiddish. Not clear at all how it became part of my lexicon, nor whether it has a similar etymology to putter. Nevertheless, putz is vulgar slang for penis and I've never heard putter to mean that, although I suppose it may somewhere. Putzing in the garden is perhaps as masturbation is to copulation, and so like the distinction between an incompetent gardener and a real gardener. In any case, my approach to gardening is most certainly desultory: "Moving or jumping from one thing to another; disconnected; rambling."

In spring, I often also have the pleasure of working in other people's gardens. One friend gets my style and when working in her garden even encourages my rambling. Coordinating between vehicle availability and weather, she picked me up with her car so we had a chance to chat. The conversation turned to politics and I mentioned the current world food crisis triggered by rapidly rising commodity prices. As we approached our destination, she asked something to the effect: "Can we get out of this mess?" Or more to the point: "Tell me we're not doomed!"

Phil Jones points to two articles warning that food price increases will cause mass hunger. And he asks:

What are *you* doing to help produce more food and avert this?

I'm not doing enough, but at least the issue of famine is on my radar screen. Phil's question gets to the point, all of us ought take this challenge seriously and wonder what we can do.

Mostly what I do is to rearrange flowering plants in my garden. I've been gardening long enough to be happy I'm not dependent on my efforts for my food, it's not easy to raise crops.

My friend Nathan's CBO, the BSLA, in the Iganga is working with people in people in villages to form farmer groups. The particular emphasis is with widows caring for dependent children orphaned by AIDS. Education is a key component of the program, not just about HIV and AIDS but education especially about food production and post harvest handling. The BSLA provides help with inputs like fertilizer and seeds. They also conduct training in husbandry and other subjects at their offices in Iganga. This sort of community action is worthwhile, but difficult to find support for. I've got to give Nathan credit for sticking to the work even when the going gets really tough as far as finances go. Slum Doctor Programme a small non-profit in Washington State is providing generous assistance.

The current food crisis is precipitated by world economic events. But by in large the solutions to famine must be local developments. In 2005 I wrote a post titled But Let Us Cultivate Our Garden taken from the last sentence of Voltaire's Candide. I searched for the post as an easy way to find a quote from a wonderful Adam Gropnik review of Ian Davidson's Voltaire in Exile:

By “garden” Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action.

The modest help I'm able to lend to Nathan's BSLA program is important to me because I think it's helping. Yet I'm frustrated I don't do more in my locale. I do cultivate my garden. By doing more, I think I mean to encourage others nearby to cultivate their gardens too. Our gardens are indeed a proper answer to Phil's question about what we can do.

To Be of Use

Phil Jones is one of my favorite bloggers. Phil is a polymath and has a real genius for explaining complex concepts in ordinary language. That said, I get hardly anything at all when he writes about coding, but that he is an information scientist has been a great help to me in trying to get a perch to view what's going on in the ever changing landscape of information and communications technologies.

Phil Jones has written several posts on netocracy. That Wikipedia entry notes that netocracy is a word-play on the words internet and aristocracy. The term as Phil is referring to it is based on his reading of two Swedish philosophers, Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist propounded upon in their book Netocracy - The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism. There seems to be some fairly derisive reviews of the book online. If you enjoy reading Slavoj Zizek, his piece The Ideology of the Empire and its Traps maybe of interest for some context for Bard and Soderqvist's ideas. But Phil's presentation a the Wittgenstein Symposium is a concise introduction to the ideas.

Recently Phil wrote a piece, Live Together, Die Alone which explores some of the pitfalls of netocracy. And that piece really has seemed worth blogging about, but collecting my thoughts has proven difficult.

Phil makes a useful distinction between netocracy and concepts like attention economy and commons based peer production, noting:

Not that "attention" isn't an essentially important idea too in netocracy, but "imploitation" reveals a different character.

If you believe it's all about "attention" then simply *maximizing* your number of connections is a good thing. It's all about openness and inclusion and transparency.

Blogging is an attention economy. Ebay, Google, Myspace, Craiglist etc. are attentional. They are "markets"

Netocracy OTOH is about hoarding and managing links. Facebook, AlwaysOn, aSmallWorld ... these are netocratic.

Unlike most bloggers, I'm loathe to look at the stats for this blog, finding it easier to imagine that nobody reads it anyway. So I blog for myself, but that's not entirely it, really. I love to read blogs and even to comment occasionally. Being a reader of blogs feels like being part of a community and that having a blog is part of the price of membership. I participate at an YSAN (yet another social network) called Ned. Among the many advantages in writing within a social network is responding it a context of discussions with others. I particularly like Ned because the people there are from all over the place; including a nice contingent from my beloved Uganda. I wrote that last sentence with a smile; I've never traveled to Uganda. I love Uganda because by way of the Internet I've come to know a few Ugandans. Blogging and participating in social networks are activities which I consider social.

Internet tools offer such opportunities for collaboration and I'll concede to imbibing in a dose of cyberutopianism when contemplating the possibilities. Ethan Zuckerman wrote a good critique of cyberutopianism in a review of Fred Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Zuckerman's blog searches well and he's had plenty more to say on the subject. Still with all the downsides--even social ills--of the online world, the potential to create something good online seems great.

The whole premise of Bazungu Bucks is evidence of that cyberutopian thinking is a little trippy. Bazungu Bucks are traded nowhere. I gave away BBs explicitly saying I'd accept them in exchange, but nobody has ever offered one in exchange for doing anything. I do not imagine that Bazungu Bucks ever will become a viable alternative currency. But the notion that people all over can be of some use to one another, and that even Americans like me can be of service to African people. The big question is how?

As in Marxism aristocracy is contrasted with proletariat, Bard and Soderqvist's netocracy is contrasted to the consumtariat. Phil points out that in an economy of links, the netocracy in some ways steals social links from the consumtariat. That's one way of looking at what happens at Facebook, or at least prompted user outcry over Facebook's social ads scheme called Beacon. The consumtariat are social and actively creating--often by appropriating cool stuff we find on the Internet--but as Phil put's it:

We are "composing" with instruments handed down to us by the elite. (As Attali warned) And so we are isolated.

John Robb noted recently:

Criminal hackers take down the ELF to sell Viagra.

Reading that provoked a laugh. Reading John Robb generally doesn't make me laugh, in fact reading him is a good antidote to too much cyberutopian enthusiasm. Crimeware is just one darkside of netocractic conspiracy. John Robb's Global Guerrillas blog provides plenty of evidence for how anti-social these new social tools can be.

I was dumb recently and fell prey to a phishing site. Perhaps my antivirus and various protection software had lulled me into complacency. In the process of trying to clean up the mess I used Spybot-S&D. In the more than 100,000 known malware files the software hunts for, predictably there are porn site dialers, all sorts of files associated with online gambling; what I hadn't anticipated was the number of bogus anti-spyware, anti-virus, and "protect your children" sorts of malware. Sex and money as motivators seem almost quaint in comparison. It was a shock to discover there are thousands upon thousands of malicious sites playing fear to advantage.

Phil wrote:

By making social connections a means to an end rather than an end in themselves, a tool rather than the condition within which we live, we have stripped them of all real significance or value. They have become dead. We have become dead. Out capacity to participate has been eroded even as we gained a capacity to curate.

Phil's in Brazil, I'm in the USA; I have friends and interest in Uganda and others around the world. Online connections certainly are need not be "means to an end rather than an end in themselves." But, Phil steps in a positive direction by pointing to the need for genuine local relationships with others; we actually participate with others. Local connections matter in ways that are somewhat distinct from more global relationships. Our local relationships help to ground us in genuine ethics and value of being people.

I'm inclined to agree with those who credit Rene Dubos with the maxim:

"Think Globally, Act Locally"

The communication among people across localities is important and meaningful. Still, Dubos' insight that global problems are conditioned on local circumstances and choices is really quite profound. Phil has resolved to endeavor to include more participatory and social music in his life. For my part, I try to make more paper party hats because, heavens knows in tough times like these we need more parties. Our ability to produce online can lead to forgetting how important being in touch with others is.

A windstorm downed a big fir tree in the front of the property. It collided with a Chinese Chestnut tree and that probably has damaged that tree beyond salvaging. The fir tree seemed in good health, but a few years back a close lightening strike damaged its bark on a section near the base of the trunk, which accounts for weakening it enough to fall in the wind. When the lightening hit he sap got so hot so quickly the soil along roots nearly twenty feet from the trunk exploded in air making little culverts in the dirt. Sawing up the trees is something to do. I've been gradually limbing the tree, but I'll leave that effort until it's a little warmer. Spring is on it's way. This spring I want to engage more with others locally. Our local solutions contribute to the solving of global problems.