July 2008 Archives

There are two extreme answers to the question of what we are responsible for?

The maximalist position is that we are responsible for everything. When we act, whether consciously or not, something happens in the world. A series of effects propagates outward from our actions, and that series may be endless.

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for the want of a shoe the horse was lost… and on, and on.

We rarely glimpse the long-term, distant outcomes of our actions because our perceptions are limited. My presence at tonight’s Socrates Cafe meeting may lead to another person reading a book I shared with her. That book could change her life but I may never know it.

From the maximalist perspective we arrive at the ideas of globalism and environmentalism. My choice to drive to the library releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leads to global warming. Everything I do becomes significant.

The other extreme in this debate is the minimalist. We are responsible for our actions and nothing more. Each of us is surrounded by sphere of agency. Sometimes these spheres may touch but they never overlap.

I always have a choice about how to respond to a situation. Someone cuts me off in traffic. Do I become angry? Do I ignore the situation? Do I try to run them off the road?

The emphasis is on freedom and choice. Even under the extremes of distress there is always a choice. It’s an existential view of the world.

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.

I attended the fifth Social Media Breakfast at the Minneapolis Public library this morning.

Jon Gordon from FutureTense started things out with a Q&A about technology and media. Most of the questions surrounded the new NPR API and the social media activity at Minnesota Public Radio. He mentioned the changing attitudes among journalists about social media. Perceptions are shifting slowly from not letting media employees speak online to accepting off-the-record conversations about anything.

This reminded me of how I felt when I read or heard last year about journalists not voting in order to protect their impartiality. I thought then that the idea was stupid. I’d rather have a journalist vote and be upfront about his or her participation than someone who tries to hard to appear above the fray. The question is how much disclosure do we need or want? Does a journalist have a responsibility to tell the audience how she voted? What will happen when media organizations start publishing their raw interviews and material on the web for remixing and analysis?

Paul Saarinen (I would’ve gotten the spelling correct, it’s just like the architect Eero Saarinen, even if I’m not from the range) spoke about the parallels between social media and game playing. I remember first hearing this from Ed Vielmetti in 2005 when he compared Wikipedia to an MMORPG. Just like pornography leads the way in Lively so gaming leads the way in online social interactions. To the hippies who started the WELL and influenced the hacker movement this is probably no surprise.

Meg Canada and Jody Wurl finished the morning off by showing off how hip librarians are to social media and networking. I remember encountering a lot of librarians when I first started to read and write blogs five or six years ago. Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian has been blogging since 2002. Canada and Wurl toured some of the highlights on the social media booksphere LibraryThing and Bookspace. I was surprised at the low number of hands raised when we were asked if anyone was on LibraryThing. I guess I’m spoiled by the high ratio of superpatrons in Ann Arbor.

Almost everyone at the meeting was on Twitter during the meeting. A twitter search for smbmsp gives a good trace. To test the geek quotient of all those people I think we should setup an IRC channel next time and see how many people know what we are talking about.

I drove into the Weisman Art Museum last night to listen to Harry Boyte and Don Shelby talk about re-inspiring citizenship in the 21st century. Boyte just released a book called the Citizen Solution about the growing movement to reconnect ourselves to politics and the communities we inhabit.

Shelby started things off by recapping an anecdote about his third grade teacher from the forward to the book. He speculated about Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address - especially the emphasis on the famous phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Did Lincoln emphasize the noun or the prepositions? Is it about the people or the functions of people?

Boyte stood up to tell us about his book and work. He’s seen all of the stories and complaints about the contemporary American loss of citizenship: Bellah, et.al. Habits of the Heart, Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the claims that we are being siloed into partisan and information niches (True Enough by Manjoo), that there has been a decline in mutual trust. (Some of those references are mine.) The Civic Health Index, produced by the National Conference on Citizenship showed an uptick in charitable giving after 9-11 but since then has noticed declines in trust in other people and charity.

Boyte believes there is another story to be told in parallel to the declension narrative. This is the story of self-organized citizens working together to create civic agency, working together to create something outside of, or beyond, predetermined solutions. It’s an emergent phenomenon of people coming together to accomplish something.

Amir Pinnix concluded with his story of becoming a citizen athlete. He spoke about growing up as an only child with his mother in Newark, New Jersey. When he moved to the University of Minnesota he felt that something was missing on campus so he and a friend started SCOPE, Student Committee on Public Engagement. He told us to never give up and never stop trying to improve the world. I particularly liked two quotes “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “you can’t lead folks unless you love folks, you can’t save folks unless you serve folks” (from Cornel West). Pinnix was an impressive speaker so I expect he’ll go far in the future. Google suggest this Star Tribune profile for further reading.

After this we broke into small group discussions at our tables. There were about 8 or 9 tables of 5-10 people. At the tables a staff member or student from the Humphrey Institute posed three question to us.

1. What responsibilities accompany being a citizen?
2. What do we believe is meant by the idea of grassroots politics?
3. What is your dream for the future of our country?

The discussion at my table focused on local community building, reaching out to our neighbors both in person and via technology, trying to create an environment in which we can be open to the possibilities inside ourselves and others.

I was impressed by a story from one my tablemates about her experience moving to a new community. She was initially wary of some of her neighbors asking question about her life. But she realized later that they were the local leaders of the community neighborhood and were asking so they could include her in the community. I thought this summed up the risk and fear that we all face when acting as a citizen? It’s hard to reveal ourselves to others and discouraging when our revelations are met with silence.

I didn’t get to pose my final question to the larger group because time ran out. But I wanted to ask Harry Boyte what if we act and nothing happens, then what?

Back when I was an undergraduate at Yale I used to tell my friends that it was all a sham. Then I was usually talking about grades or the system. Today it’s just the system.

Via Dean Baker I read that America is abandoning the twenty-five year dream of the free market.

Through this uniquely American lens, saving businesses from collapse was the sort of thing that happened on other shores, where sentimental commitments to social welfare trumped sharp-edged competition. Weak-kneed European and Asian leaders were too frightened to endure the animal instincts of a real market, the story went. So they intervened time and again, using government largess to lift inefficient firms to safety, sparing jobs and limiting pain but keeping their economies from reaching full potential.

There have been recent interventions in America, of course — the taxpayer-backed bailout of Chrysler in 1979, and the savings and loan rescue of 1989. But the first happened under Jimmy Carter, a year before Americans embraced Ronald Reagan and his passion for unfettered markets. And the second was under George H. W. Bush, who did not share that passion.

So it made for a strange spectacle last weekend as the current Bush administration, which does cast itself in the Reagan mold, hastily prepared a bailout package to offer the government-sponsored mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The reasoning behind this rescue effort — like the reasoning behind the government-induced takeover of Bear Stearns by J. P. Morgan Chase just a month before — sounded no different from that offered in defense of many a bailout in Japan and Europe:

The mortgage giants were too big to be allowed to fail.

I could go through all the nostrums - corporate welfare, class warfare, middle class aspirations - and I could go through all of the evidence - that markets fail as often as they succeed, that no one has ever lived in a completely free market society, that 20% of the population thinks it’s in the top 1% of the income distribution - but what’s the point.

The evidence I see is different from the evidence that others perceive. I read part of “True Enough” by Farhad Manjoo last week and it reaffirmed my bias that bias will never be overcome.

So what went well at PublicRadioCamp last Saturday?

Back in February Dan Gillmor stopped by Minnesota Public Radio to talk about the future of journalism. The setup was standard interview fare - two people at microphones in front of a crowd sitting in an auditorium. The reaction to the event was immediately negative - people complained about the lack of interaction with the audience and the back channel chat on Twitter was devastating.

Last Saturday a smaller group of people met in the same location for Public Radio Camp. The setup was completely different. Butcher-block paper on the walls, ubiquitous wi-fi, tables, movable chairs, and about thirty people who were interested in improving media not just talking about it.

So which one of these events was more successful? As usual it depends on your goals, audience, and perspective.

I felt the Gillmor event covered material I already knew. There was minimal interaction with the audience in a conversation that was ostensibly about how the audience is becoming more powerful than journalists. The journalists in the audience seemed to mostly be fearful about the future of their profession.

At Public Radio Camp everything was turned around. People were enthusiastic about public radio and the information they hoped to get from it. They were interested in expanding participation and bringing more people into the conversation. Finally the format was based on open space and left people alone long enough to let them self-organize.

The people that brought us MinneBar hosted a Public Radio Barcamp at the offices of Minnesota Public Radio today. Bob Collins, one of MPR’s star bloggers, liveblogged the conference on News Cut. I won’t duplicated his efforts by describing what happened but it was an exciting experiment in opening the black box of journalism up for the public, or at least for those interested enough to act.

There was a lot of synergy between the two groups working on user-generated content and Nuevo Radio. So what I’d like to see next is another event like today’s. But instead of just brainstorming ideas we should get together to produce a news story.

Here’s how I think it could work.

Everyone arrives in the morning and things are setup as they were today, a bunch of white boards or paper on the walls, a few tables, and chairs. There’s a brief introduction where we explain what we’re going to do - create a news story in a day. For the first hour everyone brainstorms story ideas: who can we interview, what media do we want to use, how do we research the idea?

Then we divide the tasks up into teams and go out and do it.

This would work really well for a significant event, like the upcoming Republican National Convention. The drawback is that everyone else is going to be covering the convention. I don’t know if there is much more that an ad hoc group of citizen journalists will add to the cacophony.

An even better event might be the opening of the state legislative session in January.

Once we’ve pulled off a couple of citizen media camps then we can start looking for a permanent place to produce new media.

Published late on 7/14

Reading

• Enclosure
• Public Goods

both from Wikipedia

• Discussion - does a historical perspective add anything to our definitions of the commons, how about the possible ways of managing the commons. On enclosure - note the changing dynamics of the economy in England - the shift toward sheep farming; the importance of historical particularity - it’s clear that many different forms of enclosure were pursued and many forms of commons governance as well.
• Public goods - key concepts - non-rival, non-excludable; the idea of inalienability - some things should not be sold, children, organs; 4 part matrix of rivalry and excludability; common pool resources are rivalrous but non-excludable, thus leading to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ because people can access the goods easily and benefit from being a free-rider.

Class discussion

How does the historical enclosure movement relate to current issues?

1. It shows that the problem of the commons has been around for a long time and that various solutions have been tried in the past.
2. Two central actors threatened the commons in the past: private landowners and the government. At various times their interests have overlapped and diverged. When acting in concert they can have a profound effect on the economic and social structures of the commons. In the case of the enclosure movement, they worked together to transform Britain from a medieval, agrarian culture to a mercantile/industrializing nation.

Both of these actors continue to play a large role in modern commons. States and governments have often been called upon to protect common resources, especially the environment. Private corporations continue to enclose the commons for their benefit. Some examples from intellectual property law are: copyright extensions, patent extension and litigation, etc.

How are the distinctions between rivalrous and non-rivalrous / excludable and non-excludable goods worked out in practice?

Case study: food policy and markets. Wikipedia treats food as a private good. Could there be a situation where food is a public or commons based good? Our default position in modern society is to analyze goods through the lens of markets. For food to be a public or commons good society would have to be structured very differently than it is now. Perhaps food was a common good in hunter-gatherer societies in the past. It may also have been treated as a gift by other cultures. But the transition to sedentary agriculture probably ended any food commons that might have existed in the past. The crucial factor may be the transition between abundance and scarcity. In a world of abundance it is easy to treat a good as held in common, but when scarcity arises then people are likely to start hoarding and or attempting to privatize the good themselves. An example of this comes from a case study in “Making the Commons Work.”