Make sure you are not a computer

Grammar says everything. The online signup process for Nimbuzz, one of the wifi telephone services, asks users:

“To make sure you are not a computer, please type in the characters you see in the text box below:”

In other words, you can find out if you are human or computer by taking their simple test. Imagine if such a test were available to the androids in BladeRunner.

At least we all now have a place to turn if we are afraid we might be computers.

The Crowd – a new roundtable at PBS Digital Nation

I’m moderating a conversation between the smartest people I know thinking about open source, crowd-sourcing, the hive, and digital mob behavior over at http://pbsdigitalnation.org It has already evolved into a mind-expanding, passionate, no-holds-barred conversation.

You are all invited to participate along with:

Danah Boyd – Social Media Researcher, Microsoft Research; Fellow, Berkman Center of Internet and Society, co-author, Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out. danah.org

Amy Bruckman – Associate Professor, Electronic Learning Communities, Georgia Institute of Technology www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/index.shtml

Nicholas Carr – author, The Big Switch and the forthcoming The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains . roughtype.com

Kevin Kelly – Senior Maverick, Wired magzine. Author, Out of Control, and What Technology Wants – coming in October www.kk.org/thetechnium/

Mark Pesce – co-inventor of VRML, founder, FutureSt social web consultancy, author, Share This Book (upcoming) www.sharethiscourse.org/

Clay Shirky – NYU Interactive Telecommunications Programm, author Here Comes Everybody www.shirky.com/

RU Sirius – co-founder, Mondo2000, Editor, H+ magazine www.hplusmagazine.com/

Sherry Turkle – Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, author, The Second Self, Simulations and Its Discontents, and Alone Together (forthcoming) web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/techself/

Jimmy Wales – Co-founder, Wikipedia. Trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home

The Book Business

Here’s a “trailer” for the video version of a talk I did for MediaBistro about the future of book publishing in an electronic era. I will try to find the whole thing, or some way for rushkoff.com people to see the entirety, as it was a free talk and free might as well be free.

PBS Roundtable in Full Swing

I’m leading a series of monthly roundtables at http://pbsdigitalnation.org . They will be in the style of Steven Johnson’s original Feed magazine – or as close to that as we can get for the time being – where visitors can develop threaded conversations around the original posts.

The first topic is the PBS Frontline’s Digital Nation documentary, and – perhaps predictably – not everyone in the show likes the way it came out. This is how one from Henry Jenkins begins:

I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated. The website allows us to ask our own questions, while the documentary tells us what to think.

And here’s a snip from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale’s thoughts on the end of text:

Hi! Although sequentially reading the individual words comprising an entire novel is a wonderful and complete experience (I’m 41 and spent a big part of my childhood reading everything I could well before computers were available), the most recent research in how the brain is probably organized suggests a better fit between the way we ‘read’ in the digital world of today and the way we actually store and manipulate information internally. The magnificent sense of ‘getting’ Great Expectations has to do with fractal/hierarchical memories that are simultaneously evoked and span different levels of abstraction/cognition. So each of us a has a different (but fairly similar) high level ‘memory’ of what Victorian women were life, for example. That feeling can be instantly evoked by a small trigger – like reading any part of that book. The act of coming to deeply understand the text is the act of connecting and storing a bunch of associations that become your memory of the book. This actually fits pretty well with the cliffnotes + chat + a couple of pictures + a couple of blogs model that compresses a long text into a few minutes of what are effectively short evocative hyperlinks.

Please come visit, participate, share ideas for future roundtables! Next month, a debate about “The Crowd” with Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, Nick Carr, Mark Pesce, RU Sirius, Clay Shirky, Danah Boyd, and Amy Bruckman.

Crowd-jamming a New Book Title for Life Inc.

So RandomHouse has agreed to do a paperback version of Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back.

I’m going to add an extensive “resources” section to the end, with contributions from people and organizations who are succeeding at that challenge.

But they also want to retitle the book. Maybe to something more specific, or at least more evocative. Most people think the book was called “Life” as it is.

So, I am opening this quest up for collaborative frenzy. Help?

The book is about the way value creation and exchange has been legally monopolized by corporations and central banks – as well as how this dehumanizes us. It concludes with ways to take back peer to peer value exchange, and collapse this corporotacracy in the process. Click on the movie above for the 9-minute gist.

But I need a new title – ideally a better one, that will interest more people. Capitalism: A Love Story was a much more accessible title than Life Inc, for example.

If you come up with a title that works, I’ll give you something – like a bunch of books and credit – as well as my thanks.

Digital Nation Roundtable now LIVE

I’m hosting a new place for discussions about our digital future, the Digital Nation Roundtable, on the PBS Frontline site.

I don’t have the direct link yet, so scroll down that page a screen until you see it. And the join in!

Digital Nation – my new documentary – Tuesday 2/2 on PBS

Digital Nation – a PBS Frontline documentary I’ve been working on for, gosh, two years now – is finally airing this coming Tuesday evening, Feb 2, at 9pm on pretty much all PBS stations in US. (I know: that’s during the Lost premiere that even Obama feared going up against. But you can Tivo Lost, watch us live, and watch Lost after without the commercials.) For those of you outside the viewing area or without TV’s, you can watch the whole thing anytime from broadcast onwards by going to http://pbsdigitalnation.org

Meanwhile, I’m happy to announce that Frontline has agreed to let me host a series of Roundtable discussions following the broadcast. One per month, with invited guests and running commentary from you. (I’m shooting for something like the Talmudic format Steven Johnson used for Feed magazine – still the best threaded dialogues I can remember happening online between a central conversation and the general public. With any luck, these Roundtables will be the next main thing I’m doing – and I really do need quality conversation to happen there to keep it alive.

The above clip – Patrick Stewart on Twitter, the iPhone, and his passion for gaming – is not in the show. But it is an example of the kind of conversations and guests we’ll be having in the Roundtables – both by text and video.

So please, come to pbsdigitalnation.org after the show and share your thoughts with the people who were in it, see the discussion in progress, and push the participants to go deeper. Most important, suggest topics and guests – including yourself – you’d like to see on there.

Corporations as Uber-Citizens

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling was positive in one respect: it made law out of what was already happening. While corporations earned “personhood” back in the 1860’s when a court clerk (likely bribed) added this language into the margins of another court decision, they never quite had the rights of citizenship before. They already write our laws (through lobbies) elect our leaders (with money) and create public opinion (with money and PR). If you’re interested in how and why that happened, please read my book Life Inc. But they have always tended to do so by working around government’s efforts to limit their influence.

It was a losing game for a government by the people, of course, because almost no one gets into office without the kind of corporate assistance they need to pay back if they want to get into office again. Meanwhile, while corporations have enjoyed the benefits of personhood for over a century, they don’t suffer the main pitfalls: chiefly, death – but also despair, fatigue, and the need to feed their kids. They could outrun or at least outlast any effort to curb their influence. That’s how the railroads got to trample States’ rights to their own land, how GE got out of cleaning the Hudson River, and so on. They just wait, make a little progress, and then wait some more.

The era of Obama seemed to promise something different. Here was candidate who, at least initially, raised more cash through decentralized means than by appealing to large centralized corporations. As a candidate funded through small donations by real people, he seemed to offer an antidote to business as usual. If a couple of hundred million people donating small amounts could, in aggregate, raise more money than a couple of hundred mega-corporations, then democracy stood a chance even as the PR and money driven spectacle it has become. Of course, Obama’s later donations turned out to be just as corporate as anyone else’s (if for no other reason than that they smelled a winner), and his hands almost as tied. He raised so much, he rejected the campaign finance tenets he had promised to adhere to back when he thought he’d be the underfunded candidate.

But the lasting sense was still that real people might be able to exercise at least some influence over who gets elected to office. Maybe, just maybe, the net and a new spirit of participation could play some small role in the democratic process and even make incremental progress in developing campaign finance reforms. Meanwhile, over the last thirty years, legislators on both sides of the aisle have sought to free themselves of corporate influence, and passed what legislation they could limiting corporate campaign contributions (especially by non-humans).

Luckily for corporations, the activist justices appointed by an earlier version of our corporatist government (the Bush 2 regime) have decided to reverse this process. Instead of acting as as stopgap to preserve constitutional rights, they are serving as a new legislative branch – rewriting the law by declaring it unconstitutional. It is a violation of corporations’ civil liberties to limit their influence over the political process. Even though they are artificial entities, with greater access to capital, infinite longevity, and no interest in or connection to humanity, we now guarantee them the right of free speech.

Of course, the right of free speech was created in order for human beings to have the ability to talk back to the corporation – the British East India Trading Company – that was running the colonies before the Revolutionary War. And it was upheld a century later so that laborers could organize unions or speak out against industrial abuses without fear of getting killed. (Even though most unions, perhaps predictably, ended up becoming as abstracted as the corporations they were created to counteract.) Freedom of speech was intended a way for human beings to guarantee their ability speak out against largely systemic and structural repression. Now, that structural repression itself has that same guarantee.

All this does is make centralized government even less relevant to our plight as human beings. I admire folks like Larry Lessig for their faith in our ability to reclaim a government by the people, to use the net to expose and even reverse corporate influence in the political process, and for us to legislate a commons back into human affairs (even though it has been on the decline for the past 600 years).

But I’ve got more faith in our ability, as people, to rebuild our society and economy from the bottom up, without the participation or approval of a corporate-funded and corporate-driven central government. We can rebuild local economies based on the abundance of our labor and resources rather than the scarcity of centrally issued currency. We can rebuild local agriculture based on the quality of the topsoil, the features of the climate, and the nutritional needs of people rather than corn lobby laws. And we can rebuild our mechanisms for making meaning based on our shared hopes and values rather than those developed by PR firms to make us compete for false, individualistic goals.

In short, I say screw ‘em. Let’s do this ourselves.

ETSY talk

I’m honored to be speaking at Etsy in Dumbo, Brooklyn, this month about the creation of value and how to exchange it directly with others.

The people at Etsy are my heroes, so this should be particularly fun. The talk is free but you’re supposed to rsvp. You can also watch it live online, but you still have to register for that. From the Etsy site:

Come on down on January 21, 2010, at 7 p.m ET at Etsy, 55 Washington Street, Suite 512, Brooklyn, NY 11201. This is a free event open to the public and refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP here.

If you’re not in the New York area, you can join us through a live web-broadcast in the Virtual Labs, Etsy’s online multi-user chat room of the future. (You don’t need to RSVP. You just need to be signed in to Etsy. Registering for an Etsy account is free. Learn more about how Etsy’s online multi-user Virtual Labs work.)

It’s Up to Us

I posted this about a year ago – the night of Obama’s election. A few people have mentioned it to me in the past week, so I thought I’d repost it now.

Though I share in the jubilation at Obama’s election, I find I’m also a bit guarded. Holding back, as if afraid to get “fooled again” by the promise of new leadership.

To be sure, it’s going to feel good and be good for America to have a potential world leader as our president – someone who, instead of bringing himself down to the level of the least common denominator, actually demands that we raise ourselves to his level of discourse and sophistication. Friends are asking me what words like “bipartisanship” mean – a sure sign that they are actually, finally interested in how government functions and what it is Obama might do to change it.

But I’ve also got the nagging sense that too many of us are still hoping and waiting for what Obama’s going to do. As if the president somehow enacts policies or spends money in a way that makes everything better. This is not what a president does. Yes, there are certainly public works programs Obama can promote, to rebuild highways or develop alternative energy technologies while giving jobs to more Americans. These are potentially great top-down stimuli for a failed economy and neglected infrastructure – but they do not rebuild a society ravaged by runaway deregulated capitalism and military misadventure.

That part is up to us. And in this sense, we must take Obama at his word: the moment is now, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The election of Obama is itself a cue. It’s a cue that America can elect a smart, capable, and caring person as its leader. That we are capable of transcending the logic of short-term self-interest, fear, and even racism. And if we are capable of doing this, it means we are better than we act most of the time. This moment is the bang of the starter’s pistol – an awakening, an opportunity.

When there’s a big blackout in New York, especially during the summer, some people take it as a “cue” to start looting. It’s not that the blackout itself makes it significantly to break down store fronts; it’s not that the police are so very busy with the blackout. The lights going out is a cue to behave differently – to release the hidden potential for vandalism and long-repressed rage.

Likewise, the election of a black man to the presidency is a cue that something has changed. As my friend, Ari Wallach explained to me on my new radio show last night, it’s a kind of “shock and awe.” There’s a thoughtful, progressive and black president-elect on the cover of the New York Post. The cognitive dissonance this generates is an opportunity to reprogram. It’s what advertisers and social programmers try to do in pretty much every communication they make. It’s as big a disconnect and reconnect as 9-11 was, only constructive instead of destructive. A narrative is broken; another is born.

But this new narrative is not the story of how we are led by some new person. It’s the story of how we lead ourselves. It’s about how we accept the cue to act.

Everyone I know in my own circles is obsessed with creating the next big Internet phenomenon or organization to marshall all this energy and help people do their own bottom-up activities. I’ve been invited to a few dozen meetings already for such projects, and I’m happy to see everyone so enthused. But if everyone wants to do the “meta” job of creating a brand or utility through which activism happens, then there will be no one left to do the actual organizing.

No, the opportunity is not to create the next great website for modeling bottom-up community activity, but to go and actually do the stuff. It is to participate the public school, work towards alternative energy possibilities, design and install bicycle lanes, argue at work for equal pay for women, assist local agriculture projects, develop complementary currencies and non-profit credit unions.

My faith in the change we need will be strengthened by my own and others initiative. Obama can inspire us, and even remove some of the obsolete regulations preventing progressive activities from taking hold. His ability to lead us out of this mire into a brighter future will be limited, however, by our own capacity to engage.

Obama’s going to be busy for while, anyway. Two wars, a dozen failed federal agencies, and a banking industry that needs to be dismantled are going to take up a lot of his time and energy. While he attends to mitigating the damage of past failures, it is we who need to build a new society based on the values we share but have closeted during these decades of institutionalized self interest.

How? Where? Just go out the door and look around. There are opportunities literally everywhere. If we do get fooled again, it will only be because we have fooled ourselves.

Here’s original post and comments.