Archive for July 26th, 2008

I’ve been on a National Geographic Magazine binge; so many of their feature articles are fascinating investigations of society through the lens of science, conservation or travel. One, entitled The Genius of Swarms, takes a look at the ability of certain groups to be smarter than their individual components.

“Ants aren’t smart,” Gordon says. “Ant colonies are.” A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

The tendency manifests itself in diverse species who seem to act as one even though no one is giving orders.

Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Instead, ant colonies, caribou herds and bee hives all rely on the signals and actions of their peers. Relying on local information and simple principles, groups exhibit the capacity to solve complex problems.

Businesses and governments are taking note. Firms with complicated logistical challenges, say delivering expensive, flammable gas in the least expensive and safe manner, are learning from ants and reaping the rewards of facsimile. The military is having success with “Centibots project, an investigation to see if as many as a hundred robots could collaborate on a mission.”

Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite example, has used swarm intelligence to create a resource of immense value and seen through biological understandings, it is clear why principles like NPOV have come to be enshrined in Wikipedian policy: they are the simple rules of thumb which help shape collective action.

The NGM article is really only a small piece of the growing literature on what James Surowiecki calls the “Wisdom of the Crowds” and what Cass Sunstein investigated in “Infotopia.” I’d be interested in seeing some research into the methods of governance for swarms: although they are distributed actions, what are the norms and principles which govern them? How do these come into being? How are wild mobs without reason replaced by thoughtful decision-making groups? The article passes briefly over this,

Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. For those of us who sometimes wonder if it’s really worth recycling that extra bottle to lighten our impact on the planet, the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don’t see how.

But the answer to avoiding fads or market bubbles remain elusive.

In January, Bill Gates delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos calling upon the audience to embrace a “system innovation” to deliver the bottom billion, those poorest people, from poverty. In his reckoning, capitalism harnesses one major human motivator, self-interest, while government and philanthropy apply the other, care for others. Gates thinks a hybrid system is needed to address the dire needs of the impoverished.

“I like to call this new system creative capitalism – an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities.”

Creative capitalism would use dual incentives to solve hunger and disease: profits and altruism. Profit-driven firms would be more accountable while focusing on traditionally under-served markets. Take the example of “a Dutch company, which holds the rights to a cholera vaccine, retains the rights in the developed world, but shares those rights with manufacturers in developing countries. The result is a cholera vaccine made in Vietnam that costs less than $1 a dose – and that includes delivery and the costs of an immunization campaign.”

In response to Gates’s call to action, a number of prominent economists and lawyers have developed an online conversation about creative capitalism’s promise and its weaknesses. Participants include Nobel laureate Gary Becker, Judge Richard Posner and aid skeptic William Easterly. Many of the essays are critical.

Easterly writes, “Mr. Gates’ speech attacks the system that has historically done the most to alleviate poverty—traditional capitalism—in favor of an untried and implausible alternative—an illusory Third Way that mixes profits and altruism.” Posner opines that creative capitalism is nothing more than traditional PR-based charity which actually fits nicely with traditional capitalism.

After browsing the critiques, I think much of the trouble comes down to Gates’s nomenclature. The examples in his speech or C.K. Prahalad’s wonderful book, “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” are not truly a new system. Prahalad demonstrates the massive profits and opportunities open to firms which are willing to understand and enter the market of the poor.

The problem comes down to capitalism’s tendency to lead to thoughtless profit pursuit. What is needed is not creative capitalism (as Greg Mankiw said “I though capitalism WAS creative.”). What is needed is conscious capitalism. Mortgage brokers, borrowers and Wall Street investment bankers got a taste of unconscious capitalism with the subprime fiasco.

Part of the problem comes down to the way corporate governance is conducted: being under pressure to out-perform the last quarter every 3 months places an insane focus on short-term thinking. Judgement Day for those corporate officers with fidicuary responsibility to shareholders comes not once a lifetime, but 4 times a year. Accountability is good, but long-term thinking often falls by the wayside.

Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist and CEO of Creative Commons, noted something similar at a recent panel. Money makes people short-sighted and when coupled with the Internet’s efficiencies, he believes “fluctuation amplification occurs.” His hope is that capitalism will be injected with long-term thinking about issues like the commons.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ox02qM_yuc]

As it relates to the Internet, Joi worries that a rush to mobile-based connectivity will promote carriers who do not reinvest in the ecology of the Internet and who swallow profits for short-term gain.

The same could be said of Gates’s goal. The same wholistic approach which must be taken to defend the Internet’s openness is the approach which must be taken to invest in the poorest in our world. It requires awareness of the difficulties and opportunities of capitalism. By recognizing that today’s poor are next decade’s consumers, capitalism will continue to lift out of poverty millions, but only if it is done consciously.

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It’s official: China is now the largest Internet market with 253 million users. The number is only 19% of the Chinese population, well behind the 70% of Americans who are Internet users. Recent years have seen a noted increase in Internet penetration, especially among younger citizens. The rapid economic development of China has led to a significant segment of the population which has both the time and the money to be online.

There are many obstacles to the realization of international connectivity; among them:

• the difficulties of deploying digital infrastructure,
• the high cost of connections,
• language barriers, and
• cultural differences.

The first two barriers are certainly complex tasks which rely on technical, political and economic variables, but my gut feeling is that they are not as important as the other, less tangible hurdles. Undoubtedly someone with a more sophisticated understanding of network deployment could tell me why the Internet’s global penetration is not a guarantee, but on this topic I am optimistic. There is a hearty demand for the information-bearing networks and, in tow, a swarm of would-be ISPs, web services and advertisers seeking to support the demand. With development, we will see the digital divide crumble.

The cultural divide is what worries me.

The instantaneous, global spread of ideas is unprecedented in human history. Sure, the Silk Road is a fascinating example of the globalization of products and diseases; even a few ideas made the journey. Sure, by some measures the world was just as globalized prior to WWI. But the scale and extent of the current global information society dwarfs historical comparisons. For the first time in history, ordinary citizens have the capabilities to connect across the globe to people of wildly different backgrounds, histories and interests. It was supposed to be a sovereign realm unto itself where “governments of the industrial world… have no sovereignty.” Nationalism was supposed to disappear, to dwell in history with the horrific wars and conflicts it supported.

The reality, is quite different. The Economist notes that, “the very people whom the Internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions.” How can these painful distortions of humanity be limited in the digital realm? The answer, of course, isn’t clear, but my intuition is that it will not depend on hardware or software. A future free from conflict - digital and physical - will be paved by breaking down the cultural differences and coming to understand the reasons for differences of opinion.

One area technology may help is in breaking down the language barriers which make meaningful conversation difficult. Tools like Google Translate are a good start, but they are far from perfect and understanding the nuance behind political differences requires much more than what is available now. Instead, we must rely on human translation which introduces a level of bias (no matter how innocent the translator) and, oftentimes, shifts discussion to another location, as is the case with Global Voices.

Take the example that the New Yorker did in a recent piece on China’s rising cybernationalists. By all accounts, Tang Jie is on his way to becoming an accomplished academic who has a firm understanding of the West and the current international diplomatic scene. Tang is also the creator of an incredibly popular video which capitalized upon and created a nationalistic uproar earlier this year following the Tibetan protests in March and Olympic torch debacle in Paris. The video, embedded below, is full of crescendos of dramatic music, potent imagery and conspiratorial suggestions of a new Cold War run by a “cabal” against China.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=MSTYhYkASsA]

But below this sensational 6 minutes, as Evan Osnos’s excellent article explains, is a sophisticated, thoughtful thinker who approaches political disputes openly.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

However, although Tang and his friends point out valuable discrepancies in how America runs foreign or trade policy, the truth of the matter doesn’t get translated into his video. What has happened is a cultural homoginzation of tools, but underneath remains a cultural deviation of values. Both Students for a Free Tibet and Tang Jie communicate with supporters via online videos, but the underlying differences are masked by the same sensationalism that poisons CNN and Tang’s video.

A screenshot from Tang's video

In a rapid-fire media environment, the sort of enlightened exposure between thoughtful objectors needs to be cultivated - on both sides of the Pacific. Grace Wang is one of those enlightened thinkers, but the crazed online mob got in the way:

At Duke University, Grace Wang, a Chinese freshman, tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on campus. But online she was branded a “race traitor.” People ferreted out her mother’s address, in the seaside city of Qingdao, and vandalized their home. Her mother, an accountant, remains in hiding. Of her mother, Grace Wang said, “I really don’t know where she is, and I think it’s better for me not to know.”

Although I’m beginning to sound like a Luddite, I am anything but. For a long time I was outspoken in my belief that China was acting horribly in Tibet. The Internet, and listening openly to others, has given me a deeper, more levelled understanding. I think attentively designed conversations will arise in the amazing information landscape of the Internet. We just need to consciously recognize the technical and cultural inputs to do so. And we need to recognize that they may not be universally embraced. For example, although the American tradition is steeped in recognizing freedom of expression as a foundational element of political discourse, a majority of polled Chinese approve of government control of information. So, I’m reminded of Rebecca MacKinnon’s headline during the recent Tibetan protests: Is discussion possible? It is a question of acute importance whose answer relies on both the technical and cultural.

I’ve been cleaning up my saved RSS feeds - a tedious but rewarding task - and came across an inspired speech by Susan Crawford that was delivered at the Freedom to Connect conference. In it, she takes a critical look at the market forces influencing network providers and decides that a crucial element for the future of the generative Internet is the “countervailing power of users/consumers.”

“User power needs to be organized in response to the network operators’ power.  It needs to be aggregated and made visible.  Without it, we’ll have no votes, no policy changes, and the oligopolists will be able to continue to act with unfettered discretion.”

To this end, Crawford is the founder of OneWebDay which seeks to be an Earth Day for the web. To make manifest the users who can provide a check on oligopolistic ISPs, OneWebDay is soliciting stories about your experience with the Internet.

OneWebDay is September 22nd and there is plenty to check out before then.

The US Constitution and centuries of case law provide strong protection from government searches and seizures. As basic of a right as any in this country is the necesity for reasonable suspicion before a search is allowed by agents of the government. However, recent court rulings have carved out a niche which makes warrantless searches of laptops at borders legal even without reasonable suspicion. That means border agents can now confiscate and search laptops or other computers crossing the border without justification.

Under the ruse of the war of terror, this federal policy of searching laptops for security has been used to broadly investigate lesser crimes without the judicial oversight which is fundamental to this country.

Executives have been told that they must hand over their laptop to be analyzed by border police–or be barred from boarding their flight. A report from a U.S.-based marijuana activist says U.S. border guards browsed through her laptop’s contents; British customs agents scan laptops for sexual material; so do their U.S. counterparts.

Not only does this pose problems for business executives with trade secrets stored on their devices, attorneys with privileged information or political activists, it takes advantage of the way in which digital memory is used. Increasingly, digital storage serves as an extension of our brains - the last bastion of privacy. Why bother remembering the details of your client’s case when you can store all of it digitally?

In face of this dramatic change in privacy protection, a number of infotech advisors have suggested ways to protect your privacy at the border.

• The EFF, who is pushing for Congressional oversight of the issue, discusses the imperfection of encryption and the move towards using blank devices for international travel.
• Declan McCullagh explains how to encrypt sensitive data on your machine.
• Chris Soghoian uses web storage or FedEx to cross borders without any data on his computer.

So, next time you are traveling internationally and want to protect the privacy which is enshrined in our Constitution, do so with the techniques listed above.

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