politics

If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

No, not contemporary, but Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics from 1964. More:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

Compare to certain pundit’s obsession with historical analogy:

The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

This past semester I took an excellent course entitled Infrastructure Studies: Knowledge, Distribution and Power that took a broad, sociological view of the concept of infrastructure. For the term paper, I examined the GDP through the lens of infrastructure and classification schemes. The paper is embedded below or available for download (under a CC BY license) here.
A “Vulgar” Measure: GDP as Infrastructure
Incidentally, the day before the paper was due, a straightforward introduction to the troubles with GDP was published in the NYT Magazine.

In Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner (a great introduction to mobile phone scholarship), the authors contrast two social movements facilitated by mobile phones: the 2001 protests in the Philippines which ousted Joseph Estrada and the 2004 demonstrations at the Republic National Convention. Working off a 1975 book, The Strategy of Social Protest, in which William Gamson argues that oppositional movements fail, at least in part, due to their tendency towards factionalization.

“Those protest groups that had the ability to maintain a unified focus and ideology were the most successful. Those that were plagued by competition between different factions were not as successful in carrying out their agenda. Carrying this thought into the realm of personalized mobile communication, it is clear that, while the mobile telephone can help to facilitate the logistics of protest it can also facilitate the logistics of ideological splits.”

They speculate that, compared to the Filipino protests, the RNC protesters did not significantly disrupt the convention because there was no unified focus – environmentalists rubbed shoulders with pacifists who bumped into pro-choice supporters. Although they all opposed the RNC, the protesters never came together for something.

As a specific matter, the choice of the RNC protests has its strengths and weaknesses. If the metric of success was “significant disruption” of the convention, I think the sophistication of the NYPD and fear of ever repeating the 1968 Chicago DNC experience makes such disruption highly unlikely (just as significantly disrupting trade talks after Seattle 1999 is highly unlikely); however, this example is nice because just four years later, many of those discordant protesters were successfully united in opposition to the GOP, this time under the banner of Hope, Change and Obama ’08.

More generally, understanding the relationship between nichification and digital democracy seems like a fruitful exercise. A few years ago, Clay Shirky wrote about the rise of the mega-niche in Wired, and that magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, made the theory of The Long Tail famous. Both concepts point towards the role of ICTs, and especially the Internet, in facilitating factionalization: I’m a student who cares about the esoteric issue of copyright reform, so I can find an organization especially for students who care about copyright reform.

To what extent is this involvement to the detriment of my broader political engagement, perhaps by isolation in Sunstein’s digital echo chambers? And how do leaders of movements keep them unified? (At least as far as the Obama effort, Micah Sifry has some thoughts about the post-election disunity and how it might have been avoided.) On a global level, if some cultures are more individualistic or communal, will ICTs differently affect their digital democracy efforts?

One of the most pressing topics in the digital activism debate is that of slacktivism, a “pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts also tend to require little personal effort from the slacktivist.”

Livestrong wristbands or green-tinted avatars are some prime examples of what Evgeny Morozov calls “the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation”. He worries that the same lowered transaction costs that were supposed to make activism more accessible are, in fact, displacing effective models of change:

“The real issue here is whether the mere availability of the “slacktivist” option is likely to push those who in the past might have confronted the regime in person with demonstrations, leaflets, and labor organizing to embrace the Facebook option and join a gazillion online issue groups instead. If this is the case, then the much-touted tools of digital liberation are only driving us further away from the goal of democratization and building global civil society.”

But placing political importance on every politically-inclined action misses the motivation behind it. Much of the involvement in what is seen as digital activism should, instead, be seen through the lens of social activity.

Fred Stutzman noted this while examining the success of the Students Against Facebook News Feed, a group that garnered hundreds of thousands of members and encouraged Facebook management to implement significant changes in one of their most important site updates:

In the Facebook, groups are arbitrary affiliation vectors. Groups can be whimsical, such as a group named after a movie quote, or serious, such as a group dedicated to volunteering. Groups are costless to join, and they simply require a click of the mouse to join. Many users partake in a large number of groups; groups are generally thought of as a low-involvement way to make identity statements.

Certainly many of the group members disliked the changes to Facebook, but this is unlikely to be the only, or even the predominant, motivating factor for “slacktivists.” Instead, as Stutzman mentions, these digitally mediated acts are ways to craft an identity. As danah boyd writes in her essay on teens’ use of social networking sites [PDF], these sites “are providing teens with a space to work out their identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life.” Joining the Barack Obama for President group or tinting your Twitter avatar green may do little to actually beat McCain or Ahmadinejad, but that is not the motivation for many of the clicks. It isn’t, as Evgeny writes, that “our digital efforts make us feel very useful and important but have zero social impact.” Instead, it is that the digital acts are innately social that they have impact, but for important personal social interests, not necessarily wider societal goals.

To be fair, the widespread misinterpretation of digitally mediated actions isn’t just due to the skeptics who rightly point out that traditional power structures still matter. The digital activism adherents also place too much emphasis on the case studies like the recent Trafigura kerfuffle where Twitter hashtags seemed to play an important role. They look at cases like Students Against Facebook New Feed and see a political act where much of the action was, in fact, motivated by personal social motives. Mainstream media stories that breathlessly count the number of group members or new trending topics on Twitter are to blame, as well.

Humans are diversely motivated beings, and often these motivations are mundane or vain; it’s important to recall this while celebrating or vilifying next week’s digital activism case study.

[Photo credit]

To what extent can we quantify human action?

Given rapidly expanding computational capacity and the proliferation of cheap sensors, there is a large, distributed trend towards human quantification. Wired Magazine confidently threw it on the cover of its July 2009 issue, celebrating self-tracking as popularized by the Nike + iPod system. It’s certainly a trend with a lot of momentum, and I imagine a lot of success will be had by people building businesses around it, but I’m increasingly worried about the way in which the concept is treated in gushing terms and without an understanding of its limitations.

To be clear, I think there is solid evidence that making explicit certain types of information can induce better behavior. One of the best examples is the feedback loop created by displaying energy use in real-time to homeowners, a practice that has been shown to reduce energy consumption. In fact, anyone who has driven a Prius can probably attest to their effort to keep the real-time MPG monitor in the higher numbers, an effort that changed my driving habit for the more efficient.

But I think too much exuberance for human quantification runs the risk of falling prey to a form of techno-utopianism that has already stricken many fields.

This post was catalyzed by two recent articles. The first, by copyright crusader turned political reformer, Larry Lessig, is an extended critique of the drive towards more transparency in government. He writes,

“We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust.”

For Lessig, the work of groups like the Sunlight Foundation or MAPLight (“money and politics: illuminating the connection”) are too simplistic. The problems these groups rightfully seek to fix are too complex to be solved by transparency alone.

“This is the problem of attention-span. To understand something–an essay, an argument, a proof of innocence– requires a certain amount of attention. But on many issues, the average, or even rational, amount of attention given to understand many of these correlations, and their defamatory implications, is almost always less than the amount of time required. The result is a systemic misunderstanding–at least if the story is reported in a context, or in a manner, that does not neutralize such misunderstanding. The listing and correlating of data hardly qualifies as such a context. Understanding how and why some stories will be understood, or not understood, provides the key to grasping what is wrong with the tyranny of transparency.”

Now, perhaps the people who need to know the entire story – the trial judges, the political decision-makers – will take the time to look past a simplistic “money + politician = bribe” equation, but I think the worry is legitimate. The reason for the worry is the seductiveness of simplicity.

This is a point Paul Krugman makes strongly in his recent essay about failure of economists to predict or avoid the current recession. As he chronicles the shortcomings of modern economic thought, he writes,

“As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

The “impressive-looking mathematics” are the economic models that academics have conceived and investors embraced. The short-comings of these have been noted time-and-again by critics like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Richard Bookstaber (whose book I reviewed here), but these are minority voices. Bookstaber’s Congressional testimony is actually quoted by Krugman:

One thing that seems clear is that risk models that are designed to function in normal market conditions should not be relied upon to predict outcomes in times of crisis. On this account, VaR doesn’t kill banks; executives who don’t recognize the limits of VaR [the value-at-risk financial model] kill banks. As Bookstaber put it, “one has to look beyond VaR, to culprits such as sheer stupidity or collective management failure: The risk managers missed the growing inventory [of risky assets], or did not have the courage of their conviction to insist on its reduction, or the senior management was not willing to heed their demands. In other words, models succeed because they meet the needs of real human beings, and VaR was just what they needed during the boom.

This, to me, is the same point that Lessig was making – technologically-induced simplicity (in the form of “money + politician = bribe” or VaR) is seductive and likely to be misinterpreted to the detriment of society.

Certainly some people understand this. Carl Malamud, who has led an impressive effort to opening up government, responded to Lessig’s article as such,

“Lessig’s point is that transparency, naked and by itself, with no broader and deeper aims, will not automatically produce good results, and may indeed produce randomness in our government or far worse. Merely revealing data is not enough. One must work with it, work with policy, and monitor effects. Transparency without a long-term commitment to policy is transparency without context, transparency that is merely naked…”

The parallel for Krugman’s world is, very likely, the work of behavioral economists who are placing humanity’s knack for irrational activity within the framework of economic thought. However, in his vehement response to Krugman’s essay, U Chicago professor John Cochrane writes,

“The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research…”

This is what Lessig calls “the problem of attention-span,” and even were Krugman and Cochrane to coalesce into a sophisticated macroeconomic theory that took into account the limits of human quantification, I fear the simple, erroneous models will win the day (again).

Update: Tim Wu responds to Lessig’s piece with an important reminder that civic virtue is the key ingredient, not technology.

[Image Credit 1 and 2]

This may be a week of Costa Rican sun and 24 hours of travel speaking, but amidst the search for viable business models for journalism, should we actually want monopoly?

As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, monopoly rents were a large reason newspapers were able to sustain expensive, important journalistic endeavors like investigative or foreign reporting. As the geographic monopoly source of information, newspapers could charge extraordinary rates for advertisements. In turn, these profits subsidized the type of reporting that Paul Starr rightly notes is essential to democracy. More efficient competition, like targeted online advertising, has undermined this status quo.

So, does (limited?) monopoly information control, have a desirable benefit? Could Google’s continued rise and importance to online advertisers signal a new opportunity to capture monopoly prices and subsidize “hard journalism”?

It goes without saying that this vast, unprecedented level of global monopoly would have terrible effects, so, more prudently, perhaps the title of this post should be “should we wish for false-monopoly?”

It’s late; help me figure this out.

[Sorry for longish, rambling post, but it's important.]

In 2001/2002, MIT unveiled MIT Open CourseWare – an initiative to make available the material from their classes. For free. Online. Today, they publish more than 500 courses per annum – ranging from simply syllabi and assignments to full video recordings. They have been joined by Yale, University of Michigan, Tufts, Notre Dame and hundreds more around the world. (And, if things go to plan, Georgetown will be joining soon.)

MIT could have joined the dime-a-dozen for-profit distance learning businesses that sprouted up with the Internet, but given the dramatically decreased costs of publishing online, MIT, with the generous support of some very charitable foundations, decided to change the game. And I think, in time, that game change will change the world.

But to get there – that changed world where higher education doesn’t remain the purview of a select cadre of ivory tower dwellers – much more needs to be done.

I’ve been involved trying to make sure Georgetown does its part, but now is the time for big thinking. We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars to stimulate the economy and, one hopes, prime it for continued success.

Education is a key part of continued competitiveness, growth and success. It’s no secret that the United States cannot compete on manufacturing cars or sewing t-shirts. We need to develop the human capital to embrace our future as a knowledge economy. We need a population equipped to research, develop, synthesize, manipulate and invent new information. We need education to get there.

Yet, America is falling further and further behind. Our primary education system has been hemorrhaging opportunity for decades. Fortunately, we have had an unrivaled network of institutions of higher education. The world’s best and brightest come to American universities – the same ones American high school students aspire to join. These schools have – through their introductory courses – served to catch up students from diverse backgrounds. In essence, our universities have made up for high school failures (at least for the students who make it through the high schools to universities).

But we’re failing to do that now.

In his recent interview with Charlie Rose, Harvard professor Michael Porter, who studies international competitiveness noted that America has fallen out of the top 10 in college attainment. Although we have many of the best colleges in the world, supply is falling short of demand.

That is why Open CourseWare makes sense now, more than ever. We need to utilize the Internet to “explode the classroom.”

People crave education. Laid off factory workers don’t want to work at Wal-Mart. They want to receive knowledge so that they can compete again. In a Biblically bad economy, people don’t curl up and cry. They seek knowledge to make sense of the world. And thanks to UC-Irvine and MIT, plenty of people are turning to OCW to study finance and management.

Whether you like it or not, the government is going to be a big part of our economy for the foreseeable future. It has always played a role in education – establishing universities, funding research and employing top academics. My argument is that it should play a role in opening higher education to all.

This could take many forms:

• Mike Caulfield has been doing some thinking about why OCW is stimulus worthy. The idea is to fund OCW efforts at any university that commits to produce 10 courses in an open manner. Financial constraints are one of the main challenges to OCW, so let’s stop paying dying industrial car companies, and let’s fund the next generation of thinkers.
• I’ve mused that perhaps OCW should be framed in terms of taxpayer access. Just as my paying taxes to NIH justifies my access to their research, shouldn’t my taxes to the University of Illinois justify my access to an OCW site of theirs? (By the way, NIH Open Access is threatened. Please help.)
• And most recently, the very smart folks at the New America Foundation have included a proposal for an “Open University” in 10 New Higher Education Ideas for a New Congress:

(6) Open University

Approximately 5 million adult workers displaced by global trade will need education and retraining over the next 10 years. There are millions of additional adults who have some college, but no degree-many of whom would like and should be encouraged to complete their studies. Modeled on Great Britain’s 40-year-old and well-regarded Open University, Congress could seed a non-profit American Open University that provides low-cost, quality online education to undergraduate and graduate adult learners everywhere. Students would benefit from the flexible higher education course times and offerings associated with distance education programs. An American Open University would need to be seeded with $100 million over five years to begin operation and guarantee students access to financial aid. (Five years in, accreditation would attach, thereby enabling students to access the main federal financial aid programs.) Priority should be placed on proposals that partner with existing, accredited colleges and universities.

Pros: Future-oriented, big idea; appeals to working class and professional adults wanting or needing to go back to school for undergraduate or graduate training; successful model in the existing Western Governors University started by Governors Roy Roemer (D-CO) and Mike Leavitt (R-UT); low cost.

Cons: Traditional higher education community will oppose competition claiming inadequate quality assurance and duplication of both for-profit University of Phoenix and non-profit university distance education offerings (e.g., University of Maryland); United States Open University failed in 2001 when British financing was pulled before the school was accredited-a problem avoided here with seed financing.

Moderate Alternative: American Open University grant funds could instead be distributed to existing state colleges and universities to develop and expand distance education course and degree programs. Priority would be given for programs directed at degree and certificate completion for those adults with some prior college credit. This moderate alternative removes most of the traditional higher education community’s expected opposition, but reduces visionary appeal.

I’m not particularly biased in favor of one option over the others, but know that something needs to be done to open education to more people. We are already seeing wonderful exhibitions of what is possible on top of an education infrastructure (see here and here). If we expand the free (as in freedom, if not price) educational content available, we can unleash a new generation of knowledge workers who will pull us out of this crisis.

When I was younger, I had very clear political ambitions. I wanted to climb the D.C. ladder.

That is, until I realized that some of my political convictions were strongly against the politically correct positions high-powered politicians were expected to have. In middle school I was writing my Senators condemning China over its Tibet policies. More recently, my digital history is strewn with strongly worded denouncements of powerful interests like the big content industries. All of this is not even touching on the realities of friendships played out online – jokes that may strike third parties as off-color or unprofessional.

The reality of having lived a strongly opinionated and Internet-heavy life is that I have a history of content which could easily be dug up by opposition staffers after a would-be appointment. Luckily for me, for the most part I don’t think my skeletons will ever be worthwhile to dig up. But plenty of my generation’s closets will be searched. What to make of the coming storm?

The Economist jumps into this fascinating question with a very smart article discussing the future of politics and reputation. Astutely noting, “who has a closet without a skeleton?,” the article uses Obama’s intensive vetting process as a harbinger of things to come.

But I don’t think that covering up people’s unsavory pasts is likely to be sustainable. Instead, I think we are moving towards a society of disclosure and acceptance – Obama never had to confront breaking news that he tried cocaine because he disclosed it well before he was a Presidential candidate. Not everyone can have best-selling books, though.

Instead, I think the next forty years will be a roller coaster where my generation’s past will sink many a rising star. Only the most adept will be able to avoid the career-stunting attention paid to their youthful indiscretion, but, in the end, we’ll (hopefully) have a society more accepting of the human, in failure and success. We’ll turn the media spotlight on ourselves and recognize that we’ve all done things we’re not proud of and that it doesn’t mean we are unqualified for public office.

The Economist reaches much the same conclusion. Although it seems that, “Only the very blandest, most media-savvy and controlled people, who have never uttered a controversial sentence in their lives, will be deemed fit to hold public office…” another possibility is that “Perhaps, when dirt on almost everybody becomes readily available, politics will lose its hypocritical, moralistic tone… That could make people realise that politicians, too, are only human, and make them more forgiving of minor transgressions.”

What do you think? Are we destined for blandness or acceptance?

Ari Melber, writing in The Nation, discusses the options Obama’s administration will have given the persisting digital connections between voters and his presidency – the phone numbers, email lists, MyBO members and the existing desires, manifest on Change.gov, to be involved and heard by the transition team.

He touches on a worry I’ve had, given Obama’s support and his unprecedented network to them.

Many Obama supporters want the network to turn from electoral politics to lobbying. After the election, half a million activists responded to an e-mail survey about the road ahead. The most popular goal was to help the administration “pass legislation,” according to campaign manager David Plouffe. If Obama’s initiatives stall in Congress, these activists will presumably back him instead of their local representatives. Combining the White House bully pulpit with constituent lobbying could have a dramatic effect on Obama’s presidency. Previous presidents have gone over the heads of Congress by appealing to the public, of course, but never with a parallel whip operation targeting representatives in their backyards. If the pressure works, the experiment could even alter the conventional balance of power. After all, citizens typically lobby the legislature for their own policy goals–not on behalf of another branch of government. While George W. Bush boosted executive power by routing around Congress, Obama may fortify executive power by mobilizing citizens to roll right over Congress.

The worry is that because local representatives do not have the digital Rolodexes stretching into the millions, they will not be able to motivate their constituents to the same extent Obama will. Any basic civics course will teach why slow deliberation is desirable, but Obama’s potential ability to force the hand of legislators will continue the consolidation of power in the executive branch that George W. Bush has so forcefully done.

Melber rightly points out, though, that the network isn’t merely a push medium – as Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler have so convincingly shown in Here Comes Everybody and The Wealth of Networks, respectively, digital tools empower the individual, as well. He points to MyBarackObama members using the campaign’s social network to protest against Obama’s support for warrantless wiretapping. The example, though, points to the unfortunate reality: although Obama heard the dissidents, he didn’t change his upcoming vote.

What remains to be seen, though, is whether other political offices can take advantage of the same tools. Are local representatives able to attract widespread attention for their social networks? It certainly makes sense to have an agora where all politicians could hear the voice of the people without CNN’s filters or Fox’s bias. Does it make sense for Congress to have a social network? Or, as the article points out, will that only be one more node that organizers have to address? Perhaps data portability can become a democracy 2.0 theme?

What do you think?

Nudge is a book which, in the 24 hours since I purchased it, has transformed how I think about the world. Co-authored by two University of Chicago professors, behavioral economist Richard Thaler and lawyer Cass Sunstein, Nudge brings a superb policy approach to the table. Although the name is unwieldy, “libertarian paternalism” has solved a major internal debate of mine.

Representative democracy is great. The devolution of power allows for freedoms which are often restricted in other forms of government. People’s ability to choose and influence government allows impersonal institutions to respond to personal needs. I’m a fervent believer in personal choice and support many civil libertarian causes.

At the same time, people can make some really dumb choices. Often, when I hear or witness some particularly uniformed opinions or decision, I’ll catch myself snottily thinking “…and these people get to vote? Great.” I’ll frequently voice support of a technocracy where the most skilled and brightest make decisions, insulated from the ignorant masses.

Yet, these two approaches are opposed to each other and I’ve struggled to make sense of my dual support. Luckily, Thaler and Sunstein have lent their considerable intellect to this problem and brought resolution in the form of libertarian paternalism which uses “architects of choice” to “nudge” people towards better decisions. The bad decisions people make are often the result of conditions outside their control: time restraints, financial limitations and a host of psychological phenomena which foster poor choices. Libertarian paternalism aims to create situations where it is easier to make the best choice while not limiting other options (as mandates would do).

Nudging recognizes that people respond to much more than incentives, as traditional economics would have you believe. Nudges recognize the complex array of options which make simple tax cuts or prison penalties unlikely to create the best outcomes. Nudges come down to designing systems which help people reach the best outcome. Full of examples, the book shows that seemingly innocent differences in order or defaults can have profound differences in outcomes.

Nudge is divided into three parts: an explanation of the theory, a series of policy recommendations, and responses to critics. The first portion is definitely my favorite as it lays the intellectual foundation for this idea which can play a part in many policy debates. Perhaps since I fall prey to a number of the blunders they outline (I’m young, I’ve got nothing to worry about!), I was not as enthralled with their discussions of how to improve credit markets or pharmaceutical plans, but I certainly hope that the right people do read those parts because the plans outlined to help millions are incredibly important additions to the national debate on issues as broad as environmental protection to investing to school choices.

Libertarian paternalism recognizes that humans are fallible and need help. It knows that experts have the experience to help. But it contrast to traditional paternalism, it recognizes the failings of government mandate and that knowledge is dispersed and people, if given appropriate settings, can make the best decisions for themselves.  So, allow me to nudge you towards their website or Amazon page where you can purchase it for yourself.

[Also by Sunstein is Infotopia.]