Source
Automatically imported from: http://commons.somewhere.com:80/rre/1995/TNO.2.2.html
Content
| | | | --- | --- | | Red Rock Eater Digest | Most Recent Article: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 |
TNO 2(2).
``` ---
T H E N E T W O R K O B S E R V E R
VOLUME 2, NUMBER 2 FEBRUARY 1995
---
This month: The industrial organization of public debate How can we make Free-Nets free? Democratic politics in a networked society Newt-O-Rama
---
Welcome to TNO 2(2).
This issue includes two articles by guest authors. Peter Harter of the National Public Telecomputing Network explains how NPTN thinks about the future of Free-Nets, given that computers and the skills to maintain them are not free. No single answer suffices, but it's important to map out the whole range of options so that the people who really need free access can get it, and so that the whole community can benefit from the beneficial effects of free electronic information services, just as they benefit now from libraries.
Also in this issue, Joe Costello calls for political progressives to abandon the doomed bureaucracies of Washington and rediscover the original spirit of democracy in movements for decentralized self-governance. Information technology, Joe argues, makes such changes both necessary and possible. Joe is best known for the famous 800 number in Jerry Brown's 1992 presidential campaign, and he has a lot to say about the role technology can play in restoring the health of our political system.
Opening the issue is an article of my own, the first installment in a planned series of reflections on what I greatly enjoy calling "the industrial organization of public debate". Talk radio hosts don't just come up with those arguments off the tops of their heads. No way -- they have a whole elaborate industry backing them up. This industry isn't a conspiracy any more than the auto industry is -- it produces things that paying customers want, it obeys the laws of supply and demand, it is fiercely competitive, and it is undergoing rapid changes that are partly technological and partly not. Once we see political arguments as industrial artifacts -- even the ones your friends use at parties -- the whole world looks different. The "follow-up" this month includes some bits of retraction and clarification regarding my comments on IDI (Issue Dynamics Inc), one of whose on-line campaigns I discussed in TNO 1(12) and 2(1), plus an unusually interesting batch of pointers to net resources.
Finally, an administrative note. I have recently done some editing on the back issues of TNO. If you have any issues of TNO in a gopher server or other public archive, I'd much appreciate if you could retrieve the current versions. This can be done by sending messages that look like this:
To: rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu Subject: archive send tno-january-1995
using the month of the issue you want to fetch. Or else you can simply make a pointer to the WWW version of TNO, whose URL is:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/tno.html
Thanks very much.
---
Notes on the industrial organization of public debate.
One day in the mid 1980's I was passing through a shop, the Tech Coop at MIT to be precise, when I heard two shop clerks debating one of the major issues of the day, nuclear weapons. One had a liberal perspective and the other had a conservative perspective. What struck me was that none of their arguments was original. All of them were, seemingly word-for-word, arguments that I had heard in other settings -- in the newspaper, on the radio, in protest meetings, debates among other people, and so forth. This is not to deprecate these clerks. To the contrary, it struck me that most political debate is like this. Since we are all finite creatures, we usually cannot come up with good arguments off the tops of our heads. If we wish to debate the issues of our day, we need a source of arguments. And it seemed to me that the success of a political movement depends to some extent on its ability to produce a steady stream of arguments and distribute them to its followers. When highly developed in the context of a market economy, the production and distribution of arguments becomes an industry that we can analyze like any other.
This article begins a series of sociological meditations on the industrial organization of public debate. The relevance of this topic to The Network Observer is that, as I will get around to arguing at some point, new technologies are playing a role in ongoing changes in the conduct of public debate. At the same time, though, industrially organized public debate has an underlying grammar that new technology does remarkably little to change.
One of the reasons I noticed the debate about nuclear weapons in the Tech Coop was that, during that same period, I was the holder of a fellowship from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation. John Hertz became wealthy through Hertz Rent-a-Car, and being a strong anti-communist he left his fortune to the support of military research. In practice the fellowships are administered by a group of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories working with Edward Teller. These are the people who have pushed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars", recently renamed to something innocuous and no doubt to be renamed again under the terms of the new Republican congressional agenda). You'll surely recall that SDI was the subject of a prominent public controversy during this period.
The Hertz Fellowships paid well and had few strings attached, and I don't feel particularly bad about taking the money. One of the strings, though, was an invitation to attend an annual lunch with the people from the Foundation. I vividly recall one such lunch, at which Edward Teller spoke. The substance of his remarks was a defense of SDI against various common criticisms. Now the people in the room were largely supportive of SDI, and in fact many of them actually worked on it, so they did not need to be convinced. And they were not stupid people by any means. Yet I was struck by how much credence the audience gave the arguments, given how little sense they made when considered logically. I realize that it's easier to see the fallacies in arguments you disagree with. But it seemed to me at the time that the purpose of the arguments was not to convince anybody in the room, or even to stand up under logical scrutiny, but to be adequate weapons on actual occasions in which audience members might find themselves defending SDI against critics. The arguments were, in common parlance, rhetorical "ammo". The metaphor is apt: ammo doesn't have to make sense; it just has to disable or kill.
I expect that many people, in reading this story, will regard me as cynical, or as setting out to trash my patrons by denigrating their motives for feeding me a free lunch. But this is not my intention at all. I first began to formulate my ideas about these phenomena in the context of military technology issues in the 1980's because those were the issues that most affected my life -- being someone who occasionally walked around the corner from my military funded research lab to get risk arrest while protesting on the front steps of the military funded research lab next door. The irony here was never lost on me, and I spent a great deal of time thinking about it.
Yet I do not imagine that the phenomena I'm describing are limited to the military, or to the political right, or to people I disagree with. To the contrary, I think that virtually all political debate works this way. A speech at a reproductive rights demonstration on the state capitol steps serves the function of distributing debating points to the faithful, just as Edward Teller's speech did at the Hyatt. These speeches serve a variety of other functions, of course, but the distribution of debating points is one of them, regardless of whether the participants think of it in those terms. The larger question is, how does the system of distribution of political arguments work? How has it evolved? What determines its form and its effectiveness? How does it interact with technology? And does it have an inherent political bias?
One test of a good idea is, once you hear it you start to see examples of it everywhere. And at first I did see many examples. But it took real work before I came to see whole world as pervaded by industrially organized public debate. Much of the phenomenon is hidden by several effects. One such effect is that people who believe in a point of view generally do not stop to scrutinize sympathetic arguments as industrial artifacts; to the contrary, they nod their agreement and then maybe reproduce the argument themselves when the occasion arises later on. Another factor tending to hide the phenomenon is that public relations, one major component of the industry, frequently operates behind the scenes, for example through articles that public relations practitioners persuade reporters to write. Yet another factor is that pundits and talk show hosts generally maintain an image of themselves as wholly individual voices, when in fact they are supplied by a considerable infrastructure of think tanks, wire services, activists pushing particular stories, and so forth. A final factor is that both liberals and conservatives invest tremendous energy articulating the hundred reasons why the other side has an unfair advantage in all things, so that it takes real intellectual work to see them as participants in a logic that, I would argue, is somewhat independent of the particular political points of view being conveyed. Which side has the resources to create a larger and more effective infrastructure, of course, is another question. But once you know about such infrastructures, the whole world looks different.
Consider, for example, the institutions known (at least in the United States) as "think tanks". (It's an awful phrase -- a common euphemism is "research institutes", though that latter phrase includes some scientific and technical institutions that do more than produce ammo for public debates.) Think tanks are businesses. They generally have nonprofit legal status, but they still have to take in money to pay their staff, and their customers will want something for that money. Think tanks thus compete for customers, have an interest in knowing those customers' needs, necessarily seek to innovate in their means of serving those needs, face strategic questions such as vertical integration, deal with organizational issues of centralization and decentralization, and so forth -- like any business.
But what do the customers of think tanks get for their money? They do get some physical objects, namely "studies" of certain policy questions. But these studies are not ends in themselves. Ultimately, the customers want to bring about certain material effects in the world by arranging for certain groups of people to hold certain beliefs. Customers who are private individuals most often want to propagate their own beliefs. Corporate customers want to propagate beliefs that will lead to actions that permit them to strengthen their competitive positions. Foundations work on agendas created through the social networks that govern them. In any case these "studies", then, are intermediate products in a longer pipeline whose ultimate intended product is other people's beliefs.
The public debate industry produces a wide variety of these intermediate products. For example, take the lists of "talking points" that each major political party faxes to a long list of its followers each day. Or political action alerts distributed on computer networks. Or the thumb-indexed handbooks that trade associations often distribute to their members, containing facts and figures and quotes that can be used in assembling an argument on a given topic. Or press packets. Or speeches at conventions. Or scripted spiels delivered through telemarketing with the goal of generating phone calls to Congress. Or many varieties of books and other print publications like newsletters for special audiences. In each case, we have a some kind of preaching to the converted, providing ammo for arguments aimed at persuading others down the line. When the preaching is organized professionally, through paid research staff and public relations people, we are clearly justified in calling it an "industry". But even when it's done by amateurs on their own time, it still has an economics and a social organization that have consequences and that deserve to be understood.
Future issues of TNO will have more to say about the industrial organization of public debate. We need to know a lot more about the logic of this industry before we can start to reason about the role of technology, much less the likely "effects" of technologies such as the Internet. As I keep saying, we cannot understand what role a technology will play in the world until we have enough good concepts to enable us to see the complicated interactions in enters into with everything else.
---
In defense of progress(ives).
Joe Costello Foundation Communications joec@cts.com
"Accelerated change invokes the gyroscopic or principles of rigidity. Also, to high-speed change no adjustment is possible. We become spectators only, and must escape into understanding. This may be why the conservative has an advantage in such an age of speedy change and is frequently more radical in his suggestions and insights than the progressive who is trying to adjust. The practical progressive trying to make realistic adjustments to change exhausts himself in minor matters and has no energy to contemplate the overall."
Marshall McLuhan, 1960
The Congress was the last bastion of liberal strength for an increasingly weak and fractured American progressive movement. The New Deal coalition captured and held Washington D.C. for over half a century. Forged in the economic crisis of the 1930's, the American progressive movement worked to create a society more politically, socially, and economically democratic. Over the past two decades, the foundation of this coalition has decayed. Cut off from its body, the head of the progressive movement floated in the giant glass jar of Washington. Clinging to increasingly archaic ideas of a fast-fading industrial era, the progressive community tried to push the central control levers of a factory that no longer functioned. In the last quarter century, the progressive community became a victim of its own inertia.
In this century, the progressive movement has been closely allied with the Democratic Party. It would do well for all progressives to go back and study the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party. Jefferson was one of the finest offspring of the Enlightenment. He implicitly understood the implications of the continuing growth of human knowledge, and that human society would have to evolve to metabolize the growth of human experience. As Jefferson wrote:
"I know also that the laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed and enlightened as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance and keep pace with the times."
This remains a radical view of the structure of human society. For millennia, human institutions gained a great measure of their authority through the simple feat of longevity, of passing on the past. Jefferson lived in an age of great discovery and innovation. He saw and participated in the deposing of institutions and thought that were grounded in millennia of tradition. Jefferson understood that the "progress of the human mind" was continuous.
Though the twentieth century has seen an unprecedented rate of transformation in human society, it is simply a branch in the tree of human history, which has roots deeper than the existence of the species. One of the greatest consequences of the industrial era was the ubiquity of centralization. The mechanical nature of industry fostered centralization in all aspects of society. As the industrial barons created their empires, the means to counter balance this power increasingly fell on the Federal Government.
As in the other ages a philosophy or theology was established to justify the power structure. The theology of economics has penetrated all aspects of society and has become the determinant of most of our actions both public and private. As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in Economic Perspectives:
"The continuing survival of classical (economic) beliefs protects business autonomy and its income and serve to obscure the economic power exercised as a matter of course by the modern enterprise by declaring that all power rests, in fact, with the market."
Money has become the principal medium of communication and command in all aspects of society. Monetary means of control and distribution are extremely undemocratic. Economic theologians can best be compared to Neoplatonists, spewing their elaborate economic treatises and formulas about perfect economic forms existing somewhere in the ether. In medieval times at the height of the Church's power, the congregation sat facing the alter while the priest stood with his back turned to them, chanting in unintelligible Latin. Similarly today, the economic congregation believes economics must have meaning because it has such a powerful control on their lives. Luther wasn't necessary, he was inevitable.
Humanity is rapidly approaching the end of the industrial era. Economic philosophy is increasingly unable to find answers to chronic problems and societal institutions are cracking at their foundations. Human society is being affected by the advancement of knowledge at a pace of unprecedented speed; human life is being impacted on every level. As the industrial era brought in new philosophies and tools of organization, so too will this new era.
The tools of this new era are being constructed from electronic media. Simply, the ability to move information at the speed of light. Electronic media are relatively new, but their impact upon the institutions of American society has exploded with nuclear force. The reformation which electronic media will bring has just begun and the greater the implementation the more exponential the rate of change.
"No, my friend, the way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions he is competent to." Thomas Jefferson
The network structure, developing with electronic media, greatly differs from the centralized, hierarchical systems which have been the foundation of human organization for millennia. At its core the network is participatory, allowing the individual to play a direct role in community affairs. Individuals converge into communities or nodes on the network. The network is simply the linking of all the nodes, allowing communication and interaction from any part of the network to any other part. Hierarchical vertical systems are being replaced by a horizontal network web, which allows for the greater utility of information. Archaic centralized systems are increasingly straining under the burden of an influx of information.
Electronic media allow for global democracy, paradoxically creating a global community while at the same time strengthening locality. The answer to globalization by the world has been to instill centralized institutions on a global scale: the United Nations, World Bank, etc. Creating these institutions on a global scale will increasingly create less accountable, centralized, highly bureaucratic and thus undemocratic systems.
What is a progressive philosophy faced with a global centralized hierarchy? The answer is a global decentralized network, as national boundaries become permeable and geographic constraints dissolve at an ever increasing pace. The old hierarchical, centralized institutions must evolve into decentralized, horizontal networks. Representative republics evolve into a participatory democracy.
In the last fifteen years, the political debate has been focused on the inefficiencies of the Federal Government. A political movement has sprouted to bring the control of the Federal Government back into the hands of the citizenry. Progressives have been caught in the indefensible position of vindicating the centralized Federal structure. The popular movement to decentralize has been exclusively focused at the government, while the large corporate leviathans go unscathed. Global corporations are striding unimpeded across a lilliputian political landscape.
These great transnational corporations have become the first true residents of the developing global village. In Adam Smith's 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, he devotes a significant portion of his writing to the practice of mercantilism. Today, Smith's mercantilism has been turned on its head. The transnational corporations have little need for government protectors. They are for the most part more powerful than national governments. These transnationals play one national government against another looking for the greatest profit. They increasingly are beyond any democratic accountability.
The information era is increasingly threatening many of the adhered-to economic faiths. The value of information and its resulting societal structures will no more conform to the values and structures of the industrial era than the mores of agrarian society fitted into the industrial age. Those who say we are replacing a manufacturing economy with a service economy would best be advised against this fallacy by the admonition of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:
"Thus the labor of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labor of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers; he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants."
One of the great deficiency of economic thinking is the simple division of production and consumption. In the next era, there will be no clear demarcation between these two acts. Careering has become more important than living. An individual's identification with society has been their job. But today, the concept of a job is blurring and for many disappearing. Automation is replacing the worker. The great migration of industrial jobs to cheaper labor markets will be short-lived, for automation will soon become less expensive than the cheapest of human labor. The industrial era made humanity a cog in the machine; the information era removes us.
Humanity still establishes our civilizations as though they are controlled by outside forces. We have established an economic philosophy and the faults of the system can be blamed on the "natural forces of the market". Yet the economy is entirely of our making. In fact, in this new era, being involved in the designing of life will be where we receive meaning. For we are now past the age of technology for technology's sake, and we must understand that how the future is designed is in our hands, which necessitates that it be in all hands.
The road ahead lies filled with difficulties. To bring order to the globe is an unprecedented act. In the past, the rules between civilizations have always differed from the internal order of civilizations. For the most part, the rule between civilizations has simply been the rule of might. The next several decades will be a time of great turbulence as central order is besieged.
The new era must begin with a democratic renaissance. Democracy thrives on diversity. It is through democracy that the most can be gained from the individual. It is through democracy that each community will be empowered. It is through democracy that society can progress. So, progressives, reclaim your mantle. We can do nothing about the past or the present. In this time of great change the only means which exist are in creating the future.
---
Universal access and Free-Nets.
Peter F. Harter Executive Director & General Counsel The National Public Telecomputing Network pfh@nptn.org
The National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) believes that improving and increasing access to computer mediated communications is integral to economic and societal progress. NPTN is the founding and parent organization of Free-Net(R) community computing systems of which there are 47 online Affiliates and 120 in various stages of organization. Generally, a community computing system enables individuals to access local and global information by dialing in from their computer and modem, or public kiosk, to a centrally located multi-user computer, within which is contained databases and special interest groups, and telecommunications capabilities allowing users to access the Internet.
NPTN received a 1994 NTIA-TIIAP Award to construct 30 Free-Nets in rural America as part of NPTN's Rural Information Network Program. Through its work to provide the every day citizen with some means of access to electronic information and to participation in the creation and distribution of electronic information, NPTN supports individuals and institutions to realize the importance of furthering the growth of this medium.
However, as demand for access continues to grow, the resources available for supplying the necessary infrastructure become constrained. One of the difficult questions confronting Free-Nets and other community computer systems is how their growth should be paid for so that their good work may continue and grow.
In spite of the name of NPTN's brand of community computing, "Free-Net", the medium and the messages it carries are not free of costs. Typically, a Free-Net is built and operated by in-kind gifts, substantial volunteer time and resources, and grants. Only a few Free-Net systems charge users any kind of fee, and when they do, they provide free access for those who cannot afford the fee by waiving the fee. Free-Nets know, perhaps more than others, that there are definite and substantial costs that must be financed in order to operate a basic community information and communications service. Such costs are rising as the demand for Free-Nets increases both in terms of the number of users on existing systems and in terms of the number of online Free-Net Affiliates: In January of 1994, NPTN had fewer than 20 systems online; to date, NPTN has 47; by the end of 1995, NPTN estimates that we will have at least 100, and possibly 150 systems online.
Demand will continue to intensify as more people come to know and understand the power of this medium. This power can be explained by examining the many dimensions of the name Free-Net: freedom of assembly in an electronic space; freedom to create information; freedom to access information; freedom to speak in an electronic town hall; freedom to contact others easily and readily via Internet e-mail; freedom of expression; freedom of association via the creation and use of the special interest group areas that are endemic to this medium.
Walter Wriston, former Citicorp chairman, said that power used to relate to money; today, however, power lies in the information about money. From banking in New York City to bumper crops in Nebraska, access to electronic information resources represents power. For the farmer in rural Nebraska, access to U.S. Department of Agriculture information may help him produce a bumper crop; access to weather information already available on the Internet could do the same. For the inner city youth, access to special interest groups and electronic libraries can mean a new path to pursue, an option from gangs, and a means to improve one's own life through self-determination and the information resources that are needed to fuel the growth of knowledge.
At its heart, a Free-Net enables one to gain the literacy skills (i.e., traditional reading and writing literacy, computer literacy, and network literacy) necessary to be a productive citizen in the "Information Age". Happily, the end result of a Free-Net is that the user is empowered. Once empowered, the typical user sees the value of such a service and is willing to give their time and or money to see that the service grows so that others may benefit from it.
The recent U.S. Department of Commerce Request for Comments on Universal Service asked whether services that benefit private businesses should be charged a higher rate to reduce the cost of services provided to ordinary citizens. NPTN is not in favor of simply placing the entire cost of access onto one sector of the economy. Private businesses have a vested interest in seeing more citizens become computer and network literate: more users implies more potential consumers. Private businesses may participate via a voluntary rate charge and or in the form of development and or planning fund support of access projects in their own communities. NPTN does not favor electronic welfare if such is defined to mean complete subsidization of individual access.
NPTN is of the belief that funding for access should come from a variety of sources and means that are subject to change so that economic models may compete against one another. In such a paradigm one community can compare its model to that of another and see what lessons may be learned. In this way, individuals can have a role in forming how their electronic community is run as they will have some stake in how it is funded, be it through a surcharge on local telephone or cable service (i.e., similar to funding for 911 service), through user fees, through municipalities, through commercial services rates, or some other tool.
Citizens should be encouraged to pay their fair share and should be provided with access and services that they feel they receive value by using and thus obligated to pay something for what they receive. However, they should also have a say in how the access and services are provided if they are to pay either directly and or indirectly. This may be best achieved by not arriving at one, singular, uniform cost and funding structure for access. If a stable economic model is achieved, provisions for subsidizing access for those who cannot afford it can be made readily and effectively.
Access and its costs are critical issues for discussion and decision during the continuing construction of the world's information superhighways. Cliches aside, the interest in building information networks has been intense in recent times; hopefully, the interest will not wane as the difficult matters of access and costs are dealt with in Washington and at the local level. Importantly, the most significant decisions are being made by those individuals and institutions building networks; those who are building and running Free-Net systems are dedicated to providing access at little or no cost to the end user. 1995 may prove to be a watershed year for Free-Nets as access increases and NPTN contends with how it may be supported financially.
(Free-Net is a service mark of The National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN), registered in the U.S. and other countries.)
---
This month's recommendations.
Los Lobos, Kiko (Slash/Warner). These guys have the darnedest time making a record that does justice to their incredible talent. Several records of earnestly sentimental songs about decent people living hard lives in the barrio have had integrity but not permanence. But "Kiko" is a breakthrough -- a visionary synthesis of musical worlds. The world of Kiko, though, is not a neighborhood but a dream in which opposites coalesce and the urgency of daily crises folds back into the timeless cycle of myth. The record is brilliantly recorded, woven through with a whole vocabulary of resonant sounds that stand out on a first listening but then fade into a smooth emotional fabric in which everything makes sense.
Gordon Clay's "Healing the Father Wound" workshop. Gordon Clay used to be an advertising executive in Chicago but then became one of the earliest and least publicized pioneers of the men's movement. This was something like fifteen years ago, back before any fashions for taking groups of men out in the woods to beat on drums and talk about their feelings had risen or fallen or even become comprehensible to most people. Since then this guy has learned an incredible amount of important stuff about feelings and wounds and ritual and the body, and he has committed himself to healing men who go around feeling angry or numb all the time. This is not a profitable activity. Most recently Gordon decided to sell all his belongings and take off in a camper to drive around the country bringing his knowledge to the men who need it. Having heard a lot about him at a distance, almost two years ago I went to Harbin Hot Springs (a few hours drive north of San Francisco) and participated in a workshop he ran called "Healing the Father Wound". I've done some strange and intense things in my life, but this is the only time I can ever say that something made me better overnight. After three days of Gordon's workshop I more or less stopped drinking, I got rid of several tons of anger about some evil shit that happened a long time ago, and I learned how to get the ordinary suppressed anger of daily life out of my system so that I don't take it out on other people as often. This isn't an exploitative cult scene where you'll be hectored into giving up your whole personality and manipulated into recruiting another round of disciples while convincing yourself that you're saving the world and revolutionizing your life. The workshop does cost real money ($450 last I saw) but this money pays for three very heavy and complicated days in a great setting with a small group of really nice people. He runs the workshop both for men and for women (that is, men and women in separate groups). Write him for information c/o MAS Medium, Box 800-FW, San Anselmo, CA 94979. I believe the next workshop dates are in April.
PR Watch. The public relations industry has been around since the turn of the century, but it has been growing and changing rapidly since American industry began to respond to the surge of progressive political movements in the 1970's. While much PR work is mundane and unexceptionable, many feel that the more aggressive and ambitious types of PR have gone too far. John Stauber is one such person, and he started PR Watch in late 1993 to inform the public, and especially journalists, about a wide range of PR practices, for example intelligence-gathering on grassroots groups. Quarterly -- $200 a year for businesses, $60 a year for individuals and nonprofit organizations, and $35 a year for working journalists and people with limited incomes. The address is 3318 Gregory Street, Madison WI 53711, phone (608) 233-3346, fax (608) 238-2236.
Z Magazine. If Newt Gingrich and the Christian Coalition worry you then you might consider doing something about it. My own feeling is that the only thing that ever changed the world is people getting together and organizing themselves behind their vision of a good society. That's what conservative Christians are doing in the United States, and in that regard they're winning fair and square. Long-time TNO readers are aware that I read an awful lot of stuff from across the political spectrum, and in my opinion the publication that's closest to the broad and vibrant world of popular progressive movements in the United States is Z Magazine. Its production values aren't always slick and the articles are occasionally dumb, but more often I find Z refreshing and challenging and informative. Not a whole lot of boring old left-wing sectarianism -- just plain, straightforward reports from youth movements, greens who value both people and trees, innovative varieties of feminism, and much else. Sandy Carter's music reviews are excellent, and Sara Diamond has been taking the Christian Right seriously in a whole long series of sober and judicious articles. The February 1995 issue, available on many newsstands, is particularly good. As one says these days, "What's the alternative?" Their address is 116 Botolph Street, Boston MA 02115. Monthly, $26 one year, $60 three years in the US. Write them for other subscription rates. The people at Z are closely affiliated with the excellent South End Press (same address). Check out their new Spring 1995 catalogue.
---
Company of the month.
This month's company is:
The Workgroup Solutions -- Conferences and Expo March 5th - 10th, 1995 in Boston c/o The Conference Group 8160 E. Butherus Dr., Suite 3 Scottsdale, Arizona 85260-2523
phone: (800) 247-0262 (602) 443-4090 fax: (602) 443-4094
This month's company is a conference. A conference is a business proposition, of course, and the industrial conference circuit is a sort of "virtual corporation" that continually reassembles different elements into a series of wholes -- each of which stands or falls by the number of people who pay to attend.
These particular conferences, Groupware '95 and Workflow '95, scheduled on adjacent days under one organizational umbrella, both concern technology to support people working together. This is obviously an important topic, inasmuch as the values that define people's work together have a powerful effect on the nature of our society and the quality of our lives. Do the tools support independence and autonomy, or do they support pervasive surveillance? Does their rhetoric of "empowerment" have anything to do with reality? Do they enhance skills or do they make people more expendable by easing transfer of their skills from one person to another? The answers to these questions will not be simple or uniform, and in actual practice they will probably depend on factors that go far beyond the technology itself. But nonetheless the technology is crucial, and I think it is very important for people who care about the future of work to attend conferences like this and carefully, critically "read" the offerings on display -- and not just the rhetoric, but the technologies themselves. What will happen if Lotus Notes, for example, is used in the work environments that you're familiar with? Both good things and bad things, no doubt. And how can individual employees, as well as groups of organized employees and concerned citizens, prepare themselves to ensure that the future of work will be more humane and more consistent with staying sane and raising a family? We can't think clearly about these questions in the abstract. That's why we should attend conferences like this one.
---
Follow-up.
I've been feeling bad about some of my rhetoric concerning Issue Dynamics Inc in the last two issues of TNO. For the record, I was mistaken about one fact in my article about PFF and IDI in TNO 1(12); IDI created the Wireless Opportunities Coalition's on-line campaign to influence an FCC ruling, but IDI did not create WOC itself. Also, despite what reasonable people might have inferred, the critical quotation about paper fronts that I included from John Hill's autobiography was not intended to apply fully and literally to IDI. The companies sponsoring WOC were in fact mentioned in the WOC web pages, although these pages did represent WOC as a larger coalition and did not say that it was a creation of these companies. Finally, I truly regret my harsh comment in the TNO 2(1) follow-up section about IDI's accumulating credibility with the net audience to expend in the service of its corporate clients; this comment personalized the debate in a way that serves no purpose at all.
Response was generally positive to my article on the conservative movement in TNO 2(1), which seems to have been clipped out of the TNO issue and forwarded to half the planet. One reader, however, pointed that it was unfair to describe a prospective recurrence of the social chaos of the laissez-faire 1880's, even jokingly, as a "leftist's dream" (the idea being that chaos is a good opportunity for a revolution) in that only a tiny fringe of the left would be so perverse as to embrace such circumstances, given the suffering they would entail. A number of other readers took me to be arguing that the whole American population has converted to conservatism, which is not my view. I was simply arguing that the conservative electoral coalition, consisting of those people who vote for conservatives and the institutions that organize them and that intend to reorganize the government and much of the rest of society along conservative lines, is in for the long haul.
My article in TNO 2(1) listing my ten least favorite electronic mail phenomena elicited little comment until it was reprinted in the Risks Digest, whereupon I received a great deal of response. Most of it was supportive, including several lists of additional e-mail pathologies provided by people who have greater technical understanding of Internet mail than I do. Several readers also pointed out, though, that my complaint #9, about the Errors-To: field, was misguided. These folks, all ardent enemies of the Unix sendmail program, argued that Errors-To: was invented by Unix people who didn't understand e-mail error handling, and that the e-mail standards do include a much better approach to indicating where mailers should send bouncemail messages, based on the message's envelope rather than on its header. I have to admit that this is more technical information about electronic mail than I really care to possess, or that I ought to have to possess in order to run a large mailing list. One person told me that the IETF is trying to standardize bouncemail, though I haven't followed up on the comment. If it is true then I will sprinkle rose petals at the feet of the IETF membership because I regard the current situation as completely unacceptable.
The Benton Foundation has published a useful on-line report about prospects for public-interest information infrastructure politics in the new Congress, and especially on the state and local level. The URL is http://cdinet.com/benton
For information about the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, look at: http://www.msen.com/~emv/kobe.html
I don't know if it was Newt Gingrich's idea originally, but he supports it and it's real -- the Thomas legislative information service on WWW. Check it out. The URL is http://thomas.loc.gov/ Right now it's not all that impressive, but it's a start anyway. Next step -- figure out what features and documents it's missing, make sure everyone on the net knows to want them, and make sure everyone in Washington knows that everyone on the net wants them. By the way, the House gopher is at gopher://gopher.house.gov/
An extensive guide called "Internet Resources for Not-for-Profits in Housing and Human Services" is available through WWW at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Non/online.html
Lindsay Marshall
The proceedings of the 1994 Digital Libraries conference is on the web at http://atg1.wustl.edu/DL94/ And information on the 1995 conference is at http://bush.cs.tamu.edu/dl95/README.html
The web pages for the Ninth Annual Symposium on Geographic Information Systems for Natural Resources, Environment and Land Information Management, 27-30 March 1995, Vancouver, British Columbia are at http://www.wimsey.com:80/~jdcates/gis95/
One big file containing the whole Federalist Papers is available through anonymous ftp to mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu. The files are pub/etext/etext91/feder16.txt and pub/etext/etext91/feder16.zip It's over 1MB in .txt form and something like .6MB in .zip form.
Ol' Newt is everywhere. Mother Jones printed some of the first useful articles on the guy, and now they've put them on-line on their web server http://www.mojones.com/ The first of these articles, from 1984 -- and that's 1984, not 1994 -- tells us, among many other things, "Gingrich told several intimates in 1974 that his goal was to be Speaker of the House". It can be found at http://www.mojones.com/N84/osborne.html
What? You haven't had enough of Newt yet? The Newt Gingrich WWW Fan Club is at http://www.clark.net/pub/jeffd/mr_newt.html This page includes a pointer to the under-construction Progress and Freedom Foundation home page, whose erstwhile nonexistence I remarked upon in TNO 1(12).
You can even read the Heritage Foundation's theoretical journal, Policy Review, on gopher. This is the best place to find out where the highly organized forces of the conservative movement are headed next. Required reading for all liberals. The URL is gopher://gopher.enews.com:2100/11/magazines/alphabetic/mr/policy
And if that isn't enough, the National Rifle Association is on the web at http://www.nra.org
Finally, the Anti-Defamation League has a report on the militia movement: http://www.acsys.com/~sims/revolution/adl-report.html
---
Phil Agre, editor pagre@ucsd.edu Department of Communication University of California, San Diego +1 (619) 534-6328 La Jolla, California 92093-0503 FAX 534-7315 USA
---
The Network Observer is distributed through the Red Rock Eater News Service. To subscribe to RRE, send a message to the RRE server, rre-request@weber.ucsd.edu, whose subject line reads "subscribe firstname lastname", for example "Subject: subscribe Jane Doe". For more information about the Red Rock Eater, send a message to that same address with a subject line of "help". For back issues etc, use a subject line of "archive send index". TNO is also on WWW at http://communication.ucsd.edu/pagre/tno.html
---
Copyright 1995 by the editor. You may forward this issue of The Network Observer electronically to anyone for any non-commercial purpose. Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
--- ```
| | | --- | | ProcessTree Network TM For-pay Internet distributed processing. | | Advertising helps support hosting Red Rock Eater Digest @ The Commons. Advertisers are not associated with the list owner. If you have any comments about the advertising, please direct them to the Webmaster @ The Commons. |