Author: Tom Slee

I’ve moved my site here from whimsley.typepad.com. This site contains the complete blog (including comments) from the Typepad site, but many of the links will take you back to the old place, which exists in archived state. There are RSS and email subscription buttons up there on the right.

A few updates after my "self-assessment" post.

First, I've received a dozen or so really helpful and constructive emails from a number of people. It's been good for the ego, and it's definitely given me encouragement to keep at this for a while yet. Sincere thanks to those who wrote (I think I've got back to everyone, but forgive me if I missed one or two). Also, thanks to Henry and Brad for the free labour on their blogs.

Second: I'm in the middle of  moving the blog from here to a shiny new installation at tomslee.net (which has been a stub of a site for a few years). I'll post here when that's done.

Third: in the days after that last post I received one invitation to speak at a conference, one acceptance of a talk at a second, and an invitation to write a multi-book review. Whining in public seems like a good way to go.

Finally: for those looking for No One Makes You, the publisher has this to say:

In the US: the book is available new at B&N (though it displays an old cover we assure you it is the correct edition). Or, you can contact our office directly (info (at) btlbooks.com or 1-800-718-7201) and we’ll ship you a copy anywhere within North America.

Purchasers in the UK and Europe can order new copies directly through our UK distributor, Central Books (and support an independent distributor of books and magazines).

An ebook edition is being worked on and should soon be available. If you would like to be notified when it is available, please contact our office info (at) btlbooks.com or 1-800-718-7201. Thanks for your interest in No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart.

I'll post that somewhere permanent once the site has moved. 

So 2013 look pretty good. Now I just need to actually write something.

Attention conservation notice: self-involvement.

Update: Comments are closed because, in the light of morning, this looked like fishing for compliments (with added whining!) But no! It is merely an aide-resolution, to get myself moving forward in 2013.

Background

New Year. Time to take a realistic look at the state of my writing. 

The goal of my writing was to have an impact, however small, on issues that matter to me. I had been an activist in a number of political, union, and social justice organizations, and writing seemed to be a way to continue to contribute that fit into a new stage of my life. I've been trying to write in my spare time for roughly 15 years now. When I started, my children were entering school; now they are adults. 

The first half of that 15 years was spent writing and studying/researching No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. Whimsley started off as an attempt to promote the book, but soon moved into technology & politics, where it has stayed ever since.

The total cost of this writing project to me and my family is now well into six figures in foregone income: several years ago I "negotiated" a four-day working week, largely to pursue this project. On the other hand, it has to coexist with a nearly-full-time job, which means that although much of what I write has a pseudo-academic bent, I doubt that I'm in a position to obtain qualifications relevant to what I write about.

I hesitate to post this, as it's self-involved and not very cheery, but it may provide some useful information for other bloggers.

Assessment

Here are some metrics for the seven years since No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart was published, most of which relate to my blogging:

• Sales of "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart". Around 1,000 2,000. Most in the first year. (Thanks to Brad DeLong and Alex Tabarrok for many of those)
• Blog readership: Sitemeter says about 100 hits a day, and I guess that about half of that is people/bots who don't read. The traffic is about the same as it was in 2008.
• Number of invitations to contribute to other publications: 3. (Thanks to Bronwyn Drainie and Alastair Cheng)
• Number of invitations to contribute to other sites: 3. (Thanks to Henry Farrell)
• Number of invitations to conferences and workshops: 2. (Thanks again, Henry)
• Number of publications to have quoted my work, to my knowledge: 1. (Thanks Evgeny Morozov)
• Awards, prizes, or nominations for same: 0.

What can I say? That is not a picture of success, and given the generous support I have received, the responsibility for remaining mistakes clearly lies, as they say, with the author.

My major reward from blogging has been to discover a small but select group of very smart people who have continued to read this blog, promote it from time to time, and engage in conversation. Thanks to each of you.

The highlight of this year came out of a rant on the "Open Data movement", written in a fit of pique one morning and publicised by Evgeny Morozov on Twitter, which led to an opportunity to post at Crooked Timber on the topic. Second was contributing to the Literary Review of Canada again. But let's be honest: writing to have an impact at the age of 53 feels very different from writing at the age of 38, and the numbers make it clear that it's not working. To reinforce that feeling, the traffic for an individual post at the blog depends hugely on whether some of a small number of individuals link to it: I am still dependent, that is to say, on patronage and on chance, and I have not managed to build an audience of my own to sustain significant interest.

Diagnosis

I suspect my own failings are the major cause for this poor performance. I write slowly and infrequently, and usually long pieces. Clearly the style and content of my writing has failed to build a significant audience.

A second reason is that, naive as this sounds (especially in the light of what I write), I actually thought that writing stuff and putting it on the web would be enough to build a reputation and an audience. Clearly it isn't, and that should not be surprising. I have no credentials behind what I write, I'm terrible at self-promotion, my networks related to my writing are minimal, and although some pieces have been provocative I am uncomfortable in the culture of quickfire debate that drives much political writing. None of those things is likely to change.

If anything, the effort has emphasized to me the importance of credentials. I know that I use them myself: coming across a new blog or a new book I look for what others have said about the writer. I don't know why I wouldn't expect others to do anything different when deciding about me.

Prognosis

Uncertain. I suspect that I will continue here for a while yet, but something has to change. Fortunately I will have quite a lot of time in 2013, so it's not a bad time to try to change something. I am looking at these possibilities.

1. See what I can do with this paper to gain credentials. I am circulating it, but see comment on self-promotion above.
2. Pull together a book based on what I've been doing here (likely working title "Wikibollocks: The Broken Promises of Openness") but I suspect that it would be too dry for a popular book (plus I cannot point to a big reader base when approaching publishers), and that I'm undercredentialled to write an academic book. If I were a publisher I would not take me on.
3. What's that? Why yes, I am open to offers.

So, we'll have to see.

Favourites

On the bright side, here are some pieces I still feel good about (31 of them). It's good to have them still out there.

The Sharing Economy

• Peer-to-Peer Hucksterism: An Open Letter to Tim Wu (2013)

Open Data

• Why the "Open Data Movement" is a Joke (2012)
• Open Data Movement Redux: Tribes and Contradictions (2012)
• Seeing Like a Geek (2012) – Invited, at Crooked Timber

Open Government

• What is Wrong with Government 2.0 (2010) 
• What Else is Wrong with Government 2.0 (2010)
• WikiLeaks Shines a Light on the Limits of Techno-Politics (2010)

Open Source

• Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job (2008)
• Paying for Linux (2008)

Reputation Systems

• Click to Judge (2012) – Invited, at the Literary Review of Canada
• Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche (2009) – a little theory
• Netflix Prize: Was the Napoleon Dynamite Problem Solved? (2009)
• The Netflix Prize: 300 Days Later (2007)

Privacy and Data Aggregation

• Data Anonymization and Re-identification: Some Basics of Data Privacy (2012) – technical

Digital Technologies and the Arab Spring uprisings

• Digital Activism: If Information is Not the Problem, Information is Not the Solution (2010)
• Egypt's "Facebook Revolution": Looking Under the Lamp Post? (2011)
• More Egypt, More Facebook (2011) 
• Internet-Centrism 2 (of 3) (2011)
• Internet-Centrism 3 (of 3) (2011)
• Identity, Institutions, and Uprisings (2012) – academic paper (submitted)
• When Theories Matter: Uprisings in Authoritarian States (2012)
• What Cascade Theories Don't Tell Us (2012)

Irritabilia

• Wikibollocks: The Shirky Rules (2010)
• Mr. Google's Guidebook (2008) – a little whimsy. My most-read post.

Book Reviews

There are quite a few, but these are my favourites

• The Long Tail (2007) – 160 pages of page-by-page critique
• The Pirate's Dilemma, by Matt Mason (2009) – stream of irritation
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
• Identity Economics, by George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2010)
• The Myth of Digital Democracy, by Matthew Hindman (2010)
• Adapt, by Tim Harford (2011) – probably my favourite
• Sixty-Two Things Wrong with "Future Perfect" (2012)

Dear Tim Wu,

Has something happened to your brain? Can your short article in the New York Times, Apps to Regulate Apps, be the product of the same grey matter that produced the excellent “Who Controls the Internet?” and the admirable “The Master Switch”? What’s going on? I hope it was a momentary lapse and I hope you will change your mind about this sloppy and potentially damaging piece.

You were writing, as you know, about AirBnB and Uber: two new “peer-to-peer” companies building big businesses around apps that let you “book a car ride or rent someone’s apartment using your smartphone or computer”, and apparently breaking a few laws along the way. You write that “no one can deny that these apps are responding to real demands and helping cities become easier to live in and visit”, and you place them on the side of Progress, and the Future; in contrast, the reactions of cities who have banned these apps “recall Ned Ludd’s response to the automated loom”.

While you do acknowledge that there are complaints about the companies, you decide that “many of the complaints are anecdotal”. But complaints are always anecdotal unless someone tallies them, and tallying them is, of course, one of the points of regulation: AirBnB and Uber are not tallying them, that’s for sure. They may even try to sweep them under the rug in case it damages their valuation: exactly the kind of conflict of interest that make regulations necessary in the first place.

But let’s step back a bit. I’m no Valley Visionary, so if I were setting up a business based on offering unlicensed hospitality or cab rides, I might ask myself a few questions first. And I may ask myself: why is it that every town and city I’ve ever been to has licensing requirements for people offering taxi services or overnight accommodations? Is there a global taxi cartel or a multinational bed-and-breakfast conglomerate enforcing its will on municipalities from Aberystwyth to Yellowknife? And if there isn’t — and of course there isn’t, because taxi and B&B operations are usually local and small-scale operations — I may ask myself: what’s behind all these rules?

And if I stopped for more than two minutes before seeking seed funding for my enterprise, I may tell myself about property zoning, about landlord-tenant agreements, about the risks run by customers who step into a taxi or a hotel in a strange city, about liability in the event of accidents, about the importance of equitable access, about complaints investigation, about safety checks, and more. Not, of course, that licensing is unproblematic in all cities – far from it – but these would at least be things I would wonder before proclaiming that those who stand in the way of my right to make a buck are simply Luddites. And if I were to advocate changing zoning regulations in cities throughout the world, and changing taxicab licensing rules too, with all the expense that comes with those changes, I’d have put a little thought into it. Especially because, as you say in your final sentence, “It is, in short, a time to think carefully”. Unfortunately, all the evidence is that AirBnB and Uber have not stopped to think, so the idea that they should set the agenda for civic licensing discussions, placing new stresses on the already-stretched finances of municipalities around the world, despite displaying such solipsistic lack of attention, is presumptuous at least and offensive at worst.

Unfortunately your two suggestions – that cities should require the companies to provide applications which could be used by landlords and co-op boards with a check on their tenants’ use of AirBnB, or that cities could “simply” require Uber to disclose information about its prices and traffic – do not even scratch the surface of the issues that need to be sorted out before AirBnB or Uber can be taken seriously as forward-thinking, sustainable partners in civic development. And I hope that, if you reflect, you’ll agree that the new peer-to-peer companies are a blight on the landscape of egalitarian thinking. Yes, according to CNN, CEO Brian Chesky “thinks of Airbnb as more than a company – to him it is a movement. His site invites users to return to a time when hitchhiking wasn’t dangerous – when it was just fine to share anything with strangers because no one was all that strange.” But Brian Chesky has not tried to start a movement, he’s started a company: and he hasn’t actually done anything much to make hitchhiking less dangerous. He wants his customers to think of it as a movement while he owns the business. While they invoke the communitarian traditions of the informal economy, these new peer-to-peer companies are more likely to erode that economy than enhance it.

We all know the informal economy. I used to hitchhike to university, my neighbours have yard sales, friends help each other move house. None of this activity is regulated because it’s at most minimally commercial. But there is a line, of course: if I started having a yard sale every weekend then my neighbours might think I’m stretching a point and complain to the by-law people. If I rented my house to strangers week in and week out – for money — they might ask if I’m running a rooming house. And that’s assuming that the people renting my house aren’t running a brothel. So there is a trade-off here: informal activity for little or no money is OK. Commercial activity plays by different rules; a level of accountability is needed.

So now here comes AirBnB (to take one example), who want to keep the idea that it’s about the noncommercial and “sharing” informal economy, and scale it up. They talk about their hosts in a non-commercial sense: earning “additional income”, or “extra money” (link) — rolling out, I could not help but notice, the very phrases used years ago to justify not giving women’s jobs the same protections and benefits as men’s jobs. It’s not the real economy, it’s just a bit of pocket money: we don’t need all those expensive rules and regulations. But they want to build a billion dollar business on the back of it. And while eBay famously did this for knick-knacks, the nature of the activities makes the two companies completely different. There are information asymmetries with serious consequences here. The model is that AirBnB take 10% of the booking fees and take 0% of the responsibility for what happens when you book, or hire, a room. Now many exchanges do go well, partly because the early stages of an activity like this do draw from a community of people who are committed to the non-commercial side of the action, but the success attracts others, and for personal safety in such cases (rare incidence but severe consequences) recommender systems are simply not the right tool. It’s not like Wikipedia (or eBay or Yelp) because you can’t just Undo an apartment-trashing, and the fact that AirBnB had not thought about what happens when an apartment is trashed shows, as Farhad Manjoo writes, that is simply wasn’t thinking. It didn’t care. And if Brian Chesky really thought about AirBnB as a movement, he’d care.

The questions are heightened by the contrast between the community-friendly rhetoric of the company and the apparent character of its founders. One has a reported history as a spam-merchant (that and more from Ryan Tate), and the financing has raised ethical questions about the way in which early investors can take large amounts of money out of the business without diluting their control. The long and short of it is that the company runs as a scheme to make large amounts of money for a small number of people by appealing to large numbers of egalitarian-minded young people. Investment (and presumably board-level presence) from Andreessen-Horowitz, Yuri Milner, and now maybe Peter Thiel, all with well-known neo-liberal attitudes, makes this clear.

Your other company, Uber Taxi, has a similar litany of complaints: taking a 50% cut of tip money (illegal in many places), and more. The “surge pricing” following Hurricane Sandy is a clear example of the eat-your-cake-and-have-it approach that characterizes these peer-to-peer businesses: the company adopts hard-nosed Economics 101 pricing models (which we can argue about) while employing a rhetoric of community and sharing. You can have at most one or the other, but not both. Unsurprisingly it is run, as Seth Finkelstein pointed out on my previous post, by an admirer of Ayn Rand.

The contrast with real efforts to break down barriers to access and to make more accessible, non-commercial travel a reality is dramatic. None of the peer-to-peer companies “start from an entrenched social problem and work backwards from there” as Catherine Bracy writes. For real inspirarion, look back to efforts like the Ramblers Association’s 1932 mass trespass of Kinder Scout, the services provided over the years by the Youth Hostel Association and Hostelling International, all characterized by a broad base, by people who thought about what they were doing, and who had an actual commitment to their goals. And guess what? Remarkably enough, none of these has billionaire venture capitalists – or even the profit motive – behind them.

So, Tim. Back to the beginning. The Randian, simplistic free-market thoughtlessness behind the wave of “peer-to-peer” companies, and especially those who are trying to uproot regulations that protect consumers, is far from the wave of the future: it’s hucksterism masquerading as progress, hubris as vision, callous selfishness as community-mindedness, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t think it’s something you want to associate yourself with. Will you retract your support for AirBnB and Uber?

yours,

Tom Slee

Written in Org version 7.8.10 with Emacs version 23

Wikibollocks entry for today comes from Grist magazine, a "source of nonprofit, independent green journalism", who just ran a piece on peer-to-peer sharing which includes sentences like this.

We’re choosing peer-to-peer because we want to do business differently. We actually kind of want to pretend like we’re not doing business at all.

Some questions for Grist.

• Why do you think that you are on the same side as Uber (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, and a host of venture capitalists), Sidecar (based in the SF Bay area, funded by Google and other venture capitalists), and Lyft (based in San Francisco, in early-stage VC funding) and AirBnB (based in San Francisco, funded by Jeff Bezos, Andreessen Horowitz, Crunch Fund, Ashton Kutcher and other venture capitalists)?
• Does it not occur to you that when billionaires promote "pretending like we're not doing business at all" then maybe there's something a bit dodgy going on?
• When Jeff Bezos (personal wealth $18.4B) and Marc Andreessen (personal wealth, $600 million) are one one side and taxi drivers are on the other, what makes you think that Bezos and Andreessen are the progressive side?

Look, Grist, I understand that words like "peer-to-peer" and "sharing" sound nice and egalitarian, but in pieces like this you're actively working against the things you claim to stand for.

We interrupt the posts on identity and uprisings to bring you this not-so-handy print-off-and-keep companion for readers of Steven Johnson’s new book Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. From here on, the author is “SBJ” and the book is “FP”. Page numbers are in parentheses.

1. First, and the reason I am writing this: Claiming that the “peer progressive worldview” stands for decentralization and egalitarianism. It will lead instead to an increasingly polarized world, with centralization of information on an unprecedented scale.
2. Starting with a promise that it does not keep. In its opening pages, FP tells the story of air traffic to highlight the unappreciated, steady, incremental progress of living conditions over the course of the 20th century, brought about by a combination of private enterprise and government regulation, rightly highlighting the overlooked role of public sector in improving quality of life. The author criticizes “progressives” for being too “ambivalent about actual progress” (xxxiii), yet soon the boot will be on the other foot, and SBJ will cast aside this optimistic tale of progress. The progressives that so dismay him, of whom I am one, turn out to have a more positive attitude to history than the “peer progressives” that the book celebrates.
3. Having a short attention span. Only a few pages further on, the switch takes place, unremarked. SBJ writes of his peer progressives that “In an age of great disillusionment with current institutions, here was a group that could inspire us, in part because they had attached themselves to a new kind of institution, more network than hierarchy – more like the Internet itself than the older models of Big Capital or Big Government” (xxxvii). The institutions that he was praising just a few short pages ago are now caricatured with Big Capital Letters, labelled as relics of old-style thinking (see also p 51). SBJ now adopts the very disillusionment that so upset him, turns away from incremental progress, and never looks back, taking on the more romantic mantle of the revolutionary. The truth in his introductory pages, that the value of incremental progress will inevitably be overlooked, is ironically confirmed.
4. Dismissing the work of aid workers. As if to rub our noses in his rejection of incrementalism, SBJ tells a story about foreign aid workers Jerry and Monique Sternin, and their work in Vietnam. He praises these protagonists because they “did not descend on those communities with the usual imperious style of many foreign aid groups” (p 21). And in that imperious style, the work of charities around the world is dismissed. There is not a sentence, here or elsewhere, about the dedicated individuals who do not fit his message that everything must be changed. There are no grey areas here, and no need to think twice about this blanket, qualifier-free condemnation. Curmudgeon I may be, unready to adopt the self-proclaimed optimism of the author, but my cynicism seems to me shallow compared to the cavalier attitude of FP. A list of “things wrong” may seem negative, but it at least reflects an engagement with the subject, a consideration of the author’s point of view. “Usual imperious style” indeed.
5. Identifying peer networks inconsistently, wherever it suits him, leading to a morass of confusion. Many structures contain different elements, hierarchical, competitive, and collaborative, and SBJ simply highlights the aspect that fits his message. He likes the Sternins’ work, so he says they build on the “peer networks of rural Vietnam”. Peer progressives, the author tells us, “genuinely like free markets”, except when they yield “power concentrated in a handful of economic oligarchs” (p 29), but then again when the economic oligarchs live in Silicon Valley, we will see that things are different again.
6. Making a brief reference to trading towns of the early Renaissance as “adher[ing] to peer-network principles in much of their social organization” (p 27) is far from enough to claim that these towns are “the birthplace of modern capitalism” (28), and to place the whole of modern industry on the network side of the leger. A flimsy statement, unsupported by evidence or argument, and not to be taken seriously.
7. And what a misuse of history throughout! The book treats the rich and diverse history of organizational structures as a source of a few nuggets, chosen to illustrate a pre-defined agenda.
8. Speaking of which: no bibliography, a mere seven pages of notes, and seven pages of index.
9. Only TED, that admirer of bite-size chunks of information, could refer to this short book as a tome. It is slim: 250 pages of generously-sized and widely-spaced text.
10. Caricaturing the cultural industry in order to bury it. There are eight pages on the novelty and potential of Kickstarter, the fundraising site for creative activities. The main story is of Jacob Krupnick, a film maker who raised $24,817 on Kickstarter to make a 71-minute dance music video, with almost half of the 600 donations being less than $30. We are told that “Historically, Jacob Krupnick would have been forced to choose among three paths… go mainstream, find a wealthy benefactor, or turn his creative vision into a part-time hobby” (35). I have taken to pausing after every bold, broad-brush assertion like this to think of a story that would tell the opposite message. In this case I think of Glasgow’s Bill Forsyth, who in 1980 raised £2,000 for his first film, “That Sinking Feeling” by posing as a concerned youth worker. He sent his begging letter to local bookies, brewers, distillers, and others. A local trade union sent £2, both William Hill and Marks & Spencers sent £25, and a biscuit company sent a few pounds too. Forsyth, of course, went on to make Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero.
11. Ignoring the role of money. When I hear someone tell me that it’s not about the money I reach for my wallet. “What is ultimately important about Kickstarter is not whether it is a for-profit company or a creature of the gift economy or some interesting hybrid – what is important is the social architecture of the service” (47). Kickstarter’s requirement of delivering money to its owners and/or shareholders will shape the direction it takes.
12. Identifying fundraising over the airwaves (by American National Public Radio for example) as a centralized “Legrand Star”, while claiming fundraising on Kickstarter is a peer network (39). After all, each project raising funds on Kickstarter is its own “Legrand Star”. Meanwhile, the centralized 311 system is portrayed as a network. See 4, above.
13. Giving the Internet too much credit for the Arab Spring uprisings. “To date, the most prominent examples of network architectures influencing real-world change have been the decentralized protest movements that have emerged over the past few years: MoveOn, Arab Spring, the Spanish Revolution, Occupy Wall Street… .” (48 – 49)
14. “Arab Spring” is not and never was a movement (48).
15. The Spanish Revolution? There wasn’t one. (48)
16. Claiming that [the] Arab Spring is “something of a distraction” and not “concrete and practical”. “The grand spectacles of Occupy or Arab Spring have turned out to be something of a distraction, averting our eyes from the more concrete and practical successes of peer networks.” (49)
17. “But every material advance in human history – from the Great Wall to the Hoover Dam to the polio vaccine to the iPad – was ultimately the by-product of information transfer and decision making. This is how progress happens: some problem or unmet need is identified, imaginative new solutions are proposed, and eventually society decides to implement one (or more) of those solutions.” Here is the play without Hamlet. What dark tragedies are glossed over in “society decides”. This is a bloodless, technocratic view of material progress, reflecting the similarly bloodless path he charts to the future, in which problems are solved, but struggles never fought. (49)
18. Believing in a magic bullet. “When a need arises in society that goes unmet, our first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem”. (50)
19. Believing that he is beyond all that old Left/Right stuff. (51)
20. Claiming the peer network “is not some rarefied theory, dreamed up on a commune somewhere, or in a grad school seminar on radical thought” (52). Not only anti-intellectual, he is also dismissive of other alternative cultures.
21. Presenting New York’s “311 service”, a municipal non-emergency incident-reporting system, as a peer network; it is the centralization of a previously disparate set of services, a Legrand Star of information collection using standard big-enterprise Customer-Relationship Management software from Oracle (55 – 58).
22. Spending several pages telling us how the 311 phone service for problem reporting allowed the government of New York to track the periodic maple syrup smell to a flavour compound manufacturer processing fenugreek seeds. What is the point? The identification of one smell is so non-earth-shattering as to be sleep-inducing.
23. How many times will we be told about the revolutionary potential of reporting the location of potholes using a smartphone app? (57) Has there ever been any evidence that pothole-location-ignorance is a problem to be solved, never mind the limiting factor on local government’s ability to keep our streets in good condition? If so, why have none of these accounts produced it?
24. Being blind to the privacy concerns of New York Taxi drivers. He speaks of installing “GPS devices that communicate vast amounts of information back to the Taxi and Limousine Commission” in taxis (65) as if it puts the taxi drivers as peers in a peer network. But it doesn’t. It’s a centralizing, hierarchical, overseeing move. The fact that SBJ does not see this is an indication of his willingness to see what he wants to see. This is the “peer progressive” world? (63) Count me out.
25. Underestimating the role of actual peer networks. When friends of the authors wanted to renovate their basement, they found out about major roadworks in the area just in time, from neighbours (67). “Yet despite its urgency, the news had arrived on their doorstep via the word-of-mouth network of two neighbours gossiping together”. (68) SBJ sees this as a failing of traditional news distribution, calling for a new peer-network structure, but he should see as evidence of the strength of existing networks.
26. Not trusting undesigned systems. Neighbourhood networks do not have a purpose, while the “peer networks” that SBJ promotes are single-purpose problem-solving initiatives (see 16, above). Power in designed networks resides with the network owner; power in informal networks is dispersed. By neglecting neighbourhoods (despite his claim to be writing in the spirit of Jane Jacobs) he is missing the complexity and richness of real-world networks.
27. Misunderstanding the role of news in his “pothole paradox”. What he sees as neighbourhood news (76 – 77) does not need a purpose-built institution to deliver it, it needs strong communities. Blaming “traditional journalistic institutions” for having a poor track record of meeting this need is like blaming restaurants for not meeting the need for family breakfasts, mistaking a commercial need for a community need.
28. Focusing on the supply side, ignoring the demand side. Surveying the shape of the media, FP gives a familiar description of the variety and proliferation of online content. “There is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered.” (90) But what voices will be heard, and what opinions amplified? Here, he is silent. He claims that the news system is transitioning “from a small set of hierarchical organizations to a distributed network of smaller and more diverse entities” (79): I hoped to see him take on some of the serious critiques of this claim, notably Matthew Hindman’s extensively researched “Myth of Digital Democracy”, but there is no mention: all we get are stories of Macworld and online technology blogging.
29. So many stories. Stories should be supplements to argument, not the substance of it.
30. Quoting “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” It was a clever phrase when William Gibson coined it, but now it is well past its expiry date: it has become a lazy way to brush aside questioning voices. (85)
31. Ignoring inconvenient exceptions in the history of the media. Every weekday throughout my childhood, my parents had The Guardian delivered to the door. Owned and run for many years by a non-profit organization (The Scott Trust), it was set up in 1821 by a group of non-conformist Mancunians. For many years after moving to Canada I got the country’s largest circulation daily, The Toronto Star, owned by a charitable organization (the Atkinson Foundation). And these are only two I know of – I am far from a media expert. But in FP we read that “For more than a century, serious journalism has been financially supported by the massive profits newspapers accumulated, thanks in large part to the near monopoly they had on local advertising.” (91) [Most major newspapers, my understanding is, have always run at a bit of a loss, this being the price that their owners pay to have their say in national debates. But I may be wrong.]
32. Treating intrusive, data-mined advertising as a positive, productive system, while foreign aid is a problem to be fixed (see 3, above), and education is too (see below). Now, a checkin at a lecture on Foursquare goes out to friends, “alerts local businesses who can offer your promotions through Foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the Web, which then attracts advertisers interested in your location or the topic of journalism itself…. you are helping your friends figure out what to do tonight, you’re helping [the host] promote its event; you’re helping a nearby bar attract more customers; you’re helping Google organize the web… new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases.” (94) The assumption of a confluence of interests among advertisers and individuals; the idea that we need to increase the “productivity of the system”, whatever that means in this context: these are dystopian visions.
33. Claiming that ProPublica licenses its content “so that whoever wants to publish its articles may do so” (94) does not fit with ProPublica’s own statement that “Many of our ‘deep dive’ stories are offered exclusively to a traditional news organization, free of charge, for publication or broadcast. We published more than 110 such stories in 2011 with more than 25 different partners.”
34. Having ignored the history of non-profit news publishing (see above, and BBC anyone?) SBJ emphasizes the non-profit nature of ProPublica, drawing attention to the novelty of the model (95). But FP fails to tell us how ProPublica works. [It is funded by the Sandler Foundation, and it is chaired by Herbert Sandler, a savings and loan CEO who sold his bank to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion in 2004. The Sandlers got $2.4 billion and put $1.3 billion into the Sandler Foundation. Not so different from the Atkinson Foundation and the Scott Trust.]
35. Confusing the ability to put a page on the web with reaching a mass market. “Every niche perspective – from the extremes of neo-Nazi hate groups to their polar opposites on the far Left – now has a publishing platform, and a global audience, that far exceeds anything they could have achieved in the age of mass media.” (99 – 100). I can think of one or two unsavoury groups in 1930s Europe who seemed to reach a fairly big – one might even say global – audience.
36. In fact, throughout the whole book there is a silly and distorted comparison of “the Internet” (now) with “mass culture” (past), sweeping to one side all the alternative culture that has somehow persisted over the years. It’s a stacked deck.
37. Treating academia as it treates history, as a source for cherry-picking stories that support an existing viewpoint. In this case, the work of two academics who questioned the “filter bubble” effect (102). It’s the only academic study quoted in the book, so far as I can remember.
38. Quoting David Brooks on anything. (103)
39. Ignoring the history of “leaderless” protest. SBJ writes of the Seattle protests of 1999 that “it’s almost impossible to think of another political movement that generated as much public attention without producing a genuine leader” (106), and I think back to my own political coming-of-age: who were the leaders of the anti-apartheid movement, of Rock Against Racism, of the campaign for abortion rights? Who led the North American resistance to the US wars in Central America, or the poll tax protests in the UK? I see no evidence that the protest movements of today are more leaderless than those of 30 years ago. And I am confident that it’s only my ignorance which precludes me from giving earlier examples.
40. In 2001, the American state had not “optimized its military to do battle with other states” (110). As early as the 1980s, the focus on “Low Intensity Warfare” was well documented, in support of military adventures in Central America, and counterinsurgency in the Pacific. [Also, of course, to fund the “Afghan resistance” to the Russians. That turned out well.]
41. Twitter was not responsible for “spawning pro-democratic flashmobs in the streets of Cairo”. (111)
42. It is true that the whole section on the Internet’s “capacity for shape-shifting” (118) and its affordances, or lack of them, is inoffensive. But it has no strong message either.
43. The Internet makes communication cheaper, but it wrong to say it “democratizes the control of information”. (121)
44. “There is no contesting the tremendous, orders-of-magnitude increase in the numbers of people creating and sharing, thanks to the mass adoption of the Internet”. (121) There is some contesting it. The verbs “creating and sharing” cover many counting oddities: tweeting during a TV show counts, but talking to your family during a TV show does not count. There is and has always been a wealth of “creating and sharing” to which books such as FP are completely blind.
45. Prizes and tournaments are generally not peer networks. Prizes are a useful mechanism to tackle some problems, but again he ropes them into his peer network picture by seeing networks where he wants to see them.
46. Caricaturing “old-style” leftists. The political right and left are characterized as “the mirrored alternatives of Big Capitalism and Big Government” (139): so much for the co-operative movement and many other autonomous movements on the political left.
47. When John Harrison won the longitude prize he was not “at the edge of the network”. (142) The participants in a prize competition are not a “peer network”. Uless by “network” you mean “a lot of people”.
48. The sponsors of prizes have sometimes been networks, as in his tale of the Royal Society for the Arts, but often are not.
49. The X Prize Foundation (147) is indeed a peer network. Of billionaires. The resurgence of prizes is not a mark of a new egalitarianism, it is the mark of a new patronage culture born of huge inequality.
50. Being unwilling to reach out beyond his immediate circle of comfortable thinkers creates a filter bubble of his own. For example, on the topic of government corruption, his sole source is Lawrence Lessig (157).
51. Offering fixes to the problems of democracy through vote delegation (proxy votes), but completely missing the fundamental role of the secret ballot. “proxy votes could be bought, of course. A phony public school expert could walk through a neighbourhood handing out twenty-dollar bills to anyone willing to pledge his school superintendent vote to her. But this is true of any democracy.” (171) It is simply not true in a democracy with a secret ballot, because no one can verify how an individual’s vote was cast, but proxy votes involve an actual visible and trackable transfer of a vote (vote selling), which is completely different. The problem of vote selling, so far as I can tell, is a fatal one for the technocratic schemes in this chapter.
52. Presenting Whole Foods Markets as a model of the new decentralized, flattened organization, while ignoring its anti-union, libertarian roots. Autonomy is OK, just so long as it is our autonomy.
53. Flattened hierarchies (179) do not necessarily translate into more empowered employees or decentralized organizations. Instead, they can do the opposite, and “broaden the span of control for the CEO“.
54. Taking pains to distinguish “peer progressives” from “libertarians” on the economic right, but not mentioning that the chapter on “Conscious Capitalism” takes its name from an organization co-founded by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Food Markets and a committed Randian libertarian.
55. Attributing the success of Silicon Valley to “the unique social chemistry of the Bay Area, with its strange cocktail of engineering geeks, world-class universities, and countercultural experimentation. But the organizational structure of most Silicon Valley firms also deserves a great deal of credit” (185). The idea that Silicon Valley firms are more “egalitarian operations” (185) than others is daydreaming.
56. A fundamental rule of any serious thinking is not to take people at their own valuation, but SBJ breaks this rule repeatedly. He takes his description of the culture and goals of Whole Foods, Intel, and Facebook straight from the leaders of the companies.
57. Intel founder Noyce says he “rejected the idea of a social hierarchy” (186), and there may be some truth to that, but to take seriously the idea that other Silicon Valley CEOs have adopted a peer network approach one would have to avoid looking at any list of the world’s wealthiest people.
58. Disparaging the education system. My parents were both teachers, and my father did teacher training for many years, so I have absorbed some feeling for the difficulties of making schools effective. But never fear, the peer progressives are here. After a whole page of thinking about the problems of schools SBJ concludes that they would be better if they were run like Whole Foods Markets, because “peer progressives want do do away with the bureaucracies as well as the union mentality. They want schools to be run like EOBs (employee-owned businesses), where teachers are shareholders in an enterprise that grows more valiable as it reaches its goal” (192). And that’s it. No notes, no references to other thinkers. It becomes clear what it means to be an optimist, to be a pragmatic peer progressive. Thousands, perhaps millions of people have thought long and hard about education systems and their problems, but it is fine to ignore them all and still be an optimist. Instead, one can wave a few sentences of lazy thought in their direction, confidently asserting that this is the way forward: yet to question this is presumably to be cynical and negative. I’m sorry, but this is not optimism, and it is not pragmatism, it is the juvenile hubris of the know-it-all.
59. Facebook does not “want to strengthen the social ties that allow humans round the planet to connect, organize, converse, and share” (193). It does not “consider the cultivation and proliferation of Baran Webs to be its defining mission”. It just says it does. The onus is on the author to show the truth of the statement, and he does not.
60. “The Facebook platform” is not “a continuation of the Web and Internet platforms that lie beneath it” (193). Facebook is the biggest centralized system ever built: a billion people connected to a single of servers, mediated by a single set of policies, making money for a single set of shareholders. One Server Farm to Rule Them All.
61. Faced with the immense wealth of the early Facebook investors, and the personal control that Mark Zuckerberg has, SBJ admits that there is massive cognitive dissonance in the “peer network” idea. But his solution is simply to hope: “top-down control is a habit that will be hard to shake… But the empirical track record of conscious capitalists and employee-owned businesses suggests that we might have been focusing on the wrong elements all along.” (195)
62. Believing that struggle is unnecessary. It is not mentioned anywhere in the book.

Attention conservation notice: 3,000 words of amateur rumination on the problems with agent-based theories of uprisings. Part of a series about identity, institutions, and uprisings.

In the torrent of debate over the causes and dynamics of the "Arab Spring" uprisings, one of the strongest currents has its source in cascade models of uprisings. The starting points for these  models are Mark Granovetter's simple and abstract Threshold Models of Collective Behaviour and Thomas Schelling's similar ideas in "Macromotives and Microbehaviour". If a population of individuals is presented with a choice between A and B, and if each will choose A only if some number of other people (their "threshold") also choose A, then very small differences in the distribution of thresholds can lead to very different results. In some cases, everyone chooses A, in others everyone chooses B, in others, the population is split. One spark sputters; an identical spark starts a prairie fire.

Timur Kuran and Susanne Lohmann used these ideas to explain the sudden and surprising uprisings of 1989 in Eastern Europe. Both drew attention to the paucity of information in an authoritarian state, about what others believe and about the nature of the state itself. Highly motivated protesters with a low threshold engage in dissent or protest and thereby reveal information to other disgruntled people about the breadth of disenchantment, or about the nature of the state, or about the experience of other individuals in relation to the state. Others join in and by doing so reveal more. And so it goes. With the right distribution of thresholds, a single person's action can light a fire that sweeps across a continent. Sudden, dramatic uprisings in authoritarian states are a switch from one equilibrium to another as dissent draws back the veil of silence and people see each other, see the nature of the regime under which they live, and realize that everyone else sees it too.

Information and symbolism

Just as the cascade point of view has taken on the "network society", so it has highlighted the role of information in authoritarian states, and hence the role of media and technology in fostering change. It's true that information in authoritarian states is limited, almost by definition, but it's a long way from that to the idea that the paucity of common knowledge is what is holding back uprisings. Again, it's easy to express ideas of information flow across networks within agent-based models, but that doesn't actually tell us that information flow in authoritarian societies is the barrier to social change. Yes, there is something of interest in the lens that information provides, but treating it as the only lens of interest is too narrow.

Once you start swimming in the cascade current, you find yourself surrounded by like-minded individuals. It's no surprise that agent-based theories have found fertile ground among those interested in technology. After all, technophiles are typically happy with a focus on the role of information, tend to have a mathematical cast of mind, but are less happy with sociological concepts or social-historical investigations of social movements. Economic concepts and techniques find a welcome home (transaction costs and utility functions) while talk of collective identity is more difficult to translate into agent models. To be blunt, adopting the agent-based outlook saves you a lot of work, because you don't have to read all those historical studies of movements and organizations and make up your mind about the issues they raise.

That there is something of a cultural divide between the agent-based modelers and other currents of the debate, such as those who study social movements, is not new to me of course: here is Andrew Walder:

The field of social movements and contentious politics has been a prolonged effort to establish a sociological alternative to the more parsimonious theories of economics. The increasing insistence on the subjective dimensions of mobilization—collective action frames, the formation of collective identities, the role of emotions—is essentially motivated by a feeling that the initial emphasis on organizations, networks, and political opportunity structures were not sufficiently different from rational social choice models to offer a fully sociological alternative.

Protests and other acts of dissent share many common features. For one, they are often deeply symbolic acts. Protesters choose symbolic days on which to make their point (the 40th anniversary of the GDR), they focus their actions on national symbols (the storming of the National Palace by the Sandinistas). Presenting protest as information-revelation ignores the symbolic nature of protests, the importance of demonstrating "worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment", the practice of drawing from a shared repertoire of actions, which other currents of thought have shown to be important. At least, my reading of the literature suggests that there is a lot of verbiage around the basic theory, and sometimes in this verbiage there is reference to the symbolic nature of the protests, but there's little to actually tie the words to the theory.

If scholars of social movements have demonstrated that identity and its formation are important motivators for political action, and if these factors appear nowhere in the cascade models that seek to explain sudden political change, then there's a gap in the theory.