Kerabu

Lords of Hypocrisy

A superbly written blog I've been following of late is Will Connors' Things We Should Have Written Down, chronicling the author's adventures covering conflict in and around Addis Ababa. Connors is a correspondent for a regional newspaper there, but the blog is far better than any newspaper reporting.

What prompts me here is a two-part post on "Lords of Hipocrisy," or the "opulence and inefficiency" of NGOs in the area. In Part 1 Connors details several anecdotes about aid workers from Care, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders and other groups tooling around in their SUVs and generally lording it over the locals. Here is Part 2:

The estimated budget for an upcoming 17-day ‘research trip’ by an acquaintance working for an anti-hunger NGO:

SUV rental: 500 birr per day x 17 = 8,500 birr ($979)

Gas for SUV: 600 birr per day x 17 = 10,200 birr ($1,175)

Hotels: 200 birr (two people) per night x 17 = 3,400 birr ($391)

Miscellaneous supplies: 100 birr per day x 17 = 1,700 birr ($195)

Estimated Total Expenses: 23,800 birr ($2,741)

Destination: Several of the top tourist spots in Ethiopia

Justification for this trip: “Preliminary research for a future survey”

Hungry Ethiopians that could have been fed with $2,741: ???

I'd go so far as to draw a parallel: Connors' blog is a far better resource on Ethiopia than any newspaper.  And like newspapers, these aid organizations are similarly obsolete, bloated and ineffective.  What blogs have done for information, entrepreneurial types will soon be doing for development. And we can probably learn a lot about the opportunities and pitfalls New Development will face by looking at what New Media has gone through in the past few years. Might save some wheels from being reinvented.

Open Source Women in Africa

Via WorldChanging (which is having a fund drive, btw), I came across the Africa Linux Chix site, which is so hot and so cool it's almost ridiculous. Here's the bulk of the post I commented on, and the bulk of my comments, after: 

It is probably a good thing that FOSS strategies and tactics are being used in Africa to move things in whatever direction they're gonna go in -- without the additional (colonial?) burden of rights-bound software.

But in the face of limited resources on the planet and even fewer resouces in the majority of African countries, will computing be to Africa be as "important" as it is in the North? Will it take the same shape as we in the US expect? Flash-animated websites, adservers, news feeds for one class of user, proprietary networks for another class of user, etc.

Are woman-centered FOSS efforts going to work differently than capitalist and anti-capitalist (male) ones?

It seems to me that successful computing in Africa is going to have to follow a low-power, distributed model. Everyone who has computing capacity is going to have to share it with everyone else... like the SETI project, in a future Africa, idle cycles from all manner of computing devices (cell phones, PDAs, desktop machines, workstations) are going to have to support the information infratstructure of a future Africa.

Or will Africans simply centralize their computing power in resource-intensive, air conditioned, highly-secured physical locations?

If Cheik Diop was right about Meridional Civilization vs. Northern Civilization, then in the same way that the regular flood of the Nile "programmed" humans to work collectively (ultimately making examples of both monumental architecture and long-term peace possible), Digital Africans would benefit from seeking similar approaches to computing resources. For Diop, what was learned in Egypt thousands of years ago still operates in contemporary Black African cultures. At the time he probably would have classified computing power as a natural resource or a scientific field... this is long before it became a lifestyle. To me, FOSS strategies & tactics, in relation to Africa, could work much more like music.

And my reply (to more in the post than this)...

Computing is indeed a natural resource--we talk of "data mining" but what computing really accomplishes is mind mining--in evolutionary terms, it's the way we can make our brilliance as valuable as once was our physical labor. No place is better situated to make that leap, I think, than Africa (I write this from Southern California).

One point I'd make is that Open Source isn't anti-profit, it's merely anti-capital--in an open source environment, you don't have to amass before you can produce. You can have an idea, write it, and take it to market. There are still barriers, to be sure, but they're fewer than ever, historically. An African woman has as much access as a white man in Palo Alto--other than being outside of the insidery tech community. What she has to weigh against that is a lack of preconceived notions and blissful ignorance of the accepted wisdom in her community--both of which are key ingredients in innovation. I'd urge you to take a "capitalist" approach in terms of monetizing your efforts--make products, start companies, sell stuff, think entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurialism is the noble cousin of capitalism.

The next Steve Jobs may well be an African woman--or women. I think it's very, very likely that this will happen eventually, and that the greatness of a continent will come about as a result of the innovativeness of a true outsider tech culture much like the underground culture that drove Silicon Valley in its heyday.

As for the idea that strategies and tactics could work more like music: that's the most beautiful and powerful idea I've heard in a long, long time, for so many reasons. Music is both deeply structured and intuitive, and that's what computing is--and the business structure that houses it must be exactly that in order to thrive.

Co-Op vs. Open Source

This is interesting, from Kid Mercury, responding to an article on Innovation Insider about the Darwinian development process and new media:

I agree that this model is the future of media, and I'll even take it a step further and say this will result in the end of corporate business structure as we know it -- open source production strategies need open source organizational structures as well, and as the value of knowledge surpasses that of capital and as the means of production (a computer and Internet connection) become more and more affordable, expect things like LLCs and Ltd's and S-Corps to be replaced by co-ops. To put it intuitively, the future of media won't be done by a traditional company with a traditional payroll -- it'll be done by revenue-sharing alliances and communities.

I think he's spot on--up to the point where the word "co-op" occurs.  To be fair, I don't think he really means co-op, as he uses open source, more accurately, in the next breath--but this too leads me to want to explain why the word co-op gives me hives, just for the sake of argument.

Port of the reason that traditional business structures must go is that they dampen speed, agility and creativity by the very fact that they are negotiated between individuals. A co-op is probably the worst offender of all when it comes to favoring negotiated behavior over personal initiative and dampening the human impulse to create. Open source collaboration is quite a different model from the co-op. Basically an entrepreneurial model for collaboration, open source depends on synergy, rather than negotiation. I think that the reason a lot of new media and other "new" business models are failing is precisely that they fail to recognize the fundamental difference between these models--and they almost always bet on the wrong pony, choosing negotiation and heirarchy every time. As I've written before, new media companies that mine content are bound to fail--precisely because they strip the synergy from the happy chaos of the blogosphere.

For instance, I read today on TechCrunch that Technorati has added "authority" as a filtering tool--authority being another word for linkedness. This is a useful tool, as anyone who has waded through the meaningless bit it also reinforces the values of heirarchy and consensus, to me this cuts against the grain of what's valuable about the blogosphere. (It also mirrors a problem in the physical world, where "extroverts" fare better than "introverts" because of a culture that values connections over content, but that's another story.) The problem with Technorati hasn't been that it doesn't show me the biggest, but that it doesn't show me the best. I'd rather see search get fuzzier and smarter--give me a search cloud I can manipulate to produce results based on richness and accuracy of content, rather than popularity. Maybe we should be looking to dating sites like match.com and eharmony for ideas for improving our search models (matching tools, rather than searching tools?), rather than building more dumb, machine-like tools that spit "results" at us.

Good Design, Great Design and Carnality

Today I'm thinking about what's good, and what isn't. It came together just now when I watched the Avalanches' Frontier Psychiatrist, which made me go: "Oh, wow, it took 20 years, but someone finally made a music video worth watching. Hmm." 

It takes a good video to confirm the badness of all that went before (and no, those Michael Jackson videos from the 80's weren't "good." They were just pervy-compelling because we could tell there was something really, really wrong brewing there).

Frontier Psychiatrist is a real artwork, because it's a whole thing that exists in visual and aural dimensions--not an illustration of a song. And because it uses sampling to talk about a more primal form of sampling--memory, dreams, the "psyche." It also uses kitschy Americana to sidle up to the sentimental grandeur of a raw, individualist culture that thrives on the romance of the "frontier," much in the manner of Aaron Copeland, or even William Burroughs.

Which brings me to a newer phenomenon than music videos: the web. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one has yet designed the first great website. No one has yet published the web's Don Quixote, let alone its Naked Lunch. Though the Million Dollar Homepage is pretty cool, it's still more of a prank--and I'd argue that it's not even all that well executied.

I agree with Andy Rutledge that most websites are bad and succeed in spite of their bad design, including Ebay and  Amazon. I also agree with Andy that Craigslist isn't bad, because the design suits the site's purpose so very well. (I'm not sure I agree with him about Google, though--its homepage is pretty close to being a gesture of greatness.)

I think there's a philosophical divide preventing us from transcending our design rules, and that is that we persist in thinking of design and technology as completely separate métiers. Technical innovators tend to be proud of the ugliness of their product (Slashdot, Technorati). While web designers tend to let their tool kits drive design (tables, CSS), "applying" style as if icing a cupcake. There's precious little design-driven innovation out there. And even less purely carnal artistry taking place online (I'm thinking of Van Gogh eating his paints). I think our approach to new media has been way too cool to date. Not nearly enough madness and intuition to achieve great leaps of insight.

I have a hunch that it's about time for things to get more interesting, though. I'm looking forward to reading the forthcoming book from 37 signals, Getting Real (despite a truly cringe-worthy title that makes it sound like something by Anthony Robbins or Suze Orman). In the excerpts on the website, they say things like this:

Getting Real is all about starting from the user interface and customer experience and then building out. Visual design first, programming second. The more traditional process is starting from the abstract (documentation, diagrams, charts, etc.), coding a skeleton app, and then homing in on the real by finishing it up with an interface. We think that’s backwards.

I'm going to take their advice, and get out my watercolor sketchpad next time I want to noodle around with designs for Kerabu. Time to stop worrying about CSS; maybe the fact that I can still draw a fairly realistic horse will lead me closer to the anatomy of good site design.

It's the Rule of Law, Stupid

There's an excellent post on Rule of Law in India and its Economic Implications by Naveen Mandava at The Indian Economy Blog, which explains succinctly why a responsive and responsible judicial system is essential to a healthy economy.  Mandava cites two studies that show that the strength of the judiciary system in various states and territories in India correlates strongly with the regions' economic robustness. He then cites an alarming statistic: the Indian government itself is a party to 60% of all civil suits. In other words, the goverment can't get out of its own way. India's economy is booming. Imagine how strong it would be if the country aggressively pursued judicial reform?

This adds a dimension to something I've been writing and thinking about for a while now: that the rule of law, not democracy, is the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of an entrepreneurial economy. Democracy follows on both of those.

This means that judicial corruption and inefficiency is far more damaging to emerging economies than corruption in other branches of government.

It also means, dare I say it, that most of our foreign-policy activism that is aimed overtly at promoting "democratic" reform is wasted effort, in the absence of a foundation of judicial and economic reform.  One need only look at the absurdist "democratic" rise of Hamas to see that democracy can't really function properly in a corrupt legal and economic system.

Stop Making Sense

The best movie review I ever read (?!), of Chronicles of Narnia (haven't seen and probably won't unless on an airplane), is by Tyler Cowan on Marginal Revolution, and reads, in part:

OK, I missed the first thirty minutes and heard the rest in a blurry Mexican dub.  My question remains: What does scarcity mean in a fantasy film?

If you are a Queen with an ice palace and a magic sword, why do you use (hire?) two lumbering polar bears to pull your chariot?  Especially in the temperate climate of New Zealand.  If a lion can be reincarnated, is the rest of the plot all for show or a test?  Just how do resources get allocated?

Perhaps it is faith which is scarce in fantasy stories.  As stocks of faith rise and fall, other complementary resources, including the power of your weapons, are reallocated accordingly by the principles of the imaginary world.

That seems to imply that fantasy films cannot operate under the game-theoretic assumption of "common knowledge."  People must disagree about the true model governing the world, otherwise greater faith yields no relative advantage.

Are fantasy movies what economic models would look more like if we took the absence of common knowledge more seriously?  (Yes there are stylized models of non-common knowledge in the specialized literature but the notion is kept under check; the game-theoretic results we use typically are built on common knowledge assumptions.)  Keep in mind that, above a certain level of subsistence, much of your welfare springs from your inner stories and narratives, not from concrete goods and services.  Your real advantage in life, if you are born sufficiently wealthy, is your ability to tell yourself beneficial stories.

This blog post just rings all the bells for me. I was travelling last week, and am spending the day catching up on my reading. I have several old-fashioned articles (a Gladwell thing in the New Yorker, something from Scientific American, etc.) open in browser windows, but I'm avoiding reading them. Truth is, I much prefer to get my information in these concentrated, poetic, intuitively leapy bursts. Cowen's post is about anything and everything at once, and makes no sense and perfect sense. Reading his thought is as close to actually having the thought as is possible--it's practically a Vulcan mind meld.

I guess that's what is blogging is doing to our communication styles: re-codifying the way we transmit information from brain to brain, to better resemble the way these packets are passed from synapse to synapse within a brain. Discrete, hallucinatory bursts of info that can be infinitely re-ordered, "remembered" and "reassociated" as needed. Finally, the end of that clunky, temporary construct known as "rationality" is in sight (or I should say it's in thinking distance).