Betting "Against" the Internet

Many are familiar with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt and his quote of November 2006, where he opined:

"What's surprising is that so many companies are still betting against the net, trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's solutions. The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don't work. Betting against the net is foolish because you're betting against human ingenuity…"

On his web site, Erik Heels, an MIT Engineer, patent and trademark lawyer expertly outlines examples of those who are fighting the basic advantages of the World Wide Web as opposed to those who are adopting the advantages. He raises good points, those which Lessig and others demonstrate. For example, "\When publishers provide partial feeds for their content - or no feeds at all - third parties step in to fix the problem. Gravity. You're fighting gravity. For example, I enjoy reading (and legally reprinting) the Dilbert comic strip and Scott Adams's blog (by Dilbert's creator). But Dilbert's publisher, United Media, does not provide a Dilbert feed. Enter Tapestry Comics, which provides feeds for comics, both official and "unauthorized." The Tapestry Comics Dilbert feed is a full feed. I read it in Google Reader, I share it in Google Reader.The phrase "illegal feeds" makes a good headline, but it is legally accurate? Is "unauthorized feeds" accurate? Do you need the permission of the copyright owner to read their copyrighted works, or is this fair use? What about sharing an "unauthorized" feed item?"

Fundamental to the revolution and adoption of new paradigms in thinking of "ownership" and how the distribution of the Internet functions, is the notion of controlling content. In the new world, controlling content is futile and represents another example of the old vs. the reality of the new. As Heels points out:

"Railroads, electricity, the industrial revolution, television, the Internet. Each revolution has had its opponents. But every technological advance that increases efficiently is a good thing. When efficiency increases, qualify of life improves for everyone. Efficiency is good, inefficiency is bad."

Jefferson - A Father of the Revolution and Proponent of Open Systems

For the vast but relatively brief time that humans have elected to engage, create, or submit to governments, whether they be religious institutions, monarchies, dictatorships, social regimes, republics or any other form or combination thereof, the basis upon which those in charge wielded their power is the control of information and the associated lack of understanding and education of their constituency. Be it building superior armies, affecting rumors or common thinking or submitting to and enabling commercial influence of the masses, those in charge, over time, tend to manipulate the masses to a view that benefits their control.

A significant and historical dimension of controlling the citizenry has been wielded through the control of information. Begining with the printing press, this mode of control started to diminish. In the past century information control has diminished increasingly as technology and education proliferate across the globe. More people have access to information than ever before, and therefore the means with which governments and institutions have to hide from information is diminishing greatly. However, this reality does not result in enhanced governance. In fact, it is resulting in more corruption and poorer governance and those in charge are increasingly attempting to seize what they can through this time of great change and flux. The battle is between the old and the new and what lies ahead is an opportunity- if people only seize it.

The foundation of a just governance of people is based on an enlightened people. Therefore, when the citizens of the world object to wrongs it is they who must take responsibility for those acts which reflect an unexamined and unchallenged government. While the grip of the revolution is seizing us all, failing to take on the responsibilities associated with the new paradigm will result in the possibility of more oppression and lost opportunity available through the revolution of change. A visionary, Jefferson opined years ago of the realities of humanity, governance and leadership. In the age of revolution his words carry more weight than every before and bare consideration in reflecting upon the opportunity for mankind.

"Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government." -- Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 1802. FE 8:179

"Reformation in government follows reformation in opinion." -- Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:366, Papers 15:138

"If Caesar had been as virtuous as he was daring and sagacious, what could he, even in the plenitude of his usurped power, have done to lead his fellow citizens into good government?... If their people indeed had been, like ourselves, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. 'Restore independence to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do its will.' But steeped in corruption, vice and venality, as the whole nation was,... what could even Cicero, Cato, Brutus have done, had it been referred to them to establish a good government for their country?... No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and their people were so demoralized and depraved as to be incapable of exercising a wholesome control. Their reformation then was to be taken up ab incunabulis. Their minds were to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments proportioned, indeed, but irremissible; in all cases, to follow truth as the only safe guide, and to eschew error, which bewilders us in one false consequence after another in endless succession. These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government. But this would have been an operation of a generation or two at least, within which period would have succeeded many Neros and Commoduses, who would have quashed the whole process. I confess, then, I can neither see what Cicero, Cato and Brutus, united and uncontrolled could have devised to lead their people into good government, nor how this enigma can be solved." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1819. ME 15:233

 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." --Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315

Turn off the tube, read, write and seek to understand the revolution. You have a duty to human kind to learn, think and act.

How We Live & How We Eat - The Revolution in Global Food Production

In a recent CNN Report, “Food Crisis, a Silent Tsunami” , Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program, claims bio-fuel promotion is unintentionally adding to skyrocketing world food prices and threatening to “ plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger." Sheeran attended a Food summit hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, aimed at determining ways to boost food supplies and identify deterrents as commodity inflation of the past year is contributing to increasing consumer food prices and a food crisis in unindustrialized countries. Yet the debate between fuel or food is really misplaced. As my friend Phillip Mills pointed out to me some time ago during the publishing of his and his better half's book "Fighting Globesity" Our method of industrial food production is at its roots inefficient, inextricably tied to fossil fuels as a base for its production and that is the real problem and basis of the challenge. How sad more people do not realize how untenable the unsustainable nature of the human food supply chain is.

The views expressed by an increasing number of well meaning educated people, like Sheehan, are an example of how broken the global and industrial food system is and illustrates the lack of understanding surrounding it.  The method of industrial global crop production is unsustainable; therefore to incorporate the debate of rising cost of food with bio-fuel competition is akin to worrying about how the furniture on the deck of the Titanic is arranged. The global food system is very inefficient and dysfunctional. How we are processing energy for human consumption is vastly problematic and is why we are experiencing both large jumps in fossil fuel costs and food commodities at the same time. The reality is we use vast amounts of fossil fuels to grow soy, corn and wheat - the core components of the global industrial food system. Wether we use those crops to feed people or alternatively to grow "bio-fuel" is irrelevant in the long view simply because the manner in which global grop production is occuring is so damn inefficient.

As Pollan points out in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma,   “when you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.” Simply put it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. That is the real problem, which people like Sheeran, among others, fail to grasp. Even the surge in "organic" foods does not help - it costs over 70 calories of fuel to transport 1 calorie of organic lettuce from California to the central U.S. This does not even begin to address other side effects of our food system - the permeation of corn and its contribution to obesity and the adverse consequences of industrial farming to the environment are but a few of many other ill affects. As the world becomes more industrialized and developed the reality of the unsustainable nature of the system is exacerabted.

How can this change?  How can we help avoid the situation where the industrialized world is becoming increasingly obese while one child is dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes? How can we reconcile that one of the most productive base of farms and a key food basket for the world, Iowa, is a food dessert that only produces feed grade corn and soy and must import 80% of what the population there consumes as food? While complex, the solution is truly basic. We must decentralize our food chain and make it sustainable as nature intended. We must go back to our roots. This relates directly to the revolution – our centralized modes of production do not work any longer. It will take more people making more informed and better choices to drive the change. Unfortunately, this requires that things break before they get better and many unfortunate will suffer the consequences of change.

In recent decades both central planning and the mechanical worldview that justified it have lost their practical and philosophical appeal because they increasingly do not work and our food supply is but one example. The emerging worldview, now becoming more widespread in business as well as in countless other fields, has replaced the mechanical, reductionist model with the organic and the relational. This is the basis of sustainability. Whether the subject of study is a living thing, a society of living things, or a corporate re-organization, the new focus is on the sum of inter-relationships of its members rather than the isolated members themselves. When the centralized industrial era segregated animals from crop production by replacing naturally occurring manure that nourished crops with petroleum based fertilizer and substituted grains grown on the farm to feed the livestock with subsidized corn in feedlots, we created short term gains while eroding rational systems, creating the unsustainable.

The new systems worldview accepts and respects the voluntary, natural order as well as the inborn character of its constituent components, whose natural interactions create that order, an order that is more durable and flexible than one imposed from the outside, no matter how many PhDs helped conceive it. The systems view teaches that all working systems succeed because they comprise smaller, self-organizing sub-systems that retain some degree of autonomy, which enables the overall system to remain adaptable and robust. This view not only restores respectability for the naturally occurring, traditional order, but philosophic legitimacy for local autonomy and decision-making. It is the foundation of the revolution both in how we live, and how we eat.

You've Got to Love Lawrence Lessig

I love the accomplished Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's grasp of the new media vs. the old and in particular this excerpt from his column in Wired Magazine, "A Costly Addiction" dated November of 2006. When this site sets forth the notion that protectors of the past, particularly as it relates to copyright protection, are battling the creators of the future there are few more capable of portraying the realities of this battle than this legal mind who wrote:

"Of all the things that have not gone according to the framers' plan, perhaps this is the most significant. Practically everyone in Washington, DC, is now dependent in precisely the way our founders feared. All but a few members of Congress devote the majority of their time to raising money for reelection. Doing the job we've hired them to do – governing – takes a distant second place. A good politician comes to understand precisely how much his campaign will gain or lose with each decision he makes. Like rats in a scientific experiment learning which lever delivers food, politicians learn the complex dance that keeps them in office.

So it should be no surprise that this dependency (or corruption, as it ought to be called) has begun to permeate the institutions that support policymaking, including academia. In the recent congressional hearings on telecom and network neutrality, for example, 77 percent of the nongovernmental testimony was from commercial or trade organizations directly dependent on the result – meaning less than 23 percent came from sources that were even arguably neutral. That figure will continue to fall until the only people heard in DC will be those who have a direct financial stake in the outcome they plead. Independent policymaking will be as common as powdered wigs.

The answer is obvious to anyone watching the history of policymaking as it affects the Internet. The winners have been the industries most skilled in playing politics (read: the content industry); the losers have been the ones focused more on innovation than on sucking up to Congress (read: much of the technology industry). Those losers, though, are the future; the winners, the past. And it takes an extraordinarily perverse view of progress to think that protecting the past is the best path to the future."

View his site http://lessig.org/content/columns/ and read his book.

Man is God: The Creation of Experience and the Prosumer

See this video that sets forth key elements of change which represent the revolution and establish experience as a product and the concept of the "prosumer" .