Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Just one problem

This sticker came on our new Osterizer® blender. The new blender replaces an old blender that wasn't very old. It's such a close match that we now have two pitchers to go with one base.

Anyway, that "leading competitor" must really suck.

Consent

Throughout the Industrial Age, and especially during the Mass Media Era — the end of which is threatened by the massively self-informing nature of the Net — politics has been about money. We've had a government of the money, by the money and for the money, most of which has come from industrial interest groups.

This fact was brought home once again in the story of Hearthside Lobbying for Energy, by Virginia Ellis in the LA Times. Pointing to the piece, Dan Gillmor says,

Read this story, especially the boilerplate denials from legislators that their votes had anything to do with the money showered upon them by interested parties. Shame is an abstraction to such people.

Yet we still live in a democracy. Our legislatures and public bureaucracies govern at our consent.

We can reform our democracy by informing each other, and substantiate the informed consent by which our governments govern. That's the top challenge for connected citizens.

Lately I've heard more, for some reason, about the alleged hazards of networked democracy — of the risks of mob rule, of candidates and legislatures governing by poll rather than principle. Maybe the risks are there, but I think the upside so far exceeds the downside that the latter serves mostly as a red herring.

Democracy isn't just about popularity. It's about consent. In our increasingly networked world, we have more opportunities, every day, to inform our consent, to deepen and substantiate it with facts and informed opinions by principled and involved people and organizations.

Governing is complicated. In the case of an issue like energy policy in a state like California, it's hugely complicated.

We can't uncomplicate it. But we can use the Net to inform our consent around approaches to it.

Seems to me there's a lot to talk about here, and it's not just about whose name is at the top of a ticket.

Bonus link #1: Mitch Ratcliffe's Political advertising — from the IRS.

Bonus link #2: Britt Blaser's The Greatest Thing. Imaginable.

Here's your issue

I can't think of a more important issue for the 2004 election than Saving the Net. That's why I wrote the essay at that link for Linux Journal. (And apparently it is a big issue. I'm getting a pile of mail about the essay, along with a huge and interesting string of comments on the thing.) An excerpt:

What will it take to revitalize this understanding of property and to cause outrage against the damage done to it by Congress?

I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:

1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets

In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.

The Internet has proven to be a fine marketplace for all kinds of stuff. Look up any product on a search engine, and you'll see free markets at work all over the place, with power growing on both the supply and the demand sides o every category you can name.

Markets flourish on the Net or with the help of the Net because the Net is free. That's free as in beer, speech, liberty and enterprise. That freedom is guaranteed by the end-to-end nature of the Net, and the NEA principles it engenders: "Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it."

This may sound a bit like communism to conservative sensibilities, unless it is made clear that the Net belongs to that class of things (gravity, the core of the Earth, the stars, atmosphere, ideas) that cannot be owned; and that even thinking about owning it is ludicrous....

Saving the Net and the NEA goods that thrive on the Net should be a paramount concern for technologists everywhere. Those goods include Linux and every idea that's good enough to grow when it passes from one brain to another, gaining value along the way.

Our work is cut out for us. Let's do it.

One job for me, and for anybody else interested in helping out, is finishing the building out of AOTC and GeekPAC. Contact me if you're up for it.