Isabel Walcott Hilborn

What a difference 21 years makes

Back in 1988, our commander in chief Ronald Reagan championed and signed the Convention Against Torture, which states that torture is never acceptable even with war as an excuse, and which requires participating countries to prosecute their torturers (thanks Glenn Greenwald on Salon for this, and for the pointer to the Krauthammer column).

Today in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer describes the circumstances under which he thinks torture is permissible and says anyone who never sees any justification in torture should not be entrusted with military decisions.

The other day in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman said Obama was right not to prosecute, because it would "tear America apart" and we have a "unique" enemy.

A Pew poll published the other day revealed that "the more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists" (CNN).

What on earth is going on, when the people who mourn Christ's crucifixion, with a faith built upon mercy, suddenly condone torture?  When a one conservative icon's recommendations nobody took issue with 20 years ago are suddenly considered nigh treasonous by their own party?  When the human-rights-loving, law-expert President we just elected refuses to hold anyone accountable for breaking international and US law?  When a writer and columnist we respect and admire says it's okay to trade human rights for political harmony, like some kind of warlord dictator (fascist or communist, take your pick)?

What on earth is going on?  This is America.  Can people not simply open their eyes and say, "looks like someone's being accused of criminal acts, let's give him a trial"?  Is that so darn hard?

And, yet more PDF notes

Tried to get this up last Friday, but just didn't get around to it. Better late than never!

A few more speakers from the morning sessions at the Personal Democracy Forum. Again, apologies for any notes that aren't accurate.

Thomas Friedman: If an activist media has merit, it can have global impact. Readsa few new chapters from his book The World Is Flat, which he is expanding.

TXU announced plans to build 11 new coal-fired power plans. President of Environmental Defense Fund tried to get in for a meeting, but governor of TX was on their side.

Activists built a global constituency to establish how far out of the mainstream their plan was. The efforts paid off when KKR offered them $45B, the biggest leveraged buyout in history, but only want to go forward if they can work out the problems with EDF and NRDC, a climate-friendly deal.

At the end of the day, this buyout rode on the approval of the 2 people at the table who had no money on the table. TF’s friend – we were operating under the old rules, and the rules have changed – where’s the roadmap for the new rules? People all over the world demand: "Who are you to play with my food?" Business school grads, environmentalists, philanthropists, all with a desire to make an impact. The internet makes this activism easier and cheaper than ever. TF: If it’s not happening, it’s cause you’re not doing it. Thows down the gauntlet.

The next new chapter: "What happens when we all have a dog’s hearing?" This is the flip side to social entrepreneurship. The downside. Paris taxi was driving, talking on phone and watching a movie. I was working on my laptop, listening to my ipod. We never spoke to each other. Technology can make the far feel very near, but it can also make the near feel very far. He spoke with Linda Stone about what she calls Continuous Partial Attention. We’re everywhere except where we actually are, physically. And the woman driving with her handheld phone almost runs over the jogger with his ipod. What effects are these techologies having on our daily lives? Allowing us to interrupt each other.

What happens when we can suddenly hear everything whispered about us? When we all have "dog’s hearing"? Someone is blogging about you right now. Just type your name into Google. People can make vitriolic and personal attacks. How thick is your skin? Are you ready for all your students to blog about you? We are all public figures. Court cases are already arising.

Some kids made a Myspace page under the name of a hated assistant principal. Lawsuit says the parents are guilty of defamation.

…It’s often the less benign sides of this flat world that get the traction. Friedman talked to some young women, who said that Al Gore was Jewish. The arab newspapers told them so. Large numbers of people outside this country think that the Jews were warned not to go to work the day of 9/11. They believed this "rumor" which was spread with malicious intent. When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you?

Friedman: The country with the most imagination, who lets it run free and supports it the most, will win. China will not necessarily win. They censor Google. Let’s not cede the century to them.

If we don’t take the politicians and business leaders by the throat and say we need a carbon tax, it won’t happen – and the people most affected by this aren’t even born yet. So, where is the disruptive energy in this room? I don’t feel it! Where is it? Bring it on!

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danah boyd

"Companies think about how to make money, not how to engage with the people you meet there. Let’s look at this through the eyes of the people who live there. It’s a form of public life, they hang out there with their friends. What are these "friends" on the social networks?

• people "collect" friends – for their identity – who are they, who do they friend, and what does this say about me?
• Commenting – I can write a message on a friend’s profile for all their friends to see. Why don’t politicians use this? These comments make the friend look cool, it raises their face, it shows you can reciprocate. What would it mean if politicians actually paid attention to their supporters, linked to their posts, give them traffic, leave a comment on their profile? I am told, politicians don’t have time for this. But they do this in public, they do them face to face. These are important because they make it real. Most of the people at those crowds are already fans, they don’t need to be converted.
• For these under 30’s, they live in a place where there’s no place to get together, so they get together online. They don’t come out to see you in public, but they would do it in online spaces. These spaces do have properties that are fundamentally different.
• Persistence. What you say sticks around, for better or worse. The younger crowd is learning how to deal with it.
• Searchability. Parents can learn about their kids. Young people take for granted they can find their friends wherever they may be.
• Can’t tell difference between what is original and what is a copy. A big tactic for bullying.
• Politicians, get your butts out there, and shake hands.

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Next speaker: Farouk Olu Aregbe, started the group One Million Strong for Barack, doesn’t work for the campaign. His own experience campaigning for college president gave him experience organizing groups of young people, and organizes student government for the U of Missouri.

"Started as a group, then started getting advice about putting up videos, linking to other websites, sending out emails, and so forth. We ran into a threshold – do we want to spend money on becoming a PAC? No… we decided to form subgroups, solicited $15K from students, this is significant, college students don’t have money. We have challenges we’re facing. How to take these masses of volunteers, take them offline, channel this energy.

Yes we want to reach a million, but we really want to get them to vote. And this means we have to somehow keep their interest. There’s a June 9^th Walk for Change. We’ve centered ourselves around events. Taking people offline, getting things done.

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Matt Stoller -

"For me this is a story of betrayal. A failure of the political system. The people who did well online, Howard Dean. This is my crazy uncle theory. The guys who said things at Thanksgiving who said things that were true but uncomfortable. Kids like to hear them, but parents don’t. These candidates did really well online. They appealed to people who felt betrayed by the system.

This is a good way to understand the politics of the left online. Open left. Organizing around a key set of principles. Each betrayal has opened up a space for people to innovate politically. The Clinton Lewinsky affair in the Drudge report led to MoveOn. Etc.

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Seth Godin

"The sooner we quit something that has worked really well for 50 years, the sooner we will win. Ideas that spread, win. In the last hundred years, the system has evolved to spread the news. TV drove this – I can interrupt people to spread my message forcibly, even if it’s not true. We saw that this worked! People spend this money because it worked. Politicians did this. Get donations, buy ads, get elected, det donations, buy ads, etc.

Now, the world is filled with noise. "As seen on TV" is broken.

This doesn’t work the way it used to. Look how many choices of tofu we have!

It’s not working – but candidates are spamming us again and again. It doesn’t work. We’re getting good at avoiding spam. Why are marketers still going to singles bars when they could be building a relationship with their customer? People on both sides of the aisle are doing it exactly wrong.

91% of real estate brokers never contact the buyer or the seller after the deal is done. What permission does is it lets you have a private conversation with your customer. Now they are in the fashion business. The core of greenpeace can’t be, how do we raise more money to interrupt people to tell them something they don’t want to hear? It must be, instead, let’s give them something to talk about.

Seth: the message needs to get to the geeks. Stand for something. Something people will choose to talk about. Electioneers and marketers are still hunters. It’s time to farm. How do we create movements where, when you show up, there are other people in the room?

Newly named idea, "cumulative advantage". People look at the best of YouTube to figure out what to watch. There’s a huge reward for being part of the "short head" – as opposed to the long tail. Don’t broadcast, network.

Flip the funnel, that eats money and comes out votes, into a megaphone, where your customers tell each other about you. The new cycle is be remarkable, tell a story to your sneezers, they spread the word, you get permission from new folks…

More Notes from PDF

I really liked the format of the conference - the 10 and 20-minute speakers kept things jumping!  I had some trouble with internet access and power strips, so I'll just dump in some notes.

Pew Study - Internet and American Life session – 75 M in 2004 did some sort of political activity related to the campaign, online.  In this cycle, half of internet population and growing.

In the past 10 years, went from wealthy white males using the internet for politics, now there’s rough parity between the sexes. Average age in 96 was 33, now it’s risen to age 39. It’s a lot less white, the minorities using the net for politics has doubled. The number of people saying the net was the primary source of political information doubled since 2004. In the competition between the internet and other sources for news, the internet is the one line on the graph that goes up. Spread of broadband has been driving this. People under 35 using broadband are now saying, for general news, the net is almost as important for them as television. And for political news, it’s more important than newspapers.

There’s a highly forensic quality to the type of information people get online. It’s primary source material, they like the transparency, and it’s much more easy to find. They use comedy sites like the Onion and Daily show. People have a more expanded notion of what news is and where it comes from. Candidate sites, and special interest sites. However, local news and local politics aren’t really showing up as much.

14 million people being content creators in the last political cycle.

Speaker from Pew predicts, that just the act of getting wireless will impact politics. New voters don’t think of the internet as a separate realm of "virtual life" as opposed to real life. The notion that the net is in competition will fade – in younger people’s heads, the world is mushing up together in such a way that the old categories don’t make sense. When they’re not with the device they love, they love the device they’re with.

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{PDF got great Sponsors, like Eventful, icontact, FeedBrner, BlogAds, the New York Observer, YouTube…}

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Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School, Author, the Wealth of Networks.

Let’s examine. Democracies began to rely on mass media began in 1840. Rose from $10K to $2.5 million – a bifurcation between production and consumption. Characterizes the next 150 years.

• SETI at home was the fastest supercomputer in the world – by pushing processing to the edge. Every connected person has the physical capital that they need to communicate.

So now, the most important inputs into the most advanced economies, are humans, with non-fungible time, experience, wisdom. Commons based production, increases the diversity of actors and their transactions. Decentralizes authority to act, places it where capacity to act is. So stuff can really get done.

Grid: decentralized at top, centralized at bottom. Left is market based, right is non-market.

TL:Price-system, TR social sharing, BL firms

Democratic public sphere needs universal intake, filtering, dyenthesis and salience, and independence from gonverment. The limitations of mass media is that they rely on one tiny intake funnel, owners have too much control, and the baywatch effect, let’s disperse attention from the difficult and pay attention to fluff.

Different players want different outcomes – government wants less scrutiny, companies want more control, citizens want more transparency, etc.

[Refers to the sunlight foundation, Greg Elin’s hard work…]

[Great chart of Sinclair’s stock price and at what point they said they’re not going to air the swift boat show. Terrific case study!]

Lessig at Personal Democracy Forum

I'm really enjoying Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry's Personal Democracy Forum at Pace University in NYC.

They started the conference off first thing this am with a Keynote from Lawrence Lessig. I'll post a few notes.

In brief: There’s a place for copyright, but let’s keep it in its place. There are limits to the copyright system. Obama is the only presidential candidate so far who has said that debates should be open – not proprietary content where you have to pay a network to view them later, and you can’t cut, paste, mix or edit. He’s concerned about corruption, feels candidates’ views are based on who will finance them.

Question from Jeff Jarvis in the audience: say someone went after a blogger (presumably for unfair use of text of a campaign debate, for example). What’s their defense?

Lessig – there is no defense really, I’ve defended fair use and it takes years of litigation. Companies comply with requests in order to avoid litigation. Fair use is really just the right to hire a lawyer. With debates, there’s an easy answer. Let’s not fight over it; debates should just be open. Brewster Kahle is allowing uploads of remix of politics.

Sylvia Paull asks: where copyright is disregarded, like in China, there’s a lack of creativity. Is there an inverse relationship between lack of copyright and creativity? Lessig: Good question.

If you can't join 'em, beat 'em...

Bruce sent along an outrageous article that was in the WSJ last week, regarding a problem that has been going on for at least a year (that's right, you heard it here first!)

Did you know that your telecommunications provider is free to prevent you from using your Internet connection to send video files or make long-distance calls?  And no, I'm not talking about provisions blocking raunchy content, preventing the illegal exchange of copyrighted materials or prohibiting unsolicited telemarketing.

The telecom and cable companies want you to access video from their preferred providers (they get a cut, you know?), and they can ban your freedom to access videos in other ways.  Which means you might never get to see little Maggie's first steps, or the day Jimmy first rode a bicycle.

The long-distance phone companies like the revenues they get from land line phone use, so they'll try to put Skype and other Internet telephony solutions out of business by banning their customers from accessing those services.

Think you can escape by turning to smaller, community ISP's?  Think again, because the big telco's are working their hardest to keep small ISP's from providing broadband to communities.  They like their monopoly status.  (Great comment at muniwireless). 

But what a cop-out!  These OldBigCo's should be embracing the future, and changing their revenue models to meet the future head-on!  If they keep fighting against it, we in the US will become second-class citizens in a modern world, clinging to our outdated companies and revenue streams as they dwindle ever-smaller...I call this Coward Capitalism.  Get out there and innovate, people, or at least acquire the little fish who are doing it for you.  That's the big difference between modern tech companies like Google, and the OldBigCo's.  We must learn to embrace change, not squash it.

At heart, this sliver of the access debate is about democracy and openness, not saving a few bucks on phone calls and movie tickets.  Bruce Kushnik has been railing about this and similar topics for years; Alex Goldman is a less biased expert.  I'll close with a great bit from Martin Geddes' blog:

"Cheap, ubiquitous and unfiltered communications are becoming a prerequisite of a pluralist participative democracy. Societies that fail to encourage the free flow of information will suffer because ingrained interest groups will ensure the rules are set up to perpetuate their privileges. When you can’t make a Skype call, you’re losing something more than money."

Crazy Extremist, or Respected Corporate Leader?

It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.  First we had Larry Summers, the President of Harvard, discussing why Harvard doesn't have many women professors in math and science.  According to Summers, this is not due to discrimination, for which there is no "evidence", but because women don't have the required "innate ability" to succeed in those roles.  This comment was made as Summers supposedly was trying to recruit more respected women science professors to the University.  Way to go, Larry, they're really banging down the doors to work there now!

Now, we have the legendary ad guru Neil French, Worldwide Creative Director of WPP, one of the largest ad agencies on the planet.  At an ad-industry event which advertised itself saying "no question will be spared and no topic will be taboo", women learned a little too much about French's true feelings when he responded to a question about why there weren't more female creative directors.  His answer?  "Women don't make it to the top because they don't deserve to. They're crap."

French then continued to call women  "slacker-breeders", "babes", "bitches", and even "c*nts" (!) who will inevitably leave work early to "go suckle something" (who fed French when he was small?).  Now you can ask what else you would expect from a former pornographer and heavy metal band manager.  Or you can ask how someone with those views could make it to the tippy top of one of the most respected empires in the communications world.  You can say that this is a rare case where an extremist shoots his mouth off.  Or you can wonder how many others share the same opinions, but have far too much delicacy to say so.

Nancy Vonk, one of the women who considered Neil French a mentor, was at the event and said she has finally "snapped out of it" and realized behavior like his cannot be tolerated.  Comments on her blog say this is just "one man's opinion", that women aren't negatively affected, and that childrearing is more important than work anyway.  Which is fine until it comes to questions of promotions, pay, and which creative ideas "win". 

And then, I bet, it really matters if someone who thinks like Neil French is your boss and you're female.  And because women make the vast majority of all consumer purchasing decisions, workplace gender discrimination probably erodes an ad agency's bottom line as well.  Who would hire an agency that is so out of touch with the people they're trying to reach?

Neil French has resigned (or been asked to resign) his post; Lawrence Summers kept his after a minor dust-up.  How many others are out there, in charge of hiring, managing, and promoting?  And how long will it take Neil French to get a new job?

Local Politics

It's so great to see Andrew's campaign starting to get traction and his ideas being adopted by the MTA.  Check out today's profile in the New York Times.  Andrew is a true force for what is right and good in the world, and still unspoiled by "politics as usual".  If he's chosen to advocate for New Yorkers, he'll bring a measure of integrity and passion back into a career path that right now is all about the ego, the game, and following the money.  I hope to see him elected.