social media | Digifesto

January 9, 2012

Truth vs. Power: Buddy Roemer, SOPA, money in politics and liberation technology

Buddy Roemer is a former Governor and Congressman of Louisiana who is running for president as a Republican. He has so far not been allowed to take part in any televised debates, and so is relatively unknown. The television stations say that he is not eligible to debate because he has not raised sufficient campaign contributions. This is a problem for Buddy, because he has refused to accept Super PAC money and caps individual donations at $100.

Whatever else one may say about Roemer as a candidate, there is something wrong with this picture. Putting aside the other tools of the modern campaign (advertising, for example), the debate is the cornerstone of rational politics. In these events, we pretend for a moment that we are lead by those who are able to persuade us to follow them. This is only a fantasy when reasonable candidates are barred from entry.

Of course, politics is not a fair fight for our approval as citizens. Citizens are pawns. Or, perhaps more appropriately, ants ready to swarm to any greasy slick of propaganda spewed from the orifices of power. So must we be viewed by the billionaire Super PAC donors who have been investing in the Romney campaign, shareholders ready to instate their loyal CEO.

Is it going too far to say that these Romney shareholders aim to turn a profit on the presidency? We could consider the alternative: that these are philosopher-king oligarchs, who have spent their lives earning their billions through honest business only to turn their attention to national politics and endorse Mitt Romney. Out of selfless benevolence, they seek a consistent champion of middle and lower classes. Some of them think Gingrich would be a better one.

No, that seems unlikely.

If there is any iron law of politics, it is that those in power aim to keep themselves in power. Companies that succeed will try to maintain their market power, even when their products face obsolescence. Unions that triumph will shift demands from workers rights to the excluding the unorganized. Non-profits that form out of genuine selfless action contort themselves to chase funding and become whatever will justify their existence. Prison systems will fight to incarcerate more people. Political parties will try to maintain control of political messaging to keep out political diversity. And so on.

Truth erodes the grip of power. By recognizing these patterns as what they are, we can choose to deny them. We can liberate ourselves by holding institutions of power to account.

However, truth is something we transmit to one another. Truth travels as information. In our era, that means the spread of truth is controlled by mass media and information technology. But media and IT are themselves part of our economy and politics. Herein lies the problem.

SOPA is a good example of this. Media companies that want to use the power of the state to enforce monopolies on their works (Hollywood, the RIAA, etc.) are battling with Internet companies that profit from easy sharing of information across networked users (Google, Facebook, Twitter) over control of the Web. The media companies have been playing politics for much longer than the internet companies. One friend of mine explains to me that the Hollywood lobbyists are physically older than Google’s. They have been on K Street longer. They have better connections with legislators and other lobbyists. So they are winning.

Buddy Roemer is trying to expose this truth about how politics works–that policies are determined not by citizens but by lobbyists paid for by the rich and powerful. He has other politics but he has ripped this plank from his platform and sharpened it into a spear fit for the head of Mitt Romney.

But the media companies by and large control the spread of truth. These media companies are in their tangle of alliances with powerful political parties and corporations, they have no incentive to let in a candidate who is so eager to blow the lid off the whole complex. So they raise the requirements of debate eligibility to exclude anyone who isn’t playing their power games.

So Roemer has turned to non-mass media to launch his campaign. Roemer has been working hard on his Web campaign, using social media (especially Twitter) to get his message out.

Perhaps Roemer’s faith in this alternative structure is due in part to his witnessing of the Occupy movement. I believe it can be uncontroversially said at this point that social media was necessary (though not sufficient) for the successes of the Occupy movement, whether in organizing, gaining publicity, and in responding tactically to suppression. Its success in raising the issue of inequality in national politics has been due largely to its independence from centralized media. It continues to use the Internet to organize itself over the winter in order to plan its next moves for 2012. Perhaps Roemer can raise awareness about political inequality through similar channels.

It is worth watching and studying these events because the question of whether and under what conditions information technology can be liberation technology will determine our future. Is it possible for a message that is true but unpopular with power to spread? Under what conditions? This is not just a question of theoretical interest. It is a strategic question for those concerned with their own freedom.

We have many clues to this question already. We have the efficacy of the open Web, as opposed to centralized media channels, in assisting politics of truth. In SOPA, we see how the centralized hub of the Internet, its DNS system, is where it is most vulnerable to attack by powers that are threatened by it.

On the other hand, open data programs by governments show that there is also a politics of mutual empowerment through sharing information with citizens. Government transparency initiatives allow the kinds of analysis and awareness of money in politics that show us who is supporting SOPA and help us verify the claims of Buddy Roemer and the like. And SOPA has shown examples of industries that are able to gain power by benefiting openness and wage political battles to defend it.

What technologies are needed to further embolden truth? What strategies will get these technologies into the hands of those that can use them? How can truth be sifted from fiction, anyway? Can we find out before a growing concentration of power stamps out our ability to search and disseminate our answers?

I am eager to discuss these topics with anyone interested and collaborate on solutions.

6 Comments

November 4, 2011

To Google Reader users

A lot of friends of mine were avid Google Reader users. For some of them, it was their primary social media tool. They had built a strong community around it. Naturally, they were attached to its user interface, features, and workflows. It was home to them.

Google recently ‘redesigned’ Google Reader in a way that blatantly forced Reader users to adopt Google+ as their social media platform. A lot of Reader devotees are pissed about this. They want their old technology back.

My first response to this is: What did you expect? What made Reader so special? It was just the first of several experiments in social media that Google’s used to edge into the Facebook’s market. (Reader, Buzz, Wave, now Google+). Of course, the industry logic is that your community should be dumped onto the newer platform, so that Google can capture the network effects of your participation. Your community is what will make their new technology so valuable to them!

Still not happy?

The problem is that Google Reader was a corporately operated platform, not a community operated one. You may not have know that you had other options. There are a lot of social media communities that have a lot of self-control, Metafilter being a particularly great one. (incidentally, Ask Metafilter has a good guide to Reader alternatives) There is also a lot of energy going into open source social media tools.

The most prominent of these is Diaspora, which raised a ridiculous amount of funding on Kickstarter when the New York Times wrote about its being a project. I stopped following it after the first press buzz, but maybe it’s time to start paying attention to it again. Since its community has recently announced that it is not vaporware, I decided to go ahead and join the diasp.org pod.

To my surprise, it’s pretty great! Smooth, intuitive interface, fast enough, seems to have all the bells and whistles you’d want and not a lot of cruft–basically all the stuff I care about on Google+. I’ve got a public profile. Plus, it has great tools for data export in case I want to pick up and move to a different pod.

Looking into it, Diaspora does not yet work as an RSS reader, though there is an open issue for it. A bit of a missed opportunity, IMO. Some other people are build an open-source Reader clone in response, which could more directly solve the Reader problem. Whatever the current technical limitations, though, they can be surmounted by some creative piping between services.

The point that I hope stands is that there is a hidden cost to a community investing in a technical infrastructure when it is being maintained by those that do not value your community. People’s anger at the Reader redesign demonstrates the value of the open source alternatives.

3 Comments

January 31, 2011

No adequate social media options

While this post is guaranteed to be a pile of cliches, I need to write it anyway to get it off my chest.

None of the current social media platforms are doing it for me right now. Why is that?

There are the minimal functions that I want out of social media.

Self-expression. There needs to be a blogging/publishing platform to support self-expression. So that that self-expression can be authentic, there needs to be fine-grained privacy controls so that I can choose who I’m exposing my thoughts to.

Sharing. I want to take advantage of and participate in crowdsourced content curation on the web. When my friends are interested in something or think I will be interested in something, i want to hear about it. If like something that somebody has showed me, I want to be able to share it with other people. It is very important to me to be able to attribute the thing I’m sharing back to the person who shared it with me–it is a way of respecting them and congratulating their good taste, and not taking credit for how cool they are except by proxy. It is not at all important to me to acknowledge some global idea of how much something is “liked.”

So far, this description covers almost all the major platforms, especially Facebook and Buzz. However, those aren’t so good for other reasons.

One is that the software needs to be open source and my content portable from system to system. I don’t want Google or especially Facebook keeping ownership over all this material which might be very personal. I don’t want the features in my social media to be distorted by a profit motive.

Another has to do with comments. Comments on existing content are a means of self-expression and a means of sharing. Currently, the conventions around commenting are confused: bloggers will post a blog post which is essentially a comment on an existing work, with an excerpt, but will need to put it in a separate context because of technical constraints. Meanwhile, responses to a Buzz or Facebook item are displayed as second-class content and are not themselves resharable. I want my comments to be considered first-class self-expression and be stored on the service under my control.

Moreover, I want threaded comments, because ultimately what I want is to have conversations with the people I care about about the things we are sharing together, but I want to be able to filter out other commenters who I don’t care about.

So when I look at a piece of content shared by a friend, I want to know the lineage of how the friend found it, and I want to see the conversation about it thats been had by people I know about or who some algorithm thinks I could be interested in. I want to be able to tune out boring people and tune in interesting people.

I want there to be “communities,” which could really just be done through an ad hoc tagging system to start with. I.e., I would “follow” a tag and then see the feed of content surrounding that tag.

Of course, it would be hard to monetize such a service, as it would promote genuine community among people who care about each other and not the targeting of advertising. So as far as I’m aware such a thing doesn’t exist yet. But a guy can dream.

1 Comment

October 1, 2008

Get Real

Internet is expensive in South Africa, since all uploaded data has to travel via satellite. So I will try to keep myself terse.

On the first day of FOSS4G2008, Sindile Bidha delivered a “lighting talk” on “GIS in schools programme and Quantum GIS.” Quantum GIS, or QGIS, is open source desktop GIS software. Bindha spoke about how in Eastern Cape, one of the poorest provinces of South Africa, they were trying to introduce QGIS into the high school curriculum. The challenges? Among others: no trained teachers, no documentation, and no computers.

The next lightning talk was delivered by Arnulf Christl, president of OSGeo. He rexcitedly read passages from the book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and interspersed his own commentary:

This is a revolution. No, it’s an evolution. The whole world can connect instantly, everywhere!

There was a talk given today on the subject of “Mapping the Sanitary Sewers of a South African City – First Experiences with FOSS GIS.” Somebody is apparently making tentative steps to use open source geospatial software to make sure shit is disposed of properly. First steps.

I didn’t go to that talk.

Instead, I went to a talk entitled “Participatory Free and Open Source GIS in the Web 2.0.” A Brazilian masters student studying in Osaka told us that the Web 2.0 was exciting because…well, I forget the specifics, but the reasons were displayed on a slide in the form of a tag cloud. She told us that her thesis was on the future of the web and GIS.

“Studying the future is very popular in Japan; when I went there for the first time, I thought it looked like the future!”

Because crowds are wiser than individuals, she needed to talk to several people–maybe 30 total–about their predictions of the future, for her thesis. She breathily asked the audience of nerds “who are so passionate about their work”–on the word passionate she turned to a slide displaying a red heart on a white background that was reminiscent of the Japanese flag–if they would agree to be interviewed by her. To tell her what they thought. About the future.

Q&A begins. The first question from the audience, loud and clear: “How do I sign up for an interview?”

Another talk I missed today was about the “Development of a Malaria Decision Support System based on Open Source Technologies.” Each talk–about malaria, about sewers, about the Web 2.0–was twenty minutes long. About every three seconds, a child dies of malaria.

One issue that has come up frequently at FOSS4G is the importance of having free (as in “freedom”) data to be used with all the FOSS geospatial software that the conference is about. The software is useless without data. We are reminded of this most stridently by the OpenStreetMap community, which holds “parties” where they collect data by walking through streets with GPS in their hands. They held one of these parties to map Hout Bay, a suburb outside of Cape Town, last Sunday just before the conference. They put their data on the web under a CC-by-sa license (though, admittedly and regretably, the license cannot legally apply to the data because data does not fall under copyright law).

Late in the afternoon, I attended a workshop about GIS education. It was attended primarily by people from South Africa’s GIS community; they were trying to figure out how the hell they could teach people how do work with GIS software. At some point, somebody asks about how schools can get data for GIS students to work with in the classroom. Ideally, it’s data that is local and relevant to the students’ lives. Some guy from the South African government piped up:

“Oh, we have lots of data–on roads, lakes, vegetation, everything–and we want to make it free. We just don’t have the bandwidth to host it!”

The government doesn’t have the fucking bandwidth.

Internet is expensive in South Africa.

3 Comments

Category: social media