Even though Gene and I have been quiet on Anderkoo, we’ve been present elsewhere on the web. Most of my writing has been about the intersection of faith and the economic crisis.
I’ll start linking to some of those posts here on a regular basis, but by way of catch-up here are two that I most appreciate: Integrity and the Economic Crisis on God’s Politics and Consuming our Way to Compassion at Duke’s Call and Response blog. Enjoy!
For sixteen years Edward Kennedy was my Senator. Then I left Massachusetts, and now Ted has left all of us. We will all miss the “Lion of the Senate,” as will the Senate itself. I’m not just talking partisan politics here: Kennedy was vital to Congress because he hearkened back to an era when the legislature was co-equal with the President. It’s telling that Barney Frank has called him “the most powerful man never to have been President.” At our nation’s founding, the qualifier would have been unnecessary.
The layout of DC, where I now live, is also telling. The quadrants – NW, NE, SE, and SW – are split at the Capitol, considered the seat of power at the time of the District’s establishment. Yet the capital’s diamond-shaped boundaries center not there but on the White House — what most Americans would today consider the locus of U.S. power. No tourist, domestic or foreign, would fail to know the name of the President (the myriad T-shirts bearing his likeness ensure it), but without Kennedy, I suspect most visitors would be hard-pressed to name a single Congressman or Senator, even their own.
I’ve written before about why Congress needs a Geek Corps, and I continue to hope that the advent of a more decentralized social media will boost the relative power of our legislature vis-a-vis the Presidency, which had enjoyed peculiar primacy due in part to the dominance of broadcast media. President Obama himself seems to recognize the need to restore Congressional power with his deference to the legislature in establishing health care policy — maddening as that might seem to his backers.
I’m a big fan of Zipcar for many reasons, among which the least-discussed is that it lets me never worry about car maintenance. I’m one of those auto n00bs that mechanics love to see come through the door: ignorant, anxious, and trusting. So owning my own car is an ongoing maintenance liability: every “check engine” light is yet another opportunity to blow a few hundred dollars on repairs of dubious value.
Zipcar lifts the burden of car ownership and gives me what I want: a convenient way to get to the outlet mall and back. I don’t need to take adult ed classes on auto maintenance nor turn car ownership into a hobby.
Zipcar does for cars what The Cloud does for computing. It divvies up labor and lets specialists deal with issues with far more expertise and much better economies of scale than distributed ownership. We don’t need to know how to change the air filters or set up MySQL to drive to the beach or post a photo album.
On top of efficient division of labor, cloud computing/commuting also distributes risk appropriately. This means that the inevitable lemon car or DOA hard drive is handled as part of a larger batch rather than dumped, hot-potato-like, on individual hapless victims. This also means that consumers, in aggregate, make better choices. When presented with two hard drives — one of which is $10 more than the other, but also 5% more likely to fail — an individual is likely to go for the cheaper option and roll the dice. The cloud, on the other hand, is more likely to make rational cost-benefit analyses. An sysadmin who buys 100 hard drives knows that 5% failure rate means 5 dead drives, not a random gamble.
This kind of logic extends to all sorts of capital goods, including housing. Putting so much capital into a single investment strikes me as somewhat feudal in an era when capitalism argues for diversification and specialization (that is: buy REITs and outsource your real estate management).
What I like best about the cloud approach is that it’s eminently capitalist while capturing the flavor of socialism. We pool our resources, but we pay for what we get within a robust marketplace. (Zipcar will have really succeeded when they face a viable nationwide competitor).
Now I don’t believe that we should completely alienate our cars/condos/computers to some vendor and end up at its mercy. Even as I keep more and more of my stuff on Google and other clouds, I also want the option of backing it up on my own personal hard drives. And yes, some people take deep pleasure in ownership, tinkering with the car or repainting the shed. (I myself just built a new computer this week). But for those of us who aren’t expert mechanics, programmers, or construction contractors (nor friends with one), trustworthy cloud services can help mitigate the risks associated with ownership while tapping into expertise not otherwise accessible.
President Obama and his new media team are rightfully receiving kudos for their inaugural online town hall. Roundup at Personal Democracy Forum. But as a pilot, there’s room to improve, as the first commenter on the linked PDF post points out. Moving forward, the new media team should focus on re-tuning the technology to hit the core values and purposes of town halls and citizen participation:
1. Patch vulnerabilities. Whether or not you believe legalizing marijuana is a top-echelon issue facing the country, most of the top-rated MJ questions had little or passing relevance to the categories they dominated. The last category of question listed, “Budget,” became a honeypot for swarms of legalization advocates (the first seven of the top ten questions were on that topic), with only the addition of the word “tax” differentiating it from similar questions voted up in the “health care” and “green jobs” categories. I’m inclined to believe this was an authentic grassroots movement, but it could just as easily be engineered as a bot or mechanical turk astroturf campaign. What’s particularly pernicious about using crowd-sourced moderation is that the campaign wins either way: at a minimum, millions of Americans will be forced to read their submissions, even if only to vote them down.
2. Nuance the moderation: I voted on some 40+ questions and quickly began to realize that a straight up/down/abuse vote wasn’t capturing my opinion. For one thing, it became clear that if I wanted my interests to rise, I should vote against everything else (much like the way voters game multi-choice elections with bullet voting). It’s important for the system designers to realize that they are developing a game — a set of rules that determines winners and losers. For another, I found I had more specific things to say about each one: that a question was off-topic, or didn’t really ask a question, or was too generic, etc. In fact, I guess what I really wanted was:
3. Allow interaction: If the White House wants real civic engagement, it shouldn’t be built as spokes on a single hub (citizen -> President). The beauty of the Internet, like democracy, is that it’s many-to-many. I recognize that allowing citizens to talk to each other opens huge and difficult problems that make the deluge of posts demanding to see the President’s birth certificate seem trivial by comparison. Perhaps it’s up to civil society to pick up where Open for Questions leaves off — given enough lead time, citizen associations can build their own events off the town hall to host more robust discussions that can’t happen in the Presidential site. Still, this experiment is one of the closest things to a true public commons on the Web we’ve seen so far, and it’d be a shame if the only way to run it were a state monopoly that shunts citizen discussion off to private spaces.
4. More personality: One of the strengths of the town hall format is connecting abstract public policy to the lives of real, visible people. The format of Open for Questions (very limited space, no nuanced voting), however, privileged generic questions that went straight to the point and didn’t give a strong sense of who the person is and what their circumstances are. I felt a very strong difference in affect between Obama’s interaction with online questions (which was practically a press conference) to the video and especially live, in-person questions (which felt much warmer and more personal).
5. Or focus on the Internet’s strengths. Scratch that last suggestion. Maybe nothing will ever beat the face-to-face conversation for warmth and authenticity. Why not focus the online town hall on the very kinds of questions that town halls are terrible at: those best answered nonverbally (whether numbers, illustrations, or charts) or which require the President to draw on his advisors and not just the talking points he’s memorized. (We want the President to manage a team, not to be a one-man savant, after all). Stretch the new media team’s capabilities and see if they can create interactive charts, videos, or even games to frame or illustrate the President and his advisor’s responses.
Finally, let us acknowledge what has just happened: President Obama and his team have engaged over 93,000 people in an online town hall conversation. I hope this is just the first step towards a more robust system of citizen engagement.